Roy Lee immigrated from Hong Kong, China to San Francisco, California in the late 1950s. This paper will discuss two sets of push and pull factors that led to his immigration. Firstly, the United States offered what was, in his opinion, a preferable set of political, economic, and social institutions, relative to those offered by China. Secondly, the United States government offered him a free education and a guaranteed job for immigrating, while China failed to provide any schools that met his standards. Beyond this, there will be discussion on how his immigration challenged his class position but did not challenge his racial position and this structure in the United States through Takaki’s explanatory framework. By the time Lee immigrated,…show more content… While he hovered around working class to lower middle class in China, his immigration to the United States with the guarantee of a full university education and a white-collar job placed him squarely within the middle class. Furthermore, Lee advanced within his career while retaining frugal habits, allowing him to reach upper middle class status within a few decades of immigrating. This presents a challenge to Willis’s claim that “working class kids get working class jobs” (Willis 1977:1). However, given that Willis did not take into account immigration, it would be more pertinent to discuss how Lee’s racial identity changed as a result of his immigration, and how that change in identity ultimately upheld racial structures in the United…show more content… In the last couple of years before he immigrated, he met his future wife, who was white and therefore something of an odd one out in Hong Kong, though she would have resembled the British colonizers and therefore would have probably had some race-based privilege. However, racial identity in Hong Kong was very different than that of the United States. Around 1961, over 98% of Hong Kong residents reported their place of origin being one of China’s provinces, with less than 2% originating in Europe, the United States, and other parts of Asia (Fan 1974). Only one percent of the population reported English being their primary language (ibid). In contrast, around 88% of the United States population at the time of the 1960 census was white and only one percent of the non-white population, or around one tenth of a percent of the entire population, was Chinese (Bureau of the Census 1961, 1963). Per California census data, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Lee immigrated, the percentage of Chinese persons was 1.5%, over ten times higher than that of the general United States population (Metropolitan Transportation Commission - Association of Bay Area Governments Library n.d.).. In San Francisco County, where he eventually settled down and still lives now, Chinese persons made up 4.9% of the population in 1960 (ibid). Nonetheless, his immigration took him from an environment in which he was part of the vast ethnic majority
