Abstract
San Francisco Chinatown has a history of over 150 years, and Staicov outlines some of the main historical events that have shaped the community. After an era of exclusion, Chinese Americans today experience a more open and tolerant society that, for better or worse, perceives them as model minority. To investigate if socio-historical developments play a role in identity construction and linguistics variation, Staicov talks to participants who have experienced these developments first hand. “San Francisco Chinatown: Introducing the community” describes how Staicov entered the community to recruit both first- and second-generation participants and explains that the focus on Cantonese-speaking members reflects the linguistic origins of the community.
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Notes
- 1.
Among these flexible citizens are “mobile managers, technocrats, and professionals seeking to both circumvent and benefit from different nation-state regimes” (Ong 1999: 112, original emphasis).
- 2.
Researchers who are members of the community might have easier access to participants but need to be careful not to be restricted by their insider knowledge and connections (Walker and Hoffman 2013: 82).
- 3.
Differences in ethnicity, for example, might be problematic in highly racialised societies where tensions between different groups are prevalent. In such a setting, consultants might feel less comfortable to interact with the researcher, which will also affect their linguistic choices. Similarities, on the other hand, for example with regard to age group, might have positive effects and can make consultants feel more at ease as a researcher might be perceived as a peer, rather than as an authoritative scientist.
- 4.
In order to protect my participants’ privacy, all names used in this study are pseudonyms. The only exceptions are public figures who can easily be identified through online searches. Pseudonyms were found using the baby name wizard website (http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager). I looked for names of similar popularity of the participants’ true names in order to find suitable pseudonyms.
- 5.
Throughout this study, generation is defined relative to the migration history of participants. The first generation, thus, describes those individuals who migrated to the United States from China, the second generation refers to the children of the immigrant generation, as well as to those immigrants who arrived in the United States before puberty, sometimes referred to as generation 1.5.
- 6.
Taking historical developments into account, Sharma (2011, 2012, 2014) and Sharma and Sankaran (2011) found that British Asians of the earlier second generation (i.e. those who experienced a difficult anti-immigrant atmosphere between the 1940s and 1980s) differ in use of linguistic features, compared to the younger cohort, who grew up in a more open, multi-racial environment between the late 1980s and today.
- 7.
Even though all of the first-generation participants were required to have lived in San Francisco for at least ten years, the particular situation that Chinatown represents an ethnic enclave meant that, for many speakers of this generation, acquiring English was not of immediate necessity. This was especially true for the men who participated in this study.
- 8.
While in the context of San Francisco Chinatown, Chinese is often equated with Cantonese, I decided to keep the two labels separate: labelling Cantonese Chinese indicates that Cantonese is still perceived as dominant in Chinatown, despite increasing influx of Mandarin, which is the official language of China. If the categories Chinese and Cantonese were collapsed, 87 per cent would have selected Cantonese as their heritage language.
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Staicov, A. (2020). San Francisco Chinatown: Introducing the Community. In: Creating Belonging in San Francisco Chinatown’s Diasporic Community. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24993-9_2
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