Editor’s Preface

Among the many areas of interest that writers in Asian American studies engage in, the phenomenon of social mobility ranks as one of the most popular. Understood oftentimes as a defining characteristic of American society when figured as a quest—the advancement of one’s social position, that is—it assertively announces a very persistent kind of American exceptionalism that harks back to the earliest critiques of British monarchical rule and the subsequent inauguration of the U.S. republic. Here, where social mobility is to be rendered as a possibility for all, hard work, not the mere possession of royal blood, should get you through. However, this ideological construction of a laboring, self-reliant, and especially an entrepreneurial American subject in pursuit of the prospect of greater prosperity was and continues to be a site of both motivation and contention. Is hard work enough to guarantee success? Are opportunities to become socially mobile, to become an American, accessible to all? Is this all what it means to become an American? The answers to these, of course, can be quite fraught. And for this JAAS issue, we have essays that address the genealogies and ongoing examinations of not only this desire to be and become socially mobile, but, even more critically, the very tenability of the taken-for-granted meanings and practices of human progress itself.

Shelley Lee’s article, our lead essay, provides us with the requisite historical contextualization of the sociological thinking behind social mobility as seen through the logics of immigration proceeding into resettlement via entrepreneurship. The triumphant figures for this assimilative narrative, the Korean small store owners of the 1970s and 1980s, were those whose struggles to make it in U.S. society allegedly followed the beaten path of individual bootstraps lifting. But at what cost and for what ends? Surely, the changing demographics and global economies during this period, along with the intensification of structural inequalities that disproportionately affected diverse urban racial communities, made this route to social mobility, at best, an uncertain one.

We follow this critical engagement with race in relationship to “success” in Suchitra Samanta’s ethnography of Asian and Asian American women in two community colleges in Virginia. And after that, in Quynh Nhu Le’s astute musings on the “colonial choreographies” of refugee resettlement as depicted in a well-received novel. Community college diplomas, also in historical terms and continuing into the present, emblematize proverbial tickets to many American mythologies of guaranteed mobility, especially for those for whom access to more prestigious universities may be limited. This very reason explains the strong presence in such colleges of students who are deemed to fall outside of the much-disputed “model minority” category of Asians, not necessarily because they are not successful or do not do hard work, but because they reveal in so many ways the blind spots of open-access schooling and aggregated category assignments. Through Samanta’s analyses, their narratives thoughtfully unravel the complexities of cultures, class structures, and gender expectations that are otherwise erased by the idealisms of American-defined progress. In many ways, these are the very questions that haunt Lan Cao’s refugees in her novel Monkey Bridge, a semiautobiographical account of a mother and her daughter who leave Vietnam to resettle in the United States. Le reads into the novel the layers upon layers of trauma brought upon by war and colonization, as they turn into subjects of recuperation in the refugees’ and their children’s journey toward American incorporation. Clearly, the contexts for refugee social mobility here have a different and altogether deep register, even exceeding the confines of U.S. resettlement operations and the “ruptures” they produce, well into what Le calls “a transhistorical Vietnamese epistemology and spirituality” that reach beyond the violence of U.S. presence in Vietnam.

So, where does social mobility finally lead, especially for those who are racialized? And what needs to be done with “race” in the course of such a process? If you think there can never be one satisfactory answer to these questions, then you are on track with Wen Liu’s essay on Asian Americans and their experiences...