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

6. Indian Edison: The Ethnoburbian Paradox and Corrective Ethnography

6 / Indian Edison: The Ethnoburbian Paradox and Corrective Ethnography In the title story of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, Ruma, a second-generation South Asian American woman, lives in upper-middle -class suburban comfort. For her, “frugality [is] foreign” (3-4). This is a striking statement in that it reverses a common wisdom—foreignness usually makes frugality familiar. The immigrant, the foreigner, is an icon of saving, having alighted upon a new land with few financial resources, yet with the fierce resourcefulness of hard work and thrift that vindicates the American Dream mythology and makes Asian Americans its object lesson. In Lahiri’s story, and in contrast to the narratives of Asian American ghettoization in the preceding chapters, Asian Americans have “arrived.” They have arrived economically and spatially, ensconced in financial stability, if not luxury, in the spatial emblem of class comfort, the American suburb. The problem of Asian American ghettoization can be resolved. Ghettoization is typically an urban problem so it is not surprising that suburbanization and the economic well-being it codes offer an immanent solution. Yet suburbanization has its limits, as I detailed in chapter 5. Moreover, suburbanization as a solution to ghettoization iterates the culturalization of class. Suburbanization codes cultural assimilation, at least in the common form presented in the example of Lahiri’s story. Ruma is married to a white man, which symbolizes her distance from her Bengali heritage, and the suburb she lives in is reflexively depicted as white. These dynamics rehearse the link between assimilation and upward mobility. Upward mobility is diverted onto the private terrain of indian edison / 177 culture, as is, in turn, ghettoization. This culturalization also fates ethnic difference to obsolescence. Is the antidote to ghettoization always the deracination of culture? Is the suburb only white? The “ethnoburb” is the dialectical alternative to urban ghettoization on the one hand, and to suburbanized, assimilatory upward mobility on the other. It is an alternative in terms of class as well as culture, putting Asian Americans in relationship to class in a way that does not bloat culture, so that ghettoization is privatized, or that attenuates cultural difference, so that assimilation remains fused to upward mobility. “Ethnoburb ” is a term coined by geographer Wei Li to describe suburban formations with pronounced ethnic populations, ethnic character, and ethnic affluence. Ethnoburbs are sites like Monterey Park, California, dubbed the “Chinese Beverly Hills,” where Chinese-language signs and architectural styles have transformed the suburban landscape. The ethnoburb gives immigrants the best conditions of culture and class. It is a site of upward mobility, yet it enables the preservation and cultivation of cultural community. The ethnoburb is an alternative aspirational destination of ghettoized immigrants and a corrective to the chauvinism of assimilatory suburbanization. Frugality is foreign, and foreignness does not axiomatically stand in for the need for frugality. The ethnoburb is not only an end of a journey, but also the beginning of one. Some ethnoburb residents are immigrants who follow the conventional rags-to-riches trajectory. Securing suburban middle-class comfort is the culmination of their hard work; the ethnoburb is their reward . However, the space is also populated by those who bypass this familiar path, by Asian migrants who are already wealthy and begin their American lives in suburban comfort. The growth of the latter group was conspicuous in the 1980s, the decade when ethnoburbs became highly visible. Intensifying globalization brought great wealth to Pacific Rim nations, resulting in the formation of sizable middle and privileged classes in Asia. The migrants among them had the means to settle directly in the suburbs, to “leapfrog the core” (Li 41). The ethnoburb is populated by model minorities as well as moneyed minorities. The ethnoburb appears to be a better and different racialized class formation. It breaks the link between upward mobility and assimilation, while also calling attention to the political-economic power of Asians in the United States. Wealthy Asians in America are not simply obeisant , politically disenfranchised model minorities, as I discussed in chapter 5, but are proxies of mighty nations that shape, if not command, global political economy. Yet these images and experiences of ethnoburb 178 / indian edison formation risk feeding an old problem—the obfuscation of Asian American experiences of class inequity. They are not obfuscated by culture per se, via the culturalization of class, but are obfuscated because the celebration of the ethnoburb is a foreshortening. Celebrating the ethnoburb as a...