{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.022934109938114306, 'fraction_numerical': 0.013105205678922462, 'mean_word_length': 5.331797235023042, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Heroines of Jiangyong: Chinese Narrative Ballads in Women's Script Translated by Wilt L. Idema Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2009 viii + 192 pp. £51.00 ISBN 978-0-295-98842-9

particularly successful in illustrating the tension between the elites’ desire to show that Chinese are loyal and very much part of American mainstream society while being proud of their own cultural traditions – an inherent contradiction played out in the Miss Chinatown USA Beauty Pageant contests held every year during the New Year celebration, whose goal is to showcase Chinese American women who embody both “Eastern beauty” and “Western modernity.” Yeh argues that Chinatown’s male leaders used the pageant to correct the historically imposed emasculated image of Chinese men engaged in “female work” of laundering and cooking by whole-heartedly accepting American middle-class values, casting them as providers for heterosexual nuclear families, and imposing patriarchal gender hierarchy and heteronormative standards on the entire community. The problem is that too much stress is put on this Chinatown elite, which is treated as a monolithic, enduring entity with more control of the Chinese American community than it actually had. After the passage of 1965 Immigration Act, Chinese American population mushroomed and the number of Chinese professionals living in integrated communities outside of Chinatown increased rapidly. These middleclass professionals have little contact and connections with the working-class Chinese living in Chinatowns. Most in fact hail from China’s northern metropolitan areas and don’t even speak the same dialects as the Cantonese Chinatown residents. Moreover, after 1965 the power of traditional family and regional associations – the power base of the elites – waned even inside Chinatowns, slowly ceding to Chinese civil rights organizations, social welfare agencies, and to overseas commercial and real-estate interests. Ultimately, the forces that shaped the festival came from the outside – Chinese Americans of various stripes demanding a voice in this ethnic showcase event, very much in tune with what the American society at large embraces and even dictates in the name of tolerance and diversity. By casting it in the light of “gendering” and “queering” of ethnicity, the author firmly establishes its centrality in the arena of identity politics. But the irony is that while San Francisco New Year’s celebration has acquired a distinct place in American consciousness because of its commercial promotion, it no longer occupies a central role in Chinese American community. Since 1953, as this book amply illustrates, it has largely become a vehicle for manufacturing Chinese American identity.