Race and Suburbia: On Willow Lung-Amam's Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia

White picket fences. Two and a half kids. A dog. The American Dream.

Is it really? And whose dream is it anyway? Can modern day America allow itself the alteration of such dream in the spirit of diversity and inclusion?  

In a recent presentation at the Research Institute of CCSRE, Dr. Willow-Lung Amam, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland, offered insights to these questions. Drawing from the new book Trespassers?: Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia, Dr. Lung-Amam examined the clashes over space and race resulting from the immigration waves of the last thirty years that have dramatically shifted the demographic and cultural landscapes of Silicon Valley.

Drawing from 130 interviews with teachers, parents, political leaders and community members, alongside archival work on regulations and urban planning initiatives adopted in the cities experiencing the most pronounced changes, Lung-Amam captured the ongoing process of reshaping Americana. This process has unraveled the troubling, albeit unsurprising, racialization of the American suburb through attempts to preserve a standardized version of white American culture, education and aesthetics. Lung-Amam's analysis revealed conflicts over “belongingness” and identity in a diversifying society, shedding light on the effects of modern, highly-skilled, and educated Asian immigrants on “traditional” American culture and values.  

Lung-Amam explored three areas that have affected Asian Americans’ movement into the suburbs: (1) Schools (2) Shopping centers, and (3) Housing. Each of these areas has experienced radical structural and conceptual changes over the last three decades, resulting in an array of responses from long-time residents – a mix of fear, ignorance, stereotypical thinking, and pure bigotry.   

Schools, for example, experienced dramatic demographic, cultural and extracurricular changes, such as an increasing emphasis on STEM studies at the expense of liberal arts, and the sacrifice of traditional American high-school domains such as athletics. These changes have indeed contributed to a constant rise in schools’ academic rankings, but were simultaneously followed by a dramatic “white flight.” As an illustration: In 1990 Whites comprised 71% of the students’ population in Mission San Jose High School, and Asians represented only 25%. In 2010 the demographic composition of the school flipped; Whites comprised only 12% of the school’s populations, while Asian students reached a sweeping 84%. 

As for shopping centers, or “Asian Malls”, these evolved in form, shape and size as public spaces for community formation and rare opportunities for entrepreneurship among the new immigrants. White-dominant municipalities had a hard time acceptingthe forms of these malls claiming they do not conform with “Western” standards of health, noise, and cleanliness. This led to changes to existing regulations as well as attempts to create Epcot-like malls representative of the changing diversity of Silicon Valley.

Similar attempts of re-Americanization were detected around the design of homes in suburbia, with long-time white residents concerned about the construction of what they deemed “McMansions”. With immigrants came alternative models of "dream houses". Some of these were considered a threat to the traditional, white picket-fenced model of suburbia. For example, some Asian immigrants built or remodeled houses to be substantially larger and flashier than the one-story, modest design of the surrounding houses. Importantly, these differences seem not only to stem from different aesthetic sensibilities but also from different cultural views of what a “home” is. While traditional White conceptions focus on the space it provides for the nuclear family (from birth to college), Asian immigrants interviewed by Lung-Amam viewed the home as a multi-generational space for years to come. A larger home was not simply about luxury, it was a means to accommodate an extended family under one roof. Such a gap in the philosophy of the home had a clear reflection in the new models adopted by Asian immigrants. In short order, long-time white residents lobbied for new regulations to control the design and development of private houses in ways that reinforced “good”, “accepted” (and traditional) suburban designs. The dreams and visions of Asian Americans in their most private domain—their homes—had to conform to an exclusive suburbia model of home and family.

Two main conclusions emerge from Lung-Amam’s book; first, it reinforces that in modern America we cannot strive for one unified American dream. As American society has diversified, so have the dreams of its people; their cultural, artistic, spiritual, educational and familial aspirations, create infinite numbers of dreams, all equally worthy. Second, and consequently—aspiring to build a diverse and inclusive society entails recognizing the right to space, even in suburbia; allowing space to criticize and challenge traditional or “correct” models of white racialized Americana. Pink fences, four kids, grandparents and Chinchillas are welcome.