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8 The Other Half of the Sky Immigrant Women in Chinatown’s Enclave Economy W omen hold up half of the sky.” This saying accurately describes the role of women in the enclave economy in New York City’s Chinatown. Most often than not, when people think of Chinese laborers in the United States, they imagine railroad workers, miners, hand laundrymen, or restaurant waiters and cooks. Women were seldom seen in the old Chinatowns, and past studies of Chinese immigration and adaptation to life in the United States often overlooked women, even as they began to arrive in large numbers after the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. There was scant recognition that the experience of immigrant women may be different from that of men and that male patterns of socioeconomic adaptation are not necessarily applicable to women. In New York City’s Chinatown in the 1980s, three out of five women worked in the garment industry, the backbone of the growing enclave economy . Most of these working women were new immigrants, married, with school-age and younger children. Day in and day out, row after row, they bent over sewing machines, surrounded by piles of fabric scraps, and sometimes with toddlers and infants at their feet.1 On the home front, they were expected to attend to the needs of their children and husbands (and parents or in-laws, or both), as well as the household chores: cooking, cleaning, laundry , grocery shopping, paying bills, and so on. In this chapter I examine how Chinese immigrant women in New York City’s Chinatown juggle multiple roles as wives, mothers, and wage workers and how their labor in both home and workplace contributes to the survival of their immigrant families. “ 170 / Chapter 8 An Alternative Framework for Analysis To examine work and its place in the lives of Chinese immigrant women in the ethnic enclave, I develop an analytical framework to argue that immigrant women ’s work is an intrinsic part of a family strategy to survive and eventually adapt to the host society. However, the adoption of such a strategy depends on specific sociocultural contexts—those from which immigrant women came and those into which they resettled in the United States. My task is to demonstrate that the meaning of women’s work varies under unique sociocultural circumstances. I aim to reconcile seemingly contradictory elements in the lived experience of immigrant women and to shed light on how cultural components interact with economic factors to affect immigrant adaptation to American society. First, I analytically distinguish two dimensions of work involved in women’s labor force participation: survival and career attainment. Each contains a different set of goals and strategies. Survival entails getting settled and securing from an unfamiliar and often hostile environment the essential means of livelihood. Career attainment involves the socialization of women into the normative structure of an economy traditionally dominated by men, occupational mobility equal to that of men, and economic independence from men.2 Oftentimes, newly arrived immigrants are busy working in order to put food on the table and make ends meet. Some segments of the immigrant population may quickly bypass the mere survival stage because they bring with them strong human capital and economic resources.3 However, a disproportionate number have first to secure food, clothing, and shelter in order to proceed to their American dream. The survival strategies of many immigrant families entail not only male employment but also the economic participation of women in paid work. Therefore, the work of immigrant women may not be secondary; rather, it may be a necessary part of the struggle for survival. Second, I analytically distinguish immigrant workers from native workers. The reason is straightforward. Immigrant workers are often treated differently in the labor market, viewed as aliens threatening the job security and labor rights of native workers, especially in times of economic distress.4 Historically and routinely , immigrants have been excluded as “the indispensable enemy” from the working class of the host society.5 A 1992 Business Week poll revealed that more than 60 percent of U.S. residents interviewed believed that new immigrants took jobs away from native workers and drove wages down.6 Even descendants of immigrants who were born in the United States and have been fully assimilated may be disadvantaged merely because they look like the foreigners “flooding the country” at a given time.7 Some disadvantages are associated with immigration itself. Many newcomers lack the English-language ability...

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