ABSTRACT
When I started my preliminary research in Chicago's Chinatown in the summer of 2003, I was still a poor graduate student who had no car and no cell phone. So I walked around the neighborhood most of the time, trying to talk to as many people as possible and learn the neighborhood's infrastructure. One afternoon when I was on my way back from an interview in Bridgeport, I was harassed by some white teenagers on the street. They yelled imitation Chinese at me and threatened to beat me up. Coming from a very sheltered life at an elite university campus, I was totally unprepared for the physical and verbal assaults in this multiracial urban setting. My heart was consumed by anger, humiliation, and helplessness after the incident. Fortunately, people in the Chinese American community comforted me. They shared with me their personal stories of being harassed in the neighborhood and taught me about the various hidden racial boundaries in the city's geography. That was how I discovered Bridgeport, a historically white, working-class community undergoing a multiracial transformation due to the influx of new immigrants from Asia and Latin America. As I talked to more and more people in the neighborhood, my own little “traumatic experience” faded in comparison to the interracial harassment and hate crimes that Chinese immigrants had to cope with every day in Bridgeport. However, this incident marked my true initiation into the immigrants' world and their acceptance of me as a member of the community.
