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 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

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