Week 6: "The Idea of Chinatown"

(On Anderson's "The Idea of Chinatown:
The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in Making of a Racial Category,"
Shah's Contagious Divides:
Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown pp45-76,
Cheng's "Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs:
Chinese Americans and the Politics of Cultural Citizenship in Early Cold War America,"
and Li's "Spatial Transformation of an Urban Ethnic Community:
From Chinatown to Ethnoburb in Losangeles")

This week's title "The Idea of Chinatown" refers to Anderson's article. I found it interesting how the author of the, in a way, 'head artitle' had the most 'White' name compared to the other three authors. I started reading the paper with a degree of suspicious and caution, wondering what kind of perspective Anderson would take as an 'outsider' looking into Chinatown. (This would have not been the case if Cheng was the one who wrote "The Idea of Chinatown"). While reading the paper, I quickly realized that being an outsider/insider wasn't so much of an issue. Rather, being an outsider gave Anderson the ability to perhaps take a more objective standpoint with regards to government "inscribing social definitions of identity and place in institutional practice and space" ('Abstract'). Other scholars were consistent with Anderson as they kept their studies and research within the same context of the spatial organization and structure of Chinatown. Shah focused more on health issues, such as waste disposals, smallpox epidemics, and public health apparatuses, later in the chapter; Cheng highlighted the phenomenon of suburbanization and the issue of identity of Chinese Americans that move out of Chinatown; and Li wrote to acknowledge "ethnically owned formal financial institutions in minority communities," or more specifically, Chinese American.

Of all four papers, I found Cheng's "Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs" most interesting as it discusses about 'cultural citizenship.' I came across this term in Cities in a Global Context when we covered the issue of "Invisible Labor, Contested Citizenship" and migration/mobility. National citizenship and cultural citizenship are not alike because the former is given by the state to give privileges such as voting and whatnot, while the latter refers to one's identity and belonging to a particular group, whether that be race, gender, religion, etc. It was interesting to see how Cheng brought the state/government influence into the context of cultural citizenship with the case of Cold War. Being pressed to be accepted by Americans, Chinese Americans assimilated and became Americanized. They took on the same values and roles to be consistent with the American norm. Especially in terms of family relationships, Cheng pointed out the key 'American' aspects of nuclear family and motherhood/marital status of women.