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“The Chinese? Better not to Do Anything Wrong”: How Chinese Working-Class Immigrant Women in
the San Francisco Bay Area Negotiate Racial/Ethnic Identities and Inter-racial and Inter-ethnic Tensions
Introduction
Friedman (2002) defines our current transnational world condition as characterized by a movement
of culture and a globalization of meaning, via media, diaspora formation, and movements of commodities.
As Appadurai contends (1996), the world of the present witnesses “moving images meeting
deterritorialized viewers” (p.4), which creates diasporic public spheres as part of the cultural dynamic of
urban life in most countries and continents. At the same time, transnational capital, which is no longer
linked to a particular place but hovers above the world in the global ether looking for cheap labor and
profitable markets, stimulates mass migration worldwide. Along their routes of migration, diaspora
members carry with them memories, customs, music, and beliefs, which in turn are mediated by the
media, Naficy maintains (1999). In other words, transnational capital, mass migration, and media
saturation are embedded in each other’s conditions and stimulate each other’s movements. And this
constructs the reality of the current world.
Chinese diaspora members constitute a major group of migrants in this global movement.
According to the 2002 report of the U.S. Bureau of Census (2002), the Chinese are the largest Asian
minority group in the United States. Over 2.7 million Americans are of Chinese origin. There are also 1.3
million non-citizen Chinese in the U.S., who are categorized as refugees, permanent residents, and people
on temporary visas. Many among the Chinese diaspora population are not white-collar professionals but
unskilled workers. According to Hamamoto (1997), the fundamental transformation of the global
economy into the transnational capitalism of the late twentieth century has stimulated heavy flows of non-
skilled Third World immigrant workers into Western metropolitan areas. Chinese women, along with
other women of color, have constituted a stratum of easily exploitable “cheap” labor in a number of labor-
intensive industries, such as the garment industry in New York City, and the electronics industry in
northern California and the Boston area. As documented by Fuentes and Ehrenreich (1983), in the U.S.
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Convention