THE CHINESE OF ORANGE COUNTY : PARENTS WANT TO PRESERVE HERITA, THEIR CHILDREN WANT FAST TRACK TO ASSIMILATION

At the stroke of 9 on a Sunday morning, students by the hundreds are arriving at the deserted University High School campus in Irvine.

Lines of Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs and Toyotas drop them off from stylish homes in Newport Beach, Anaheim Hills and Tustin. Dressed in trendy sweats and high-top tennies, they jostle, gossip and kid among themselves as they make their way to class.

These are Chinese-Americans gathering for their weekly three-hour classes at the Irvine Chinese School that operates out of rented buildings on the University campus.

The rest of the week they lead quiet lives in some of the county’s best neighborhoods, but they are prodded relentlessly by their parents to be examples of the “model minority” while they pursue the fastest track possible in American assimilation.

Yet each Sunday they enter another world in which they speak only Mandarin, recite Confucian fables and attend lectures on Chinese history and the sciences.

The sight of 700 Chinese-Americans ages 5 to 18 crowded into this quintessentially American campus in a quintessentially American suburban town is stunning.

Make no mistake: This school is nothing less than a Sunday congregation of the cultural faithful. A rousing affirmation of ethnic roots.

An extended Chinese family of 700.

Despite the fact that it is now 13 years old and the second largest of 80 such Chinese cultural schools in Southern California, the Irvine Chinese School is still virtually unknown outside Asian communities.

Yet it and the 15 others like it in the county tell much about an undeniable fact of demographics here: namely, the Asianization of Orange County.

True, nearly all attention has been on the influx of two other Asian peoples here, the the Vietnamese, who now number about 100,000, and the Koreans, who now number about 70,000. But those groups have high visibility. The Little Saigon and Koreatown strips in central Orange County are two of the biggest commercial enclaves of their kind in the United States, and they have stirred resentment among some Caucasian residents who fear that the groups are trying to undermine the primacy of English and to erect compounds of their own on American soil.

The Chinese population here has a much lower profile, although it wasn’t always so.

Anti-Asian feeling had been building since the 1870s because of the competition for laborers’ jobs. In May of 1906, when anti-Asian sentiment was at its height throughout California, Santa Ana’s tiny Chinatown was burned down by city fathers who considered it a blight and feared it would produce an outbreak of leprosy.

There were only a few hundred Chinese living here at the time. It would be decades before they would settle here in any great numbers. In 1960, the Chinese population in the county was just 444; in 1970, it was 2,832, but by 1980 their number had increased to 14,213, and for 1990, it is projected to be at least 20,000.

Researchers say most of the increase since the 1970s represent people who have emigrated--some from Hong Kong, but most from Taiwan--and that these people are generally more affluent, more educated and more sophisticated in their adoption of American ways than their predecessors.

In a study of Asian immigration, UC Irvine assistant professor John Liu, a member of the university’s Comparative Culture Program, found that newcomers from Taiwan accounted for 72% of the 3,996 Chinese who settled in Orange County between 1983 and 1986, far outnumbering those from Hong Kong and China.

It appears that these newcomers deliberately bypassed the traditional Chinese enclaves in Los Angeles County, including Monterey Park, for the anonymity of Orange County suburbia.

“These are immigrants who seek what everyone else seeks--Caucasian Americans included--from this society,” Liu said. “They want the kind of job mobility, schools and leisure that go with the American Dream life style of an Orange County.”

In fact, Orange County, which has never had a big Chinatown in the usual sense, is fast becoming one of the most sought-after suburban destinations in the United States for this newer wave of high-status Chinese newcomers, Liu and other Chinese-American researchers said.

The Chinese immigrants who live in Monterey Park and in the other enclaves of the San Gabriel Valley “don’t have to--or want to--venture outside the Chinatowns,” said Celia Young, a Laguna Niguel-based consultant in Asian-American relations. “They have reconstructed a Chinese society right there. But this group clearly doesn’t want to live like that,” she said of those who have chosen Orange County. Instead, she said, “they are willing to become immersed in the Caucasian society, but hoping to do so without losing their (Chinese) identity.”

A comment by Shih-how Chang, principal of the Irvine Chinese School, typifies the attitude of this group: “We seek the best for our families, for our children,” said Chang, who is an American-educated engineer. “We do this,” that is, live in Orange County, “because here we can give our children the best from two cultures.”

No group personifies this phenomenon better than the 450 families who underwrite and operate the Irvine Chinese School.

They have high-status jobs. Most of the men are engineers--the professional job most traditionally most frequently chosen by Chinese immigrants and American-born Chinese, according to studies--but the roster also includes computer scientists, physicians, professors and manufacturing-firm owners.

The roster also includes at least one link to a monumental event in China’s past: Kia-lin Sun is a great-granddaughter of Sun Yat-sen, the most revered leader in the uprising against the Qing Dynasty that led to its overthrow in 1911 and ’12.

Most of the school’s parents were born on the China mainland in the 1930s and 1940s. Some lived in Japanese-occupied sectors such as Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou and Shenyang. Others lived in areas still held by Chinese forces, including Chongqing, the wartime capital that was heavily bombed through the war. When the Communist armies swept into full control of the mainland in the late ‘40s, the families fled to Taiwan, the last stronghold for Chinese Nationalists. Taiwan became a model of economic prosperity, although not of political democracy.

Hundreds of Taiwan’s best students became part of another flight in the 1960s and 1970s--this time to the United States to pursue graduate degrees. Their exodus was encouraged with the repealing of anti-Asian immigration laws and the increasing willingness of American firms to hire Chinese professionals. Many of these expatriates found work in high-tech industries and chose to stay permanently in America, becoming American citizens and starting families.

For most, it apparently was not political objections that brought them here. “They didn’t leave Taiwan because of the limited political freedoms there,” said Young, who is also a member of the Irvine Chinese School board. “If anything, politics have always played a small role in these people’s lives.”

What attracted them most was the belief in America as the promised land, the fabled vision of the Gold Mountain of the original Chinese immigrants in the 19th Century. The farmers and laborers of Guangdong Province had emigrated expecting to reap great wealth, then return home.

Families in the later waves of immigration threw themselves into the process of becoming acculturated in their new society, but they always stopped far short of full assimilation for themselves and for their children.

Their situation is the classic one for any immigrant group.

“They feel they are an endangered species in this country, maybe the last of their line to truly practice and honor the traditional Chinese ways,” said Albert Chu, whose son attended the school. Chu is president of the Asian American Planning Council in Orange County, an umbrella organization for Asian-American community groups.

Another parent, engineer Tsun-sen Fu, whose wife, Mitzi, was principal of the Irvine Chinese School when it opened with 30 students in 1975, put it this way: “We are worried, yes, that our children will forget where their families came from, what we lived through, what we believe in. Yes, we are very concerned about our children’s Chinese identity, about their roots.”

The weekly Chinese culture and language classes are one answer.

The schools, launched by the parents themselves and supported by tuition fees, have multiplied over the past several years. There are now 16 in Orange County with a total enrollment of 3,000. The Irvine program is the largest, but other major schools include those in Huntington Beach, Anaheim Hills, Fullerton and Fountain Valley.

The parents do not rely on the formal instruction on Sunday mornings alone, however. They reinforce the Chinese traditions at home.

The parents are role models. They pride themselves on their smooth entry into American society--mingling easily with Caucasians at work and at American school functions, cultivating the image of being low-profile, hard-working, well-behaved achievers--part of the model minority. Yet their social lives still revolve around other Chinese, the preferred language is still Mandarin or another Chinese dialect, and their reverence for Chinese traditions is powerfully maintained.

They insist that their children adhere to the Chinese traditions of familial obedience, respect for elders, observing ancient holidays and seeking perfection through diligent attention to education. Specialists in intercultural relations, however, point out that some of these parents, like many in other Asian immigrant groups--underestimate the stresses their children confront in trying to satisfy the demands of two cultures.

Speaking of the experience of Asian immigrants in general, Gene Awakuna, a psychologist and director of UC Irvine’s student counseling services, put it this way: “The parents believe they are doing the right thing, but because the parents are themselves so secure in their own (Asian) identity, they don’t know what it means to suffer from these kinds of bicultural shocks.” Awakuna teaches acculturation classes at UC Irvine, whose enrollment is now more than 35% Asian.

Many such children are torn as they try to achieve a balance between independence and traditional devotion to duty.

Another pressure point is socializing with people outside the ethnic group. For example, many Chinese parents tolerate interracial dating, seeing it as a reality of American society, but most are still appalled by the prospect of interracial marriage.

Chu of the Asian American Planning Council says that the Chinese schools are not there just to pass the torch of heritage. They also provide a Chinese socialization “that is the schools’ hidden agenda--to encourage students to think about marrying, but only to another Chinese,” he said.

Most family tensions, though, seem to revolve around the traditional study-and-work ethics.

Chinese parents, for instance, never cease citing the higher-than-average numbers of Chinese students on high school honors lists or in the student bodies of schools such as Harvard and Stanford universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“That’s the complaint you hear most often” from Asian students--”that their parents are always pushing them to do even more homework, to get those high grades, to not shame the family,” said consultant Young, who conducts workshops for Asian students.

All this raises an exceptionally sensitive issue--the matter of mental health.

According to Chu, who is a county social worker, cases of extreme mental stress--including incidents of parental abuse and children running away--have been reported among Asian immigrants. And, he added, as with “any other racial group, these cases cut across all economic and occupational lines.”

Still, the number of mental health problems reported for Asians is very low. But Chu said that the low rates are a reflection of the scarcity of counselors who speak Asian languages and Asians’ well-known aversion to “airing their problems to outsiders.”

Yet in the view of Chu and others, Asian families such as those associated with the Irvine Chinese School are probably coping better than most and are less likely to exhibit “extreme behaviors.”

The field is still lacking in authoritative studies on bicultural stress among such families, but Chu offered this view: “They don’t live in isolation. They have fewer (English) language problems and are better educated. Many have resided here since they were graduate students.

“We have to assume that their adjustments--as difficult as they may be--are comparatively less stressful.”

But even a smoothly acculturating Asian group, specialists said, is not spared the shocks of American racism.

One Irvine Chinese School parent who asked not to be named discussed the issue of racism this way: “When Caucasians get to know us, understand that we are good citizens and take care of ourselves, then there can be no problems. It is like football. If you do a good job, it is the score that counts--not your culture or color.”

He and other Chinese parents interviewed acknowledged the existence of the noisier evidence of new anti-Asian rancor such as the recent attacks on the use of Asian languages in the Monterey Park and central Orange County enclaves.

One Chinese school student who made a more candid appraisal added: “Oh yeah, it is still there--the taunts, the crude jokes--but you get used to it.

“These things come in cycles. People now resent us because we’re not acting quiet and docile. It seems all they ever read is about (Asians) coming here with bags of cash, buying up everything.”

But, specialists argue, this is a reflection of Asians’ higher racial visibility and the higher levels of fear and rancor that come with that visibility.

Liu, the UC Irvine social scientist, described the situation this way: “Do these people think (Asians) are better, brighter? I think not. They look upon us in much the same way they did back in the last century: We’re seen as devious and sneaky, and that’s why we get ahead!”

Despite these attitudes--or because of them--activists have long been urging younger Chinese-Americans to take matters into their own hands and make a peace with their dual identities.

To consultant Young, herself a China-born American immigrant, this idea is especially valid for American-born students such as those in the Irvine Chinese School classes.

Students like these, Young said, “have to find their own middle space. They have to accept the fact they are bicultural and different--and that this is perfectly normal.”

And, Young added, “they have to tell themselves that it’s OK to take pride in their Chinese-ness, to let it come out in the open.”

Even if that means being Chinese only part time. Once a week. Every Sunday. For three hours.

It’s another Sunday at the Irvine Chinese School.

The 700 students were dutifully in their classes, reciting Confucian tales, brush-drawing ancient Chinese characters, taking spot quizzes on new words.

The youngest, barely 5 years old, were sitting wide-eyed in a room repeating the latest parable line by line and sound by sound.

On the plaza, boys in cross-buttoned uniforms were kicking up a storm in the kung fu class. Inside a hall, girls with bamboo sticks danced gently to a traditional song.

And there were scores of parents--some going through tai chi paces, some in choral practice--others holding their little weekly reunions, chatting and laughing, their Mandarin sounding so natural, so properly in place despite the surroundings.

There were gaps in this mini reconstruction of a Chinese society. During class breaks, students lapsed into English, as if coming up for air before the next immersion into Mandarin.

And there was this role-reversal oddity: Three adult Caucasian students were huddled over the calligraphy tables doing their best to learn the basic strokes of written Chinese.

But overall, the mood was one denoting a gathering of a very specific ethnic clan.

“We need to be together, even for a day, because out there it is not the same. I need it for myself, for my children,” said a 43-year-old Hong Kong-reared businessman. “Oh, my kids don’t like it one bit. I have to drag them here. Maybe some day--maybe they will understand.”

Maybe.

“I used to feel that way,” said Michelle Ko, 17, president of the school’s student activities council. “But you grow up. You begin to see what parents are getting at. I know kids now in universities or overseas, and they’re taking Chinese again!”

Said another 17-year-old, Steven Huang: “You get to feel the linkage between generations. I like that. I used to feel not quite American, not quite Chinese. Now, maybe, it’s not as confusing. America is a multicultural society, right?”

Billy Chen, also 17, tried to sum it all up. “OK, it’s not really that bad,” he said of the school. “You know, I kind of look forward to it. It’s like seeing your kinfolk. Hey, it’s like one big family!”

At the stroke of noon, the classes stopped, the spell was broken, the students were taken away, back to their places in the American society.

For another week.