Toward Engaged and Critical Archaeologies of the Chinese Diaspora

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-82
Author(s):  
Kelly N. Fong 方少芳‎
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Chinese Diaspora ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
Critical Reflexivity ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Black Feminist Archaeology

Drawing upon the work of other archaeologists of color and the author’s personal experiences as an Asian American woman in archaeology, this chapter explores potential future directions for Chinese American / diaspora archaeologies as a community-oriented field that is critically engaged with issues of race, racism, racialization, power, capitalism, politics, and white supremacy. Particularly inspired by black feminist archaeology and interdisciplinary work with Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies, this chapter outlines five areas for building engaged and critical archaeologies of Chinese Americans and the Chinese diaspora: recruiting and retaining more Asian American archaeologists; conducting interdisciplinary work with Ethnic Studies; engaging in collaboration with community partners; practicing critical reflexivity of positionality and privilege; and participating in contemporary politics. The chapter uses examples from Isleton Chinatown and Chinese American community cookbooks to demonstrate what community-engaged, community-collaborative critical archaeologies by archaeologists of color might look like.

Lessons from Ethnic Studies

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Fong ◽  
Clement Lai
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Historical Archaeology ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Interdisciplinary Collaboration ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Chinese Diaspora ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Archaeological Work ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

This chapter argues for interdisciplinary collaboration between historical archaeology and Asian American Studies/Ethnic Studies, and it articulates a Chinese American historical archaeology. Both fields stand to benefit from collaboration, with the potential for contributions to archaeological work in the Chinese diaspora more broadly. Ethnic Studies brings to historical archaeology a more nuanced understanding about race, specifically with regard to theories of racialization and racial triangulation, as well as decades of experience doing politically conscious, community-engaged, anti-racist work. Historical archaeology provides Ethnic Studies with a framework for studying material culture, something that Ethnic Studies scholars have yet to study in depth, in conjunction with oral histories and the documentary record. Furthermore, interdisciplinary collaboration has the potential for reorienting Ethnic Studies towards researching community social histories. The chapter argues for continued interdisciplinary collaboration to promote historical archaeologies of Chinese Americans and of Asian Americans more broadly.

scholarly journals SOCIOCULTURAL DETERMINANTS IN PAIN PERCEPTION AND MANAGEMENT AMONG OLDER CHINESE AMERICANS

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S713-S714
Author(s):  
Simona Kwon ◽  
Jazmine Wong ◽  
Janet Pan ◽  
Andrew Rosenberg ◽  
Germaine Cuff ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Pain Management ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Mixed Methods Study ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
Management Interventions ◽  
Older Chinese ◽  
Older Chinese Americans

Abstract Background: Chinese Americans make up the largest Asian American subgroup in the US. Data from a large health system indicate that older Chinese Americans experience lower satisfaction in pain management after surgery compared to all other racial/ethnic groups. Objective: To understand pain experience among older Chinese American patients to improve pain satisfaction strategies Methods: A mixed methods study was conducted, including: 1. A scoping review of the peer-reviewed published literature; 2) face-to-face survey; and 3) qualitative interviews. 14 Chinese American postsurgical patients >65 years of age were recruited for the survey and interview with a trained bilingual Community Health Worker. Questions from the Survey on Disparities in Quality of Healthcare and Kleinman’s Explanatory Model of Illness guided the data collection tools. Results: The 31 studies identified in the review were largely observational; none assessed pain control or management interventions for older Chinese Americans. Most participants reported experiencing a language barrier that hindered healthcare staff communication during hospital stay. Even with an interpreter, limited English proficient patients reported lower understanding of health information compared to those who did not need interpretation. Ideas of “pushing through” pain, perceiving physicians as “busy people,” and mismatch in pain assessment tools contributed to pain attendance delay. Facilitators to care included family support, culturally and linguistically-tailored tools, and availability of cultural remedies. Conclusions: This mixed-methods study identified key themes including socio-cultural barriers and facilitators to effective pain care and management. Findings will inform tools and resources to better capture and address pain management in Chinese Americans.

Protestantism in Twentieth-Century Chinese America: The Impact of Transnationalism on the Chinese Diaspora

2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 121-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Tseng
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chinese Diaspora ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Protestant Denominations

AbstractThis article examines how an indigenous form of evangelicalism became the predominant form of Chinese Protestantism in the United States since 1949. Chinese-American Protestantism was so thoroughly reconstructed by separatist immigrants from the Diaspora and American-born (or American-raised) evangelicals that affiliation with mainline Protestant denominations and organizations is no longer desired. This development has revitalized Chinese-American Protestantism. Indeed, Chinese evangelicalism is one of the fastest-growing religions in China, the Chinese Diaspora, and among Chinese in America. Though the percentage of Chinese Americans affiliated with Christianity is not nearly as high as that of Korean Americans, Chinese-American Protestantism has achieved impressive numeric growth over the past fifty years. Much of this growth can be attributed to the large number of Chinese who have migrated to North America since World War II.

Anna May Wong and Asian American Popular Culture

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley Lim
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The World

Anna May Wong (January 3, 1905–February 3, 1961) was the first Chinese American movie star and the first Asian American actress to gain international recognition. Wong broke the codes of yellowface in both American and European cinema to become one of the major global actresses of Asian descent between the world wars. She made close to sixty films that circulated around the world and in 1951 starred in her own television show, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, produced by the defunct Dumont Network. Examining Wong’s career is particularly fruitful because of race’s centrality to the motion pictures’ construction of the modern American nation-state, as well as its significance within the global circulation of moving images. Born near Los Angeles’s Chinatown, Wong began acting in films at an early age. During the silent era, she starred in films such as The Toll of the Sea (1922), one of the first two-tone Technicolor films, and The Thief of Baghdad (1924). Frustrated by Hollywood roles, Wong left for Europe in the late 1920s, where she starred in several films and plays, including Piccadilly (1929) and A Circle of Chalk (1929) opposite Laurence Olivier. Wong traveled between the United States and Europe for film and stage work. In 1935 she protested Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s refusal to consider her for the leading role of O-Lan in the Academy Award–winning film The Good Earth (1937). Wong then paid her one and only visit to China. In the late 1930s, she starred in several B films such as King of Chinatown (1939), graced the cover of the mass-circulating American magazine Look, and traveled to Australia. In 1961, Wong died of Laennec’s cirrhosis, a disease typically stemming from alcoholism. Yet, as her legacy shows, for a brief moment a glamorous Chinese American woman occupied a position of transnational importance.

Asian Americanist Critique and Listening Practices of Contemporary Popular Music

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Summer Kim Lee
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
American Popular Music

What is Asian American popular music? How do we identify it, define it, and listen to it? What work is being done by naming a genre as such, and need it even be named? Asian Americanist scholars and music critics have grappled with these questions, articulating the political desires for Asian American representation, recognition, and inclusion, while at the same time remaining wary of how such desires reiterate liberal multiculturalist discourses of assimilation and inclusion. A growing body of interdisciplinary work in American studies, performance studies, critical race and ethnic studies, queer studies, and sound and popular music studies has addressed the historical emergence, visibility, and representation of Asian Americans in popular music. This work has become less concerned with finding out what “Asian American popular music” is and more interested in how Asian Americanist critique can be rooted in minoritarian listening practices so that one might consider the myriad ways Asian Americans—as professional and amateur performers, musicians, virtuosic singers, karaoke goers, YouTube users, listeners, critics, and fans—actively shape and negotiate the soundscapes of US popular music with its visual, sonic, and other sensorial markers of Asian racialization.

“The Invisible World the Emigrants Built”: Cultural Self-Inscription and the Antiromantic Plots of The Woman Warrior

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-115
Author(s):  
Patricia Chu
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Cultural Self ◽  
The Woman Warrior ◽  
Chinese View

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts both depicts and creates for its readers such an experience of strangeness that many non-Chinese-American readers view it as “exotic” and Chinese, some Chinese Americans dismiss it as a misrepresentation of Chinese-American experience, and most Chinese view it as American. As Kingston herself has noted, many of the book's early reviewers praised the book, yet inappropriately tried to draw general conclusions from it about Chinese Americans, or even Chinese (Kingston, “Cultural Mis-readings”). Chinese readers are likely to share the initial responses of Zhang Ya-jie, a scholar from the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) who felt that Kingston’s treatment of certain stories, especially the woman warrior story, was “somewhat twisted, Chinese perhaps in origin but not really Chinese any more, full of American imagination,” and was put off by the book’s expressions of bitterness toward Kingston’s mother and its generalizations about Chinese people (103). Perhaps in response, much Asian-American discussion has focused on the book's ethnic authenticity, rather than its poetic rendering of Kingston’s experience, as a quick survey of four Asian-American critical approaches may suggest.

Chinese Charity in Early Chinese American History

2020 ◽  
pp. 121-137
Author(s):  
Yong Chen
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Chinese Diaspora ◽  
Private Giving ◽  
Universal Love ◽  
Ethnic Solidarity

This chapter examines philanthropic activities in early Chinese American history. It reveals the extraordinary prominence of philanthropy in the daily life of Chinese Americans from beginning of Chinese immigration to WWII. The essay illustrates the enormous magnitude of Chinese American philanthropy in the context of the Chinese diaspora and shows the importance of ethnic solidarity in motivating and mobilizing Chinese Americans to give. Such an examination underlines the limitations of the western romantic notions of philanthropy exclusively and simplistically as an act of “voluntary private giving,” motivated by universal love for others. The features of Chinese American giving in the early years can also help us better understand patterns of Chinese American charity today.

Out of the Shadows and into Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (4) ◽  
pp. 56-82
Author(s):  
Sue Fawn Chung
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Role Models ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Advanced Degrees ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
American Women ◽  
Chinese American Women ◽  
The Many

From 1974 to 1984, Democrat Lilly Fong (1925–2002) served on the Nevada Board of Regents, the first Chinese American woman to win an election in Nevada and to hold that position. Fong laid the foundation for Republican Cheryl Lau (b. 1944) to be elected as Nevada’s secretary of state (1991–1994), the first Asian American to hold a major statewide office in Nevada. This study focuses on how and why these women emerged from the shadows into Nevada politics and suggests why they failed in later attempts to win an office. As second- and later-generation Chinese American women, they shared the strong Chinese cultural traditions, beliefs, and prejudices and were products of the changing role of education for women and the emergence of women in Chinese and Chinese American public life. They also were affected by the women’s movement in the United States and the Chinese emphasis on education, which led them both to advanced degrees and teaching. Gender and racial discrimination, anti-Chinese legislation and attitudes, and history and cultural traditions, especially the belief that women should be confined to domestic activities, were among the many barriers they had to overcome. They became active at a time when Chinese American political organizations became more influential and widespread, especially in cities with large Chinatowns. They, like many of their generation, had historical role models and contemporary ones, including Democrats Patsy Mink (1927–2002) of Hawaii and March Fong Eu (1922–2017) of California (to name just two). They shared similar backgrounds, including parents who were active in the community, the financial support of their husbands, a concern for U.S.-China relations, and, from time to time, their appeal to the mainstream community. They both believed in the Confucian adage that “education is the equalizer of mankind.” What they both lacked in their later campaign efforts were mentoring on tactics and the ability to quickly challenge negative media publicized by their opponents. They needed strong pan-Asian support, but, until 2000, Nevada had a small Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) population. They also needed broader support among voters of other races and ethnicities. Both women, who had female challengers at one point or another, lost to Euro-American women, which suggests that gender was not the major factor in those reelection failures. They had responded to the call for AAPI involvement in politics and, by their efforts, laid the foundations for recent successes of other AAPI women in Nevada and the West.

scholarly journals Exploring Bicultural Experiences: Responding to a Chinese American Young Adult Novel

2010 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Shwuyi Leu
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Identity Development ◽  
Critical Literacy ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Ethnic Literature ◽  
Ethnic Identity Development ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
K 12

Reading and responding to ethnic literature that is reflective of one’s own experiences often has significant value for the younger members of the parallel cultures. This paper reports the results of the responses of young adult and adult Asian and Asian American readers to a Chinese American young adult novel set in the 1920’s. The findings suggest that (1) cultural background played a major role in reader response, (2) cross-cultural reading responses revealed readers’ ethnic identity development, especially when dealing with between-world situations, and (3) Chinese Americans continue to experience racial discrimination today. Implications for educators include the importance of critical literacy and the inclusion of multiethnic literature in the K-12 curriculum.

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