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?