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125 Today’s Asian American youth generation is still haunted by the immigrant experience , and its material conditions continue to shape Asian American youth.1 As George Lipsitz has argued, the ideological dominance of the nation-state in area studies (including American studies) has “poorly prepared us for the ways in which culture functions as a social force or the ways in which aesthetic forms draw their affective and ideological power from their social location” (2001, 17). In this chapter I try to connect the late capitalist phenomenon of Pacific Rim popular culture to the emergence of Asian American youth who may move across borders in some ways but reconfirm the power of citizenship in others. Because the spatial placement of Asian Americans is pressured by fantasies of a globalized Pacific Rim, some American youth of Asian descent are willing to accept a classdriven consumption model of culture, while others turn to more challenging popular spheres of race-based interethnic exchange. Immigrant arrivals have everything to do with the specific conditions of nationstate relationships. The immigrant experience is thus always particular even as it is folded into the sweeping gestures of statecraft and legislation. Generation is a theoretical concept that has had to change in order to keep up with the circumstances driving its upsets. The first-, second-, and third-generation configuration of immigrant experience suggests shared conditions that obscure significant differences within the same generation. Even the supposed clarity of Japanese American generations has been problematized by Asian American studies: the Issei-Nisei-Sansei monolith is less clear when Shin Issei (new Issei), such as Japanese war brides, and Nisei Kibei, who were schooled in Japan, are considered (Wong 2006). The classic ethnic studies model for relative generation—that is, the first generation emigrated GenerAsians Learn Chinese the asian american youth generation and new class formations Deborah Wong c h a p t e r 7  deborah wong 126 to the United States, the second generation was born in the United States to immigrant parents, the third generation was the product of the U.S.-born second generation, and so forth—does not stand up well to the particularities of Asian American youth culture and the conditions of its emergence. At the turn of the millennium, the North American youth generation of Asian descent locates itself within a globalized circuit of Pacific Rim exchange more than it does with the Asian American complex of the 1960s and 1970s.2 I do not dismiss the importance of generation in relation to the experience and memory of immigration ,3 but different waves of Asian immigration from many countries over several centuries have resulted in a wide range of Asian American generational distinctions. For instance, a second-generation Japanese American born in the 1920s was subject to markedly different legal and political pressures than a secondgeneration Korean American born in the 1980s to parents who emigrated following the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. David K. Yoo, the eminent historian of the Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) argues both for and against the second generation as a meaningful Asian American category. He notes that Nisei who “came of age in California in the second quarter of the twentieth century” grew up in diverse home environments: some were completely bilingual, some had only nominal fluency in Japanese, and some were sent to Japan for schooling (Yoo 2000, ix). This resulted in stronger Japanese than American cultural and language skills. Yoo, who is a second-generation Korean American scholar, writes, “As a child of immigrants, I often sensed an affinity with these older Nisei—an affinity that I attribute to some extent on a shared second-generation experience even while recognizing real differences” (xiii). For Asian Americans, then, second-generation identity is a dynamic category instantly subject to the vagaries of time and place even while inviting examination of how Asians become Asian Americans—and how Asians negotiate citizenship in the United States. The watershed of 1965 looms large in American immigration studies. It Asianized the face of American immigration and forced new ways for thinking about generation.4 American ethnic studies responded to the realities of post-1965 immigrant communities by theorizing the 1.5 generation as a discrete formation, applicable to any immigrant group but in fact particularly characteristic of many Asian immigrant communities in which young people born in Korea, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, and beyond became impressively bicultural. Sandhya Shukla writes, “Diasporas simultaneously illumine and recreate vectors...

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