Taipei or Los Angeles? (A sign outside of a restaurant in San Gabriel.)

In preparation for doing fieldwork in the Chinese ethnoburbs of the San Gabriel Valley, I’m (re)reading Min Zhou‘s (周敏) Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation. This quote from the chapter on the San Gabriel Valley that she wrote with Yen-Fen Tseng (曾嬿芬) and Rebecca Y. Kim stood out to me:

“In the past, the movement of ethnic minorities of lower SES [socioeconomic status] into urban neighborhoods triggered white flight into the suburbs. The current movement of immigrants of higher SES into the suburbs has ushered in a similar trend because newcomers have settled without going through the time-honored process of acculturation. They pose a new threat to the established white middle-class residents, who fear being “un-Americanized” by the newcomers. The Chinese ethnoburb shows that affluent immigrants from Asia, no less than blacks and Hispanics, can be perceived as a threat to white middle-class communities when they achieve a substantial presence.” (p. 94)

On an anecdotal level, my parents’ block in the San Gabriel Valley was all white and elderly when we moved in 15 years ago. Now, it’s all Chinese and Sino-Vietnamese families. At least one of our neighbors moved to the conservative and vehemently anti-immigrant state of Arizona, where she lived out the rest of her life far away from this incoming tide of perpetual foreigners.

Zhou, Min, Yen-fen Tseng, and Rebecca Y. Kim.  2009.  “Suburbanization and New Trends in Community Development: The Case of Chinese Ethnoburbs in the San Gabriel Valley, California.” Chapter 4 in Min Zhou, Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.