Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities

The Cold War of Chinese American Narrative

Heidi Kim

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781439919026, 9781439919019
• eBook ISBN: 9781439919033
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

In the Cold War era, Chinese Americans were caught in a double-bind. The widespread stigma of illegal immigration, as it was often called, was most easily countered with the model minority, assimilating and forming nuclear families, but that in turn led to further stereotypes. In Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities, Heidi Kim investigates how Chinese American writers navigated a strategy to normalize and justify the Chinese presence during a time when fears of Communism ran high.

Kim explores how writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Jade Snow Wong, and C. Y. Lee, among others, addressed issues of history, family, blood purity, and law through then-groundbreaking novels and memoirs. Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities also uses legal cases, immigration documents, and law as well as mass media coverage to illustrate how writers constructed stories in relation to the political structures that allowed or disallowed their presence, their citizenship, and their blended identity. 

Kim illuminates the rapidly shifting political and social pressures on Chinese American authors who selectively concealed, revealed, and reconstructed issues of citizenship, belonging, and inclusion in their writing.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Illegal Immigration in the Cold War
• 1. Narrative Cold War: Public Faces of Chinese America
• 2. Happy Families: Modeling the Minority in the Era of Immigration Reform
• 3. Blood Tells: The Attack on Chinese American Family Ties
• 4. History, through Literature: Rewriting the Past after the Confession Era
• Epilogue: The Failure of the Model Minority Narrative?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index