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Yvonne M. Lau 13 Chicago’s Chinese Americans: From Chinatown and Beyond The Chinese Immigrant comes to America as an economic adventurer. —Paul Siu ALTHOUGH THIS DESCRIPTION was written more than 50 years ago by Paul Siu (1987) in his doctoral dissertation, The Chinese Laundryman, it aptly describes a significant number of Chinese Americans today. In recent decades, cities like Chicago have been transformed by changes in local and global restructuring that include the transnational migration of labor and capital .GiventhehighervisibilityofAsianAmerican populations in California and the Northeast, and the strong presence of Asian American and ethnic studies on bi-coastal campuses, smaller centers of Asian American community life in the Midwest and in cities like Chicago have been under-represented in academic research and popular literature. Ethnic enclaves like “Chinatown ,” both real and imagined, are immediately linked to cities like San Francisco or New York. This chapter reviews some of the early history of Chinese migration to Chicago, examining trends in Chinese immigration to Illinois , both in Chicago and compared with the six-county region. Within the city of Chicago, Chinese Americans represent the largest Asian community, followed by Filipinos, Asian Indians , and Koreans. They have contributed to the revitalization and gentrification of Chicago’s neighborhoods, from the far North Side to the South Loop and southwest side. To challenge prevailing images that all “Orientals ” or “Chinese” are alike, this chapter highlights the increasing diversity among Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans. Suggesting that, aside from traditional ethnic enclaves like Chinatown, a number of ways exist for immigrants to seek and maintain their cultural and ethnic identity, the chapter encourages readers to think beyond Chinatown. For today’s upwardly mobile immigrants, retaining transnational linkages may not depend on living or working in an ethnic enclave. Using their larger pools of human, cultural, and social capital , advantaged Chinese Americans may never be attracted to a Chinatown, and may opt insteadtoliveandpossiblyworkinthesuburbs .By analyzing old and emerging communities, this chapter delineates geographically bound from socially constructed communities. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: FROM SOJOURNER TO IMMIGRANT Chinese immigration to the United States occurred over four historical periods: (1) open immigration from 1849 to 1882; (2) immigration policies of exclusion from 1882 to 1943, except for members of exempted categories such as merchants, scholars, and the like; (3) immigration quotas permitting limited entry from 1943 to 1965; and (4) revived entry following the 1965 Immigration Act and continuing until the present. The 1965 Immigration Act ended the 1924 national-origins quotas and created a new system of preference categories focusing on familyreunificationandoccupationalskills(Lau Chicago’s Chinese Americans 169 2002, 47); this chapter focuses on this latter contemporary period. Just as Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871 provides the entry point for the century-long trajectory leading to New Chicago, it is also a marker for the first recorded Chinese-owned business in Chicago. In 1872, as the city rebuilt from the Great Chicago Fire, the first Chinese hand laundry opened in Chicago’s Loop at 167 West Madison (Siu 1987, 23). Chicago’s first Chinatown was established during the 1880s, near Clark and Van Buren—part of what came to be known as the Loop. The small downtown Chinatown fulfilled the basic business and social needs of the early wave of Chinese, who were predominantlysingleandmale.Unlikeotherurban Chinatowns, Chicago’s first ethnic enclave was not a residential center. Chicago’s Chinese population was small, overshadowed by those of gateway centers like San Francisco and New York.In1910,65Chinesewomenand1,713men lived in Chicago (Lau 2002, 47). Furthermore, with hard lessons learned from the American West experience and anti-Chinese movement, most Chinese who made it to the Midwest chose not to live in Chinatown, preferring to “blend in,” scattering themselves around town and living invisibly within their storefront businesses. By 1883, a newspaper article reported that 700 Chinese in Chicago had asked Peking to open a consulate in the city because the police had “raided them indiscriminately on the pretense of cracking down on opium dens” (Jew 2003, 167). By 1910, higher rents, indicative of the growing Loop economy, and internal factionalism in the original Chinatown led the leaders to expand to another Chinatown, south of the Loop, near Wentworth and Cermak, which provided affordable storefronts and apartments. According to documents collected by the largest social service agency in Chinatown, escalating rents and conflicts displaced about half of the Chinese population in the Loop into this Italian and Croatianneighborhood(ChineseAmericanService League 1996, 2). Some presence...

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