Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs: Chinese Americans and the Politics of Cultural Citizenship in Early Cold War America

This essay underscores how Chinese residence in the suburbs crucially shaped the fluctuating image of the suburbs as a place inclusive of racial and ethnic minorities and one that excluded racialized populations with its whites-only restriction. During the early cold war years from 1946 to 1965, the onslaught of Soviet propaganda against U.S. racism made incorporating racial and ethnic minorities within society's institutions imperative to establishing the credibility of American democracy over communism. As the suburbs came to signify the U.S. national identity, the contradictory meanings of suburbanization translated into competing visions of Americanness. Suburbanization as Americanization thus alternately denoted a process of forging whiteness as the marker of legitimate citizenry and of assimilating and recognizing all racial and ethnic minorities as Americans. While many sociological studies focused on Chinese residence in the suburbs as a way to attest to the success of Cold War democracy in creating a socially equitable society, other studies drew attention to the Chinese only to construct the "failure" of blacks to assimilate properly within U.S. society, thus justifying their social and spatial separation from whites. The Chinese significantly functioned in these studies to speak to the leveling of racial stratifications and to explaining the persistence of a white/black divide in early cold war America.

This essay also explores the values and terms which shaped the Chinese into assimilable subjects and in particular, how cold war domesticity and its promotion of the ideal of middle-class heterosexual nuclear families influenced the constructed image of the Chinese. It highlights how sociological and historiographical studies along with newspapers and magazine articles published during the early cold war years focused on the growing presence of Chinese women in order to fashion the Chinese in conformity with the domestic ideal. This emphasis helped to transform the "segregated immobility" of bachelors into heterosexual nuclear families, fit for desegregated mobility. The presence of Chinese women thus crucially mediated the terms of cultural membership in the nation. The concluding examination of the Sing Sheng case where a Chinese family battled to reside in a whites-only neighborhood in South San Francisco develops the themes introduced in this essay. It demonstrates how popular newspapers narrated the contradiction over the meaning of Americanness into a contestation over who counts as an American. It also calls attention to the ways newspapers stressed Sheng's role as father, husband, and head of a heterosexual nuclear family, in order to construct him a desirable candidate for residence in the suburbs.