Theorising the immigrant experience has, historically, considered this to be an essentially urban experience. I seek to explore how contemporary immigrants and immigrant communities in the American suburb are developing new individual and group identities through the daily experiences – shopping, eating, socialising and schooling – which they both construct and draw upon.

This paper charts the development of the spaces and places in the Bay Area which have been integral to Chinese American community life. It is found that the suburban mall today plays an important role for new generations of immigrants in the construction and articulation of individual and group identities. Drawing on the field of “new retail geography”, I argue that contemporary experience of suburban immigrants indicates that the spatial component of identity construction – “my neighbourhood makes me who I am” – is undergoing a radical transformation at the same time as sprawling (sub)urban regions are reconfigured to be consumption-oriented.

In this paper, the immigrant experience is understood as an identity-forming process within contemporary society where individuals will increasingly be responsible for constructing and narrating their own identity, and navigating the identities ascribed to them by others through traditional associations of race, class, gender and other group identities. To continue to derive identity from one’s physical environment, I argue, identity navigation will have to be literal as well as metaphorical: the individual must construct their own city from the various playgrounds of consumption within the (sub)urban region, empowered by mobility. Correspondingly, theories of immigrant experience will have to embrace suburban territory and hyper-mobile lifestyles.