The New Chinese America: Class, Economy, and Social Hierarchy

4. The "Spirit of Changle": Constructing a Regional Identity

102 Chapter 4 The “Spirit of Changle” Constructing a Regional Identity Most of the signs for the Chinese American associations in New York’s Chinatown are permanently carved on stone walls or tiled on huge buildings with Chinese architectural touches, to signify their long history and prominence in their community as well as their control over land and buildings. The eye-catching awning of the Changle American Association (CAA) on Chatham Square, at the tip of East Broadway, in contrast, points to the organization’s youth—it was established in 1998—and suggests that the office space is leased. Located on the second floor of 2 East Broadway, the headquarters of the CAA is a busy place. Men and women go in and out of the small office and the adjourning meeting room, speaking loudly in the Fuzhou dialect. The door of the office is also open to visitors: the association takes public relations seriously. More than anything else, the leaders of the organization want their people to be known to the world. American Chinatowns were the worlds of Cantonese immigrants in the past. Starting from the late nineteenth century, the Cantonese immigrants, an overwhelming majority of the ethnic community, built extensive district- and clan-based networks with the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) as their highest representative body. For many decades, the CCBA was recognized as the community’s spokesperson by both the larger American society and the nationalist government in China. It launched communitywide actions against local and federal discriminatory laws in exceedingly effective ways during the years of exclusion; its efforts to crack down on political opponents within the community between the 1930s and the 1960s are also well known. Since 1965, however, the power of the CCBA has declined The “Spirit of Changle” 103 significantly. More profound than internal factionalism and the CCBA’s alienation from labor and youth groups are rapid changes of demographic composition of the community. In New York, for example, Cantonese residents of the old Chinatown in Manhattan were gradually surpassed in number by immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1970s.And in the 1980s, thousands of new immigrants turned Flushing in Queens into one of the city’s fastest-growing ethnic neighborhoods. Beginning in the early 1990s, Manhattan’s Chinatown got yet another facelift, as latecomers from Fujian province in China emerged as a dominant force. Meanwhile, ethnic neighborhoods in Flushing and Brooklyn have become worlds of Fujianese, Wenzhouers (from Zhejiang province in China), and Northeasterners of the Chinese mainland.This chapter is a case study of this development. It examines the ways that recent Chinese immigrants from the Changle (pronounced Chang-le) region of Fujian province negotiate power within the Chinese American community. In their struggle against discriminatory stereotypes, the leaders of the CAA attempt to create a distinctive image for immigrants from their native place. Immigrants from the Changle region are no strangers in the minds of the American public. Beginning in the 1990s, they have been the subject of a number of headline stories: they were targets of the U.S. government’s crackdown on human trafficking from China.While the mass media and the general public focused on the tragedies that often accompanied this type of smuggling, the immigrants were working hard to create a new image for themselves. As the fastest-growing Chinese American regional group, the Changle immigrants exemplify the new dynamics and power relations in post-1965 Chinese America. Changle and the Image of the Changle Immigrants Located along the Min River in Fujian Province on the southeastern coast of China, across the strait from the island of Taiwan, Changle is the homeland of a majority of the new Chinese immigrants in New York. With a population of a little over 672,000 in 2001, the county (which acquired cityhood in 1994) is not as big as most of its neighbors, largely because a significant portion of its natives have emigrated.A 2001 census compiled by the Fuzhou municipal government, which has administrative Th e N e w C h i n e s e A m e r i ca 104 jurisdiction over Changle, revealed that about 400,000 Changle natives and their descendents were living outside China, in such places as Hong Kong,Taiwan, Macao, the United States, and Europe.1 Nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants in the United States came primarily from...