When You Are Related to the “Other”: (Re)locating the Chinese Homeland in Asian American Politics through Cultural Tourism

Abstract

In 1972 eleven college-educated, secondthrough fourth-generation ChineseAmerican youths of Cantonese descent traveled toHongKong to study theCantonese language.1All had hoped to serve theChinatown community as activists, yet most could not even talk to the newly arriving non-Englishspeaking immigrants; they described their political dilemma in a 1973 selfpublished pamphlet called Going Back.2 The group decided to tour China, then embroiled in the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), “to return to the home of our ancestors, to learn about our history and to see how old China has changed into the socialist motherland of today.” Visiting their ancestral villages, they met their relatives. Some students labored in the fields to contribute to socialist reconstruction.Most, raised in the suburbs and politicized in the Third World student activism of the late 1960s, hoped Asian American activist politics could model itself on China’s revolution.3 As they put it: “3rd, 4th, 5th generation born in America, living in white middle-class