I was fairly surprised by this week’s readings. From Nicholas Klein and Andrew Zitcer reading to the chapter on New York’s Chinatown community a lot of the stereotypes I’ve come to know melted away. Rather a new understanding came to me while I read about the Chinese immigrants in Peter Kowng’s book. The realization that the very ubiquitous notion that every Chinese person has achieved academic success was something that was conjured up by looking only at the surface amazed me. The generalization seemed to hold true because of data already collected but the reality of it is more complex than that. Peter Kwong describes the uptown and downtown Chinese to show the polarization between the different Chinese that come to America. He shows us that the idea of the Chinese being smart comes from the census data in the 1970s. The data portrayed the Chinese as the well off, highly educated “model minority.” This data creates an average though. It does not show the clear distinction between the groups that make up the upper stratum and the lower stratum of the data. People from Taiwan with high educational standards and from Chinese elite families who came during the Cultural Revolution in China dominate the upper stratum. The lower stratum consists of many new immigrants from the People’s Republic of China. The upper stratum is very different from the lower stratum in terms of education, professions and income before and after they come to America.

What was very interesting to see from Zitcer and Klein’s study was how understanding of a different place and people is strongly framed by word of mouth. Not just from anyone but from a person with “insider knowledge.” Its hard to discern what is true or not without actually being there. The ridiculous stories that do pass through word of mouth just serve to emphasize a person’s different or lack of understanding in a given situation. The bus driver situation in a Chinatown bus bus serves this point. The non-Chinese saw the bus driver as a lunatic, who smoked and didn’t abide by the law while the Chinese saw him as a person who chain-smokes to try to stay awake during his over twelve hour shifts. Its just like how outsiders with “insiders data” since the 1970s might have seen Chinatowns as places of upward mobility and the Chinese as the “model minority.”