Diaspora and Class Consciousness : Chinese Immigrant Workers in Multiracial Chicago

This project adopts an interracial framework in studying the convergence and divergence of minority experiences in a highly racialized urban setting, treating the Chinese immigrant experience as a pivot through which to examine the complex process of the multiracial transformation of white majority neighborhoods. But it also goes beyond the hegemonic black/white binary in studying race relations in the United States, exploring the interconnectedness among different minority experiences and aiming to bridge the gap between a U.S.-centered view of race and a transnational perspective generated by recent scholarship on migration and transnationalism.

This book is an ethnographic study of the multi-linear process of racial knowledge formation among a relatively invisible population in the Chinese American community in Chicago, namely the working class. Shanshan Lan defines "Chinese immigrant workers" as Chinese immigrants with limited English language skills who work primarily at low-skill, blue-collar service jobs at the extreme margins of U.S. economy. The book moves away from the enclave paradigm by situating the Chinese immigrant experience within the larger context of transnational labor migration and the multiracial transformation of urban U.S. landscape. Through thick ethnographic descriptions, Lan explores Chinese immigrant workers’ daily struggles to cope with the disjuncture between race as an American ideological construct and race as a lived experience. The book argues that Chinese immigrant workers’ racial learning is not always a matter of personal choice, but is conditioned by structural factors such as the limitation of the Black and white racial binary, the transnational circulation of U.S. racial ideology, the negative influence of prevalent U.S. rhetoric such as multiculturalism and colorblindness, and class differentiations within the Chinese American community.