More Books, Magazines : Local Libraries Stock Up for Asian Readers

Miki Nishiyama was never much for libraries. His wife, Tomie, was the reader in the family--and she read only Japanese.

“We hardly ever went to the library,” said Nishiyama, a retired aerospace engineer who lives in Monterey Park. “There were not many books . . . for my wife to read.”

But that was several years ago. Now the library near his home, the Bruggemeyer Memorial Library in Monterey Park, offers an extensive collection of Japanese-language books. So does a nearby library in Montebello and another in East Los Angeles.

Nishiyama and his wife now pore regularly over shelves crammed with Japanese-language novels, encyclopedias, art books, cookbooks, newspapers, magazines, travel guides, videotapes and more. They visit one of the libraries about once a week, he said.

“We’re really surprised and delighted to see so many books,” he said. “I like to read Japanese mystery stories and Japanese newspapers. A lot of times Japanese newspapers are more detailed (than American papers). You see both sides of the world. It’s very interesting.”

The change is part of a new chapter in library service, reflecting Los Angeles County’s growing populations of Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants.

The Asian population of the county doubled between 1970 and 1980 and nearly doubled again by 1985, reaching nearly 800,000 residents, according to census figures and recent United Way estimates.

The trend has been particularly evident in the San Gabriel Valley, where Asians now account for about 40% of Monterey Park’s 58,000 residents and more than 30% of Alhambra’s 71,000 residents. Surrounding cities also report large increases.

The Bruggemeyer library, like many in the area, is responding to the new readership. The library’s collection now contains about 8,000 Asian-language volumes, including more than 5,000 books in Chinese and about 1,100 in Japanese, a library spokesman said.

Korean- and Vietnamese-language books make up a slightly smaller percentage of the library’s 130,000-book inventory, the spokesman said.

More Asian-Language Books

Other libraries are keeping pace. The Alhambra Public Library now contains about 3,700 Asian-language books. The Hill Avenue Branch of the Pasadena city library has nearly 2,600 volumes.

Los Angeles County libraries make available about 25,000 more at branches scattered from Rosemead and Temple City to La Puente, Rowland Heights and San Dimas.

“We’re responding to the needs of . . . a huge Asian population,” said Evelyn MacMorres, central-county administrator at the Montebello Regional Library, which offers 11,000 volumes of Asian-language books and houses the county’s 8-year-old Asian Pacific Resource Center, which offers reference books in Asian languages and in English.

That library, in a city whose 56,000 population is now about 14% Asian, draws heavily from communities such as South El Monte and Monterey Park, where the Asian influence has become more and more apparent, MacMorres said.

In Monterey Park, “most of the streets have bilingual signs with Asian characters,” she said.

Library officials said they are reshuffling their budgets to accommodate the changing readership. Some libraries are now spending up to 10% of their book-buying budgets on new Asian-language titles, according to Lilly C. Loo, who oversees county libraries in the heavily Asian Southeast region.

Although the Asian-language selections still make up less than 2% of the book stock in Los Angeles County, the collections are growing.

Maureen Lem, a trustee for the Bruggemeyer library, said Monterey Park’s Chinese community raised $25,000 in a fund drive last year just to buy new Chinese-language books for the library.

The drive helped expand the library’s Chinese-language collection to about 6,000 volumes, a library spokesman said. It was initiated, Lem said, simply because community residents wanted library service to reflect their presence.

“They said, ‘You really have to do something for us. We go to the library and we really don’t see anything for us,’ ” Lem recalled.

Libraries have expanded the collections despite generally sparse book-buying budgets, according to Loo. So far, she said, she has heard no complaints that the Asian-language collections are crowding out the much larger English- and Spanish-language collections.

In most communities, the percentage of Asian-language books is still far below the percentage of Asian residents.

Special Need

“You never have enough money to purchase all the books you need,” Loo said. “(But) if you have a lot of people come in and ask for books and you don’t have them, you are in fact turning away your customers. These people are a part of the community with a special need.”

K. C. Chiang, 50, a mechanical engineer at Bechtel Corp. in Norwalk, said he has watched the county’s Asian-language collection in that city grow from just a few Chinese books 10 years ago to about 4,000 today.

Chiang said he visits the library two or three times a week during his lunch hour.

“It’s not because of a language problem,” Chiang said. “I not only like to read books in my native language, I read in other languages too--like German. A lot of books you have to read in the original language. After the translation it’s lost.”

At the county’s West Covina Public Library, the Asian book collection has about tripled since 1980 to nearly 3,200 volumes, estimated Michael Garofalo, regional administrator for the East San Gabriel Valley.

The library now spends about $6,000 a year--roughly 4% of its book-buying budget--on the collection, he said.

The selection there is typical of those at most locations. Asian authors with names like Chiung, Yamaoka and Kawabata dominate shelves that are sprinkled with an occasional translated work by an English-language writer--John D. MacDonald’s “Condominium,” John Le Carre’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” James Clavell’s “Shogun.”

Nonfiction works range from Japanese newspapers to Chinese encyclopedias. Author See Chang’s book, “Apple Basic,” offers a Chinese-language primer for the popular computer language.

Broad Range of Subjects

“The selections are very diversified . . . a broad range of subjects,” Garofalo said. “The Asians have a high percentage of library users. They seem to have a great respect for reading and learning.”

Much of the growth in the Asian-language collections has been attributed to Project ASIA, a collecting and cataloguing service housed at the Huntington Park Library.

With 13 staff members and a yearly budget of $500,000, the county-administered program is designed to purchase popular Asian-language books, prepare them for use by library card-catalogue and computer systems and ship them to the libraries that order and pay for them.

The service has been instrumental in building the county’s collections in east-valley cities such as Hacienda Heights, San Dimas, Diamond Bar and Rowland Heights.

“We now get almost all of our resources from Project ASIA,” Garofalo said.

County library officials used federal grant money to launch Project ASIA five years ago, director Kate Seifert said. Most of the budget goes toward paying staff members who read the four major languages well enough to select the books and catalogue them. Libraries pay the cost of the books plus a small cataloguing fee.

“If you’re a library and you want to spend $5,000 on Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese books, we’ll use that budget and buy the books for you,” Seifert said.

The books come from retail stores in places like Little Tokyo and Koreatown in Los Angeles, she said. So far, the project has acquired and catalogued more than 83,600 Asian-language books representing more than 15,000 different titles.

The project now provides about one-fourth of the books at the Hill Avenue Branch of the Pasadena city library, spokesman Mary Wilde said.

And the number there may grow. “Since we don’t read the language or speak it, we’ve needed a lot of help,” Wilde said. “We’ve had a lot of help from volunteers” who speak the Asian languages.

Libraries have augmented Project ASIA by buying some books on their own, acquiring an increasing number of Asian videotapes and audiotapes and accepting books donated by Asian patrons, library officials said.

Popular Asian-language books include Kung Fu novels, cookbooks, romance novels, beauty guides and American citizenship books.

Loo said the most popular Chinese author seems to be Kung Fu specialist Chin-Yung.

“His books are never on the shelf--never,” she said. “His books come in anywhere from 6 to 10 parts . . . and they’re always checked out as a set. I know people who read them and stay up till 2 or 3 o’clock. It’s that absorbing.”

Seifert said there is “really very little difference between what the American reader wants and the Asian reader wants. Kung Fu is the equivalent of Louis L’Amour (Westerns) . . . adventure stuff. The taste is very similar.”

But Lily Lee Chen, 50, a former Monterey Park councilwoman, said the cultural emphasis on learning seems to be vastly different.

“The value (Asian) parents place on education and the importance of using the library really is tremendous,” she said. “I think you see (Asian) children being constant users of the library.”

A Chinese immigrant who came to America at 19, Chen stressed the importance to many Asians of blending the two cultures. Many want to become proficient in English and retain their skills in their native languages.

“The books are very important,” she said. “Asian families . . . do associate books and going to the library with achievement.”