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3. "Serve the People": The Ethnic Economy
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74 Chapter 3 “Serve the People” The Ethnic Economy World War II triggered the greatest social changes the Chinese American community had ever seen. Back home in San Francisco after three years of naval service that took him to several European cities, Jimmy Leong was restless. “My father expected me to help out in the garment shop, but my mother knew that my heart was not [in it]. Imagine: I had spent the first twenty years of my life, right up until the start of the war, living in Chinatown. I missed home badly while I was away. Now I was back again, but I couldn’t stand it any more.”With the G.I. Bill, Leong began studying engineering at the University of California in Berkeley. He and his wife, a onetime Rosie the Riveter, raised two children in Berkeley, then moved to Castro Valley in 1960.1 Like the Leongs, many young Chinese men and women who left Chinatowns after World War II never looked back. Fanning out seemed to be inevitable once the postwar economic boom provided greater employment opportunities for ethnic minorities, and racial restrictions on real estate purchases eased.After many decades of legal exclusion and social and economic segregation, the postwar generation of Chinese Americans was poised to enjoy the opportunities that American society had to offer.The historical mission of Chinatown seemed to have been accomplished.At a time when the ethnic economy had loosened its hold on the young and able-bodied members of the community, few would see the need for future development. Over the next twenty years, hardly any renovation or construction projects were undertaken in the largest Chinatowns of the nation, San Francisco and New York. The ethnic economy did not die out, however. The postwar years witnessed a historical transformation of the Chinese American “Serve the People” 75 community and its ethnic economy, paving the ways for rapid changes in the decades to follow.After 1965, a new wave of Chinese immigrants began flooding in, and in the 1980s and 1990s, historic urban Chinatowns were revitalized and many new suburban ones emerged, reconfiguring the shape of the ethnic economy. Instead of filling a few local traditional ethnic entrepreneurial niches, hundreds of business ventures reach a far larger and far more diverse ethnic population all over the United States. According to a 2002 survey released by the U.S. Census Bureau, of the 1.1 million Asian-owned businesses, 290,197 were owned by the Chinese.2 This development reflects many of the changes within Chinese America. Scholars emphasize business ownership and coethnic employment when defining the ethnic economy. After a thorough examination of an enormous body of literature, Ivan Light and Steven Gold identify the three key aspects of the ethnic economy as: the ethnic ownership economy, consisting of business owners and their coethnic employees as well as unpaid family members; the ethnic enclave economy, “an ethnic ownership economy that is clustered around a territorial core”; and the ethnic-controlled economy, consisting of businesses in the general labor market in which “coethnic employees exert appreciable and persistent economic power.”3 The demand side is absent not because of any accident of omission, but because several multiethnic-group and multilocality studies fail to show significant correlations between local demands and the rate of minority self-employment.4 Thus, Light and Gold conclude that ethnic minorities “had a much greater propensity to form strong niches in a few low-income retail or service specialties,” and that immigrants of the same ethnicity were more likely to cluster “in the same occupations.”5 In this chapter and throughout this book, however, the term “ethnic economy” is used in a rather broad sense to describe a unique ethnic experience. Unlike most other ethnic economies, the large and diversi fied Chinese American economy encompasses far more than a few niches.6 Although the Chinese have formed clusters in both historical and contemporary settings, where ethnic enterprises are most visible, their economy has expanded far beyond the boundaries of Chinatowns and ethnic commercial districts. Most important, it is impossible to get a good picture of this economy without taking into consideration its enormous [44.222.128.90] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:46 GMT) Th e N e w C h i n e s e A m e r i ca 76 ethnic market. Of concern is not so much a balanced approach to both supply and demand issues...