Panel 29: Asians and Asiatowns in the Midwestern US

Chair: Jennifer Huynh, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

Daniel Zipp, University of Maryland, “Authenticity in Asian American Urban Placemaking: The Rebranding of Asiatown”

In 2007, Cleveland’s St. Clair-Superior Development Corporation combined the historical and new Chinatowns into a singular, rebranded neighborhood: “Asiatown.” In an effort to “expand its brand,” community leaders redefined Cleveland’s Chinatown to reflect the Asian American diaspora, the lived experiences of Cleveland’s Asian American population, and to share what these experiences with the larger urban community through a “colorful packaging” that says “everyone is invited” (Petkovic 2011). We ask three interrelated questions: (1) How have Asian and Chinese community groups positioned their identity in the naming and rebranding of their neighborhood?; (2) How has Asiatown and Asian identity become a consumable product marketed towards the outside community?; and (3) How have community groups maintained internal consistency and connections as they conform to outside expectations of their neighborhood? Asian community organizations renamed and reclaimed the neighborhood, but in so doing, packaged the neighborhood as an exotic tourist and food destination within, but not part of, the city. Furthermore, as the neighborhood organizations successfully redeveloped, prices increased, gentrifying the neighborhood and forcing longtime residents to relocate. We show the power, process, and players involved in minoritized communities’ neighborhood placemaking efforts, highlighting the internal agency within larger political and economic changes that create neighborhoods as consumable identities, as well as the imagined and created identities of those who live and consume within the neighborhood.

Tao Wang, Iowa State University, “For God, Gold, and Glory: Iowans in China at the Turn of 20th Century”

This paper examines the early connections between Iowa and China. It studies the experiences of three groups of Iowans who lived in China from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Eva and Fredrick Price, a missionary couple from Des Moines, worked in Shanxi from 1889 through their death in the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Edwin Conger (and his wife Sarah Conger), also from Des Moines, was the United States minister to China from 1898 to 1905. Herbert Hoover, born in West Branch, Iowa, worked as a mine engineer and manager in Tianjin from 1899 to 1902. These individuals represented three aspects of early US policy toward China: missionary idealism, diplomatic pragmatism, and commercial interests.

Using primary sources, such as journals and letters by Eva Price and Sarah Conger, diplomatic documents from the Department of State and the Hoover Presidential Library, as well as secondary works, this study tries to accomplish a two-fold goal: it reveals the long, yet neglected, history of the engagement between the rural midwestern state with the remote, populous country on the other side of the Earth; and it demonstrates the themes of early US-China encounters in an era of Western “scramble for China” and American expansion into Asia.

Jarita Bavido, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, “Beyond Chinatown: Chinese-Americans in Small Towns of the Upper Midwest, 1875–1943”

In the late 1800s, just as the Chinese Exclusion Act took effect, a steady stream of Chinese immigrants flowed into the rural cities of Wisconsin from the West Coast and beyond. While there has been significant historical work on the experience of Chinese people in the rural West, and on Chinatowns throughout the country, less has been done to explore the contributions and complexities of the experiences of Chinese people in the Upper Midwest-- in lumber towns, mining camps, and at rail hubs. In Wisconsin, the first arrivals began laundries, but their entrepreneurial energy quickly expanded to include import stores, and by 1900, restaurants. Using newspaper, census, and archival data, this research highlights through lines of resistance and resilience. Whether by undermining unjust laws and racist business practices, or by integrating into the social fabric of their communities, transnationally and locally, they complicate the narrative of Chinese immigrants as ‚“sojourners‚” and demand a different story about the Upper Midwest in the 19th century—one that includes everyone.