Agency Softens Clash of Cultures : Asian-American Organization Fills a Social-Service Gap

It was closing time at the Union of Pan Asian Communities offices when a telephone call from a hospital liaison sounded the alert: A client, a severely retarded young Hmong woman, was going into labor. Neither she nor her teen-age husband, also severely retarded, spoke English. Counselor David Vang, himself a Hmong refugee, would be needed, fast.

Vang had followed the case closely: the marriage (arranged by the young man’s parents because, in keeping with custom, it was time for him to marry), the pregnancy, the woman’s confusion about what was happening to her. Vang had made patient explanations, in Laotian, until finally she had understood that she was going to have a child, a baby like the ones he would point out to her.

This time, the call proved to be a false alarm but soon, UPAC staffer Dorothy Yonemitsu knew, this child would be arriving. Who would care for it? What would its future be? What needs would the new mother and father have?

Yonemitsu shook her head. It was a sad case but, as program director of UPAC’s Southeast Asian Developmental Disabilities Prevention Program, she is no stranger to sad cases. “This,” she said, “just happens to be one we know about. . . .”

UPAC, a small multiservice agency with a multilingual staff of 40 (only three of whom are Anglos), exists to serve San Diego’s immigrant population from the Pacific--Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Samoa, Guam, the Philippines-- and the refugee population from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.

Although there are a number of Southern California agencies serving the Asian immigrant and refugee populations, only a handful are, like UPAC, multiservice agencies rather than single-focus ones offering, for example, employment or drug rehabilitation or shelter for battered women. “We are unique,” Beverly Yip, UPAC’s founding director said, “in that we cover a multitude of age groups as well as a multitude of ethnic groups.”

War-Torn Countries

The population served is a huge, and growing, segment. Yip pointed out that “the Asian population in the United States increased by 200-250% between 1970 and 1980. Almost 60% of all Asians you see are foreign-born.” Fleeing from war-torn countries, 285,000 refugees have settled in California.

And the needs of these newcomers from Southeast Asia are huge, as well. For the most part, they are poor, poorly educated and cannot speak English. As they are flung into a culture that is totally different from theirs, and that does not accommodate to theirs, their ages-old family values and structures are crumbling.

“Because these cultures are patrilinear, where the male role is dominant, the relocation to America has caused tremendous role reversals and turmoil,” Yip said, “compounding the loss of esteem and ego damage” resulting from idleness and joblessness.

Often, it is easier for the women to find work--as seamstresses, perhaps, or on assembly lines--and, as they begin to contribute to the family income, they begin, too, to demand more equality. As they learn English in school, and become Americanized, the children, once obedient and subservient, lose respect for their parents and challenge their authority.

The family, the unifying element in their lives, is under attack.

“For Southeast Asians, depression is probably the major mental health problem,” Yip said. “They’ve lost their home, they’ve lost their relatives, they’ve lost their jobs, they’ve lost their country. All of this is aggravated by the stresses of living in a really depressing environment, seven or eight people in two- or three-room apartments.”

The effects, Yip said, include “an increase in alcoholism, spouse abuse, child abuse. And there aren’t that many trained therapists who speak their language. “You can medicate them but it’s very difficult to treat them,” she said.

UPAC has recently opened its East Wind Socialization Center, a mental health after-care program for chronically depressed adults, where a keep-busy strategy will be employed and there will be other people to whom to talk.

Yip is concerned, too, about the “increase in gang activity among Southeast Asian youths, mainly Vietnamese. A lot of Vietnamese males were sent here (legally) as ‘unaccompanied minors.’ Many families could not afford to escape Vietnam as often you had to buy your way out. They usually sent their young men. They put all their hopes in their men.”

But often the realities for those young men, once here, were joblessness and foster homes where the foster parent was perhaps 21 years old--”You throw in two 14-year-olds,” Yip said, “and that’s a family.” The pattern is familiar: In and out of school, where, Yip said, “The older ones teach the young to sell marijuana, to steal, to extort. And they just continue on afterwards because they can’t get jobs.”

Yip, whose grandparents were born in China, was a 40-year-old graduate student at San Diego State University, earning a master’s degree in social work, when, as a class project, she wrote a proposal for an outreach program to the Pan Asian community (and promptly got $30,000 in city-county revenue-sharing funds). “Back in the ‘70s,” she recalled, “there were a lot of programs for blacks and Hispanics but, in those days, we had to prove to everyone that Asians had problems.

“There were the stereotypes: ‘They take care of their own,’ ‘They’re law-abiding citizens.’ Generally, the native population does fit those descriptions.” And the first wave of refugees from Southeast Asia, those who came before 1979, appears to have made a better adjustment than those in the second wave; the first wave was more urbanized and included many professionals and high government officials. Typically, those in the second wave were fishermen or farmers, poorly educated and with little or no English.

(Statistics for San Diego County compiled by Ruben G. Rumbaut of the San Diego State sociology department show that the average annual income for first-wave refugees was $17,306 but dropped to $2,478 for second-wave refugees).

The Vietnamese, Yip said, continue to make the best adjustment--they are more capable in English and have more marketable skills. Worst off, she said, are the Hmongs from the highlands of Laos; nomadic farmers (whose crops included opium), theirs is a somewhat primitive society culturally worlds removed from America.

Forced Kidnapings

“They got into a lot of trouble here,” Yip said, “because of their method of finding wives. In Laos, the men married 12- and 13-year-old girls. When a young man liked a girl, he could just take her off to his village and later get married.” Here, they find themselves dealing with both irate parents, who have become Westernized enough to protest these forced kidnapings, and with well-meaning people reporting parents of the kidnaped girls for child neglect.

But it is not only the refugee families who find their traditions in conflict with the American way. In 1979, under a federal grant from the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, UPAC undertook a three-year Pan Asian Parent Education Project designed to confront the growing incidence of child abuse among Pacific Asian families.

A series of rap sessions brought these parents together in home settings to discuss child rearing and socialization in their own cultures--Filipino, Japanese, Samoan, Korean and Vietnamese--and to compare these with mainstream, or “acceptable,” practices. The resulting publication, “Pan Asian Child-Rearing Practices,” concluded: “The child-rearing practices of some of these groups are frequently labeled ‘abusive’ by the American public and child welfare agencies when the real issue is cultural variation.”

For example, when Samoan participants were asked if they had been physically abused as children, 53% said yes. (Sexual abuse, however, is apparently rare.)

In Samoa, Yip noted, “Houses don’t have walls, just roofs. You start beating your kid and someone in the adjacent unit comes and takes your kid away, so it works there. Here, you don’t have neighbors who are going to take your child and sometimes people get carried away.”

She recalled, “We had one Samoan family where the father, to punish a child, had chained him to a tree.”

Folk-Medicine Method

Vietnamese parents have been reported by school authorities for child abuse as a result of their use of a centuries-old folk-medicine method of scraping the skin with a coin to rid the body of “bad vapors” and thus cure colds and other illness. The practice leaves suspicious-looking marks on the child’s body.

“I remember my mother used to do that to us,” Yip said. “These people believe that illness is due to an imbalance of vapors in your body. The Chinese use a porcelain spoon. The Southeast Asians use coins. All that friction makes your skin red and afterwards it looks like a bruise.”

Punishment was only one of the areas of “cultural dissonance” addressed by the report. The support of extended families (often lost in America), the high regard for personal traits that are incompatible with American ideals (such as the Japanese emphasis on group harmony, obedience, conformity, self-control and resignation) and women’s roles (commonly, subservient and totally home-oriented) were among values and norms counter to mainstream values and norms.

Entering a society that rewards assertiveness, and in which children have rights--rights that are even spelled out by law--the parents pointed to an “ethnocentrism” that denigrates their own values.

In the basement of the UPAC building, in a former TV store in San Diego’s Golden Hills area, Steve Epstein was leading his students through a drill. Epstein held up a card on which was written, “File Cabinet,” then asked one of the students to place that card on the file cabinet. He repeated the drill, with a card marked “Swivel Chair.”

The 16 students, among them two women, giggled from time to time as their friends walked about on the room on their missions. In front of each student was a textbook, a picture book showing people mopping, dusting and cleaning. Epstein had before him his props--toilet bowl cleaner, Ajax, glass cleaner.

These people were here to learn to become janitors, midway through an eight-week course that, UPAC hopes, will enable them to get work. Epstein was optimistic--”Last session, 10 out of 14 people got placed. Those we get working make great workers. They’re on time, they’re very enthusiastic employees. The only reason they lose their jobs is if they don’t ask questions, like ‘Where’s the window cleaner?’ They’re shy.”

Calling each student by name, Epstein split the class into work crews, dealing out cards assigning make-believe chores (vacuum the miniblinds, empty the trash can) and instructing students to “do” the chores in proper sequence.

On graduation, the lucky ones will get jobs paying $4 an hour and, Epstein observed, “It’s not very realistic for us to think they can live on it.” Under new welfare laws, their pay will be supplemented by public assistance but, Epstein said, “We’re trying to imbue Indo-Chinese families with the idea that today two incomes are needed. They have a big problem with having their wives work outside the home, even when they need the money.”

Epstein, director of refugee training for UPAC, was for three years a trainer in a cultural orientation program in the Philippines for refugees headed for America and he speaks Lao. These students, most of them Cambodians, speak almost no English. Epstein speaks slowly, in English, and points to a picture from the text: “On the desk we just dust. We don’t move anything.” They understand.

Setting Up Contract Service

There is also a class in gardening, much more popular than the class for janitors. UPAC has organized a job co-op of janitors and gardeners who work by contract, currently providing services to a condo and two office buildings, grossing $4,000 a month. The co-op provides some with part-time work but, Epstein said, “Our goal is to place them in a full-time job.”

The training, which is free, is geared to those with little or no English, people who, as Epstein said, “can’t go through the interview process” without assistance. Some do not yet understand how to ride a bus.

Job training for refugees is one of the multifaceted programs conducted by UPAC, which has $870,000 this year from San Diego County, about 90% of the agency’s total funding. The rest comes from small grants and from donations.

There is also a mental health counseling clinic, a program to help families with developmentally disabled children, a family day care program that trains refugee women to provide licensed day care in their homes and a program that offers nutritious ethnic meals and home support services to the aged. Programs, geared to the low-income, are free but donations from the clients for food and transportation are encouraged. When funding is available, parent education is offered.

UPAC will get United Way funding for the first time this month and part of the money will be used to establish a language assistance center. Through teleconferencing, it will enable non-English-speakers to confer with their doctors, or the utility company or perhaps the landlord.

Amy Okamura, a Japanese-American who is a licensed clinical social worker, is program director of the UPAC Counseling and Treatment Center, which provides outpatient services under contract with the county Mental Health Department. Two part-time psychiatrists work with bilingual paraprofessionals.

They work with both the immigrant and refugee populations. “A large number of our clients are Navy-connected,” Okamura said, “women married to servicemen who come here with little preparation for the culture shock and are then left to raise children on their own (while their husbands serve tours overseas). With the combination of isolation and crisis, many do suffer emotional and psychological problems.”

But today the focus is on the Southeast Asians whose needs, Okamura said, “are 10 times greater than the other populations,” partially because of sheer numbers but also because they have suffered the trauma of a decade of war.

Referrals From Police

Because of fear and cultural stigma, she said, “most of our clients do not seek help until the point of intolerability. We then get referrals from the police, from child protective services, from hospitals.” Of those they see, she estimated, “I’d say 75% are depressed. They’ve lost everything that was meaningful to them.”

Many Asians use corporal punishment as a means of discipline (“child abuse” is a concept for which there often is no language). “Mom takes a belt and whacks the kid a little too hard,” Okamura said, “and a neighbor calls and the kid is taken away. The mother doesn’t speak English, they’ve taken her kid, her husband’s gone. She goes crazy: ‘Who ever heard of a law that tells me I can’t do what I want to do with my own kid?’ ”

Because they cannot articulate, she said, they are “victimized over and over by the bureaucratic systems. They get punished for their so-called irrational behavior. In the Filipino culture, for example, emotions are expressed quite openly. In the mental health field these women are called histrionic. They cry, they wave their arms during times of stress. In reaction, social workers become punitive, maybe they won’t let them visit their kid in a foster home.”

Okamura smiled and said, “Among Cambodian men we’re looked upon as the divorce agency,” the place where a woman can get a restraining order, eventually perhaps custody of her children. UPAC has been known to insist that a man sign a “no beating” contract.

“These women came from a macho world,” she said. “These marriages were arranged back home and now they’re saying, ‘I’ve had enough. Twenty-seven years and seven children, and I never liked him anyway. I want out.’ ”

Their worlds are turned topsy-turvy. Okamura recalled one homesick client telling her that, in America, “Even the moon looks different.” It is a culture in which, as she put it, “parents lose all their guideposts.” Their daughters and sons are being lost to the American culture and the schools; parents perceive themselves as having lost their parental role and underlying that fear, Okamura said, “is the concern about who’s going to take care of me in my old age.”

Refugee kids, she noted, “go hog wild over their new freedom. They go punk, heavy metal. In school they may start defending themselves with hidden weapons because they can’t defend themselves verbally. The families don’t know how to approach the schools.”

Whereas the head of household may find solace in drink, suicide attempts are not uncommon among the women. In Vietnam, Okamura said, “Woman use attempted suicide to get attention and to resolve marital problems. Sometimes they succeed.”

But Okamura also sees survivors, people who overcome the odds. “I’m just amazed at how resilient people are,” she said.

For Dorothy Yonemitsu and her staff in the program for the developmentally disabled, the target group is Southeast Asian infants up to the age of three who are at high risk, perhaps because of poor prenatal care or birth trauma or exposure to dirt and disease in a refugee camp.

Counselors emphasize the importance of providing mental stimulation for a child as well as good nutrition. To many, this is a strange notion. “In Southeast Asia,” Yonemitsu said, “parents don’t play with their children very much. As children are added to the family there’s a natural social milieu. Where these people came from, they had to work pretty hard, especially in the farm areas, mothers and fathers. Grandmothers were used as baby sitters.

“We talk about nurseries, pre-school, Headstart, they’re not very receptive. They have no money--and they think Grandma can very well take care of the children and do a good job, if she’s here.”

There is fear and mistrust, as well, of efforts to assist families with a developmentally disabled child or adult. “They are very resistant,” said Yonemitsu, both because they think that the person might be in danger (the young women attacked, or raped, for example) and also because they are resigned to caring for the person, without help, for life.

“They feel it’s their lot in life,” Yonemitsu said. “When such a person is part of their family, it’s a superstition that this person came to this family to atone for some wrongs a previous ancestor had committed.” In their countries, there is shame involved and the person is apt to be hidden or denied. “Here,” she said, “we are dragging them out.”

Lyly Thai Ly, a counselor on Yonemitsu’s staff, came here as a Vietnamese refugee in 1975. In Vietnam, she said, “We didn’t have these kinds of services. We only had mental hospitals. Anything regarding mental retardation, they were hospitalized and called crazy.”

She added, “It’s even worse now. The government is trying to send more disabled people over here because they cannot afford to support them.”

Typically, she said, a Vietnamese family with a retarded child simply keeps that person hidden at home, without benefit of schooling or treatment: “If the parents die, the person will stay with a brother or other relative.”

Counselor David Vang, a Hmong who came to the United States seven years ago when he was 16, spoke of the huge cultural differences the Hmongs face here. At home, he said, “No matter how many sons you have, they have to settle around the parent or the grandparent . . . the Hmong teen-ager today is different from my generation. We still believe what my parents believe. But my younger brother believes the way Americans believe. Back in our country, no matter how old the children, if they’re not married they stay under control of the parent.”

Vang is a Christian now, wearing a gold cross on a chain around his neck, but like most Hmongs he was reared in a spiritualist religion, which he described: “When you have a grandparent who passed away (for example), you serve him as your own God.” He sees families “falling apart” as the younger generation adapts Christianity, and as the women, who had little power in their country, begin to assert themselves. Divorce, very rare among the Hmongs in Laos, is on the increase here.

Vang, emphasizing that the Hmongs are happy to be in a land where they are safe and have plenty of food and clothing, spoke of the huge adjustment for these people coming from a country where “everything is free, you don’t have to pay rent or buy food (which is home grown). Of course, we don’t have utilities. We use wood and get it from the jungle. Everybody owns the land. As long as you don’t build one on top of the other, you can build your house wherever you like.”

Even the Samoans, coming from an America-oriented country where most people speak English, find themselves in cultural conflict with the mainstream population.

“They go for a job interview, they wouldn’t know how to dress or how to act,” said Margaret Iofi, wife of the pastor of San Diego’s First Samoan Congregational Christian Church. Dave Solomon, who came to this country from Samoa more than 30 years ago and works for the state employment service in San Diego, concurred, “They’re very, very shy. It’s very hard for them to look somebody in the eye and say, ‘I can do that.’ In Samoa, they’d likely work in a family business where this type of pressure would never come up.”

By contrast, Solomon said, “The Cambodians, who’ve been fighting wars for many years, wake up ahead of everybody. They have learned to improvise. They never tell you, ‘No, I’ve never done this before.’ And they get the jobs. Whoever gets there first eats.”

He shrugged. “We don’t have that ambition. It goes back to where we come from. If you live in the village and want to get up at 10 in the morning, you get up at 10 in the morning. You can go fishing and you will eat. Our young men need to be told to act smart, work smart, get smart.”

Iofi smiled and said, “You can take a man out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the man.”

In order to get work, Solomon said, “They’re willing to take anything, but there’s no such thing as anything right now” and the young Samoans, many of whom are coming from Hawaii, where they either worked in a cannery or danced at the Polynesian Cultural Center, have few skills.

Meanwhile, Solomon said, “The family units are reaching out to these people and they’re living maybe five or six families in a household. Another Samoan family is always willing to take care of them, he said, wanting to avoid bad publicity about “those lazy Samoans.” Are they lazy? Solomon pondered the question and decided, “They’re willing to settle for whatever. They live day to day. Then they get a certain age and it hits them and they start going out and getting in trouble, drugs, drinking. . . .”

As with other Pan Asians, the women seem to find work more readily, as cashiers, clerks, cleaning women, nurses’ aides, many taking live-in jobs even though they are married.

Iofi and Solomon agreed that, on the whole, Samoan families suffer less trauma as family units because, even living in a different culture, they cling to their tradition of tribal chiefs who dictate who will share with whom, who will contribute how much to weddings and funerals. “They may grumble a little,” said Iofi, “but they’re obligated.”

If there is no chief living in an American neighborhood, the oldest man may make these decisions. But on big ceremonial occasions, a family chief will come from Samoa and, Solomon said, “No matter how they dislike the guy, it’s an honor to have him.

“The chief (some are now women) will always control everything else and everybody else. He tells the people coming here who to live with, tells the others who to take care of.”

Family ties are strong, too, among the Filipinos. Abe Doliente, a 44-year-old civil engineer in San Diego, has for 17 years been working to get his parents and three sisters to America. Now, only one sister remains in the Philippines, awaiting an OK. His parents and two sisters have moved into his house in the Mira Mesa area.

Doliente, one of eight children of poor tenant farmers in a Filipino village, is proud of his success--full scholarship to college in Manila, top scholastic honors. He is proud, too, of having been able for years to send money home to his parents--”I saw how the landlords treated them. I told myself it would not happen anymore once I could do anything about it. The landlords were like kings.” Eventually, his parents were able to buy a small piece of land and build a house of their own.

Today, Doliente is an American citizen and his parents are here as permanent residents. Now, he said, “My goal is to get my one sister here. Then I’m going to get married.” (He has not yet chosen the woman.)

Kay Bupasiri, a Laotian who came to America 10 years ago with her husband and two small children, trains Laotian refugee women in child care so they may become state-licensed and start earning money. Thirty-four women are now taking the eight-week course and 24 others have completed it; 19 are caring for children in their homes.

The concept of licensed child care is, she acknowledged, totally foreign to them. Bupasiri explained, “In our custom we help each other out. We never accept money for child care. Over here, that changed. The women feel bad, but I explain to them and they accept it.”

Language skills and the lack of transportation are big barriers to their getting outside jobs but as licensed day-care providers they can care for six children under 12 (including any of their own) and earn $1.75 per child--without having to leave home.

The course covers the basics of nutrition, safety and business management and deals, too, with the American way of discipline. “Our custom is very strict,” she said. “We never talk back to a parent, even when they’re wrong. In the United States you learn from the kid too.”

Bupasiri instructs the women, too, that they must not spank the children, as is the custom in Laos. At home, she added, “You don’t have any child abuse office to report to. If you report something (like that) to the police, you just get a lot of trouble.”

The world of child rearing, American-style, is a wonderland to many of the refugee women. Baby food, per se, is unknown in Laos. (Children are, typically, breast-fed until they are six months old and are then weaned to home-cooked food.) There are no pre-folded diapers, only towels that must be washed after use and hung outside to dry. Most baby clothes are made at home.

Bupasiri recalls when she was introduced to disposable diapers, and remembers asking, “But what do you do with them when you’ve used them?” In Laos, “When you have a baby,” she said, “you have to put everything away and stay home and take care of your baby.”

Amy Okamura’s client said it: In America, “Even the moon looks different.”