Antiracism in the cosmopolis: race, class, and gender in the lives of elite Chinese Canadian women.

• Author: Pon, Gordon

IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION, CANADA, LIKE THE UNITED STATES, HAS WITNESSED increased westward migration of Pacific Rim capital and Chinese professionals. These adult professionals often establish families in Canada and seek not only capital and cultural accumulation, but also a sense of "belonging" in their new country (Ong, 1999). Aihwa Ong, however, argues that many of these professional Chinese investor-immigrants face persistent racial biases that prevent them from gaining full acceptance in white, Anglo circles with high social standing (Ong, 1999). Among these barriers are: resentments by white neighbors toward Chinese Canadian and Chinese American immigrants who move into traditionally white, upscale neighborhoods (Mitchell, 1997; Ong, 1999); exclusion from invitation lists to prestigious and predominantly "white" social events (Ong, 1999); and persistent stereotypes of Chinese Americans as laborers, laundrymen, and restaurant workers (Ibid.). Thus, Ong cautions that transnational, cosmopolitan, Chinese investor immigrants, despite being armed with capital, Western business degrees, and an embrace of global capitalism, are still often constructed by popular discourses as aliens in the U.S. Ong notes that this led one Hong Kong manager to comment, "they want your Pacific Rim money, but they don't want you" (Ibid.: 108).

The goals of this essay are to examine how three young, privileged, middleclass, Chinese Canadian women understand and/or experience sexism and racism and what they think about social justice movements such as those concerned with antiracism. Building on the important work of Ong (1999), I focus on the young adult offspring of middle-class Chinese immigrants. I use a semi-structured interview method, which permits an empirical exploration and application of Ong's theoretical work. This article also employs what Nader (1972) refers to as a method of "studying up," that is, studying the wealthy, privileged, and powerful. Proponents and practitioners of antiracism, like many social justice movements, have more commonly researched the oppressed, downtrodden, and marginalized. However, Nader argues that "studying up" is vital to efficacious and complex social justice theory and practice formations.

My interviews with three privileged, middle-class, Chinese Canadians, ranging from 27 to 30 years of age, revealed that these women supported antiracism initiatives, but were not necessarily anti-capitalists. This dynamic suggests the need for antiracism activists to grapple with the recalcitrance these young Chinese elites feel toward anti-capitalism and to seek innovative collaborations with these women. Such collaborations require us to move beyond the modernist terms of "right" and "left."

Toronto is a cosmopolis, a diverse city comprised of many racial, ethnic, immigrant, and linguistic groups. Given the diversity of groups, differing histories, and the wide range of political interests, the challenge of inciting mass involvement in social justice movements is particularly intriguing. Yet, the struggle for antiracism in Toronto has a long, hard fought, and commendable history, particularly among African Canadian communities, leaders, activists, educators, and parents (Bramble, 2000; Dei, 1996; 2000; James and Mannette, 2000). However, critics have noted that the antiracism movement is often framed by a black-and-white paradigm of race relations that serves to exclude groups such as Asians from discourses of race and antiracism (Lee, 1996).

Beyond the black-and-white paradigm of race relations, social justice movements, including those dedicated to antiracism education in Canada, have been stymied by an ambivalence toward some nonwhite groups, especially those perceived to be wealthy. The Chinese in Canada are a case in point. Omi and Takagi (1996) describe the Left's ambivalence toward Asian Americans because of suspicions that Asian Americans, especially affluent ones, do not support left-wing struggles such as employment equity. Omi and Takagi's use of the terms "Left" and "Right" seems to denote a political spectrum in which the Left refers generally to an ideology that prioritizes the class interests of the underprivileged and supports government interventions that promote greater equity and equality through wealth distribution policies such as employment equity. Conversely, the Right refers to a general political ideology that promotes laissez-faire economic policies, or less government intervention. The Right generally regards capitalism and the free market as a just distributor of wealth, rewarding hard work and meritocracy. Undoubtedly, the meanings of the terms Left and Right are open to debate and multiple interpretations. Ang and Stratton (1996) argue that these terms are remnants of modernity, with roots in the French Revolution. They contend that:

This distinction, born of modern capitalist political ideology and originating in the ideas of the French Revolution, can no longer work as the organizing principle for "politics" in the contemporary world. It is politically nonsensical to forge an alliance between, say, anti-racist groups, environmentalists, and workers in the logging industry under the unifying banner, "the left" (1996: 75). For Jane Flax (1990: 50), ambivalence refers to "affective states in which intrinsically contradictory or mutually exclusive desires or ideas are each invested with intense emotional energy. Although one cannot have both simultaneously, one cannot abandon either of them." Due to ambivalence, the Left often ignores Asian Americans, for it reasons that the less said about them, the better (Omi and Takagi, 1996). Alternatively, the Left sometimes weakly insists on including Asian North Americans in a wider coalition (Ibid.). It is thus trapped in a conundrum of sorts, in which it does not really know quite what to do with Asian Americans.

By "studying up," I grapple with the concept of ambivalence in relation to wealthy Chinese Canadians and argue that activists must take it seriously within a framework of critical transnationalism, as Ang and Stratton (1996) do in the Australian context. Social justice movements involved with antiracism must work through this ambivalence to forge new solidarities and innovative collaborations with Chinese Canadians.

New Asian Modernities and Critical Transnationalism

The Left and antiracism does not explicitly exclude groups such as Asians; this is done implicitly via the black-white race relations paradigm. As Omi and Takagi (1996) note, the Left will weakly insist upon a shared interests model of politics to gesture toward inclusion of groups such as Asian Americans. That model asserts that because Chinese Americans are nonwhite, they would necessarily embrace and support movements such as antiracism (Ibid.). It breaks down when one thinks of the ruptures within imagined communities, let alone between groups. A significant rupture within the imagined communities of Asian America, which is pertinent to antiracism, exists between Asian American intellectuals and perhaps the majority of Asian American non-academics (Nguyen, 2002). Nguyen warns:

In these new conditions, many Asian Americans may see themselves as equal participants and beneficiaries in a global capitalism that many Asian American intellectuals view with despair. What may be worse for Asian American intellectuals than fractures within Asian America, however, is the ironic prospect that there can still be a relatively unified Asian America that will operate under a different set of signs from antiracism and anticapitalism (2002: 168). Nguyen alerts us to the fact that Asian American academics, particularly those that specialize in Asian American studies, are engaged in what Spivak (1993) might call "clinging to marginalization." By this is meant romanticizing membership in a downtrodden population that is ostensibly oppressed by racism and global capitalism.

The fracture or dilemma for Asian American intellectuals, argues Nguyen (2002: 168), is salient in university classrooms when recalcitrant Asian American students fail to endorse their professors' anti-capitalist and antiracist viewpoints. Recalcitrant students instead see global capitalism as providing a "shared worldview, collective mode of interpretation, and common class interest for many--perhaps a majority of--Asian Americans."

Similarly, Ong (1999: 19) argues that the ascendancy of Asian Pacific Rim economies is concomitant with emergent discourses that produce "new modes of subject making and new kinds of valorized subjectivity" among Asian people. These new kinds of valorized subjectivities celebrate an Asian triumph on the global capitalist scene. Attendant to this triumph, she observers, are resurgent forms of Orientalism, but now propagated by Asian leaders. In this Orientalism, Asian Pacific Rim capitalism is heralded as more caring and less callous than the capitalism of the West. From this Orientalism has issued an explosion of civilizational discourses in which Asian leaders invoke related discourses such as Confucian humanism (Ong, 1999) to construct distinctions between the East and West; specifically, Confucian-inspired capitalism is heralded as more collectivist, caring, and superior to that of the West. Ong argues that Asians are increasingly saying no to the West, not to liberalism or capitalism, as well as no to the notion that Asians are inferior to the West. Many Asians, inspired by the ascendancy of Asian Pacific Rim capital, increasingly see themselves as equals in the arena of global capitalism and therefore "seek to emphasize and claim emergent power, equality, and mutual respect on the global stage" (Ibid.: 35).

Ong points out that the demarcation of Western individualism and Asian collectivism skirts the fact that capitalism itself is wedded to liberalism and "capitalism is itself a source of profound social inequality that produces differential access to...