Cultural Citizenship and Assimilation

The keywords and grander concepts of "cultural citizenship" and "assimilation" (and the relationship between the two) carried me through my readings this week on Chinese Americans, Chinese immigrants, and the structuring of the Chinatown in America. The tangible production of the nuclear family as national pride and survival, as Cindy I-Fen Cheng points out in her essay "Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs," is central to understanding her concept of "cultural citizenship." As she highlights the politics of oversexualization of Chinese people in the white American imagination, she also points to the ways that motherhood and marital status secured a place for Chinese women in the realm of American cultural citizenship.

Still, it seems that a thread that pulls the articles together is the idea of the "othering" of Chinese in America, and a lack of full social equality, despite assimilation and access to "cultural citizenship." It is clear that cultural citizenship does not necessarily mean cultural sameness. From Chinese suburbanization to Chinatownization, the white power structure does not appear disrupted by any geographic placement of Chinese Americans. Kay Anderson asserts that "Chinatown has been a victimized colony of the East in the West," exploring the ways in which Chinatown was created and maintained by both a white expectation of "orientalism" and white geographic dominance; "indeed, it requires a more fundamental epistemological critique of the twin ideas of 'Chinese' and 'Chinatown,' of race and place" (Anderson 581).

One thing that did bother me was the use of the term "ethnic banks" in the Li et al. article "Chinese-American banking and Community Development in Los Angeles county (Li et al. 780). I understand the importance of distinguishing the "ethnic" bank from the "white" bank, but the blatant labeling of non-white-owned banks as "ethnic" clearly speaks to the markedness of non-white identities, both naming a problem and further perpetuating it. It's hard to mediate when the terms necessary to expose a social ill are terms that in themselves contribute to said ill.