Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community

Between Two Worlds: Chinese Immigrant Children and the Production of Knowledge in the Era of Chinese Exclusion

The 19th century featured two opposed yet interconnected historical trends: the growth of a multigenerational and deeply rooted Chinese American community; and the development of the cultural prejudices and fears comprised by the Yellow Peril narrative. Those xenophobic fears produced violence, social and political movements, and legal exclusions, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and its many follow-up laws and policies, all designed as much to destroy the existing Chinese American community as to restrict future immigration. But out of that period of exclusion and oppression came some of the first Chinese American literary and cultural works published in both Mandarin/Cantonese and English: the personal and collective poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station by detainees; auto-ethnographic memoirs of Chinese American life and community such as Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America (1909); and the journalistic, autobiographical, and fictional works of Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far, the first Chinese American professional creative writer. These works both reflect and transcend the realities of the Exclusion era, helping contemporary audiences understand those histories, connect them to later Chinese American writers, and analyze the exclusionary debates and proposals of the early 21st century.

Reviewed by: Asian America: Forming New Communities, Expanding Boundaries Yong Chen (bio) Asian America: Forming New Communities, Expanding Boundaries, edited by Huping Ling. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Ix + 291 pp. $25.95 paper. ISBN 0-81354487-4. On March 20, 2010, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the United States published an article about a controversy among what has been historically regarded as the Chinese American community: some Taiwan-born individuals and their children wanted to identify themselves as Taiwanese, rather than Chinese, on the 2010 U.S. Census form. Indicative of an increasingly visible division with Chinese America, this controversy is a reminder of the political, sociological, and cultural diversity that has always existed throughout the history of Asian America and has become especially pronounced in recent decades. Coherently focused on post-1960s developments and their impact on Asian American communities, this anthology broadens and deepens our understanding of such diversity. The book examines a wide range of Asian communities not only in different parts of the United States but also in Canada. The eleven chapters, along with the editor’s introduction, represent exciting new scholarship that will help us more fully understand the meanings of community for Asian Americans and their relationship with the mainstream society in a rapidly changing world. Coming from different disciplines, the authors offer multiple perspectives for comprehending the Asian American experience. In the introduction, Huping Ling makes a succinct but sophisticated attempt to conceptualize the notion of community in fast-changing Asian America by noting the multitude of the kinds of Asian communities—they exist in the metropolis and the hinterland both as urban enclaves and suburban populations defined by either geographical or cultural boundaries. Chapter 1 by Min Zhou provides a collective profile of major Asian American groups, which also illustrates the demographic and socioeconomic differences among them. Interestingly, her [End Page 397] data show that the homeownership among Asian American families (53 percent) is much lower than the national average (66 percent), which appears to contradict earlier perceptions of Asian American success in education and income. By directly tackling the question whether Asian Americans are becoming honorable whites, her analysis draws attention to the perception of middle-class Asian Americans as white, which quietly but increasingly prevails among educational institutions and government-funding agencies like the National Science Foundation as well as the suburban white middle class. In chapter 2 Haiming Liu uses family life to magnify the transnational dimension in the experiences of Chinese Americans. Illuminative of how a family would map its association with diasporic spaces is the story told by a student who invented different nicknames for the relatives living overseas to indicate not only their position in the family but also their respective country of residence. In chapter 3, Ling Z. Anderson discusses the fragmentation of the Chinese in Chicago, pointing out, correctly and insightfully, that it also “renders the new generation’s drive for pan-Asian solidarity a daunting task” (84). In chapter 4, which is focused on Little Saigon of Orange County in California, Linda Võ points out its uniqueness as a community created by “refugees.” In analyzing its political and economic activities, Võ shows the internal diversity as a result of its transition from a refuge community to an immigrant one and to a predominantly second-generation population. Concentrating on the Filipino/a community in San Francisco’s Excelsior Neighborhood, Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, in chapter 5, discusses its development and the emerging tension between old-timers and new immigrants. In chapter 6, Huping Ling examines the new and “not quite visible” Chinese community in St. Louis, calling it a “cultural community.” She perceptively notes that such a community is also found in other contexts, “where the physical concentrations of the ethnic minority groups have economically and professionally integrated into the larger society” (140) but remain culturally distinctive. In chapter 7, Wei Zeng and Wei Li investigate another case of Chinese cultural community in Phoenix, which does not have a physical enclave. They focus on a festival called Chinese Week to illustrate the importance of culture in formation of community as well as the tension among its heterogeneous groups. Yuan Shu...

This chapter examines the impact of various state apparatuses, including exclusion laws, on the little remarked but fascinating Chinese American merchant communities in Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah, Georgia. Federal Chinese Exclusion laws established a highly selective exemption system designed to prevent most Chinese from entering and reentering the United States. The law explicitly barred the first-time entry of laborers but allowed Chinese to come over as merchants, students, government officials, teachers, and U.S.-born citizens. Since most Chinese in Augusta were in the grocery business, they were allowed to travel under the exempted merchant category and their wives and children as merchant dependents. As such, Augusta's Chinese community grew in size and became one of the largest Chinese communities in the South before 1965.

This article compares data about perceptions of alcohol use and misuse, including perceived patterns of use, extent of the problem, reasons for use, and causes and effects of alcohol misuse in the Chinese, Indo-Pakistani, and Latin American communities in British Columbia. The methodology employed is an adaptation of Neuber's Community Needs Assessment model, using data from three sources: (1) relevant literature, (2) interviews with designated key informants, and (3) interviews with selected potential program consumers within the community. This article focuses on data gathered from potential program consumers. Results indicate that alcohol-related problems are considered least serious and widespread in the Chinese community and considerably more serious in the Latin American and Indo-Pakistani communities. Family difficulties present themselves in all communities as both possible causes and major consequences of alcohol misuse. Finally, implications for developing culturally responsive prevention programs are drawn.

The Chinese in Silicon Valley examines the complex and ever-growing role of Chinese American scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley. Globalization brings workers from many different countries and cultures together, impacting more than just their work environments. The Chinese who settle in Silicon Valley must learn to prosper despite changes in cultural identity, family life, and often citizenship. They learn how to utilize new social networks and make sense of a shifting ethnic identity. The Chinese community in Silicon Valley is being developed with the advantages and constraints of many factors: the new global economy, technology, the Chinese immigrants' traditional culture, and the American host culture. Bernard Wong shows that the formation of Chinese American ethnic identity and community is a result of this globalization and transnationalism. This informative book presents important new knowledge on the connection between Chinese ethnicity and highly-skilled labor and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. Secondary statistical data combined with primary personal interview data makes this a detailed and interesting study of globalization, social networks, and ethnic identity.

The adoption of the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments in 1965 promoted a large number of new Chinese immigrants to the U.S., and created a new era of Chinese American society. With higer education standard, abundant economic finance, and professional training, most new Chinese immigrants developed quite a different way from the counterparts in ancient Chinatown and represented the open and pluralistic appearance. Accordingly, Monterey Park, being located in the suburbia of Los Angeles County, was built as the first Suburban Chinatown of U.S. in the late 1970s, then spread to San Gabriel Valley in 1980s. It soon became the archetype of Chinese American community's development and riveted wide attention. This article principally focuses on the trend of the Chinese American community development from Monterey Park to San Gabriel Valley in the period of 1965 to 2006, and discusses its migration, economic activity, participation in politics, and social-cultural aspects. This master thesis includes four major subjects. First, it explores the tendency that Chinese American community took shape from Monterey Park to San Gabriel Valley, then analyzes its demographic and social indexes. Second, it deals with the structure and prospect of Chinese economic region from Monterey Park to San Gabriel Valley, then expounds the outlook of the local Chinese real estate, banking, catering industry, retail industry, hotel industry and computer business as well as introduces important Chinese economic associations. Third, it initially concentrates on the rising facet of Chinese American political participation in Monterey Park, involving their hardship, turning point and achievement, then orderly broaches the political tide and challenge that Chinese American in San Gabriel Valley would face. Eventually, it emphasizes on the course of local Chinese adaption and identification into American society, accompanying with the advance of local Chinese schools, Chinese media, religious organizations, fellowship associations, and alumni associations in San Gabriel Valley to reflect the construction and vision of Chinese culture community.

In this dissertation, I have analyzed the migrant experience of Chinese immigrants in North America through their representation in literature and photography. Each of its three chapters focuses on three major ethnic issues affecting the lives and identity of Chinese immigrants and their offspring in North America: the first concerns the ways in which occupation, home, and family affect the destinies of Chinese immigrants; the second deals with the role of language in the lives of Chinese immigrants and the career of Chinese migrant writers; the third addresses stereotypes about Chinese immigrants and their offspring and the redefinition of their identity. In this interdisciplinary study, literature inspires us to picture verbally Chinese immigrants’ struggles under the discriminatory laws and prejudices of society, and their search for respect and equal rights. As for the medium of photography, it provides ample visual evidence that reinforces and complements the literary representations of them. I have chosen to study the literary works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Qiu Xiaolong, Ha Jin, Fae Myenne Ng, David Henry Hwang, Li-Young Lee, Wayson Choy, and Ying Chen. All of them are pivotal figures and explorers of contemporary Chinese ethnic literature in the United States and Canada. Their work offers a multifaceted history of the Chinese immigrants in North America from the late nineteenth century to the present. Along with the study of Chinese American photographers, Mary Tape, Benjamen Chinn, Corky Lee, and Wing Young Huie, I have added a discussion of the work of two American photographers, Arnold Genthe and George Grantham Bain. The contrasting views that emerge help to illuminate the processes of stereotyping as well as identity construction. The work of the Americans focuses on the immigrants’ “Chineseness”, while that of the Chinese Americans seeks to present Chinese immigrant life and the fight for equality from within the Chinese American community. My discussion of the work of these writers and photographers will bring further attention to the difficulties and the challenges facing the Chinese ethnic group in North America.

PurposeThe purpose of this article is two‐fold. First, it applies the PEN‐3 model to the topic of domestic violence within the Chinese American and Chinese immigrant community. The PEN‐3 model was developed by Collins Airhihenbuwa, and it focuses on placing culture at the forefront of health promotion. It consists of three dimensions: cultural identity, relationships and expectations, and cultural empowerment. The article offers practice recommendations from the PEN‐3 analysis to plan culturally relevant and sensitive domestic violence prevention, education, and services targeted to the Chinese American and Chinese immigrant community.Design/methodology/approachUsing existing literature in the areas of domestic violence and health, mental health, and counseling interventions with Chinese Americans and immigrants, the PEN‐3 model, as an organizing framework, was applied to understand the phenomenon of domestic violence among Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants in the United States.FindingsHow Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants perceive domestic violence and how they obtain formal assistance are embedded within a larger sociocultural context including a host of factors ranging from personal, family, community, environmental, and structural variables.Practical implicationsThe PEN‐3 model reinforces the importance in addressing domestic violence within an ecological and cultural framework. Harnessing traditional Chinese value systems (i.e. emphasis on collectivism, hierarchy, patriarchy) and collaborating with the community are essential in promoting culturally sensitive interventions.Originality/valuePractice articles examining the application of the PEN‐3 model on domestic violence among Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants are lacking. More often than not, culture and other social forces are minimized by practitioners who are guided by “Western ways of knowing.”

This paper investigated how the American immigration laws affected illegal aliens during the early Cold war period. The study focused on those Chinese seamen who jumped off ships and lived illegally in the US. Their stay triggered the struggle of national security, anti-communist alliance, and refugee humanities between America and China, which just retreated from the mainland to Taiwan after its defeat by the Communist China. In the framework of Cold War, American immigration laws searched for a balance between racial elegances in the society and international politics. While the Chinese government was forced to accept the excluded illegal aliens by the US, it tried to protect the interest of Chinese American communities which needed the workforce of these seamen.As the study showed, both the American and Chinese governments claimed its sovereignty by ways of excluding illegal aliens or protecting overseas populace. The actions, though ostensibly for the sake of national security, contained diplomatic implications. The framework of Cold War offered a good global perspective to understand the forces of migration, specifically the one from nation-state hegemony.Nevertheless, the Chinese government in Taiwan suffered a predicament while asserting its hegemony. On the one hand, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office suggested helping these seamen, as Cold War refugees, staying in the United States to pacify the Chinese American communities. On the other, the Ministry of Transportation insisted on extraditing these seamen back to Taiwan, in order to stop illegally jumping ships. Such predicament was attributed to the unique suffrage and protection conferring to overseas Chinese.

This chapter draws from a three-year ethnographic study focused on the educational and community interactions among working- and middle-class ethnic Chinese immigrants in a mid-western town in the United States. Aihwa Ong (1999) argues that “Chineseness” is a fluid, cultural practice manifested within the Chinese diaspora in particular ways that relate to globalization in late modernity, immigrants’ cultural background, their place in the social structure in their home society, and their new social class status in the context they enter. The study extends research focused on the complexities of social reproduction within larger global flows of Chinese immigrants. First, we describe how Chinese immigrants’ social status in their countries of origin in part shapes middle and working-class group’s access to cultural capital and positions in the social structure of their post-migration context. Second, we trace groups’ negotiation of their relational race and class positioning in the new context (Ong, 1999) that is often invisible in the processes of social reproduction. Third, we describe how both groups must negotiate national, community, and schooling conceptions of the model minority concept (Lee, 1996) that shapes Asian-American’s lived realities in the United States; yet the continuing salience of their immigrant experience, home culture, and access to cultural capital (Bourdieu, 2007) means that they enact the “model minority” concept differently. The findings suggest the complexity of Chinese immigrants’ accommodation of and resistance to normative ideologies and local structures that cumulatively contribute to social reproduction on the basis of class.

This article provides a critical review of archaeological research that addresses race and racism in Chinese American communities. Future directions for Chinese diaspora archaeologies include employing an Asian American studies praxis that centers community-engaged research, using diasporic frameworks, and applying emic language to naming material culture and identities. Other innovative archaeological scholarship on the racialization of Chinese Americans reframes Chinese American communities as part of larger multiethnic neighborhoods, highlights gender and sexuality, and traces the transpacific connections of Chinese transmigrants. The interventions outlined provide archaeologists who are engaged in the study of the Chinese American past with the pathways needed to begin practicing antiracist Chinese diaspora archaeologies.

Objectives Mental health remains an unmet need among Chinese Americans. This study aims to identify specific needs and strategies that may address the needs. Design A total of 55 Chinese Americans consented and participated in online focus groups conducted in either Chinese or English using nominal group technique. Participants discussed the following questions, achieved themes, and provided ranking of themes in importance for each: (1) In general, what do people in the Chinese American community think about mental health or emotional well-being? (2) What have you found to be helpful for accessing mental health or emotional well-being services or care in the Chinese American population? And (3) What actions would you suggest to improve mental health and emotional well-being in the Chinese American population? Results Across the focus groups, we observed high consistency of top ranked themes including lack of knowledge and awareness, negative impression, lack of Chinese-speaking providers, and that the most helpful factor toward access to care was education and increased awareness. Seminars and trainings was the top actionable suggestion. Conclusion The findings are consistent with previous findings and continue to show that Chinese Americans need more education and training and that providers who can speak the language and understand the culture would be very helpful to increase access to care. This study emphasizes addressing mental health disparities in the Chinese American community through awareness, tailored interventions, and barrier removal. Promoting equal access also underscores the need for ongoing assessment and responsive strategies.

When you target just Chinese merchants, you have to be out of your mind not to see it is racially motivated. – Supervisor Leland Yee The live animal market conflict emerged just as the Chinese American community in San Francisco was reaching for meaningful political power. A significant presence in the city for a century and a half, the Chinese community survived the Exclusion era (1882–1943) to be reinvigorated by post-1965 waves of immigration from throughout the Chinese diaspora. Global political and economic developments powerfully influenced Chinatown and Chinese San Francisco more broadly during this period, shaping the flow and composition of migration as well as the circulation of capital and goods (including animals and animal parts). By the mid-1990s, Chinese San Francisco was vibrant, diverse, and complex, fractured by class, national origin, language, and politics even as it was stitched together by an enduring identification as a distinct cultural and racial group. With dramatic population growth and dispersal beyond Chinatown into the far reaches of San Francisco, Chinese Americans made significant gains in terms of political representation at both the local and state levels, securing the ultimate prize of the mayor’s office in 2011. The live animal market campaign was one of several issues Chinese American leaders used during the late 1990s and early 2000s to build community or mobilize their fractious population into a reliable political base. Advancing the optic of racism – uniquely resonant in San Francisco because of its distinctive history of anti-Chinese persecution – Chinese leaders argued that the animal campaign was racially motivated and thus threatening not only to Chinese live animal vendors and Chinatown residents but to all Chinese Americans throughout the Bay Area and indeed the nation. The appropriate response, they insisted, was community mobilization, self-defense, and empowerment – that is, to circle the wagons around the live animal vendors and understand that what happened to them happened to the whole Chinese American community. Intent on casting the vendors as innocent victims of racism, Chinese American activists openly declared their belief in human supremacy and peremptorily dismissed the issue of animal cruelty. The optic of racism cast shadows even as it illuminated.

Gender violence in the Chinese American community has been given little attention by researchers, clinicians, and community members. However, violence is a problem across cultures with cultural context playing an important role in disclosure, understanding, and treatment. The purpose of this chapter is to give voice to the many issues related to violence against women within the Chinese diaspora in the USA and to discuss important psychological and cultural constructs related to gender violence within these communities. The roles of religion and spirituality are highlighted specifically as factors for both religious leaders and treatment providers to consider when working with individuals of this ethnic/cultural background. The authors first provide a brief history and description of the Chinese population living in the USA with an overview of their immigration history and within-group differences. Next, an intersectionality approach is used as a lens to discuss the roles played by cultural and family values, gender, gender ideology, and religion in intimate partner violence (IPV) in this community. Lastly, a discussion is offered regarding treatment issues to consider when addressing the impact IPV has at the individual, familial, and societal levels. Implications for community members, religious leaders, researchers, and clinicians are discussed as well as potential challenges in the therapeutic context.