These two reading sections were really filled with a good balance of straight-forward information and personal stories. It really allowed me to get a full picture of the situation, one that in my opinion is almost tragic. I posted a link on this site a couple of weeks ago to an article that describes a concept called “maternity tourism”. The article referred to pregnant Chinese women who enter the United States on a tourist visa, give birth during their “vacation” and then return to China. Chinese women do this so that if their child should decide to live in the United States or they decide its best to send their child there in the future, the option is legally open to them as the baby is now considered an American citizen due to his/her being born in here. At the time of the publishing of this article I thought this practice was bizarre and extreme. I still think its bizarre, but not so extreme after reading about things Chinese parents have been and continue to do for the welfare of their children. At least in this case, the practice is technically legal and the parents remain with their children for the time being. God in Chinatown includes accounts of children not seeing their parent/s for over ten years and immigrants sending their young babies to China to be cared for by grandparents.
Such stories are heart wrenching (which was clearly the point of including those accounts- so it worked!) and tell a tale not always publicized in the media or even written about in scholarly publications. Kenneth Guest mentions theorists such as Ong and Nonini who write about overseas Chinese but with a focus on the elite, leading to “a failure to account for class stratifications within the Chinese diaspora” (64). Stories of the successful Chinese businessman, the “model minority,” are always in circulation, but experiences such as these are rarely mentioned. As we’ve been seeing in most of our readings this semester, the author tries to bring to life the other side of the story of these immigrants and Guest does so in a convincing way.
