Writing the Ghetto: Class, Authorship, and the Asian American Ethnic Enclave

Notes

Notes 1 / Introduction: The Asian American Ghetto 1. The recent U.S. economic crisis has brought class into the forefront of public debate, especially during the campaigns for the 2008 presidential election. Candidates like Barack Obama who foreground the need for greater class parity are accused of inciting “class warfare” or of being dangerous socialists, accusations that deny class inequity or maintain it as a taboo subject. But even as candidates call to attention class, they do so primarily to advocate for the strengthening and returning of power and dignity to the middle class. These candidates use the term “middle class” capaciously and also a bit obfuscatingly. This use of “middle class” as a touchstone of public class discourse glosses over the problems of ghettoization—that in addition to a middle class, there are underclasses—and constructs class in America as a structure of aspiration , of always belonging or imminently belonging to the vaguely defined, but palatably invoked position of middle class. 2. I am indebted to Gandal’s The Virtues of the Vicious for this diction. 3. Most notable are the opposing views of Wilson, and Massey and Denton. Wilson argues that class or socioeconomic conditions create ghettos, while Massey and Denton argue that race is the primary factor in ghetto formation. 2 / “Like a Slum”: Ghettos and Ethnic Enclaves, Ghetto and Genre 1. Ahn Joo’s father ultimately makes enough money to settle himself and his daughter in a middle-class Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. However, I contend that Asian American small business owners like Ahn Joo’s father remain delimited by class insofar as they have few alternatives to small business ownership. This is not to equate their difficulties with those Asian Americans who cannot even get this far, but it is to attend to a different form of ghettoization, which, though not the most severe, demonstrates an additional way that Asian Americans are delimited by class. I detail this in chapter 5, in reference to Korean American mom-and-pop shopkeepers. 214 / notes to pages 29–53 2. I focus on Park’s comments on racialized immigrant groups, but his theories on ghettoization encompass racialized and ethnic white immigrants, as well as African Americans in the postslavery diaspora (On Social Control 60, 118–19). Park is criticized for too readily likening these disparate social groups, for instance, in his mapping of the assimilation process of immigrants onto the integration processes of southern blacks migrating north after the Civil War (John Hagedorn 195). 3. This is not to pigeonhole Park’s line of thinking. Though his tone is often of great certainty, especially in the assimilationist writings for which he is well known, his work shows a diversity of viewpoints. For instance, Park wrote a foreword for Wirth’s The Ghetto (Wirth was a student of Park’s), in which Park recognizes the potential for community in the ghetto. 4. The Chicago school calls much attention to and relies on the term “ghetto,” but its concept is more akin to the concept of the ethnic enclave. I detail this ironic similarity below, but make the point here that though the Chicago school uses the term “ghetto,” this is not the concept of the ghetto that I seek to return to or make visible. 5. The secondary sector of the U.S. labor market is defined as being comprised of white-owned firms in which the majority of employees are ethnic, and is characterized by “labor intensity, low profits, low productivity, intensive product market competition, lack of unionization, and low wages.” The primary sector is comprised of white-owned firms in which the majority of employees are white and is characterized by “high productivity, high profits, high degree of unionization, and job security” (Gilbertson and Gurak 211). 6. See Sander and Nee, “Limits,” for a detailed analysis of this imbalance. 7. This is not to say that Chinatown business owners are the principal villains in the exploitation of Chinatown laborers, even as they are one source of it. Business owners are often only marginally better-off than their workers. This does not absolve them of responsibility for labor exploitation, but it adds another layer of complexity to class relations in the Asian American ghetto. The ghetto is a site of structural class inequity, but there are variations in levels of economic disenfranchisement and levels of relative privilege within that site. I discuss this in more detail in chapter 4. 8. In chapter 5, I discuss this...