中国的崛起中国城的没落

Does China』s rise mean the end of one of America』s most storied ethnic enclaves?

中国的崛起是否意味著美国最有名的少数族群聚居地之一的终结？

By BONNIE TSUI 作者：徐灵凤（BONNIE TSUI）

AS THE MANAGER of a Chinatown career center on Kearny Street in San Francisco, Winnie Yu has watched working-class clients come and go. Most of them, like Shen Ming Fa, have the makings of the quintessential Chinese American immigrant success story. Shen, who is 39, moved to San Francisco with his family last fall, an English-speaking future in mind for his 9-year-old daughter. His first stop was Chinatown, where he found an instant community and help with job and immigration problems.

David Leventi

作为旧金山干尼街（Kearny Street）上一个唐人街就业中心的经理，维尼·于（Winnie Yu）目睹了工薪阶层的进进出出。他们当中的大多数人，像沈明发（Shen Ming Fa），都具备了书写华人精英移民美国成功故事的素质。39岁的沈去年秋天举家迁往旧金山，他9岁的女儿脑子里想到的是一个要讲英语的未来。他的第一站是唐人街，在那里他发现了一个帮助解决工作和移民问题的即时社团。

But lately, Yu has been seeing a shift; rather than coming, her clients have been going—in pursuit of what might be called the Chinese Dream.

不过，后来于不断看到了这样一种转变：她的客户一直在离开而不是进来—为了追逐所谓的中国梦。

「Now the American Dream is broken,」 Shen tells me one evening at the career center, his fingers drumming restlessly on the table; he speaks mostly in Mandarin, and Yu helps me translate. Shen has mostly been unemployed, picking up part-time work when he can find it. Back in China, he worked as a veterinarian and at a school of traditional Chinese culture. 「In China, people live more comfortably: in a big house, with a good job. Life is definitely better there.」 On his fingers, he counts out several people he knows who have gone back since he came to the United States. When I ask him if he thinks about returning to China, he glances at his daughter, who is sitting nearby, then looks me in the eye. 「My daughter is thriving,」 he says, carefully. 「But I think about it every day.」

一天晚上，沈在就业中心告诉我说：「现在，美国梦已经破碎」，他的手指一边不安地叩击著桌子；他大都分都是讲国语，于女士帮助我翻译。沈大部分时间都处于失业状态，只是在能找到的时候做一些兼职工作。在中国的时候，他一边做兽医师，一边在传统中国文化学校教课。「在中国，大家过得更舒服：住在大房子里，有一份好工作。那里的生活绝对更好。」他掰著手指头，数出了几位自己认得的、在他来美国之后已经返回中国的人。当我问到他是否考虑回去时，他看了一眼自己的女儿，然后直视著我的眼睛。「我的女儿朝气蓬勃，」他小心翼翼地说：「不过我每天都在考虑这个问题。」

Recent years have seen stories of Chinese 「sea turtles」—those who are educated overseas and migrate back to China—lured by Chinese-government incentives that include financial aid, cash bonuses, tax breaks, and housing assistance. In 2008, Shi Yigong, a molecular biologist at Princeton, turned down a prestigious $10 million research grant to return to China and become the dean of life sciences at Beijing』s Tsinghua University. 「My postdocs are getting great offers,」 says Robert H. Austin, a physics professor at Princeton.

近年来屡屡出现中国「海龟」的故事，所谓「海龟」，指的是在海外受教的人士，在受到中国政府包括经济资助、现金红利、税收减免以及住房补贴在内手段的激励下移民回中国。2008年，施一公，普林斯顿大学的分子生物学家，拒绝了一个声望很高的千万美元研究基金返回到中国，并成为清华大学生命科学系的系主任。「我的博士后待遇丰厚」，普林斯顿大学的一位物理学教授罗伯特·H·奥斯汀（Robert H. Austin）说。

But unskilled laborers are going back, too. Labor shortages in China have led to both higher wages and more options in where they can work. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, published a paper on China』s demography through 2030 that says thinking of migration as moving in just one direction is a mistake: the flows are actually much more dynamic. 「Migration, the way we understand it in the U.S., is about people coming, staying, and dying in our country. The reality is that it has never been that way,」 says the institute』s president, Demetrios Papademetriou. 「Historically, over 50 percent of the people who came here in the first half of the 20th century left. In the second half, the return migration slowed down to 25, 30 percent. But today, when we talk about China, what you』re actually seeing is more people going back … This may still be a trickle, in terms of our data being able to capture it—there』s always going to be a lag time of a couple of years—but with the combination of bad labor conditions in the U.S. and sustained or better conditions back in China, increasing numbers of people will go home.」

但是，没有技能的工人也在回去。中国的劳动力短缺导致工资提高，他们可以选择的工作也在增多。位于华盛顿的智库—移民政策研究所（The Migration Policy Institute）发布了一份文件，对中国到2030年间的人口统计学做出评判，文件指出，认为人口流动只是单向迁入的看法是错误的：实际上人口流动要有活力得多。「以我们美国的理解，移民就是来到美国、住在美国、然后死在美国。事实上从来都不是这样的，」该机构的所长帕帕德美特里欧（Demetrios Papademetriou）说：「从历史上看，二十世纪上半叶来到美国的人有超过50%后来又离开了。到了下半叶，这种回流降低为25-30%。不过今天，在谈到中国的时候，实际上你会看到更多的人正在回去……从我们的数据能够捕获的角度上来说，这种回流的速度也许很缓慢，总是有几年的滞后时间—但是美国就业环境的持续不景气，再加上中国开出的更好的回国条件，越来越多的人会选择回国。」

In the past five years, the number of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. has been on the decline, from a peak of 87,307 in 2006 to 70,863 in 2010. Because Chinatowns are where working-class immigrants have traditionally gathered for support, the rise of China—and the slowing of immigrant flows—all but ensures the end of Chinatowns.

过去5年间，中国移民美国的数字一直在下降，从2006年巅峰时的87307降至2010年的70863。由于唐人街是传统上工薪阶层移民聚集起来寻求帮助的地方，中国的崛起，以及移民潮的放缓，这些几乎注定了唐人街要没落。

Smaller Chinatowns have been fading for years—just look at Washington, D.C., where Chinatown is down to a few blocks marked by an ornate welcome gate and populated mostly by chains like Starbucks and Hooters, with signs in Chinese. But now the Chinatowns in San Francisco and New York are depopulating, becoming less residential and more service-oriented. When the initial 2010 U.S. census results were released in March, they revealed drops in core areas of San Francisco』s Chinatown. In Manhattan, the census showed a decline in Chinatown』s population for the first time in recent memory—almost 9 percent overall, and a 14 percent decline in the Asian population.

小一点的唐人街近几年一直在萎缩—只需看看华盛顿，那里的唐人街已经退化为几个街区，只有一个耀眼的牌楼作为标志，里面都是星巴克和Hooters那样的连锁店，只是挂的广告牌还是中国字。不过现在旧金山和纽约的唐人街的人口也在减少，居住性减弱了，变得更为面向服务。2010年美国人口普查结果在三月份公布的时候，数字揭示旧金山唐人街核心地区的人口在下降。在曼哈顿，普查显示唐人街人口在最近的记忆中首次出现下降—总数几乎减少了9%，而在亚洲人口中的降幅为14%。

The exodus from Chinatown is happening partly because the working class is getting priced out of this traditional community and heading to the 「ethnoburbs」; development continues to push residents out of the neighborhood and into other, secondary enclaves like Flushing, Queens, in New York. But the influx of migrants who need the networks that Chinatown provides is itself slowing down. Notably, the percentage of foreign-born Chinese New Yorkers fell from about 75 percent in 2000 to 69 percent in 2009.

从唐人街的成批撤离之所以发生，部分是因为工薪阶层被排挤出这一传统社区，迁往郊区民族居民区（ethnoburbs）；开发不断地将居民推出临近街区，推向另外的第二块飞地，像纽约皇后区的法拉盛（Flushing，Queens）。但是需要像唐人街那样的网路的移民的涌入速度正在变缓。值得注意的是，在国外出生的中国纽约客（Chinese New Yorkers）占比从2000年的75%降到了2009年69%。

Chinatowns almost died once before, in the first half of the 20th century, when various exclusion acts limited immigration. Philip Choy, a retired architect and historian who grew up in San Francisco』s Chinatown, has observed the neighborhood population of Chinese immigrants being replaced by new generations of Chinese Americans. 「Chinatown might have disappeared if it weren』t for the changing immigration policies,」 he told me recently. Only after the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act lifted quotas did the Chinese revive Chinatowns all across the country—especially those communities in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

唐人街一度几乎消亡过，在上世纪上半叶的时候，彼时的各种排外法案限制了移民。退休的建筑师和历史学家菲利普·蔡（Philip Choy）在旧金山的唐人街长大，他注意到自己的邻居由原来的中国移民被新一代的美籍华人所替代。「如果不是移民政策的改变，唐人街也许已经消失了，」他最近告诉我说。只是在1965年《移民和国籍法修正案》提高了配额之后，中国人才再次让整个国家的唐人街复活过来—尤其是纽约、旧金山和洛杉矶的那些社区。

Of course, since the days of the Gold Rush, the Chinese always thought they were going to move back to China after earning their fortune elsewhere. As Papademetriou told me, what came before often happens again. Only now, fortune can be found at home.

当然，自从淘金热的日子以来，华人一直就有著赚到钱之后衣锦还乡、叶落归根的想法。正如帕帕德美特里欧所告诉我们那样，以前发生过的事情往往会再次重演。只不过现在是在家也能寻找到财富了。

This departure portends the loss of a place once so integral to Chinese America that Victor Nee and Brett de Bary Nee, in their 1973 book, Longtime Californ』, noted that 「virtually every Chinese living in San Francisco has something to do with Chinatown.」 Two years ago, when I was on tour for my book about Chinatowns—a kind of love letter to the neighborhood that accepted my family when it first arrived in the United States—the future of these enclaves was an open question. But if China continues to boom, Chinatowns will lose their reason for being, as vital ports of entry for working-class immigrants. These workers will have better things to do than come to America.

这种离去预示著对于美籍华人来说一度不可或缺一个地方的消失，倪志伟（Victor Nee）和布莱特·迪百·倪（Brett de Bary Nee）在他们1973年的《Longtime Californ』》一书中所提到的「实际上每个住在旧金山的中国人都跟唐人街有关」的那个地方消失了。两年前，当我为了自己有关唐人街的书（算是写给我邻居的情书，他们在我们家首次到达美国的时候接纳了我们）做巡回推广的时候，这些飞地的未来还是一个开放性的问题。不过如果中国继续繁荣，作为工薪阶层移民生死攸关的入境口岸，中国城就将会失去其存在的理由。相比于去美国，这些工人会有更好的事情要做。