the mouth of the wolf

In her novel Caramelo (Random House, Inc, 2002), Sandra Cisneros follows the life of Celaya Reyes, whose family crosses the border annually between Chicago and Mexico City; the story spans multiple timelines as well as cities, jumping back and forth between spaces and the memories they inspire. In Celaya's world, the border between the US and Mexico is rife with visceral sensations; "Sweets sweeter, colors brighter, the bitter more bitter," she explains as her family crosses into Mexico (17). Mexico becomes a country of synergy, where indigenous mythologies mesh with Catholic tradition, Spanish blood mixes with Indian, and the truth becomes conflated with lies. America (and specifically Chicago), on the other hand, is a cold place, dusty, and gray. When the Reyes family moves to San Antonio, a city closer to the Mexican border, tensions arise between Celaya, who, though she was born in the US, has frequently traveled to Mexico, and the other Mexican American girls at her school, who take pride in their Chicana identity:

Is hell Cookie Cantú and her yappy perras talking shit like, —Brown Power! Making fists and chanting, —Viva la raza. Or, —I'm Chicana and proud, wha'chu wanna do about it, pendeja? [...] When they catch me alone, —Bitch! Pretending like you're Spanish and shit. [...] They call me bolilla when they cross my path, or worse, gabacha. Who wants to be called a white girl? I mean, not even white girls want to be called white girls. (354)

The animosity between Celaya and Cookie is particularly striking in relation to Nicholas de Genova's text "Locating a Mexican Chicago in the Space of the U.S. Nation-State," in which de Genova discusses the transnational practices of Mexican migrants as well as the Chicano/a population living in Chicago. For example, de Genova discusses the contributions of a man named Felipe, who raised money in his community to send back to the family of a murdered man in his small, poor hometown; thus the presence of Mexico among the migrants in Chicago is both an abstract and tangible reality.

In his book An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001), Hamid Nafici discusses three distinct forms of what he terms "accented cinema": the exilic, the diasporic, and the ethnic. To paraphrase, the exilic deals with the "then" and "there," the diasporic with the "there" and "now," and the ethnic with the "here" and "now." What they all have in common, though, is a profound understanding of "the tensions of marginality and difference [...] liminal subjectivity and interstitial location in society..." (10). In other words, "accented filmmakers," despite the vast differences in the films they create (e.g. The Joy Luck Club, El Norte, etc.), all share a specific interweaving of time and space, in which the characters pine for a lost home, or try to combine their past with their present.

Similarly, the transnational subjects of de Genova's text and Aihwa Ong's text, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (discussing Chinese, specifically Hong Kong, migrants in the US), inhabit a liminal space between nations, in which they simultaneously belong to and are foreign to two separate but interconnected nations. Ong writes, "Although citizenship is conventionally thought of as based on political rights and participation within a sovereign state, globalization has made economic calculation a major element in diasporan subjects' choice of citizenship, as well as in the ways nation-states redefine immigration laws." (112) Indeed, the relationship between economy and citizenship remains a focal point in both Ong and de Genova's texts: laborers and professionals often migrate to the US to make money, which they use to support relatives in their home country, or in some cases attempt to save to invest in real estate in their home country. (Interestingly, Cisneros' novel flips this narrative: after the Little Grandfather dies, the Awful Grandmother sells her house in Mexico City and, later, helps her family buy real estate in Texas.)

Again, gender roles are important as well. Ong writes, "the masculine subjectivity of this elite diasporan community is defined primarily in terms of the individual's role as a father or a son, that is, his role in maintaining the paternal/filial structure that both nurtures and expands family wealth." (126) De Genova: "[Felipe's] explanation of his own decision to migrate ... [is] meaningfully framed in terms of the responsibilities of the patriarchal male role as 'head of a family.'" (133) In Caramelo, it is the Awful Grandmother's three sons who migrate to Chicago to work, while her daughter stays in Mexico; the Little Grandfather and his father also at certain points in their lives lived and worked in the US as well. While women are not absent from the migrant narrative, it is the men whose labor is focal; their societal role as breadwinners in different but similar ways motivate, and perhaps even allow, them to cross borders in order to gain more money to support their families.

reproductive landscape

In her book Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore discusses in depth the politicization of women in anti-prison campaigns, a phenomenon that convolutes the gendered social constructions of the "male, or public, sphere" (194) and the female, or private. Both Gilmore and Julie Sze specifically highlight the organization of mothers seeking justice, creating discourses of the domestic and the political; we are all familiar with the feminist slogan: "The personal is political." In these cases the personal is the familial, the relationship between mothers and their children, who are unequally exposed to environmental pollution (as Sze writes about) or strict policing (Gilmore).

Writing specifically about the group Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (ROC), Gilmore brings attention to the ways in which the language of families and motherhood serves as a unifying force to mobilize women with similar and dissimilar experiences towards a single cause. Gilmore quotes Barbara Meredith, the mother of a black youth shot down by LAPD police and eventual co-founder of Mothers ROC: "Our mothers had taught us everything. And our grandmothers, and our aunts, and the ladies next door. They all taught us so we could have a better life." (198) Later, Gilmore writes, discussing the increasing Latina membership of ROC, "Mothers...Wives...Grandmothers...Indeed, the Black and Brown cadres of abuelas began to hold occasisional caucuses." (226) Here we see a specific kind of formulation, a conflation of gender and race: not only are these people women, they are women of color, and mostly working class or poor; though their experiences differ, their triple disenfranchisement unifies them in very particular ways, so that they draw upon the similarities of their roles as mothers and as racialized people and as economically disadvantaged people.

Furthermore, the centrality of children, not just mothers, becomes rhetorically and politically significant. In a 1995 flyer, Mothers ROC write: "Mothers suffer a special pain when their children are incarcerated (lost to them)." (quoted in Gilmore, 196, emphasis added) The use of semantics—the fact that the objective definition of "incarceration" has little to do with the loss of one's children—reimagines the politics of imprisonment, shifting the focus on the relationship between criminality and society to the relationship between mother and child. Thus the public politics of imprisonment becomes domesticized, which allows the Mothers ROC agenda to become relatable: this is not a battle to save some impersonal and faraway idea of "criminals," but rather to save children, and to reunite families. The very name "Mothers Reclaiming Our Children" is significant on multiple levels: it brings this mother-child dynamic to the forefront; it places women in a politically active role; and it asserts that they are reclaiming, a term that is historically loaded with the politics of race, gender, and sexuality, e.g. the reclamation of language, in which non-normative groups of people take and use pejorative words to disempower them of hatred and reempower them with affirmation.

The film Prison Town, USA similarly shifts focus to the family, although mostly highlighting the relationships between men, who have either been incarcerated or employed by a prison, and their wives and children. Although the film does offer a humanized view of those affected by the prison system, I took issue with the invisibility of minorities (although there were black guards in the training camp, all four central families/individuals were white; of course, this is not to say their struggles are illegitimate, and the film does problematize issues of class and wealth, but as [I believe, but can't remember right now] Cheryl Harris points out, working class whites are more likely to ignore the similar experience of working class minorities, focusing instead on the differences of race rather than the similarities of class) and, in retrospect, after having read Gilmore, I noticed that the film also plays into dominant gender roles. While there were female guards present, the film focuses on four men who have been directly affected by the prisons, propelling them to the "public sphere," while their wives are present only in the domestic; we see how the women have been affected too, but not how they fight against the system, or whether they are even able to do so. The only public female figure was the woman at Crossroads, whose job centered around the domestic (helping families of convicts to find shelter and housing).

state of exception

Two years ago, when I took my first class in APA, a classmate said that he had never learned about Japanese internment in high school, had never known about it since college. Certain histories are ignored, erased, and conveniently forgotten: because how can we explain such gross violations of human rights and still believe in an ideal of American as an exceptional state when, really, it's a state of exception?

When we discuss concentration camps we think of Nazi Germany, images of evil dictatorships committing inconceivable acts of genocide. Racism on a grand scale. But racism removed from us, by time or place, things we think can never occur in our country, or our time. Yet in times of war, the boundaries of nations and national law become blurred, and (racial) difference becomes a marker of disloyalty. Racial profiling and internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s or of Muslims in the present day create paradoxes of citizenship and foreignness, forming what Mae Ngai calls "alien citizens": those who are caught in a liminal non-space between belonging and not belonging.

Amy Kaplan frames Guantánamo Bay in a similar way: "Where in the world is Guantánamo?" she asks; "...to ask about the location of Guantánamo is to ask: where in the world is the United States?" (832) If the history of Guantánamo as a place caught between nations, both belonging and not belonging to both the United States and Cuba, then it also becomes an apt metaphor for the place of its detainees, who are and are not citizens of the United States, are and are not aliens. The creation of legal categories like "unincorporated territories" echoes Ngai's "alien citizens," conflating physical/legal spaces with physical/legal bodies. What better place to house undefinable subjects than in undefinable territories?

sexist/racist environmentalism

I wanted to be an environmentalist at one point in my life: romantic aspirations of saving the planet inspired me, at one point, to consider (double) majoring in environmental studies; but, when I took my first college course in environmental science, something seemed wrong. It wasn't the subject matter itself, which I had already studied in high school and really loved learning about. My excuse was that double majoring would have been too restrictive on my electives, but in reality I knew it had something to do with the other students in the class, the other people in the major. Was it that they shared the same dreams, thought they could save the world too, but that their dreams seemed superficial, phony even, and made me doubt my own?

I think, after reading Andrea Smith's chapter "Rape of the Land," I have realized at least partially the answer: sitting in a classroom of mostly well-to-do, white students, I understood to some level that "environmentalism" to a certain extent meant privilege. For example, the privilege of industry leads to lower birth rates; pre-industrial and developing countries have high birth rates (and of course "developing country" is code for non-Western). The privilege of industry also leads to astronomical increases of pollution and actually, in the short term, population bursts (here's the timeline: a pre-industrial nation has a high birth rate but also a high death rate. First come medical technologies that lower the death rate; the birth rate is still high, leading to high populations. Eventually contraceptive technologies and sex education lower the birth rate, but slowly and only after the population boom). Indeed, Smith confirms that "the population of India was stable until the advent of British colonialism" (70).

I understood that many of my classmates, and myself included, came from privileged backgrounds, could afford to go to NYU, could afford to discuss things like food chains and strip mining, could afford to say we'll protect the environment when really we had no idea what protecting the environment really meant. We came from suburbia, did not grow up next door to a nuclear power plant, were not subjected to the effects of atomic bomb testings. We grew up eating meat and throwing away too much trash and leaving the light on too long, and only cared when we found out it was "wrong," or, more accurately, that it was supposed to be "wrong," i.e. that we were supposed to care.

The sensationalization of the environment and environmental problems has turned it into such a fad, an easy way to "do something right" without understanding the deeper implications or more institutional causes. For example, one time in Midtown I saw a giant, electric billboard that tallied the real-time production of carbon dioxide; but how much waste and pollution was created in producing and constructing that sign, how much energy wasted keeping it running 24/7? The environment has become the go-to cause for all kinds of pseudo-political celebrity activism, a way for people to be recognized for their "noble" efforts while glossing over what is really at stake. Take, for example, the Aryan Women's League (a white supremacist and homophobic organization): "The way to [gain public legitimacy] is to make ourselves known as environmentalists and wildlife advocates" (quoted in Smith, 77). The thought of hate groups using environmental activism as a facade to gain recognition is sickening.

Yet embedded into much of the discourse of environmentalism is hate, "what Betsy Hartmann calls 'the greening of hate'" (quoted in Smith, 69). Though we have already looked at the ways in which communities of color are disproportionately targeted for environmentally dangerous facilities, Smith reveals the marginalization of women and people of color in environmental activism. Specifically (and this is why I brought up earlier the relationship between industrialization and birth rate) the rhetoric of overpopulation as a major environmental problem belies male- and white-dominated politics: immigrant women from third world (and thus inherently racialized) countries are often cast as the problem population in such discourse, seen as "having too many children." Thus they become vilified when they are in fact disenfranchised people, the victims (not the culprits) of national and global structures of inequality and colonialism. Third world nations are, in the view of some populationist groups, responsible for overpopulation; but, Smith points out, these views ignore the giant disparity between the over-consumption of developed, post-industrial nations, and the much more modest consumption of developing nations: "there is actually enough food produced in the world to sustain every person at a 3,000-calorie-per-day diet. However, land is used inefficiently in order to support livestock for environmentally unsustainable Western meat-based diets" (71, emphasis added). Furthermore, "poverty, starvation, environmental degradation, and overpopulation are the direct result of specific colonial practices" (71).

The title of the chapter, "Rape of the Land," acts to draw a parallel between land and the environment with the body as a kind of space. Smith discusses specific, and more literal, ties between the land and the body in the form of the radiation of bomb testing, which pollutes both land and body; thus the physical body and the physical land become intertwined, so that, cliche as it is, "Rape of the Land" is a surprisingly apt metaphor to describe the multiple ways in which pollution and other environmental problems affect people and their property. When the land is violated, so is the body.

I end with a quote that continues to haunt me, though it is mostly irrelevant to the rest of my response: discussing the effects of severe atomic bomb testing in the Marshall Islands, which have caused extreme birth defects and health issues, "Some communities have decided to stop reproducing and go extinct" (69).

"You begin to understand that you are less." -Carlos Padilla

When people of color have been historically characterized with a language of infection and contamination (e.g. the "one-drop" rule), the politicization of garbage and pollution then becomes a politicization of race and racism. In her book Noxious New York, Julie Sze writes, "during the summer of 1968, black youths burned garbage as an expression of their rage and anger" (50); the burning of garbage acts as a rejection of racist, hegemonic structures that not only site environmentally dangerous buildings in neighborhoods of color but also that equate the people living in those neighborhoods with garbage.

Laura Pulido discusses the role of intent in cases of environmental racism and, in particular, attempts to dispel the popular conception of racism as individual actions driven by the intent to disadvantage people of color. Pulido asserts that racism should be understood, instead, as actions that have been influenced or made possible by the history of oppression in the United States, and which further propagate oppression. This reading of racism is especially useful in studying the debates around environmental racism; indeed, Sze mentions multiple times the role of neglect, as opposed to intent. In other words, while acts of environmental racism may not have been born of conscious decisions to harm neighborhoods of color, the fact that these neighborhoods have been neglected by the government, which in turn has allowed them to be targeted, still constitutes a form of racism.

Furthermore, the absence of a community voice in decision-making relegates those who actually reside in the affected neighborhood to a subjugated role. Sze quotes Robert Caro: "Once the avenue had been a place for people; Robert Moses made it a place for cars." (86) Here we see the erasure of the personal voice, the denial of residents in the community, who are replaced by transitory cars passing through the neighborhood. The erasure of the personal is precisely what allows these acts of racism to occur, what allows people of color to become associated with, equated with, garbage, so that the burning of garbage is not just an act of resistance against the government for allowing these things to happen, but an act of resistance against the stripping of the voices of the disempowered. The politics of garbage is not just a politics of the environment and of welfare, but also a politics of power and identity.

la lucha

"...[A]rtists have long been recognized as pioneers and catalysts of gentrification," Arlene Dávila asserts (86). Indeed, the history of postwar art in New York attests to this fact: the Lower East Side was once an artistic haven; when artists were priced out there they moved to SoHo; when artists were priced out there they moved to Chelsea and the Meatpacking District; now that artists are being priced out there they're moving to Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Gowanus. Having studied the influential East Village art scene in the late-mid/mid-late 20th century, I realize that I too am implicated in this trend, not just of artists but also of students and young professionals; haven't I too used gentrification to convince my mother to let me move into Brooklyn instead of staying in the dorms, used promises/half-truths/white lies of "everyone's moving out there, it's all students and yuppies, so it's safe"? Haven't I too dreamt of living la vie bohème, the life of an artist in a rundown Brooklyn studio, unaware that la vie bohème would only lead to la vie bourgeoise?

Yet artists have the ability to combat gentrification, to document and preserve the present, the past; Martin Wong, for example, is famous for his paintings of the Lower East Side and Chinatown, and also for collecting large amounts of graffiti art; his one-time boyfriend and collaborator Miguel Piñero co-founded the Nuyorican Poets Café in Loisaida. However, Dávila writes, "Initially established as an alternative movement, [the Nuyorican Poets Café] continues to embrace Nuyorican and Latino/a culture, however some argue that only as a 'content'—that is, as a bohemian version of multiculturalism where 'Latinidad' is oftentimes more a metaphor of inclusion..." (88-9)

The disparity between artists as bearers of culture and "art culture" as one that implicitly encourages inauthentic imitation—dressing the part, acting the part; how many of the artists that thrived in the 1970s East Village actually came from (upper) middle class suburbia, gave up their privileged lives to seek out la vie bohème?—becomes an apt analogy for the marketing of race in El Barrio, the battle between cultural preservation and "Latinidad" as a "content," the sanitized version of Latino and Puerto Rican history, or even the erasure thereof. As artists flourish, and/or as low rents allow younger crowds to move in, and a neighborhood becomes trendy, the development of businesses by outsiders trying to capitalize on the area's success is sure to follow.

Dávila discusses the importance of the tourism industry in the relationship between gentrification and ethnic cultural heritage; specifically, she compares the public awareness and recognition of places in Harlem, like the Apollo Theater, Sylvia's Restaurant, and the Abyssinian Baptist Church, with the lack of "cultural recognition of El Barrio, and of its Latino heritage" (102-3), which she attributes to the popularity of these landmarks among tourists, as opposed to the relative lack of interest in El Barrio's history. Dávila recognizes, however, that tours of Harlem are "always complemented with a visit to the Old Navy, Starbucks, and Disney Stores" (114-5)—even the Studio Museum is located within steps of a giant H&M and two Starbucks within a block of each other—the implication being that, though (or perhaps because) the existence of famous historical sites of in Harlem act as a sort of validation of Harlem as a cultural center, the effect of gentrification in the area both attracts greater interest and marketable traffic and sanitizes its history and the conflicts still present, simplifying the complexities of racialized spaces into a standardized set of buildings that represent certain abstract ideas of race that are palatable to white tourists and outsiders.

If gentrification and tourism in Harlem glosses over its complex history, it still at the very least allows for recognition of the significance of Harlem in the city and in the nation. In El Barrio, where much fewer famous establishments exist, the fight against gentrification then becomes the fight for self-representation, for the ability to create heritage sites, and the ability of El Barrio itself to become known as a cultural center. Tellingly, Dávila quotes a tourist brochure for Harlem whose sole mention of East Harlem says, "See 'Little Italy' in East Harlem" (114), completely erasing El Barrio from its map and, thus, denying not only its marketability, but its importance as a neighborhood and, to some extent, its very existence.

I'm interested in comparing the issues of gentrification in Harlem and El Barrio with the development of Chinatown, where, other than a Starbucks, a McDonald's, and a Duane Reade or two, there seems to be a complete lack of gentrification: the majority of businesses in the areas are Chinese-owned and cater to Chinese residents (although some restaurants obviously get a considerable amount of non-Chinese business; Joe's Shanghai is the first to come to mind). Despite that, Chinatown (or, at least, Canal Street) attracts throngs of tourists all the same; what about Chinatown has allowed it to still attract outside consumers while seemingly resisting gentrification? Is it the exotification of Chinese culture and fetishization of Chinese cuisine (indeed, I would argue that the majority of non-Chinese traffic to Chinatown centers around food), and the proximity to SoHo? If anything, most non-Chinese tourists seem to stay near the periphery of Chinatown, along Canal or maybe Bayard, but rarely past Pell; is it merely a rest stop for cheap, tasty food after a day of shopping? Also, how has New York's Chinatown developed this way, when, for example, D.C.'s Chinatown has faced so much gentrification that it can barely be recognized as such were it not for the Chinese-language signs (most of them translations of the English-named business) and the arch?

"in turn" meant

"Never marry a Japanese or a black," my mother told me once.

I think I've always been aware of the divide between my own Chinese heritage and all non-Chinese; "it's all in the way you're brought up," as the blonde girl in Hisaye Yamamoto's memoir would say (151). The way you're brought up, with an unconscious understanding of race (though I only realized it consciously much later in life), with a distrust of Japanese and blacks—or, no, but knowing you're supposed to distrust them, because of what the Japanese "did to us during the war" (also only later would I understand the complexities of that statement, the duality of the Japanese-Chinese war and the Japanese-American war, the conflation of Chinese patriotism with American patriotism in the form of hating the Japanese) or because blacks are just "untrustworthy."

How easy—too easy—to concede that "I was brought up this way, so that's the way I feel" (151), to inherit racism. Nature or nurture?

As easy as writing a "calm, impartial story, using 'alleged' and 'claimed' and other cautious journalese" when reporting the case of a black man being threatened by his white neighbors (154)? As Grace Kyungwon Hong writes, in response to Yamamoto's "Fire in Fontana," "Journalistic objectivity thus supports the processes through which the state maintains its pretense of offering equality to all citizens while hypocritically denying property rights to all but the most privileged few" (305).

But Yamamoto recognizes her failure, her resort to "easy": "I should have been an evangelist at Seventh and Broadway, shouting out the name of the Short family and their predicament in Fontana. But I had been as handicapped as the boy in the wheelchair, as helpless" (155).

easy to give in to hatred; easy to accept racism like an infant accepts breastmilk, from the heart of its mother; easy like my initials, like i am supposed to accept easy, accept the easy answer, the easy explanation, the easy way out, accept my mother's hatred like i accept her love; when easy is who i am what else am i supposed to do

but fight against easy

nouvel chinatown

One summer I worked as a camp counselor in a predominantly white, upper middle class neighborhood, teaching children between the ages of 6 and 12 how to fold paper to create animals, or make balloons into piñatas. One day one of the children asked me, "Do you live in Chinatown?" Because she was so young, I obviously couldn't lecture her on the history of racism in America, or even the fact that the closest Chinatown to where I live is a 35-minute Metro ride away, and that Chinese don't even live there and own very few businesses there, that it's mostly an attraction for white tourists, that the only remnants of any "Chineseness" in the neighborhood are the arch, the few signs that translate "Starbucks" or "McDonald's" into Chinese, and the annual New Years parades. Driven out by race riots and gentrification, most Chinese residents have long since relocated to the suburbs, and newer immigrants rarely even consider moving there because of the high rents. Go there now and it looks like any other upscale neighborhood in D.C., like Adam's Morgan or Dupont Circle—if you ignore the arch.

But now I realize I live in a new Chinatown: the Chinese suburb. According to the 2000 Census, my neighborhood has the highest percentage of residents of Chinese descent outside of Hawaii and California (source); of the 23,000 residents, 27.59% are Asian, and 14.49% are Chinese (Census data sources: general, Chinese alone). Just off the top of my head, I can identify at least 15 Chinese or Taiwanese families within walking distance, of which half live on my street.

The Census data is useful in comparing the status of Chinese families in my neighborhood with non-Chinese (mostly White) families: 95.5% of Chinese households and 91.6% of non-Chinese are owner-occupied; the median income for both Chinese and non-Chinese households is roughly 109,000; 75.9% of Chinese residents are foreign born, compared to 29.1% of non-Chinese; 93.6% of Chinese residents speak a language other than English at home, compared to 34.4% of non-Chinese. Expanding on the last statistic, 41.9% of residents who speak an "Asian and Pacific Island language" also speak English "less than 'very well'", comprising both the highest number of non-native English speakers and the highest concentration of poor English speakers within one language group.

Cindy I-Fen Cheng traces the suburbanization of Chinese in America during the early Cold War era, a process which seemingly contradicts understandings of Asians as "foreign" (a concept Nayan Shah and Kay J. Anderson discuss in great depth through the establishment of Chinatowns in San Francisco and Vancouver). I've discussed Claire Jean Kim's idea of racial triangulation several times already, but it is extremely significant to our understanding of Chinese surbanization because Kim's idea of Asian Americans as "foreigner" is at odds with the ways in which Cheng charts the out-migration of Chinese into the suburbs. If we look, specifically, at the Sing Sheng case, we see the ways in which Asian Americans in the mid-20th century have been re-racialized as patriotic Americans, as "insiders", to borrow Kim's term:

A widely circulated image of Sheng that showed him sitting with his wife on their living-room couch staring lovingly at [their son] Richard captured the defining characteristics that cast Sheng as similar to white Americans. His role as father and husband, more than his identity as a middle-class, college-educated veteran, had narrowed the gap separating him from white Americans. ... Depictions of Sheng properly performing his assigned gender role also helped establish his Americanness. (Cheng 1085-6)

Thus, while Asians have long been cast as "alien," "perpetually foreign," and "unassimilable," the new phenomenon of Chinese suburbanization in the mid-1900s shifted these stereotypes and reconceptualized Asian Americans (specifically Chinese) as willing and able to integrate into white society.

However, Cheng reveals the duplicity of this reinvention of Chinese Americans: "While the contrived analogy between blacks and immigrants reinforced the sense that blacks were social problems, it also cast immigrants and in particular, the Chinese, to model the solution of assimilation." (1073) Thus it is clear that the shift from Chinese as alien to assimilative works to further racialize Chinese Americans as "model minority", specifically to strengthen the divide between black and white(/Chinese). Note also that Cheng consistently refers to conceptions of suburban Chinese as becoming both more American and more white, conflating the popular definition of "Americanness" and "whiteness". Tellingly, Chinese can only become more "American" when they become "whiter"; they cannot become "American" if they remain "Chinese".

Lastly, I want to note Cheng's interest in the intersections between race and gender, and specifically the role of Chinese women in creating Chinese suburbia. This could lay the groundwork for a whole essay so I won't discuss it in too much depth, but it's interesting to me because when I moved out of an urban area into the suburbs, my father left the family, and so my connection to suburbia is inherently and inextricably tied to the role of my mother in the family and, contrarily to the ideal of the "nuclear family" that Cheng discusses in detail, the lack of a father. In my lived experience, then, suburbia became possible when my mother was forced to perform both her normative female gender role (as caregiver) and my father's normative male gender role (as worker). Obviously Cheng is writing about a generic view in a specific historical period, but the differences between the "ideal" she discusses and my own personal history, as well as the similarities, struck me as equally important in understanding my own role in these structures of race and space: to borrow what I wrote in week one, how can I reconcile the "nuclear family" ideal with my own female-headed, Chinese, suburban household?

mere accessories

Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton preface the book American Apartheid with a quote by Kenneth B. Clark: "Racial segregation, like all other forms of cruelty and tyranny, debases all human beings—those who are its victims, those who victimize, and in quite subtle ways those who are mere accessories."

But, if we accept Massey and Denton's argument that segregation has never been so severe as along the black-white binary, who are the mere accessories? I am reminded of Claire Jean Kim's concept of triangulation: if, along a scale of "foreigner" and "insider", we can place Asians (certainly), Latinos (tentatively), and Eastern and Southern Europeans (tentatively, and mostly historically) close to the "foreign" end, and white Americans at the "insider" end, then what about African Americans also makes them "insiders," according to Kim? Of course, the way she conceptualizes "foreignness" and "insiderness" refers to their acceptance in the nation as a whole; but, if we follow Massey and Denton, and reinterpret this scale to mean acceptance in the neighborhood, we complicate the position of African Americans as "insiders." "...African Americans in large northern cities were effectively removed—socially and spatially—from the rest of American society," Massey and Denton write (43).

It might be inappropriate to look at this with the same "foreigner" vs. "insider" terminology that Kim uses, however, so I want to propose a new dimension, because even though Kim's idea of triangulation is based only on two axes, it opens the possibility for many more. Using Massey and Denton's terms, we can look at African Americans (as well as Latinos, Asians, etc.) on a parallel scale of "integrated" vs. "segregated". I call this a parallel scale because it, in a sense, restructures Kim's original foreigner-insider axis, taking the very basic idea of belonging, and changing the specifics of space and acceptance.

If we look at this new version of racial geometry, the discrepancies between "foreignness" and "segregated" become truly apparent: although African Americans can be viewed as "insiders", they are predominantly segregated, as opposed to Asians, whom Kim places as "foreigners" but can be placed in a moderate position in terms of segregation/integration. I acknowledge however that my reinterpretation of racial geometry is flawed in that Kim's axes refer to the popular (and strongly white) imagination of different racial groups, while Massey & Denton discuss real-world consequences of these imaginations, but I think that fact reveals the disparity between imagination and consequence. It's telling, in fact, that "the percentage of whites who agree that 'black people have a right to live wherever they can afford' rose from 76% in 1970 to 88% in 1980" (91), but at the same time "have little tolerance for racial mixtures beyond 20% black" (93); in other words, they belong as "insiders" but do not belong as "integrated."

I return to this idea of "mere accessories": who are they, or what? Are they the Korean storeowners caught in the midst of the LA race riots, or the low-income Puerto Ricans being bought out of Spanish Harlem? Because, though I understand the ways in which realtors discriminate against African Americans, though I've seen firsthand the segregation of black communities in New York and in D.C., I don't know whether I am a "mere accessory" or not.

property/propriety, inheritance/infection

"Dear friend,
I am black.
I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do.
I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me."
-Adrian Piper, text from My Calling (Card) #1, 1986, lithograph on paper

An important figure in Conceptual art, performance art, and philosophy, Adrian Piper is known for introducing race and gender politics into a field formerly (and, arguably, still) dominated by white men. As a light-skinned African American woman, Piper has created pieces that challenge predominant associations of blackness with inferiority and whiteness with superiority, openly defying her ability to "pass" as white, as in her video installation Cornered (1988) (part 1, part 2). "But, you see, I have no choice," she says, confrontational, posed in the corner of a blank, white room, "I'm cornered: If I tell you who I am, you become nervous and uncomfortable, or antagonized. But if I don't tell you who I am, then I have to pass for white, and why should I have to do that?" (pt. 1, 4:28-52)

Piper refers to whiteness as a "racial club" (pt. 1, 2:25-30), even as a sort of haven - "...because if someone can look and sound like me and still be black, then no one is safely, unquestionably white" (pt. 1, 6:32-46), she states sardonically - a "social fact" reinterpreted as a metaphorical space that allows its insiders greater opportunities than those who are excluded. Cheryl I. Harris echoes these ideas: recalling the story of her light-skinned grandmother's move to Chicago and integration into white society, Harris writes, "...she could thus enter the white world...not merely passing, but trespassing." (1711) Thus whiteness becomes both a property in the attributive sense as well as a property in the material sense, both a personal trait and a personal possession.

Conversely, blackness too becomes a property in a way both opposite and parallel to the propertization of whiteness; obviously, the privileges of being white contrasts sharply with the disadvantages of being black, yet both blackness and whiteness are inheritable, statuses that pass down, along with their associated opportunities (or lack thereof), to younger generations. While the inheritance of whiteness comes more in the form of material and immaterial advantages, the inheritance of blackness can be construed as something more bodily and visceral; take, for example, the concept of hypodescent, or the "one-drop" rule, in which blackness becomes inherited through blood.

Inheritance through blood, or infection? Race becomes disease, a contaminant, which spreads into real estate property: Laura Pulido writes, "'Too many' people of color might reduce a neighborhood's status, property value, or general level of comfort for white people." (16) The immateriality of race becomes realized through the politics of property: who has access to what. If whites can inherit privilege, as well as monetary and real estate gains, then do nonwhites inherit pollution?

Piper undermines the idea of hypodescent, however, by asserting that "some researchers estimate that almost all purportedly white Americans have between 5 and 20% black ancestry. Well, this country's entrenched conventions classify a person as black if they have any black ancestry. So, most purportedly white Americans are in fact black." (pt. 1, 6:47-7:14) With this assertion Piper reimagines and reverses the black-white racial hierarchy, describing a "black majority" (pt. 2, 0:37-0:41) and a "white minority" (pt. 2, 1:43-55), and a society in which, though whiteness is still elite, blackness may be a property worth investing in: "Or will you feel disappointed [if you discover you are certifiably white], deprived of something special? Perhaps you'll even lie and tell people you're black even if you're not. There's a nice, subversive strategy for you." (pt. 2, 2:46-3:03)

the politics of definition

To define race, to define arbitrary categories of difference, whether by physicality or anthropology: it seems so easy to say "this is white," "that is black," as if race lay simply in the ability of the body to produce melanin. Even the Oxford English Dictionary holds this as fact: "each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics." But this popular, superficial understanding ignores the historical struggles of race, and especially the contradictory and convenient definitions of race that have both informed and been informed by American politics; the ways in which white and non-white people have been imagined and categorized by white Americans, and how these imaginations have become manifest realities.

Following Stephen Jay Gould, Claire Jean Kim imagines race as a geometric plane, a field in which relationships between different points can move in two directions: "civic ostracism" along one axis, "relative valorization" along the other; i.e. a scale of inclusion and exclusion, and a hierarchy of superiority; challenging more traditional notions of race as a singular grayscale, which posits white and black at opposing poles, with Asians, Latinos, native Americans, and so on, at various points within the middle. With this model, we can understand race not as a "bipolar" construction, but rather a complex field of nuances in which, for example, Asian Americans can be characterized (in the popular imagination) as somewhere relatively in the middle between whites and blacks in terms of superiority, but far lower than both in terms of assimilability.

But how have Asians been racialized in these terms, as "model" and "foreign"? The long history of Asian exclusion and immigration quotas in America, as detailed by Mae Ngai, both was influenced by and further perpetuated concepts of Asian foreignness: "...the 'colored races,'" she writes, "were imagined as having no country of origin. They lay outside the concept of nationality and, therefore, citizenship. They were not even bona fide immigrants." (27) If we understand non-white immigrants in this manner (though the definition of "white" as we understand it now conflicts with legal definitions of "white" in the 1920s, during the era of quotas, complicated by the conquest of Mexican lands and, in turn, the status of Mexican immigrants as legally "white" in order to account for their new and unwitting presence in America), then they become "specters" (Ngai's word), not just non-citizens, but non-people, subjects who paradoxically belong to two nations and to no nation at all.

Indeed, non-white immigrants, as well as, admittedly quite broadly, all non-black minorities (and especially Asians and Latinos), can be defined by a system of paradoxes, the disparities between belonging and not belonging, inferiority and superiority, non-black and non-white. They inhabit a liminal space, a middle space, a boundary: they cannot be placed into the narrow, tidy categories of white and black.

That is not to say, of course, that non-black minorities have no relation to the bipolar American construction of racial politics, though they may lie outside that strict binary; rather, the ways in which they have become racialized depends on that established division. I am drawn especially to Kim's discussion of the "model minority," and its historic predecessors, which cast Asian Americans in a positive light vis-a-vis African Americans and Latino Americans, especially knowing the stereotype persists to this day. I become frustrated when people tell me about "how smart Asians are," because they do not understand the political history of the "model minority," and the intricate racist undertones it suggests. Is that what we as a nation have decided all Asians have in common, their (whether imagined or real) intelligence, perseverance, and cooperativeness? Furthermore, is that what we as a nation have decided all blacks lack?

Another definition of race, offered by the OED: "a group or set of people or things with a common feature or features," as if all members of a single "race" embody a monolithic, easily articulated identity.

belonging

I.
Once, a couple years ago, when I was walking down SoHo at night by myself, a man hissed at me, "Stupid Chink," and spat. I have never been more frightened for my immediate well being, afraid not only of what he would do next, or was capable of doing, to me, but also of the implications of being a "stupid Chink," the implication that, though I was born and raised in America, had only visited China twice in my life, though my mother often jokes I am more American than Chinese, that somehow I did not belong there; but, if I don't belong in this country, where do I belong?

II.
Growing up in a small, largely white, middle class neighborhood, I didn't develop an allegiance with or even become aware of an Asian American community until I moved, at the age of 11, to a more diverse area, where Chinese American families sent their children to Chinese school, as if, by slaving for several hours each week over how to write and pronounce basic Mandarin, they could somehow become "more Chinese." Even then I avoided the Asian cliques, having had only white friends in elementary school, having only interacted with other Chinese because they were friends with my mother, because I was unfamiliar with the culture of Chinese America. I had never endured Chinese school, never gone to Chinese church; I found the "Got Rice?" logo (which all of the other Chinese teens seemed to love) distasteful.

On the other hand, I was acutely aware of my own racial identity, used to white children slanting their eyes at me, or strangers saying, "Ni hao," as if by knowing how to greet me in a language that wasn't even my native language, they somehow knew all there was to know about me. Especially in elementary school, being the only Asian with Asian parents (the other Chinese girl was adopted by a white American family), I became the oddity, the source of jokes, like how "thank you" in Chinese almost sounds like "shit shit."

III.
How can I reconcile the hard-earned success of my mother, who emigrated from China to pursue a Ph.D., managed to make enough money on her own to buy a decent house in the suburbs, send two children to college, with the working class Chinese I see every week in Chinatown, the old, hunchbacked cleaning lady who comes to my office every Friday, who can probably barely afford her rent? What decisions did my mother make, what turns of fate allowed her to gain access to higher education, a well-paid job, and comfortable housing, when hundreds of other Chinese immigrants are not so fortunate, living in cramped apartments and likely to be priced out?

Is she the exception?

IV.
1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act is passed, preventing further immigration of Chinese into America.
1924: The Immigrant Act is passed, prohibiting the immigration of East, Southeast, and South Asians.
1965: The Immigration and Nationality Act abolishes immigration quotas, once again allowing Asians to immigrate into the country.

For 80 years of American history, Asians have been excluded to some extent from entering the country; for even longer than that, they were categorically defined as foreign, ineligible for citizenship due to their non-white status.

V.
Where do I belong?