ABSTRACT
Chinatowns are sites of mystery and sites of fascination. At least, this is what the mix of public perception and public ascription around these ethnic quarters both in the United States and in Europe suggests. But of course Chinatowns have always also been sites of everyday life. They are complex urban phenomena shaped by immigration politics, racialized discourses revolving around public health and citizenship, tourism, trade relations, commercial exchanges, missionary ambitions, labor exploitation, and cultural self-fashioning. Both in the United States and in Europe these “urban enclaves” (Wilson and Portes 1980; Zhou 1992; Lin 1998) have come to represent Chineseness and orientalism. And still, to reduce the reality of the Chinatown to its stereotypical representations would be to perpetuate the stylizations of the past and to underestimate the extent of agency and selfdetermination in the daily lives of Chinese expatriates and migrants—the “internal vitality of Chinatown,” as Yong Chen wrote (2000: 47; see also Wong 1995). Especially second- and third-generation Chinese diasporic subjects were socialized in such ‘miniature Chinas,’ and shaped the general outlook, economic, tourist, and cultural set-up as well as the educational and religious backgrounds of Chinatown communities in many ways.
