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?