Author Xiaojian Zhao admits at the outset that generalizations pertaining to such an internally diverse, fragmented, and geographically dispersed group under the rubric of “Chinese America” are fraught with difficulty. The sheer size and scope of the contemporary Chinese American community and the rapidity with which it has grown—from 436,000 in 1970 to 2,900,000 as of 2000—begs for more incisive conceptual, empirical, and analytical approaches to describing, explaining, and understanding a population in the midst of dynamic transformation as it moves into the second decade of the twenty-first century.
There is little theoretical novelty in this study: Zhao hews closely to basic class analysis when accounting for the wide variation in income, occupation, and business ownership patterns within the population. The concept of “class,” however, goes undefined either empirically or analytically. Instead, it appears to serve as a descriptive shorthand to explicate the gulf between relatively well-off Chinese Americans, such as those with origins in Taiwan, and workers from Fujian Province, who are clustered in low-skill service jobs. While the author has a tendency to moralize about the discrimination and deprivation endured by working-class Chinese Americans, Zhao offers highly nuanced accounts of their struggles and a repertoire of adaptive responses, including reliance on social networks, compensatory pride in regional origins, nationalistic identification with the rise of China, and the resort to legal remedies, particularly concerning immigration issues.
Such rich accounts come courtesy of 128 interviews. The encounters take place in beauty salons, supermarkets, restaurants—wherever everyday people are to be found. The bulk of the interviews appear to be unstructured, not entirely random, and devoid of hard empiricism. But therein lies the distinctive strength of The New Chinese America. That is, the reader is given an almost novelistic glimpse into the lives of the flesh and blood men and women who make history through their labors. In recounting, for example, the quotidian hardships of a deeply indebted undocumented couple named Wu and Fei, originally from Tianjin, the tension between social class and co-ethnicity in the abstract are given concrete, human meaning.
Fei functions as a yuezi gong, or nursemaid, who tends to the needs of affluent families in Southern California. The work is only temporary—lasting roughly one month according to Chinese postpartum practice—but the terms of employment provide for room and board in addition to higher wages than those of an ordinary nanny. Fei must bear the agony of separation from a twelve-year-old daughter who remained in China with grandparents. To compound the emotional and financial hardship, the couple sent their three-month-old son to live with their family in Beijing, paying a passenger $1,000 to carry the infant. Through their struggle to gain a financial foothold in the new land, Wu and Fei express the hope that their children will be able to attend college in America.
The strongest of the book's five chapters bears the title “The Spirit of Changle.” Part of Fuzhou municipality in Fujian Province, Changle County is the point of origin claimed by the majority of new Chinese immigrants to New York. Informing this chapter is seminal work by Peter Kwong in Forbidden Workers (New York: New Press, 1997) and Ko-lin Chin in Smuggled Chinese (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999). Zhao, however, extends and deepens the literature on “Fuzhou people” through the use of interviews that yield a rich Geertzian “thick description” of their grappling with exploitation by city government, landlords, and employers. Like much of the scholarship on contemporary Asian American immigrants (cf. Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995]), however, the author finesses persistent conflict with other nonwhite groups who share social space with the immigrant Chinese underclass. Zhao alludes to takeout deliverymen being beaten, robbed, and, in some instances, murdered. But true to the orthodoxy among those in the field of ethnic studies, she does not dwell on this aspect of anti-Chinese violence—brutality that is as “real” as class oppression, social discrimination, racism, and poverty.
In all, The New Chinese America does much to deepen our understanding of working-class immigrants, but with a regional bias that favors those from Fujian as opposed to Hong Kong or Taiwan. Since the English-language ethnic press, such as AsianWeek, and websites such as GoldSea typically celebrate only the “winners” among Chinese Americans, this work offers a much-needed corrective to the universal tribal need for self-mythology. The sole frustration with this important contribution is that it leaves the reader craving more first-person narrative accounts of Fujianese Americans. As their growing numbers reconfigure Chinese America, and as they help revitalize both their home province of Fujian and the U.S. cities where they have settled, these voices must be heard. Perhaps a second volume with an emphasis on oral history would be in order.
