Making an American Festival

This provocative history of the largest annual Chinese celebration in the United States—the Chinese New Year parade and beauty pageant in San Francisco—opens a new window onto the evolution of one Chinese American community over the second half of the twentieth century. In a vividly detailed account that incorporates many different voices and perspectives, Chiou-ling Yeh explores the origins of these public events and charts how, from their beginning in 1953, they developed as a result of Chinese business community ties with American culture, business, and politics. What emerges is a fascinating picture of how an ethnic community shaped and was shaped by transnational and national politics, economics, ethnic movements, feminism, and queer activism.

Chiou-ling Yeh is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at San Diego State University.

list of illustrations
acknowledgments
Introduction / Making Multicultural America: Cold War Politics, Ethnic Celebrations, and Chinese America

1. Transnational Celebrations in Changing Political Climates
2. “In the Traditions of China and in the Freedom of America”: The Making of the Chinese New Year Festival
3. Constructing a “Model Minority” Identity: The Miss Chinatown U.S.A. Beauty Pageant
4. Yellow Power: Race, Class, Gender, and Activism
5. Heated Debate on the Ethnic Beauty Pageant
6. Hybridity in Culture, Memory, and Politics
7. Selling Chineseness and Marketing Chinese New Year: Corporate Sponsorship, Television Broadcasts, and Counter Memory
8. “We Are One Family”: Queerness, Transnationalism, and Identity Politics

Epilogue / Post–Cold War Celebrations
notes
bibliography
index