The Making of Chinese Scientists and Engineers: Leisure and Cold War Suburbanization in Silicon Valley, California

Abstract: This article considers the leisure of US-born and foreign-born Chinese scientists and engineers in relationship to mass suburbanization and Cold War science of the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on organizational archives, local newspapers, and city records, it considers how the Stanford Area Chinese Club (SACC) established a Chinese community and asserted their sense of full social citizenship in the unfamiliar suburbs of high-technology professionals, affluence, and prestige. In identifying collectively as white-collar professionals, the SACC emphasized a class and geographically distinct notion of Chinese identity characterized by the accumulation and achievement of social and cultural capital. Their investment in leisure signals how their identities drew from exclusionary urban-planning knowledge of high-technology cities that articulated place through colorblind discourses of suburban urbanity and cultural exclusivity. I argue that as much as the SACC intended to create inclusive suburban experiences for educated and affluent Chinese people, their activities relied upon and reaffirmed the cultural logics of race and class exclusion that shaped the development of post–World War II cities.