Living In The Suburbs, Becoming Americans By Cindy Cheng

In chapter two, Living in the Suburbs, Becoming Americans, of Cindy Cheng’s book Citizens of Asian America, Cheng discusses how racially-restrictive housing was causing problems for the United States’ foreign policy. The time period of the events discussed in the piece was the 1950’s and 1960’s, which was during the Cold War. The exclusionary government policy of racially-restrictive housing made foreign relations with other countries and particularly Asian country more difficult due to the nature of the policy not being inclusionary. The United States government was trying to gain support from Asian countries and so it wanted to make improvements on its civil rights policies to garner more support against the Soviet Union. Cheng also discusses

the transition of the way Asian Americans were perceived by the dominant society from unassimilable to assimilable and how this was a sharp difference from the exclusionary era of United States policy against Asian Americans during World War II. Cindy Cheng argues that the transformative potential of suburban living promoted America as a place accepting of all people regardless of race, which fails to discuss how social divisions based on race worked to the preconceived notions that white Americans held such as the perception of assimilation, perfect family formation, and activism to fight racism.

The first key issue Cheng discusses is the relationship between race and immigration with regards to assimilation into American culture. She focuses specifically on how the 1958 study Where Shall We Live? and the 1960 report Residence and Race gave the perspective to the reader that minority groups not being culturally assimilated into the United States was the main problem and that full assimilation of minority groups into American culture was the best and only solution. Leading up to these studies, the United States government was in a political showdown with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and the Unites States was looking to build political integrity in world politics by progressing with civil rights reform. The government backed the NAACP in a legal battle to abolish the practice of race-based restricted housing and formed the Commission on Race and Housing to study housing problems that affect minorities. The committee conducted the aforementioned two studies to understand how the

nation could help with the minority housing problem bogging the nation. The 1958 study collected data on blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and whites and found that no significant improvements in housing conditions occurred for non-whites between 1940 and 1950, meanwhile improvements were seen for whites during that same time frame. This study offered up the solution of Americanization as a way to close the gap in housing differentiation. It also came to the realization that Americanization and full assimilation in American culture was not possible because of the color barrier. This study failed to recognize that the minority groups didn’t simply have the choice to assimilate or not, but that they were forced to remain unassimilated because of the preconceived racialized notions that were holding the minority groups back. The studies focused on how minorities and particularly blacks depended on the racial housing and ethnic enclaves as a way to adjust to American culture and to preserve the original culture they came from. This information brought the study to the conclusion that by leaving the racialized spaces and joining suburban America, the assimilation would cause the racial boundaries to fade away. By not assimilating, the paper concluded that the minorities were slowing the process of being accepted by society. The study downplayed the role that race played in restrictive housing, and spun the information to show that it was the blacks and minorities faults that they weren’t being offered equal housing opportunities, rather than acknowledging the racist laws and ideologies that the government and people had in place. The 1960 report also conveyed a similar final message as the 1958 study did in that assimilation is the answer to the problem. The 1960 report specifically talks about the education gap of minorities to whites. It talked about how the nonwhite groups trailed in educational background to white America and that by assimilating and becoming educated that they would be able to be treated as equals. This report fails just like the first study did to recognize the impact of structuralized racism on the minority groups. The issue of assimilation into American culture was misunderstood as a problem of the minorities rather than a problem of the racist people and government who held power over the nation.
The second key point that Cheng is conveying in this chapter is that women and families played a role in the perceived assimilability of the Asian population because it helped the image of Asian Americans nudge closer to the image of the common American homogenous family.

Cheng conveys her points in this section by examining three pieces: two written by Rose Lee and the other a study by Betty Sung. Lee’s first discussed article was published in 1949 and talks about how even with the passage of the 1943 Magnuson Act allowing more immigrants to migrate, the Chinese population was remaining steady while people moved out of the Chinatowns. Lee saw this as a positive rather than a negative. Lee thought that as people moved out of the Chinatowns, the process of the assimilation of the Chinese Americans into popular society would accelerate, thus solving the problem. Lee then in her second piece in 1956 altered her stance a little by discussing how by letting more Chinese women into America, assimilation has been occurring naturally. By adding a woman into the working Chinese man’s life, they can now have a homogenous family, making them more assimilable to the suburban lifestyle. The change from the mostly male segregated Chinatowns to the more American homogenous nuclear family allowed them to be perceived as normal. Historian Betty Lee Sung then conducted a historiographical study in 1967 that reaffirmed what Lee had talked about in the second piece. Sung discusses how the

addition of a female into the preconceived notion of who Chinese Americans are helped in the acceptance and assimilation of the Chinese Americans by changing the general image of the Chinese to a positive heterosexual family rather than the negative images that the propaganda of WWII portrayed them as. The addition of woman and families to the Chinese image made it much easier for them to normalize and assimilate.
The third key idea that Cheng is conveying in this piece is how Sing Sheng’s story tested how democratic the citizens of the United States truly are, rather than just the government policies that they are supposed to follow. Cheng uses the examples of the neighborhood vote and the editorial press reaction from across the nation within the general story of Sheng to showcase how Sheng attempted to unsettle the racial hierarchy in housing that existed with racially segregated neighborhoods. Sheng’s story is that he put a down payment on a house in the Southwood suburb of San Francisco. The residents of the neighborhood told him his family shouldn’t move there because it would decrease the value of the homes in the neighborhood and that the neighborhood kids would vandalize his home. Racially restrictive neighborhoods were illegal at the time but Sheng decided rather than let the law force him into the neighborhood, to try and hold a neighborhood meeting and vote on whether he should be allowed in. He was voted down by a large margin. What made this instance explode in the media and why it is significant is because he chose to let the people show that they haven’t progressed in their opinions of minorities in the same way that the government’s policies have progressed. Sheng showed that although the United States’ policies may be more appealing to foreign governments now, the people living in the United States really haven’t changed meaning that the treatment that people receive will be the same. Cheng’s second point that she makes during the Sheng story is when she discusses the newspapers. The media tried to maintain the image of the United States democracy during this time period of the Cold War by pressing the people of Southwood and the nation to be more accepting of the Asian American people into the communities. The media portrayed Sheng as a father and husband, rather than a middle-class, college-educated, veteran in order to more effectively showcase that he shouldn’t be kept separate from white America. The media portrayed this image as a way to show that cultural assimilation was a way to make racial integration desirable to white America. An additional note on the media is that this transition to fighting for the minority showed a radical swing in viewpoint to liberalism, which again was a sharp contrast to the WWII era media depictions of minorities and foreigners.
Cindy Cheng argued that through the perception of assimilation, perfect family formation, and activism to fight racism as shown through the Sing Sheng story, America demonstrates how suburban living falsely promoted America as a place accepting of all people regardless of race while ignoring the notion of race. Cheng in this chapter shows the reader that a change in the policy of a government is not enough to cause the people of the nation to follow along. This brings into question whether the United States democracy was a failure at the time of the Cold War when people such as Sheng are excluded even though the law clearly states that they should be allowed to move into the neighborhood. This piece was also significant because it pointed out how the popular press swung its viewpoint on minorities in order to try and help the United States government protect its image during the Cold War. The sharp swing of viewpoints of minorities from WWII to the 1950’s and 1960’s shows how desperate the media really was to keep America in a good light. The assimilation of minorities helped boost up the nation’s image, making it desirable for it to occur in the United States. The United States government and the media helped to racially integrate the communities to make the United States a more appealing option as opposed to communism and the Soviet Union during this tense time in American history.