Alien Encounters, though mostly academic, contains a wide spectrum of writing. One chapter, about visiting 35 Chinese restaurants across Wisconsin, is positively chatty, using phrases like "freakin weird" and "wannabe blintz." The author was told that many migrants had arrived there from Fujian Province in recent years, though immigration to the US had become much more difficult since Sept. 11, so much so that there was still an imbalance between men and women, with Chinese men predominating just as they had in gold-mining California 100 and more years ago.
This book's version of the Vietnamese-American experience is essentially positive because it concentrates, not on a sense of displacement and loss, but on adaptation to a new environment. The Paris by Night shows (with 'Paris' pronounced in the French, not the English, way) are popular in part because they incorporate so many American cultural styles. Members of the older generation, despite usually preferring to focus on the traditional culture they've left behind, enjoy them nevertheless because they show their communities as American, not alien. And their huge audiences back in Vietnam, a place that's these days pro-American in countless ways, like them as well for exactly the same reason.
The view that Asian-Americans are both model minorities and at the same time incapable of complete assimilation, though contested, pervades all parts of this book. But there's a paradox involved, as Sunaina Maira points out in a vigorous essay on Indo-chic, looking at Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Tibetan immigrants in the New England town of Northampton. Things Asian can become fashionable exactly because they are different. This leads the reader back to Edward Said's old assertion that the West's attitude to the seemingly exotic East has always been characterized by a mixture, in almost equal proportions, of both fear and desire. Asians appear strangely "other," but also hugely desirable, thought our Victorian forebears. Not all that much, this book suggests, has really changed, in the US at least.
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