Writing the Ghetto: Class, Authorship, and the Asian American Ethnic Enclave

2. “Like a Slum”: Ghettos and Ethnic Enclaves, Ghetto and Genre

2 / “Like a Slum”: Ghettos and Ethnic Enclaves, Ghetto and Genre In a sociologist’s survey of the quality of life in San Francisco’s late twentieth-century Chinatown, residents and workers remark upon the difficult conditions of their lives, of the crowded, dilapidated housing conditions; the demanding but poorly paying, dead-end jobs; the inability to find better work and housing elsewhere because of racial discrimination ; and the damage that these material conditions impose on their psyches. This portrait tells us that Chinatown is a ghetto, a racially segregated space that is formed by and developed under social and economic structures that create a spatially contained Asian American underclass. One survey response gives pause. The respondent, noting the ghetto conditions in which she lives, describes the space as “like a slum,” as if Chinatown were not an actual slum, but an approximation of one (qtd. in Loo 79, emphasis added). Perhaps this is just an offhand use of simile, but it hints at deeper, perplexing processes of social imagination, desire, and language that resist naming Chinatown, and other Asian American ghettos more generally, as slums or ghettos. What are the processes of social imagination, desire, and language that generate this impulse, the resistance to saying simply that Chinatown is a ghetto or slum? If Chinatown and other racially segregated sites of Asian American class inequity are not ghettos, what are they instead? The resistance to calling the Asian American ghetto a ghetto bespeaks a denial that Asian Americans experience structural class inequity. It also bespeaks a more general denial of class injustice in America. Asian 26 / “like a slum” Americans have become an especially useful group to fuel this denial. This is evident in that the Asian American ghetto in particular has been recast into an “ethnic enclave,” which obscures and naturalizes Asian American experiences of class inequity. “Ethnic enclave” is broadly synonymous with “cultural community.” Rejecting the negative connotations of “ghetto,” “ethnic enclave” redefines racially segregated spaces of Asian American class inequity into productive communities infused with and driven by ethnic culture. “Ethnic enclave” constructs spaces like Chinatown as unique repositories of Asian culture, an esteemed and valuable culture that is and should be productively cultivated, and that engenders and organizes meaningful and rewarding social relations. This evaluation of Asian culture is important, and offers solace to ghetto dwellers whose social, spatial, and economic disenfranchisement often leaves them with little else but their culture. However, the recasting of the ghetto into the more positive ethnic enclave displaces a structural assessment of ghetto life onto the terrain of culture. This recasting makes the de jure and de facto economic and class structures that cause Asian American ghettoization recede from view, replacing an account of how Asian Americans are structurally limited by race and class to spaces like Chinatown with a portrait of these spaces as ethnic communities that are formed, developed, and organized by culture. The substitution of the term “ethnic enclave” for “ghetto” obscures class with culture. Structuring ghetto life through culture also turns class into culture. When elements of ghettoization are recognized, such as poor housing, joblessness, and labor exploitation, they are assimilated into the cultural portrait and reconfigured as cultural phenomena, suggesting that the conditions of ghetto life are natural expressions of Asian culture. This culturalization of class—the reconfiguration of structurally produced hierarchies of class into internally produced expressions of culture—is evident in some of the claims made about the original Chinatown ghetto in San Francisco. Chalsa Loo points out that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studies of San Francisco’s Chinatown attribute tenement living not to the legal and social exclusion of Chinese immigrants from better housing choices, but to the assertion that “it is almost their universal custom to herd together as compactly as possible. . . . [T]rained in centuries of stifling gregariousness . . . they like crowds and clamor and elbow-jostling” (Dobie 6–7). Likewise, the San Francisco Health Officer ’s Report of 1869–1870 attributes the filth and squalor of Chinatown to a “Chinese mode of living,” neglecting to mention that sanitation and street-cleaning services were regularly withheld from the area (Loo 44). “like a slum” / 27 Another study, Loo notes, states that Chinese Americans “apparently delight to exist in . . . dense conditions of nastiness” (Farwell 4). These uses of culture on the one hand deny that Asian American ghettoization exists at all, and on the other, recognize its...