Envisioning America: New Chinese Americans and the Politics of Belonging
256
Envisioning America: New Chinese Americans and the Politics of Belonging
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Overview
Envisioning America is a groundbreaking and richly detailed study of how naturalized Chinese living in Southern California become highly involved civic and political actors. Like other immigrants to the United States, their individual life stories are of survival, becoming, and belonging. But unlike any other Asian immigrant group before them, they have the resources—Western-based educations, entrepreneurial strengths, and widely based social networks in Asia—to become fully accepted in their new homes.
Nevertheless, Chinese Americans are finding that their social credentials can be a double-edged sword. Their complete incorporation as citizens is bounded both by mainstream discourse in the United States, which paints them racially as perpetual foreigners, and by an existing Asian-Pacific American community not always accepting of their economic achievements and transnational ties. Their attempts at inclusion are at the heart of a vigorous struggle for recognition and political empowerment.
This book challenges the notion that Asian Americans are apathetic or apolitical about civic engagement, reminding us that political involvement would often have been a life-threatening act in their homeland. The voices of Chinese Americans who tell their stories in these pages uncover the ways in which these new citizens actively embrace their American citizenship and offer a unique perspective on how global identities transplanted across borders become rooted in the local.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804772822 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/20/2009 |
| Series: | Asian America |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 755 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Envisioning America
NEW CHINESE AMERICANS AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGINGBy Tritia Toyota
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6242-7
Chapter One
Transforming the Field
Framing the Rules of Engagement: Summer 2003, Monterey Park, California
"I don't like all that race-related stuff, give me a better argument."
The room is quiet; the congealing take-out pizza in the center of the table suddenly looks appetizing. The scene is the monthly board meeting of Chinese Americans United for Self Empowerment (CAUSE), a political advocacy group based in Southern California whose membership is overwhelmingly American of Chinese ancestry.
It is early on a weeknight, and other board members have been straggling in after work. Meeting sites shift among the sprawling suburbs rimming Los Angeles to accommodate the group's equally extended membership. Tonight the gathering is at the corporate offices of one of the board members on the edge of Monterey Park. The atmosphere is casual and friendly. Board members network personally and professionally among themselves and frequently see one another at community and social functions. About a dozen people from Palos Verdes, Monterey Park, West Covina, and West Los Angeles sit comfortably around a long conference table.
if not better, than those of native born Asian citizens" (Ong and Nakanishi 2003, 130).
Political involvement, political participation, and political activism as conceived in this book merge with what are considered formal political processes such as electoral politics but extend beyond them as well. Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans take part in a wide range of social practices and relationships in which they negotiate identity and membership. Addressing these activities as political confronts hegemonic asymmetries and power relations. As Steven Gregory (1998) writes, "Politics does not delimit a pre-given set of institutions, relations, or actions, as much as describe a variable field of social practices ... imbued with power." Social constructions of subjectivities such as racial identity are not just political processes but "the precondition of politics" (Gregory 1998, 13). To gloss political involvement and the inherent social responses that occur outside the electoral field would be to discount the complex Asian American record of civic engagement historically and in more contemporary frameworks including broad global transformations affecting the political economy of the United States and Asia. This supports what Asian American scholars have argued must be a wider theoretical structure for defining what is political in Asian American communities, a wider conceptualization of "potential intersections," relationships, and experiences (Nakanishi 2001, 107).
The dizzying speed and aggressiveness with which new Chinese activists are fashioning politicized identities out of which they pursue collective action have unsettled not just mainstream political structures but those already extant in the Asian American political community. New immigrants' participation in various politically oriented organizations and their attendance at and support of numerous community functions make them politically active. If asked, not many would call themselves activists; many would vehemently deny the label. Yet, when an ethnography of these new Chinese Americans is constructed from their life histories and the flow of the everyday through events, links, and alliances in which they are involved, a picture of activism emerges.
This participation points to the transformative dynamic of a self- inscribed activist identity grounded at the same time in an ascribed ethno racial assignment (Brodkin 1998). It is the dialectic between Self and Other(s) that impels their participation in political processes. These new citizens of Chinese ancestry have visions of inclusion that insinuate themselves into two existing narratives. The first is an Asian American political sensibility established during the 1970s as a counternarrative to mainstream hegemonies. This traditional Asian American politicized identity translates into a progressivism privileging social justice, racial equality, and the pursuit of a recovered personal and community distinctiveness. The second dominant narrative has evolved out of the nation-state story of national citizenship and belonging, which guarantees citizens full and equal membership (Wang 1991). In this national project, both new Chinese American activists and other Asian Pacific Americans find that the presumption and promise of equal standing-regardless of race, color, or creed-remains largely unfulfilled. Ultimately, it is this dialectic that may have the greatest potential to fashion an instrumental political alliance incorporating both primarily native-born Asian Americans and new-activist immigrants.
These new activists' dreams for inclusion are, therefore, contested visions. As they construct place and space for themselves, their new politicized identities must be understood as an oppositional reading, one that is potentially counterhegemonic to both the existing, predominantly native-born Asian American political identity and the homogenizing imperatives of a national political citizenship. Of course, not all counterhegemonies are resistant all the time. It will be shown that, while not necessarily resistant but rather cooperative or co-optative, a politicized identity project among new immigrants points to the reconfiguration of power relationships not only between themselves and dominant power structures but between the heterogeneous counternarratives that constitute this ethnic subgroup within an Asian American collective.
* * *
At the CAUSE board meeting, the conversation is between two members. The subject of "all that race-related stuff" is Proposition 54 on the October 2003 California ballot. If passed (and at midsummer, passage appeared inevitable before a dramatic shift in voter sentiment led to its overwhelming defeat), Proposition 54 would stop local and state government from gathering racial and ethnic data. The amendment to the California Constitution is the newest sibling of Proposition 209, which in 1996 banned state and local government affirmative action programs. Proposition 54 is already widely opposed by major civil rights and minority groups in the state that believe the gathering of racial data is crucial to political empowerment. But among all voting groups in preelection polling, only Asian Americans support Proposition 54 (Field Research Corporation 2003).
The argument on the table is whether the board should endorse Proposition 54. CAUSE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan community-based organization. Federal regulations do not allow nonprofits to endorse political candidates. Instead, the group's brand of advocacy is geared to taking positions on legislation, propositions, or other ballot measures as well as a wide-ranging number of issues affecting Chinese and other Asian American constituents. CAUSE's positions are performed publicly via outreach and discourse "through education, voter registration, community involvement, research and publication, advocacy and leadership training." There is no animosity in this board discussion, but it is also clear that there isn't necessarily agreement.
One of the discussants is Chinese American, but not native-born. Larry is never comfortable framing debate in strictly racial terms and prefers a wider dialogue. He grew up in Hong Kong, immigrated to the United States as a college student, and was naturalized in his twenties. He left Hong Kong during a period of civil uncertainty and fear. The horrors of the Cultural Revolution to the north were spilling across the border; there were riots and death in the colony. The British had decided that the word colony carried negative connotations and had just adopted the more neutral term territory, but the mentality remained for Larry and other Chinese living there. Hong Kong Chinese were not full citizens of the realm. His parents decided it was time to look abroad for more opportunities-and safety for their children.
The other person in the Proposition 54 conversation is about the same age as Larry and is also Chinese but American-born. Ric lived in Los Angeles during the radicalizing civil unrest of the 1960s. As an active member of that generation, he both witnessed and participated in the birth of the Yellow Power Movement and the flowering of a pan-Asian American identity. These experiences led him to law school in Southern California and to an evolving personal history of progressive, community-based politics.
Ric looks around the table and says with finality, "Anything that prohibits the gathering of this kind of data or information is really a violation of our civil rights, so it's [Proposition 54] not in our interest." For him, the choice is clear. In quick succession, he ticks off three potential negative results if the proposition passes: there would be less medical research on minority groups, health and safety would be jeopardized by public agencies not being permitted to collect racial data, and the lack of race and ethnic-specific data in higher education would penalize minority students. The points Ric makes are virtually, word for word, the mantra of every progressive Asian American and Pacific Islander organization and individual in the state opposed to the proposition, most of whom also got their political start during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For Ric it is all about "that race-related stuff." He waits for comment from Larry, but the meeting has already gone later than usual and everybody just wants a quick wrap. No one else has any opinions, and by voice count the group supports a "no" vote on Proposition 54. Later, Larry, who complains that he can't get used to eating pizza for dinner, entices a few board members to a nearby Monterey Park Chinese restaurant for noodle soup. Even at nearly 10 o'clock at night, the Atlantic Boulevard restaurant is crowded with new immigrants. Once the small group finds a vacant table and orders, Larry explains that he's not necessarily a supporter of Proposition 54; he just wanted Ric to better articulate why he didn't support it-to persuade him that their interests were fundamentally the same.
* * *
At the outset, let me make clear that I hesitate to label Larry's or Ric's motivations or the goals of the respective communities of native-born and foreign-born as antagonistic per se. In the organization both men support-and beyond, in their personal lives-they have common goals, and both search for the common ground that comes from shared meanings of membership and experience. Each wants political recognition and a seat at the table when resources are divvied up, and each seeks validation as a full participatory citizen. And let me also make clear that the purpose of this book is not to simply privilege the issue of nativity but to use dissimilar life experiences analytically in order to tease out the ways in which different political identities and ideologies are born and subsequently acted upon in everyday life. In this way, a more nuanced picture of activism emerges-one that acknowledges the differences but also foregrounds the commonalities intrinsic to Asian American political lives. However, as already briefly established, what unfolds in the following pages, and must not be hidden or glossed over within these American lives, is community disjuncture, including both conflict and cooperation over who qualifies for inclusion in an activist Chinese American political arena, who qualifies for leadership, who decides on issues and agendas. In short, who will be considered as representative not just of Chinese Americans but of the wider Asian American community?
Inherent in these broad questions of representation are the overriding problems of increasing heterogeneity within the Chinese American community and the growing differentials of class and gender among Chinese immigrants and, thus, of Asian America. Addressing class concerns has always been part of a radical and subsequent progressive Asian American political project and is slowly being acknowledged by new Chinese activists as well.
The brief and seemingly insignificant exchange between Larry and Ric didn't warrant mention in the meeting's minutes. Such exchange is commonplace in the give-and-take that often characterizes CAUSE meetings, where decisions are usually made without rancor and where later, conversation is parsed. This small bit of ethnographic text between two Chinese American political activists allows for a wider discussion and frames the major themes investigated here about the meaningful ways in which identity is illuminated through life history.
How we identify ourselves and others through ever-shifting, contested, appropriated, structured, and internalized social processes of categorization and the social outcomes that result can be gleaned from everyday events and social interactions. In this view, identity formation, rather than being a static process, is creative and dynamic. Indeed, as has been noted by Kondo (1990), it is a lifelong occupation in which the crafting of self "implies a concept of agency: that human beings create, construct, work on, and enact their identities, sometimes creatively challenging the limits of the cultural constraints which constitute both what we call selves and the ways in which those selves can be crafted". The implication is that humans are not entirely free agents. As will be shown, new Chinese activists have come to realize that much of their own participatory work cannot be separated from the geopolitical and racial contexts of posturing between the United States and China. In fact, to construct and practice an Asian American political sensibility is tacit acknowledgment of differentials of power that continue to exist not just in the United States but in global discourses as well. This, then, is also a story about racial politics in the United States and beyond, including systems and structures of inequality that are defined primarily in racial terms, and how racial privilege within those contours continues to subjectify (Gladney 1998). In this sense, that which is political takes on broader ideological implications-the deliberate efforts of alienated individuals and groups to alter systems of dominance, or what has been called the tyranny of meanings (Sederberg 1984).
In its more quotidian manifestations, political participation is an especially fruitful way of looking at the dynamics of historical transformation in Asian America. Ethnographic constructions of participation are a way of getting at both history and the collective memory of a community. Furthermore, politics-whether electoral or any of the myriad forms of participation in grassroots community activities-constitute unique group and public endeavors that involve a variable and highly fluid field of social practices. It is a means by which Americans perform their public identities.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Transforming the Field 11
2 History and Race 26
3 Envisioning America 53
4 California Lifestyles 79
5 Coming of Age 115
6 Seeking New Allies, Building New Community 160
7 Still the Problem of the Twenty-first Century 181
Appendix 1 Selected Survey Results from the 2000 Democratic National Convention 197
Appendix 2 Los Angeles Country Communities with Chinese Populations (including Taiwanese) of More Than 20 Percent 201
Appendix 3 Socioeconomic Differences 202
Notes 203
References 213
Index 229