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6. Working Democracy: Transnational Repertoires of Citizenship among New Chinese Americans
- Temple University Press
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6 Working Democracy Transnational Repertoires of Citizenship among New Chinese Americans TRITIA TOYOTA In Hong Kong you’re not really a citizen . . . you don’t belong anywhere. You’re a British subject but you don’t have the same rights as a British citizen. You have no rights period. So you’re sort of floating around. I never thought of country. I never had that feeling that I belonged to any one country. N early a decade would pass before Veronica jettisoned that sense of floating.1 Anchored by American citizenship, she became an active participant in a collectivity of post-1965 naturalized Chinese Americans whose work speaks to a deep desire to invoke ways of belonging and membership. This identity project, at once both private and public, is highly politicized. It is manifested in the dynamics of both group and individual agency; its ultimate goal is the transformation of perceived unequal power relations (Gregory 1998). Put most succinctly, in the past two decades new Chinese activists have redrawn the Asian American political playing field in Southern California—and beyond. The following pages in this ethnographic investigation will reveal how this change occurred through a close-up, on-the-ground unpacking of individual life histories.2 These highly personal reconstructions clearly show a sophisticated degree of activism that flies in the face of more traditional perceptions describing first-generation Asian immigrants as politically uninvolved or apathetic (Parrillo 1982). Indeed, the political work of these Tritia Toyota / 93 Chinese immigrants adds to a body of recovered Asian American history showing that this supposed lack of interest in the political has, in fact, never been the case (McClain 1994; Takahashi 1997; Yun and Laremont 2001). Thus, the example of newer activism found in the following pages, although characteristically distinct, may be described as merely the latest chapter in an Asian American political history. For this specific cast of new Chinese American activists who are part of the vast reconfiguration of post-1965 Asian America, this desire for membership, recognition and empowerment in their adopted country can be scripted in three acts. The opening act is a vision—of the American ideal of freedom, individual expression, and democracy. Imagining this vision begins in Asia, years before their migration to the United States. Act two is a scene of radicalization when the ideal collides with the reality of sanctioned membership in the racially constructed aspects of cultural and social hierarchies that exist in U.S. civic life (Goldberg 2002; Omi and Winant 1994). Frequently, the word uttered by immigrants who experience this disjuncture is “shock.” Act three is the building of a collectivity of participatory political work that challenges ascriptions of racial and foreign to secure what are perceived to be institutionally guaranteed rights, not only with the juridical aspects of citizenship, but that are inclusive of social equality. Ethnic connections and a growing awareness of their racialized subjectivity are instrumental in building politicized identities. The bulk of this political work occurs in local contexts for local ends. In achieving these goals and despite the risk of being seen as not fully American, the utilization of transnational social processes and networks is normative. But make no mistake: transnational processes primarily benefit the local.With regard to any political or social advantages that might be gained by new Chinese activists in wider cross-border projects, these are secondary. The everyday tasks actors perform are the reagent to overarching schemes defining who should belong rather than who does belong to the polity. New activists come to understand that no matter how much educational, economic, or other social capital they might possess, the rights and rites of full membership are never fully sanctioned. Their political efforts, therefore, are statements for the rights of citizenship and, hence, political empowerment. The new Chinese activists whose American lives populate this ethnography are part of the first large group of Asians admitted to the United States since before nineteenth-century exclusion laws. They are all immigrants of the landmark 1965 U.S. Immigration Act.3 The bulk of these post-’65 immigrants are still working poor and increasingly female, as well. But for the first time, beginning in the late ’60s, a significant number of new labor immigrants from Asia can be identified as professionals and managers (Hing 2003). The Chinese activists in this ethnographic study are illustrative of these new professionalized immigrants, particularly from Taiwan and Hong Kong. However, not only did shifts in...