THE ―DEAR DIANE‖ LETTERS AND THE ENCOUNTER OF CHINESE YOUNG WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA By Copyright 2012 Hong Cai Submitted to the graduate degree program in American Studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson, David M. Katzman, Ph.D. ________________________________ Co-Chair, Cheryl B. Lester, Ph.D. ________________________________ Norman R. Yetman, Ph.D. ________________________________ William M. Tuttle, Jr., Ph.D. ________________________________ Antha Cotton-Spreckelmeyer, Ph.D. ________________________________ J.Megan Greene, Ph.D. Date Defended: June 12, 2012 The Dissertation Committee for Hong Cai certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: THE ―DEAR DIANE‖ LETTERS AND THE ENCOUNTER OF CHINESE YOUNG WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA ________________________________ Chairperson, David M. Katzman, Ph.D. ________________________________ Co-Chair, Cheryl B. Lester, Ph.D. Date approved: June 12, 2012 ii Abstract Focusing on the ―Dear Diane‖ advice letters, both the English and Chinese texts, this dissertation explores a group of young Chinese immigrant women as they encounter American culture as Chinese Americans were reshaped by new immigration and radical demographic changes in the 1980s. By utilizing assimilation theory as a framework for analyzing Chinese immigration, this work examines several important dimensions and aspects of young Chinese American women‘s adaptation to American life. This study also compares the ―Dear Diane‖ letters with the Jewish ―Bintel Brief‖ letters in order to explore some common characteristics of the female immigrant experience in the United States. The writer identifies a number of issues that young Chinese American women including the intensifying generational conflict and identity dislocation. Moreover, the writer finds that both groups of letters reveal that Chinese young women faced similar issues as their counterparts—other ethnic Asian and Jewish women. With a strong desire to Americanize, young Chinese American women often faced conflict with both their parents and mainstream society. Therefore, assimilation for young Chinese women was problematic, painstaking, and a prolonged process. iii Acknowledgements This dissertation could not be completed single handedly. During the whole stage of my work, I am very lucky to have gotten support, guidance, and encouragement from many people. First of all, I am profoundly grateful to my advisor, mentor and committee chair Professor David Katzman, who, like an anchor in the rough sea, has been a great reliable source of knowledge, guidance, and encouragement from the inception of this project to its completion. Second, my gratitude goes to Professor Norman Yetman, whose insightful critiques and suggestions helped me to improve my work enormously. What impressed me the most is that Professor Yetman worked together with me patiently on some chapters, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, as did Professor Katzman. Third, I want to thank my other committee members, Bill Tuttle, Sheryl B. Lester, Antha Cotton-Spreckelmeyer, and J. Megan Greene for their generous intellectual and moral support and encouragement. I also want to take this opportunity to thank the community of the University of Kansas for its invaluable help with technical and material support, especially the help from Tami Albin, Kim Glover, and Katie Sparks. Also, I thank Elaine Kim and Diane Yen-Mei Wong, whose invaluable help secured a smooth start to my project. I also owe a great indebtedness to Peter Haxton—a research librarian from State Data Center at State Library of Kansas—for his kind, invaluable, and timely help with almost all the data used in this dissertation. Finally, I am forever grateful to my family, Melissa Song and Zhongqi Cai. Melissa helped me prepare the interview questions and collect the data; and Qiqi has been with me throughout all the joys and pains of my entire work. She is also the real source of inspiration for me to keep working on my project until its completion. iv Table of Contents Abstract ..………………………………………………………………………………........... III Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………………... IV Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………... 1 Chapter One An Historical Examination of Chinese American Women ………………....... 11 Chapter Two A Mixed Racial Identity: the ―Double Consciousness‖ of Young Chinese Women during Their Assimilation to Contemporary America .…………........ 46 Chapter Three Coding and Decoding the ―Dear Diane‖ Letters: Race, Gender, and Culture …………………………………........................... 65 Chapter Four The Chinese ―Dear Diane‖ Letters: A Social and Cultural Exploration ………………………………………….... 103 Chapter Five The ―Bintel Brief‖ and the ―Dear Diane‖ Letters in Comparative Perspective ………………………………………………...... 138 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………… 169 Appendix 1 …………………………………………………………………………………… 179 Appendix 2 …………………………………………………………………………………… 184 Sources ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 187 Interviews …………………………………………………………………………………...... 187 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………...... 187 v Introduction That was aimed at younger [Asian] girls, primarily immigrants, who didn‘t have enough resources, and we just thought it was important to help the young girls. Diane Yen-Mei Wong (Interview) That is how Diane Yen-Mei, the writer of Dear Diane: Questions and Answers For Asian American Women, a former Commissioner of the Office of Asian American Affairs in the state of Washington, described in a 2009 interview why she conducted research on young Asian-American women. 1 It can be reasonably assumed that Diane Yen-Mei Wong used ―we‖ to mean that the ―Dear Diane‖ book was actually a result of a collective enterprise which involved many parties; and ―to help the young [Asian] girls‖ implied that young (Asian) immigrant girls did not have adequate resources as they adjusted and adapted to American life. The book Dear Diane: Questions and Answers For Asian American Women appeared in 1983 in three editions: English, English-Chinese, and English-Korean. In the Chinese and Korean language editions, the title reads Dear Diane: Letters From Our Daughters.2 The ―Dear Diane‖ book was a collective enterprise. The publisher was Asian Women United (AWU) of California, an organization founded in 1976 by a group of Asian American women in the San Francisco Bay Area with a mission to ―explore the many facets 1 Diane Yen-Mei Wong, telephone interview with the author, October 7, 2009 (abbreviated as Wong Interview hereafter). 2 Diane Yen-Mei Wong, Dear Diane: Questions and Answers For Asian American Women (Oakland, California: Asian Women United of California, 1983) (English Edition); Diane Yen-Mei Wong, Dear Diane: Letters from Our Daughters (Oakland, California: Asian Women United of California, 1983) (Chinese and Korean Edition). They are abbreviated as the ―Dear Diane‖ book or letters hereafter unless specified otherwise. 1 of Asian American women‘s experiences and varied cultural heritages through publications and video productions.‖3 The ―Dear Diane‖ project was also launched by AWU under the leadership of its director, Elaine Kim, the co-founder and former president at AWU. The writer, Diane Yen-Mei Wong, wrote all the answers to the letters from Asian-American women, primarily young Chinese and Korean women. The ―Dear Diane‖ book in English consists of 96 letters and the ―Dear Diane‖ books in Chinese and in Korean include 50 and 49 letters, respectively, selected from the English ones which are tailored to the needs of Chinese and Korean immigrant families that lack fluent command of English. The ―Dear Diane‖ letters were based on a survey conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area by Asian Women United of California between 1980 and 1981 among over six hundred immigrant and American-born Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and Korean American female students in urban and suburban middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities. According to Kim, one of the goals of this survey was to ―determine how they feel about themselves, what their aspirations are, and how they perceive their parents and family lives.‖ 4 According to Diane Yen-Mei Wong, although Chinese and Korean immigrants were the prime immigrant populations in the early 1980s in the San Francisco Bay Area, there was ―so little available that was written in Chinese, written in Korean for the immigrants to help the immigrant population find their way through America.‖ As a result, the ―Dear Diane‖ book was translated into both Chinese and Korean languages.5 The Chinese translators of the ―Dear Diane‖ book were Vanessa Lam of Chinatown Youth Center in the 3 Asian Women United (AWU), ―Asian Women United of California,‖ accessed March 31, 2011, http://www.asianwomenunited.org/. 4 Elaine Kim, ―A Note To Parents‖ in Diane Yen-Mei Wong, Dear Diane: Letters… , 1. 5 Wong Interview. 2 San Francisco Bay Area and Shirley Liu of the Oriental Languages Department at the University of California at Berkeley. The Korean translator of the ―Dear Diane‖ book was Han Tzol Yun of the Korean Community Center of the East Bay. The Chinese and Korean translations were specifically targeted at those young Chinese- and Korean-American women whose English was not well developed and whose parents could not read English well.6 The publication of the ―Dear Diane‖ book reflected a much-changed Chinese immigrant population in the United States.