Author Xiaojian Zhao admits at the outset that generalizations pertaining to such an internally diverse, fragmented, and geographically dispersed group under the rubric of “Chinese America” are fraught with difficulty. The sheer size and scope of the contemporary Chinese American community and the rapidity with which it has grown—from 436,000 in 1970 to 2,900,000 as of 2000—begs for more incisive conceptual, empirical, and analytical approaches to describing, explaining, and understanding a population in the midst of dynamic transformation as it moves into the second decade of the twenty-first century.
There is little theoretical novelty in this study: Zhao hews closely to basic class analysis when accounting for the wide variation in income, occupation, and business ownership patterns within the population. The concept of “class,” however, goes undefined either empirically or analytically. Instead, it appears to serve as a descriptive shorthand to explicate the gulf between relatively well-off Chinese Americans, such...
