Asian America: Forming New Communities, Expanding Boundaries (review)

On March 20, 2010, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the United States published an article about a controversy among what has been historically regarded as the Chinese American community: some Taiwan-born individuals and their children wanted to identify themselves as Taiwanese, rather than Chinese, on the 2010 U.S. Census form. Indicative of an increasingly visible division with Chinese America, this controversy is a reminder of the political, sociological, and cultural diversity that has always existed throughout the history of Asian America and has become especially pronounced in recent decades. Coherently focused on post-1960s developments and their impact on Asian American communities, this anthology broadens and deepens our understanding of such diversity. The book examines a wide range of Asian communities not only in different parts of the United States but also in Canada. The eleven chapters, along with the editor’s introduction, represent exciting new scholarship that will help us more fully understand the meanings of community for Asian Americans and their relationship with the mainstream society in a rapidly changing world. Coming from different disciplines, the authors offer multiple perspectives for comprehending the Asian American experience.

In the introduction, Huping Ling makes a succinct but sophisticated attempt to conceptualize the notion of community in fast-changing Asian America by noting the multitude of the kinds of Asian communities—they exist in the metropolis and the hinterland both as urban enclaves and suburban populations defined by either geographical or cultural boundaries. Chapter 1 by Min Zhou provides a collective profile of major Asian American groups, which also illustrates the demographic and socioeconomic differences among them. Interestingly, her data show that the homeownership among Asian American families (53 percent) is much lower than the national average (66 percent), which appears to contradict earlier perceptions of Asian American success in education and income. By directly tackling the question whether Asian Americans are becoming honorable whites, her analysis draws attention to the perception of middle-class Asian Americans as white, which quietly but increasingly prevails among educational institutions and government-funding agencies like the National Science Foundation as well as the suburban white middle class. In chapter 2 Haiming Liu uses family life to magnify the transnational dimension in the experiences of Chinese Americans. Illuminative of how a family would map its association with diasporic spaces is the story told by a student who invented different nicknames for the relatives living overseas to indicate not only their position in the family but also their respective country of residence.

In chapter 3, Ling Z. Anderson discusses the fragmentation of the Chinese in Chicago, pointing out, correctly and insightfully, that it also “renders the new generation’s drive for pan-Asian solidarity a daunting task” (84). In chapter 4, which is focused on Little Saigon of Orange County in California, Linda Võ points out its uniqueness as a community created by “refugees.” In analyzing its political and economic activities, Võ shows the internal diversity as a result of its transition from a refuge community to an immigrant one and to a predominantly second-generation population. Concentrating on the Filipino/a community in San Francisco’s Excelsior Neighborhood, Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, in chapter 5, discusses its development and the emerging tension between old-timers and new immigrants. In chapter 6, Huping Ling examines the new and “not quite visible” Chinese community in St. Louis, calling it a “cultural community.” She perceptively notes that such a community is also found in other contexts, “where the physical concentrations of the ethnic minority groups have economically and professionally integrated into the larger society” (140) but remain culturally distinctive. In chapter 7, Wei Zeng and Wei Li investigate another case of Chinese cultural community in Phoenix, which does not have a physical enclave. They focus on a festival called Chinese Week to illustrate the importance of culture in formation of community as well as the tension among its heterogeneous groups. Yuan Shu...