Library Books Provide a Link to New Asian Communities

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.”

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 one in East Los Angeles.

Nishiyama and his wife 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.”

A New Chapter

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 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.

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

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

Los Angeles County libraries have 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.

Library officials said they are reshuffling their budgets to accommodate the changing readership. Some libraries are spending up to 10% of their book-buying budgets on 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.

Despite generally low book-buying budgets and increasing Asian-language selections, Loo said she has heard no complaints about Asian-language books crowding out the much larger English- and Spanish-language collections.

Special Needs

“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.”

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

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

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 such east valley communities 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.

Libraries have augmented the project 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.