Abstract
The title of Willow S. Lung-Amam’s first book, Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia, says it all as to what the book is about. Trespassers is about Asian Americans’ embattled attempts to live their own American Dream—to establish their own place and make their own mark in American suburbia, long known for its racial and class exclusion and for being a bastion of white privilege. The book tells this American story of struggle by focusing on a privileged segment of Asian Americans: highly educated and incomed Chinese and Indian immigrants who have been able to move into the exclusive suburbs of Silicon Valley, an area known to house many of the largest high-tech firms in the United States.
Lung-Amam tells her story of Asian American suburbanites through a mixed-methods case study of Fremont, California, one of the largest suburbs in Silicon Valley. Her data include in-depth interviews and windshield surveys alongside observational and archival research. Lung-Amam had long conversations with neighbors, wandered through neighborhoods, sat at the back of community meeting halls and high school classrooms, and tried to capture the everyday stories of her Asian American suburbanites.
Lung-Amam writes from the position of an American with African American and Chinese heritage who is an urban planner and designer deeply concerned about inequality and urban social justice. From this position, she investigates a particular group of highly educated upper-class Asian Americans who have been able to move in and transform a suburban landscape that was not built for them. She does this with great care and empathy in five well-organized and easy-to-read chapters that are largely free of academic jargon and read like an extended New York Times article.
The overriding theme of Trespassers told consistently throughout each of the chapters is that Asian Americans’ attempts to make their own home in Fremont have constituted a difficult journey. Asian American ethnoburbians have become a significant presence in the Silicon Valley suburbs and have transformed its spatial landscape. They have moved into high-end neighborhoods, enrolled their children in top-performing schools, built their own “Asian Malls,” and remodeled and refashioned their homes to suit their own needs and “way of life.” And yet on each of these fronts, they have encountered reactions from skepticism to outright disdain. They have been treated as “trespassers.” Whether Asian malls or Asian-styled homes, landscapes built by and for Asian Americans have consistently been portrayed as undesirable, abnormal, or simply out of place in a suburban landscape built and designed with white-American suburbanites in mind.
Trespassers taps into broader questions about Asian Americans’ position in the U.S. racial landscape. On the one hand, many Asian Americans are privileged, with high levels of education, homeownership, and income; and yet, on the other hand, they continue to be denied the privileges of whites and are treated as suspect, second-class Americans, as “forever foreigners.” Thus, Trespassers, like many other ethnographies on Asian American communities, tells us that Asian Americans are privileged on some levels, particularly compared to other people of color, and yet are most certainly not the “new whites.” The book suggests that Asian Americans, even as highly educated upper-middle-class suburbanites, occupy the murky middle of the American racial hierarchy somewhere below the white majority. The book therefore tells a story of Asian Americans’ simultaneous privilege and racial and cultural discrimination.
As a general reader, there isn’t much to criticize in the book. Its goals are clear, its methodology is appropriate, and the theme of Asian American suburbanites as trespassers who have been able to move into the vanilla suburbs but are received as unwelcomed strangers and intruders quietly runs throughout the chapters. Sociologists, however, might find the book wanting in terms of theoretical rigor and lacking in more direct discussions of structural inequality, particularly in regard to the white cultural hegemony that prevails in in the multiracial and global American metropolis. Also, in the end, the book does not tell us anything significantly new about urban or suburban landscapes, Asian Americans, or the U.S. racial system: Asian American suburbanites are privileged, but not as much as their white counterparts.
Moreover, Lung-Amam’s attempt, particularly in the final chapter, to challenge communities across the United States to make spaces for immigrants, minorities, and other non-white or non-heteronormative suburban newcomers, to “make peace with our differences” and learn to “live together,” did not sound significantly different from the hackneyed “can’t we all just get along?” Critical sociologists would want her to push harder and challenge systematic structural inequalities embedded throughout the American landscape. To be fair, however, readers should note that Lung-Amam is not a sociologist. She has a PhD in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning.
On the whole, Trespassers is a short, easy-to-read, personable, and even-tempered account of a select group of Asian Americans trying to make their own mark in an American suburbia that has been built on excluding the “other.” The book would be suitable for a broad audience, from undergraduate students in urban planning and urban sociology to city planners, local politicians, and concerned citizens wanting all Americans to be able to chart their own American Dream and sketch their own names in the American landscape.