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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 these comparatively “messy” landscapes to emerge, how they supported the valley’s diverse populations, and what they suggested about the ways that different groups were and were not sharing space and building community together.
In search of answers to my many questions, I began spending more time there—primarily in Fremont, the largest Silicon Valley suburb by land area and one of the region’s most racially and ethnically diverse communities. On foot, by car, and lingering in many of Fremont’s public and semipublic spaces, I started to “take the city apart.”36 I explored its many neighborhoods and learned by seeing signs of difference in the landscape and asking questions about the people and processes that produced them.37 I sat down with business owners, residents, and city officials to hear their takes on the changing landscape I was witnessing firsthand. From old-timers, I heard what it was like to live through the valley’s swift transformation from a spattering of small rural townships into a global gateway. Many of their stories carried a deep unease about the changing demographics of the region and its impact on places that had once seemed so familiar and stable. Some complained about their new neighbors’ flashy oversized homes, Asian American parents pushing their kids too hard in schools, and the large number of new Asian-oriented shopping centers that were “taking over” the city. Asian Americans, especially recently arrived immigrants from China, Taiwan, and India, offered different perspectives. Their stories emphasized their struggles and successes in the valley. They spoke of the trials they underwent to establish themselves in the region and, with pride, at how far they had come. They showed off their large homes as signs of their success, boasted of their children’s high grade point averages, and frequently noted how much easier their lives had become because of the growing number of Asian American-owned businesses in the region. In city council and planning commission meetings, I listened as heated debates over these issues went back and forth between long-term and new residents.
These conflicts led to me to consider the spaces at the center of these debates and their importance to Asian American newcomers. As I dug deeper, I began conducting in-depth interviews with the people most familiar