Author Description

This project investigates how a suburban Chinese American middle class developed within the politically charged climate of the Cold War. It uses patterns of Chinese American suburban migration to understand mainstream Americans' shifting ideas of foreignness and racial difference. The first generation of Chinese American suburbanites occupied a marginal status in both Chinatowns and suburbia. While geographical location and social and class backgrounds separated Chinese suburbanites from urban Chinatown populations, race and culture distinguished them from their white American neighbors. Through an exploration of the intersections of Cold War cultural and policy shifts and post-World War II Chinese immigration patterns, this project explains how people of Chinese descent-the only group to be excluded from immigration into the United States because of racial prejudices-laid claim to the postwar "American Dream" of middle-class suburban home ownership. It challenges long-held scholarly and popular assumptions that the Cold War suburbs were "lily white" and culturally homogenous by asserting that Cold War liberal ideals of multiculturalism and the developing model minority stereotype of Asian Americans made it possible for Chinese people to settle in predominantly white suburban areas.