Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives

Notes

Introduction 1. Ironically, the merger of Daimler-Benz with Chrysler has not been profitable. After ten years it pushed “healthy Daimler-Benz into a severe crisis” while making former CEO Jürgen Schrempp of Daimler-Benz into a rich man. Spiegel Online International, “Merkel Takes On Fat Cats.” 2. Mississauga is a city of 400,000 people about thirty-five to forty kilometers west of Toronto. 3. In Canada, the live-in caregiver program allows women from countries such as the Philippines to work as live-in domestics. After two years, they can apply to be permanent residents of Canada. See Citizenship and Immigration Canada, “Working Temporarily in Canada.” 4. Statistics vary because of documented and undocumented migrant workers . There are an estimated eight to eleven million overseas Filipinos, and 70 percent of those are women. Among the women, a large majority work as domestic workers. See Wikipedia, “Overseas Filipino,” and Citizenshift, “Feminization of Migration.” 5. Inter-Mares, a recruitment agency in Singapore, advertises, “We recruit Filipino nannies, Indonesian housekeepers and caregivers, Sri Lankan cooks and other nationalities while they are still in Singapore. . . . And when they have gained enough experience we send them to work for Canadian families” (Inter-Mares Management Services, “Inter-Mares Maid Agency”). 6. Maria DiCenzo (“Editorial”) has noted the same kind of mobility, and Notes 143 later tensions, in the Italian Canadian community, a group that immigrated to Toronto earlier, primarily in the 1950s and 1960s. 7. Shaw argued, “It is no accident that globalization became a dominant theme in the 1990s after the Cold War ended. Although the term globalization , first used in the 1960s, has been in common use since the 1970s and became increasingly connected to the understanding of market liberalization in the 1980s, it is in the 1990s that it has dominated social-scientific and to a considerable extent political debate.” 8. Miyoshi notes that a “truly transnational corporation [ . . . ] might no longer be tied to its nation of origin, but is adrift and mobile, ready to settle anywhere and exploit any state including its own, as long as the affiliation serves its own interest” (736). 9. Sau-ling Wong is echoing Janis Stout, who wrote that American literature has, from its beginnings, been a “literature of movement, of motion, its great icons the track through the forest and the superhighway” (The Journey Narrative in American Literature, 3). 10. Angel Island was an immigration station open from 1910 through 1940. It was designed to control the flow of Chinese into the country. Gary Okihiro says, “The migrants were carefully screened by U.S. Immigration officials and held for days, weeks, or months to determine their fitness for America” (“When and Where I Enter,” 4). 11. Historian Henry Yu notes, “Canada had experienced a history of Asian migration strikingly parallel to the United States,” but “that parallel can mislead us into thinking that the experience of ‘Asian Canadians’ is simply a variation of that of ‘Asian Americans’” (Pacific Canada, xi). His introduction, “Towards a Pacific History of the Americas,” to a special issue of Amerasia Journal outlines some of these similarities and differences. 12. Mexico falls under “North American,” but because it is not a country that customarily receives immigrants, it does not have a substantial “Asian Mexican” community to date. 13. Lily Cho argues that diaspora “emerges from deeply subjective processes of racial memory, of grieving for losses which cannot always be articulated and longings which hang at the edge of possibility” (“The Turn to Diaspora,” 15). 14. David Roediger has pointed out that in the process of becoming Americans , groups such as the Irish, Poles, Greeks, and Italians also acquired the status of white Americans (333). Myrna Kostash has also noted that “in 1908, Ukrainians were not white. Two generations later we are. How can this be?” (as quoted by Gunew, Haunted Nations, 26). 15. See my discussion of the implication of this classification in The Politics of the Visible, 5–11. 16. For a comparison of Asian Canadians and African Canadians as visible minorities, see Ty, “Complicating Racial Binaries.” For a discussion of similarities between Asian Australians and Asian Canadians, see chapters 1 and 2 of Tseen-Ling Khoo’s Banana Bending. 144 Notes to Introduction 17. Parreñas notes, “The instabilities imposed by the political economy of globalization on Filipino households force a great number of families to send an...