multicultural experiment. At the same time, economic development schemes court tourists to neighborhoods that aestheticize and exotify Asian American culture and market it for profit.25 Discursively and materially, urban ethnic enclaves have helped to define Asianness in America.
The racialized landscape and its politics, however, does not respect city and suburban lines. Suburbia’s form has long been used to construct ideas about Whiteness and reinforce White Americans’ social and economic privilege and power.26 Postwar suburban housing, neighborhoods, streets, and shopping centers idealized the White middle-class nuclear family. Its picturesque and pastoral landscapes were modeled on the estates of the European elite and sold by developers and “community builders” as a new, exclusive version of the American Dream.27 Through practices such as racial steering, racially restrictive covenants, blockbusting, redlining, discriminatory Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration mortgage lending practices, and individual and collective acts of violence, this dream was denied to many lower-income residents, especially those of color.
As historians Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese note, however, these spatial distinctions did not merely reify existing social hierarchies but also helped to shape ideas and understandings of them in ways that perpetuated them through time: “In building suburbia, Americans built inequality to last.”28 Contemporary suburban landscapes continue to naturalize ideas about who and what are rightly considered suburban. While all too often maintained by policies and practices such as common interest developments, gated communities, and exclusionary zoning that exclude poor and minority residents, suburban spaces often obscures the work that goes into maintaining their largely invisible though highly securitized borders as well as White Americans’ privileged position within them.29
If the scholarship is clear that suburbia has served and continues to serve as a landscape that constructs Whiteness and helps White Americans maintain their dominant social and economic status, however, it is less clear how this dynamic is changing in the face of more diverse inhabitants. We have come to a largely unanticipated moment when the majority of minorities and immigrants now live in the suburbs of America’s largest cities. Far more attention must be given to this side of the story. As several contemporary accounts of suburban minority and immigrant life have shown, neither discrimination against people of color nor the institutionalized barriers they face have been washed away by moving to the suburbs.30 For Asian Americans, several notable works have documented their battles over issues of political representation, language accommodation, cultural celebrations, religious facilities, and others in suburbia.31
Trespassers? demonstrates that built landscapes and spatial uses that do not conform to the suburban trope often become points of negotiation for the terms of Asian American suburban inclusion. In this process, policy and planning prescriptions commonly reinforce dominant spatial norms and standards of suburban design and development. The spaces occupied primarily by Asian Americans frequently fall outside these norms, creating a sense of Asian Americans as suburban trespassers—those who commit spatial acts that are not in accord with the dictates of the dominant rules. Governed by policies and processes that have long favored White Americans, suburbia’s built environment continues to racialize Asian American space and produce subtle modes of social and spatial marginality, even among minorities of means.
Alternatively, in investigating the resistance and persistence of landscapes of difference amid the pressures to conform or adapt to hegemonic ideas of suburban acceptability, this book also demonstrates that attempts to govern or legislate the terms of Asian American inclusion within suburbia has been incomplete. These spaces obstruct rather than reify the suburban spatial order and Asian Americans presumed place within it. They beg questions about what it means to be included and how to promote a sense of multiracial and multiethnic belonging, justice, and equity in a landscape built upon exclusion and inequality.32 This challenge requires looking at suburbia from the inside out. It demands an interrogation of the lived conditions and experiences of suburban newcomers and their struggles to build a sense of home and belonging. It also requires a recognition that simply living in suburbia or in diverse neighborhoods is not enough.33 The power to shape the built environment as a reflection of their diverse identities and desires is a condition of suburban citizenship that Asian Americans and other marginalized groups have long been denied.
• • •
If every place has a story, so too does every book. Mine began not in Silicon Valley but instead in the hollows of West Virginia. My African American mother and Chinese immigrant father raised me deep in the Appalachian foothills. This strange pair of hippie homesteaders were social idealists tethered to a set of principles about racial equity, citizen activism, democratic decision making, and environmental stewardship.34 Their vow to live principled, simplistic lifestyles led them and a few others to a small plot of land in my hometown, where they started a commune in the early 1970s. Like most, theirs did not last. Eventually the members dispersed into the backcountry of this rural region into which I was born.
As a product of this social experiment, my young life was governed by contradiction. I was raised to believe in social and racial equity, yet every day I felt the sting of discrimination and rural poverty around me. While I was taught to love and see my neighbors as equals, I was all too aware that many did not view me in the same light. My parents organized protests against the Ku Klux Klan, while some of our neighbors sat silently eyeing them with as much suspicion as the hooded shadows that paraded through my hometown.
Many of my summers were spent on the road with my father, who sold his handcrafted pottery at street fairs around the country. During these travels, I became fascinated by the possibilities of city life for fostering the kinds of communities that my parents had once imagined in which I might be raised—places not bound by color but held together by a commitment to diversity, democracy, and social justice. Here and there, I saw glimpses of the world my parents fought so hard for. In Chicago, New York, Ann Arbor, Minneapolis, and Cleveland, I was struck by how people of so many different colors and classes appeared to casually rub elbows on crowded urban streets. Eventually I also came to recognize the other side of this idyllic vision of city life—segregation, poverty, and the deep social inequalities that my parents had sought to escape.
These early experiences motivated my career as an urban planner and designer concerned with questions of urban social justice and inequality. As I learned about the forces that had shaped what Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton called “American Apartheid,” I became convinced that in the right hands, urban policy, planning, and design could remake American cities into the vibrant, diverse, and hopeful places that I had once imagined them to be.35
My studies led me to explore many intentionally diverse communities such as those in Columbia, Maryland, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, that were largely a product of my parents’ generation of progressive politics. But I found myself more concerned with the fundamental building blocks of cities—how the sidewalks, brick-and-mortar businesses, community centers, parks, and playgrounds supported diverse populations and improved people’s life circumstances. During my doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, I began to look for clues about how urban form could better support diversity by exploring communities in my own backyard.
Armed with maps of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most ethnically diverse neighborhoods, I spent much of the summer of 2008 driving and walking through several low-income communities such as Pittsburg and Richmond as well as more middle-class communities such as Hercules, Vallejo, and Union City. To my surprise, my shoe-leather research brought me out of downtown Oakland and San Francisco into many low-density suburbs.
I was especially drawn to communities within Silicon Valley, where I sensed that there was something different happening. In contrast to the standard facades and manicured lawns I had seen in many suburbs, there I found custom-built homes, bustling ethnic businesses, and vibrant public spaces that appeared to be much richer expressions of difference. I wondered what had allowed
