Asian-Americans Grappling With Growing Diversity, Rising Conflicts

More than two decades after the term Asian-American was coined from the ferment of the civil rights movement, some of its own are revisiting a fundamental question: Who exactly are Asian-Americans?

At one time, the term was built on the idea that all people of Asian descent shared a common history and struggle in the United States.

But the phenomenal influx of Asian immigrants over the past two decades, not only from traditional sources such as China and Japan, but also from India, Thailand, Vietnam and other countries, has created a collection of such diverse cultures that it has forced many to concede that a single vision of Asian America has faded.

“It’s all changed now,” said Bill Ong Hing, associate professor of law at Stanford University. “The reality is that the community is hugely different. No one can claim to speak for Asian America anymore.”

The diversity of Asian America was demonstrated during three days of wide-ranging discussions on culture, education, politics, art and business that took place at a symposium at the Biltmore Hotel sponsored by the New York-based Asia Society.

The conference, exploring the growing influence of Asian America and the problems surrounding its rise to prominence, ended Saturday after drawing more than 800 speakers and participants from around the country, including Gov. Pete Wilson, best-selling author Amy Tan, U.S. Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.) and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Renee Tajima.

The diversity of voices reflected the range of personal journeys by immigrants and natives alike in search of a place in a rapidly changing America.

“Asian America is completely fragmented,” said Arthur Hu, a columnist for the newspaper Asian Week who calls himself a member of the “radical center.” “You’ve got fragmentation across generations, across regions, across nationalities, East Coast versus West Coast.”

Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo spoke of the concurrent unity and diversity of Asian America, saying: “Diversity is the byword of this community. . . . Nevertheless, in recognizing that diversity, that distinction . . . we also need to recognize a certain continuity. Since the last century, Asian-Americans have been instrumental in America’s march to greatness.”

Author Bharati Mukherjee, of Indian descent, proclaimed: “I am not a hyphenated American. I am an American writer in the American mainstream.”

Watching from the audience was one Los Angeles resident named Ben T. Yu, a Chinese-American economist who attended the conference to simply learn and possibly make a few business contacts.

He said: “It’s all very confusing.”

The vast demographic change in the Asian-American community is rooted in the passage of a single legislative measure--the Immigration and Nationality Act amendments of 1965, which abandoned the old policy of immigration quotas for each country and established a new system giving preference to relatives of U.S. residents.

Asians began migrating to the United States in large numbers. From 1981 to 1989, nearly half of all immigrants came from Asia. Their population doubled in the United States to 7.3 million from 1980 to 1990.

Chinese are still the largest group, with 1.6 million in the United States, followed by Filipinos with 1.4 million; Japanese, 848,000; Indian, 815,000; Korean, 799,000, and Vietnamese, 615,000, according to U.S. Census data.

Twenty years ago, Asian-Americans were largely American-born. By the 1980s, that trend reversed and the majority are now foreign-born.

The result of the migration, along with the movement of refugees from Southeast Asia, has been not only a much larger Asian-American population, but also a much more diverse one.

Tajima, who is now working on a television documentary on Asian America for public television, said she is now wrestling with the question of what is Asian America.

It is a question that she said not only affects the issue of political power and unity, but also something as personal as her own artistic direction.

“Fifteen years ago I would have said that we are yellow people with a common history of oppression,” said Tajima, a third-generation Japanese-American, adding with a quip, “What I can say now is that we are all rice-eaters.”

Hing said that the rise of Asian centers, such as Monterey Park, Westminster and Koreatown in Los Angeles, has brought increased influence and recognition for Asians, but it also has brought conflict and dissension, sometimes between Asians themselves.

“Everyone has to learn that things are much more complicated now,” he said. “There is no black and white.”

Mainstream America also has been caught in the error of seeing Asian America as a single, monolithic community, which has been concurrently branded with the stereotypes of being an exotic foreign threat and a “model minority.”

The stereotype has obscured ongoing problems with discrimination, poverty and crime that exist in the Asian-American community.

“Beneath the facade of achievement is a reality of limitation,” said Councilman Woo.

Sucheng Chan, professor of Asian-American Studies at UC Santa Barbara, said that accepting the model minority myth and the belief that Asians can serve as an example or bridge to other ethnic groups can be dangerous.

“We are put in the position to exploit other people because we are getting some modicum of power,” she said. “We cannot afford to allow ourselves to be tools of exploitation. We must be careful not to climb the ladder of success on the backs of other Americans.”

Don Nakanishi, director of the Asian-American Studies Center at UCLA, said the changes of the past two decades have brought Asian America to a “crossroads.”

Woo said there is an opportunity for Asian-Americans to forge a new identity as “go-betweens” in resolving conflicts between different racial groups and building new economic ties to the Far East.

Others are less certain of how Asian America will redefine itself in the future.

“We really lack a collective identity and that’s a frightening thought,” Tajima said. “I think, like a lot of Asian-American artists, I’m trying to figure it out.”