Literature of Chinese American and British-Chinese writers: Immigration policy, citizenship, and racialization

Cultural productions from both the Chinese American and the British Chinese diasporas reveal a disparity between legal citizenship and cultural citizenship and suggest national membership requires both. At the same time, legal discourse restricts Chinese and other nonwhite immigrants from the latter. Utilizing the tropes of movement and the homespace as a means of exploring the varied themes outlined above, Chinese American and British Chinese literatures problematize canonical thinking about the possibilities of movement and the securities of place. That such a number of common themes, anxieties, and tropes exist within two differently situated groups of the Chinese diaspora---the Chinese entered the United States as immigrants while the Chinese (mainly from Hong Kong) entered the United Kingdom as citizens---suggests that, for the Chinese, "immigrant" and "citizen" alike are precarious positions subject to legal regulation and mutation.; This study will trace these themes of legal and cultural citizenship and restricted identities, reading the literatures through the histories of American and British immigration and citizenship policy while examining law and history as manipulated and, therefore, unreliable narratives subject to confrontation and deconstruction. These narratives institutionalize differences between "Chinese" and "white" and normalize the exclusion of Chinese from mainstream white society and culture. Further, these narratives emerge as identity enclosures that restrict the political, economic, and social participation of Chinese immigrants and their Western-born descendants, thereby creating static identities characterized by lack of individual self-determination. Thus disempowered, the Chinese immigrant family becomes marked by the invasive presence of the public within the private, a violation that creates family disjuncture. Hence, race-biased legal policy and the unreliable narratives it creates are argued to be at the root of Chinese American and British Chinese family fractures, fractures that are often read as difficult family relationships caused by some aspect of ancient Chinese culture, without thought of American or British legal discourse. The purpose here is to problematize long-held notions about American and British "freedom" and Chinese "tradition" and, in doing so, demonstrate how abstract legal policy alters private spaces as well as national imaginaries.