Ever since their arrival in California in mid-19th century, Chinese immigrants have been celebrating Chinese New Year, and it has become the most recognizable cultural symbol for the Chinese in America. The annual Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco has become a major metropolitan event and a chief tourist attraction, attended by thousands of spectators of all stripes and covered by television. Because of its popularity, Chiou-ling Yeh argues in her book Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown that the Chinese New Year parade has over the years been used for various political and commercial purposes – whether fundraising for community hospitals or anti-Japanese war in the 1940s.
Yeh marks 1953 as a pivotal year in the history of Chinese New Year celebrations in America – the year Chinese Americans started manipulating tradition in order to fit it to the needs of American society, which at the time wanted to showcase its multiculturalism, racial tolerance, and democracy in the midst of the Cold War. The parade that year was led by ethnic Chinese veterans of American foreign wars carrying American flags, followed by a contingent of Anti-communist League members and an American-style uniformed Chinese marching band playing American military marching tunes, all for the purpose of portraying Chinese Americans as patriots with anti-communist convictions – a necessary self-preserving measure in the middle of the anti-Chinese and anti-communist hysteria of the time. The event's Chinatown organizers, Yeh argues, tried to use “the American peoples’ Oriental imagination via the ethnic festival” to reshape hostile images Americans had of the Chinese in America, curiously becoming American patriots by stressing their cultural uniqueness.
The central theme of the book is structured around the challenges the event's organizers faced in their attempt to control the messages the festival would convey over the years, and it follows them in chronological order, from the tradition-busting revelers and flappers in the 1930s, to the 1960s’ civil rights radicals demanding that the community leaders address the poverty in the Chinese American community, the 1970s feminists challenging the demeaning Miss Chinatown beauty pageant, the corporations attempting to hijack the event in 1980s to sell products to the increasingly well-off Chinese Americans, the purists bent on ridding it of Chinese American fabrications and conforming it to what they considered to be genuine Chinese cultural traditions, and gay activists who won their spot in the parade in the 1990s.
The ingenuity of the book lies in its ability to use the colourful festival to bring out the major developments in the experiences of Chinese in America. It is successful in demonstrating the tension between traditional Chinatown elites and the challenging forces that keep arising within the Chinese American community at various stages of racial and ethnic repositioning within the framework of mainstream politics. It is particularly successful in illustrating the tension between the elites’ desire to show that Chinese are loyal and very much part of American mainstream society while being proud of their own cultural traditions – an inherent contradiction played out in the Miss Chinatown USA Beauty Pageant contests held every year during the New Year celebration, whose goal is to showcase Chinese American women who embody both “Eastern beauty” and “Western modernity.”
Yeh argues that Chinatown's male leaders used the pageant to correct the historically imposed emasculated image of Chinese men engaged in “female work” of laundering and cooking by whole-heartedly accepting American middle-class values, casting them as providers for heterosexual nuclear families, and imposing patriarchal gender hierarchy and heteronormative standards on the entire community. The problem is that too much stress is put on this Chinatown elite, which is treated as a monolithic, enduring entity with more control of the Chinese American community than it actually had. After the passage of 1965 Immigration Act, Chinese American population mushroomed and the number of Chinese professionals living in integrated communities outside of Chinatown increased rapidly. These middle-class professionals have little contact and connections with the working-class Chinese living in Chinatowns. Most in fact hail from China's northern metropolitan areas and don't even speak the same dialects as the Cantonese Chinatown residents. Moreover, after 1965 the power of traditional family and regional associations – the power base of the elites – waned even inside Chinatowns, slowly ceding to Chinese civil rights organizations, social welfare agencies, and to overseas commercial and real-estate interests.
Ultimately, the forces that shaped the festival came from the outside – Chinese Americans of various stripes demanding a voice in this ethnic showcase event, very much in tune with what the American society at large embraces and even dictates in the name of tolerance and diversity. By casting it in the light of “gendering” and “queering” of ethnicity, the author firmly establishes its centrality in the arena of identity politics. But the irony is that while San Francisco New Year's celebration has acquired a distinct place in American consciousness because of its commercial promotion, it no longer occupies a central role in Chinese American community. Since 1953, as this book amply illustrates, it has largely become a vehicle for manufacturing Chinese American identity.
