Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community. (Reviews).

Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community. By Yong Chen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. xvi plus 392 pp. $45.00).

While other scholars have studied the Chinese community in San Francisco, especially during the period from the initial arrival of immigrants during the gold rush of the mid-19th century to the onset of World War II, Yong Chen's study offers fascinating, new insights by recreating the social, cultural, and political world of his subjects. Critical of previous approaches that either focused on the perspectives of non-Chinese or else responded to paradigms formulated externally to the community, Chen seeks to uncover the "common cultural systems" of the Chinese in San Francisco in order to understand how they perceived the world around them. (p.4) To accomplish this task, Chen analyzes developments in Chinese history that shaped the lives of Chinese Americans and also utilizes sources in Chinese, the primary language of communication in San Francisco Chinatown. The community's linguistic preference supports Chen's argument concerning the trans-Pacific or transnational orientation of the Chinese in the United St ates. Especially during the 19th century, Chinese in the United States were shaped by the values and sensibilities of Chinese culture. Chen argues that this orientation was not merely reactive to the experiences of racial discrimination in the United States but also a reflection of the strength of national and not simply parochial regional identification prior to emigration. This cultural nationalism persisted and evolved into a political form of nationalism in the 20th century, even as members of the San Francisco community increasingly adopted American social norms and cultural ideas. The population's desire to maintain economic, cultural, and political connections with China challenges approaches that use assimilation as the dominant narrative of immigration. At the same rime, Chen critiques the sojourner thesis that suggests that Chinese immigrants viewed the United States only as a temporary home. The coexistence of westernization and Chinese nationalism among Chinese in San Francisco suggests the need t o go beyond dichotomous paradigms of assimilation versus separatism or settler versus sojourner by analyzing how Chinese in the United States developed flexible and multilayered identities in response to their historical and geographical contexts.

Chen's access to Chinese language sources and efforts to use Chinese history and culture to understand the world of Chinese San Francisco allow him to unearth new findings and offer new interpretations about the much-studied community. For example, Chen uses medical advertisements in Chinese newspapers and Chinese language advice books to gain insight into the predominantly male community's concerns about sex and masculinity. He also analyzes the style and subject matter of Chinatown theaters to argue that immigrants from the Canton region participated in rituals that sustained memories of and perpetuated knowledge about Chinese national culture. Chen's interpretation of the 1905 boycott of American goods, a widespread effort initiated in China to protest racial discrimination in the United States, highlights the importance of reform movements in the ancestral land in fostering a new sense of political engagement and consciousness among Chinese in the United Stares. One of the book's most noteworthy sources, an English and Chinese language diary by Ah Quin, allows Chen to examine the daily life and mindset of a Chinese Christian entrepreneur. While Ah Quin was based in San Diego, his travels and concerns suggest that his life was shaped by his ties with San Francisco, the capital of Chinese in the United States, as well as China.

Although a rich and interesting study, Chinese San Francisco occasionally falters by both overreaching and underusing its evidence. In challenging existing theories regarding immigration, Chen reinscribes some of the same paradigms, especially as they relate to cultural identity and gender/sexuality. While Chen criticizes approaches that assume Chinese and American as static and mutually exclusive categories, his study and interpretation occasionally follow this line of thinking. For example the first part of the book focuses on the Chineseness of the San Francisco community. One way in which Chen demonstrates their cultural orientation is to elaborate on the limited impact of Christian missionaries on the Chinese. His analysis assumes that white religious reformers primarily sought to assimilate immigrants, but missionaries also encouraged their converts to maintain Chinese cultural practices and connections with their ancestral country. Furthermore, despite the small number of Chinese Christians, many would play influential roles in developing Chinatown institutions. The negotiations of ethnic identity between white and Chinese Christians support Chen's overall point regarding the flexible and transnational nature of identity formation. However, his insistence on cataloging certain practices as Chinese versus American also contradicts his interest in positing non-static and overlapping forms of ethnicity. Furthermore, his assumption that white, mainstream culture defined American identity ignores the variety of peoples and Americans that the Chinese encountered in San Francisco.

That Chen has a tendency to reinscribe existing paradigms is perhaps most evident in his approach to studying gender and sexuality. On the one hand, he seeks to revise existing understanding of Chinese sexual practices by critiquing the high estimates of prostitutes in Chinatown and providing insight into the desires and anxieties of the predominantly male community. However, he is clearly guided by heterosexual assumptions. While he suggests that all-female households might have been misidentified as prostitutes, when they were practicing Cantonese forms of marriage resistance, there is no exploration of possible sexual implications of this arrangement. In discussions regarding masculinity and sexual desire, there is no analysis of possible homosexual practices among Chinese "bachelors." Chen's discussion of gender roles also reveals a static conception of male and female identities as well as a traditional notion of gender progress. Chen argues that Chinese in San Francisco had "a less rigid gender hierarch y than China," because the theater audience in the United States preferred to watch "real women performing on the stage" rather than male performers impersonating women. (p. 228). Viewed from another perspective, male actors performing female roles could be interpreted as evidence of a more flexible gender structure, at least for men. Furthermore, Chen's interest in women's entry into the public realm as evidence of increased gender equality does not address how public presentations of gender, even by "real" women, can sometimes reinforce female marginalization.

Despite these criticisms, Chen's study provides a valuable addition to the existing scholarship on immigration and race. Chinese San Francisco is part of a new wave of Asian American history that emphasizes transnational paradigms to understand the experiences and perspectives of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants. The founders of the field, many of whom were second and third generation Asian Americans, initially sought to assert the Americanness of their subjects in order to counter the tendency of nativist movements and even academic institutions to view Asians in the United States as representatives of their Asian ancestral lands. In order to create a niche for Asian American Studies as separate from Asian Studies and to assert Asian Americans as individuals who contributed to and were shaped by historical developments in the United States, earlier scholarship focused on understanding how Asian Americans complicate the American narratives of race and ethnicity. In response to changing tre nds in scholarship as well as the rapid increase in immigration from Asia, academics like Chen are asserting the need to look beyond the American nation to understand communities like the Chinese in San Francisco.