When You Are Related to the "Other": (Re)locating the Chinese Homeland in Asian American Politics through Cultural Tourism

In 1972 eleven college-educated, second- through fourth-generation Chinese American youths of Cantonese descent traveled to Hong Kong to study the Cantonese language.¹ All had hoped to serve the Chinatown community as activists, yet most could not even talk to the newly arriving non-English-speaking immigrants; they described their political dilemma in a 1973 self-published pamphlet called Going Back.² The group decided to tour China, then embroiled in the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), "to return to the home of our ancestors, to learn about our history and to see how old China has changed into the socialist motherland of today." Visiting their ancestral villages, they met their relatives. Some students labored in the fields to contribute to socialist reconstruction. Most, raised in the suburbs and politicized in the Third World student activism of the late 1960s, hoped Asian American activist politics could model itself on China's revolution.³ As they put it: "3rd, 4th, 5th generation born in America, living in white middle-class neighborhoods … [we] are in a marginal position, not fully a part of white society because of our race and yet no longer part of Chinatown. So as Chinese-Americans, we realized the need to establish a new position for ourselves and our people in American society, which meant a realization of our heritage as Chinese, a recognition of exploitation and racism in America and a unification with the Chinese community."4

Nearly twenty years later, a second group of Chinese Americans visited ancestral villages in the Pearl River Delta region. The frame for the In Search of Roots Program (hereafter, Roots) was not revolution but multiculturalism. Unfolding under the auspices of the Chinese government and Chinese American community organizations, Roots emerged during China's post–Cultural Revolution reopening to the outside world in the late 1970s. By 1981 the People's Republic of China (PRC) had begun sponsoring cultural heritage programs similar to Roots as part of a broader aim of reintroducing China to overseas Chinese. Like the Going Back group, Roots participants were also born and raised during the Cold War and also engaged the ancestral culture to compensate for being "whitewashed," but they sought knowledge about their parents' and grandparents' generations or specifics of their family origins. Roots reinforced a genealogical or family history orientation.

As these two examples suggest, Asian America is a political identification and an ever-changing, transnational sociocultural formation.

⁵ My essay examines politicized ideas of community that entrench Asian American racial politics in the United States geographically, historically, politically, and economically while vesting affect in the politics of the homeland. My object is to suggest that ideas of community (and attempts to create them) be reconceptualized. Community theory must acknowledge the complex ways that identities are reterritorialized in multiple U.S. and other locations over time. It must reconsider the efforts of migrants and their descendants to reroot themselves in both the homeland and the United States. The point can be made through what is called ethnic tourism, or cultural odysseys that find Chinese American youths crafting ties to the homeland and being crafted by it. The homeland tours that I examine here unfold under different stages of late capitalism and, as I will argue, rely heavily on imaginings from far-off homelands and their fulfillments. My point is that these imaginings follow a logical grid—family routes of migration, citizenship laws, racial and ethnic politics—during each period, depending on class, generation, and political environment. My hope is that this analysis will open perspectives on studies of transnational processes, diaspora, and cultural tourism.

There is a tension between conceptualizations of Asian America as a localized panethnic phenomenon based on U.S. soil versus as part of a diasporic community encompassing relations with the...