Asian Influences : The number of Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans and others doubled in the past decade. Immigrants have found ways to adjust to their new home.

In describing how Ventura County has changed over the years, one might talk about shopping centers, golf courses and housing developments--glaring alterations to the area.

But there are other changes, cultural and demographic, that tend to be more gradual and therefore less obvious.

According to figures compiled by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the Asian and Asian-American population in Ventura County increased by 104%, to 33,000, between 1980 and 1990 while overall county population grew by 26%. The county ranks 41st in the country with 5.4% of the population being Asian.

The largest subgroups in the county’s Asian-descended population are Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. Of those groups, the Chinese community saw the biggest jump in population in the past decade, an increase of 145%.

But people of Asian heritage have a long and illustrious history in this county. They have helped make it an agricultural center, they have established themselves in local business, and they have shared their traditions with the community.

During times such as these, when economic hardships lead to increased tensions between cultures, contributions made by Asians tend to be forgotten. This may be a good time to look at some of the county’s fast-growing Asian groups, and see how immigrants continue their struggle to adapt to life in the United States.

Oxnard Buddhist Church

It was 1956, and Helen Inouye decided that it was about time to do something about the situation in Oxnard’s Japanese community. So she gathered 14 other Japanese Buddhist women and discussed things.

“I was thinking, ‘Gee, what can we do to make our church strong again?’ ” Inouye said. “ ‘We could get a women’s club going.’ ”

Not only did the women establish a club of their own, but they gave a big boost to the revitalization of the Oxnard Buddhist Church as the center of the county’s Japanese Buddhist community.

The church opened in 1929, as the Oxnard Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, in a building on East 6th Street, now the home of the Oxnard Rescue Mission. Initial membership totaled 35. The congregation relocated to the church’s present spot on H Street in 1965 and now has a paid membership of 330.

All went well from its founding until World War II. Then many of its members were interned in prison camps. From 1942 until 1945, the temple was used as a storage place for the belongings of interned members. After the war, the temple was still used as a storage facility. It also became a home for elderly members who couldn’t afford to live elsewhere.

It wasn’t until 1952 that temple activity began to pick up. But even then, members had trouble making it work.

“People had moved out of the camps and were not well-situated. They didn’t have funds to run the (temple),” said Inouye, a Sunday school teacher, historian and choir member. “The reverend was destitute.”

In addition to the monetary situation, it was a time of discrimination against the Japanese. Buddhism, said Inouye, was not something that all Japanese wanted to practice publicly, and many turned to Christianity so as to blend in more with the surrounding community.

Then came that pivotal meeting of what would become the Oxnard Buddhist Women’s Assn., with Inouye as its first postwar leader. The organizers began a membership drive, and interest from the community grew.

“There were a lot of people we didn’t know were around,” Inouye said. “Our first drive brought 35 women.”

As the club’s membership increased over the next several years, so did the temple’s membership.

“In late 1958, 1959, we all started moving this way,” said church member Susuka Ito, who came to Oxnard from Orange County. “It was mostly farmers who came from the same location in Japan. They were celery growers.”

Ito, who was born in the Japanese town of Mie Ken, said the conditions were right for her family to move north to Oxnard.

“There was too much smog in Orange County. We couldn’t afford to farm there,” she said. “We saw the (temple) on TV; they had any kind of weddings there, any kind of funerals.”

In 1965 temple officials purchased a former Lutheran church, took out the stained glass windows, removed the cross, remodeled the building to conform to Buddhist traditions, and renamed the temple Oxnard Buddhist Church. The new facility, along with the 1960s baby boom, meant more members.

These days the church has members countywide, the next closest Japanese Buddhist congregation being in Santa Barbara.

The Oxnard church offers a Sunday (or Dharma) school for children, a Junior Young Buddhists Assn., a Sangha Teens program, a Japanese language school, flower-arranging classes, the annual Obon Festival in July and other social activities.

“Other people have Japanese cultural centers,” Ito said. “We get together at church.”

The Pinoys Club

Like most groups that came to the county, some natives of the Philippines were drawn here by agriculture. But in the case of Filipinos, the Navy provided the biggest opportunity for immigration.

Itinerant Filipino farmers came to Oxnard as early as the late 1930s. It wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s, however, after the U.S. military began recruiting servicemen from the islands, that the Filipino community here began to flourish. The Construction Battalion Center in Port Hueneme became the entry point for many Filipinos and their families.

By 1972, because of the Vietnam War, there were so many Filipinos in the local military that they formed a club to gain some cohesiveness. They called the group PINOYS, a slang term for Filipinos and an acronym for Personnel for Improvement in the Naval Organization and Yeoman Services. The club’s initial 500 members were mostly, but not all, Filipinos.

“People were just doing their own things with no unity,” said Art Lagasca, the first president of PINOYS. “They were proud to belong to a group. Our motto is ‘Once a PINOY, always a PINOY.’ ” Because of this eternal membership, group leaders estimate, there are about 1,000 PINOYS in the United States.

The club puts on functions such as the recent Valentine’s Day Dance, a community blood pressure check and an Easter egg hunt. The group also raises money to help during crises in the Philippines, such as the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. The PINOYS board of directors includes a representative from the Seabee base, the Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station and the retired naval community.

Steelworker Chief Sonny Lopez, current president of PINOYS, was recruited by the group shortly after his arrival at the Seabee base in 1974.

“Think of the culture shock,” he said. “I was single, starting out boot camp. Chief Fausto Astillero made me apply for membership. He took me into his house and gave me food that I used to eat at home.”

PINOYS is one of 22 Filipino organizations in the county, under the umbrella of the Filipino-American Council. Group membership in most is determined by the Philippine province from which members come. The first organization, the Filipino Community of Ventura County, Inc., was formed in 1938. It stood alone until PINOYS was established 34 years later.

In the 1970s the Filipino population boomed, warranting an increase in the number of clubs.

“People get married, they have children, and they stay here,” said Vic Mercado, a retired master chief who lives in Oxnard. Mercado attributed the population growth not only to growing families, but to the arrival of newcomers from the Philippines.

Mercado said Filipinos tend to come to this area because they have friends and family here.

“The first thing we do is to invite them to dinner, or to a picnic,” he said. “That’s how we mushroom, through those informal functions.”

Senior Chief Mess Management Spec. Rick Tatunay, vice president of PINOYS, said many of the Filipino servicemen stationed here remain after their naval stint is up. After they leave the Navy they serve as PINOYS advisers and community liaisons.

“Retiring to the Philippines is trial and error,” he said. “Four of my best friends retired, and two years later they came back. There are hassles in the Philippines, the climate, the stability of the government. And the kids also, they can’t put up with the humidity.”

To stay or to return home is a decision Lopez will face shortly.

“I will have a dilemma when I retire,” he said. “My mind is to go back, but my kids grew up here, and their mind is to stay here.”

Korean Assimilation

Susie Lee is comfortable with both the American culture in which she lives and the Korean culture to which she was born.

“If I live in America, I cannot just maintain the Korean culture,” said the 20-year-old Moorpark College student. “But because I have Korean blood in me, I cannot lose that. The most important part of my life is to hold on to the roots or lose my true identity.”

Lee and her family came from Korea in 1982. They face the same dilemma confronting other immigrants--maintaining their native traditions and assimilating into the American culture.

Most Koreans in the county have arrived within the last 10 years, said Jong-Soo Lee, Susie Lee’s father and the pastor at the Korean Presbyterian Church in Thousand Oaks. Most, the pastor said through an interpreter, immigrated first to Los Angeles and moved to Ventura County when they could afford to.

“Many successful Koreans want to live in nicer areas, so they start to move to Thousand Oaks, or Westlake, or Moorpark, from L.A. or from the Valley,” Susie Lee said. “Most of the Koreans who live in Ventura County have their own solid professions and are pretty wealthy.”

Andy Kwan, 42, moved to Thousand Oaks in 1985. He had relocated from Korea to Los Angeles 20 years earlier with his family. Kwan maintains his Korean culture, but he understands why some Koreans don’t.

“Some people moved (to America) 30 to 40 years ago,” he said. “Because they left on their own and had nobody to turn to, they thought they had to quickly convert themselves into the American society.”

Newbury Park dentist Edwin Park was born in Honolulu; his father was born in Korea. He said his father was adamant that Park should speak English. Now, he said, he sometimes regrets not having learned to speak Korean very well.

“I do feel like I’m lacking something in my culture because I can’t speak the native language,” he said. “It’s kind of like a disgrace.”

Because the Korean community is divided into Korean-speaking and non-Korean-speaking subgroups, it tends to be somewhat split.

“Usually those people who speak only English feel kind of uncomfortable because they don’t speak Korean, and they feel like they don’t fit in with those who are Koreanized,” Susie Lee said.

Through the Korean Presbyterian Church and other organizations, the gap between subgroups may be starting to close.

“We are going out together, helping each other, teaching each other,” Lee said.

“(English)-speaking people teach the others American culture, and Korean-speaking people teach Korean culture.”

Chinese Gardens Cafe

It took Edward L. Soo Hoo two decades and several trips across the Pacific Ocean, but he got his entire family from China to Ventura.

And although the city’s Chinatown was dismantled in the late 1920s, the family’s legacy remains--the 57-year-old Chinese Gardens Cafe still stands on Main Street. The restaurant has gone through a series of ownership changes, all within the Soo Hoo family, and is now run by Margaret Soo Hoo, Edward Soo Hoo’s daughter-in-law.

Much of the restaurant’s charm lies in its authentic decor, unchanged since the place opened.

“A lot of people ask, ‘Why don’t you knock it down?’ ” said Margaret Soo Hoo, who has no intentions of so doing. “One time a guy said it looked like a Chinese whorehouse. I said, ‘Then I must be the madam.’ ”

According to local historian Richard Senate, Chinese males began arriving in Ventura in the late 1840s, about the time of the Gold Rush, looking to make money to send home. They faced much prejudice, but they stayed long enough to establish a Chinatown along Figueroa Street. They called the block-long area Sui (or New) Mon Gong after a town in the province of Canton. It lasted, said Senate, until 1927, by which time most of the Chinese community had scattered. Many went to Oxnard as farm workers.

A few, such as Edward Soo Hoo, stayed. Except for occasional trips to his homeland, Soo Hoo stayed in Ventura until his death at age 50 in 1964.

“He had wanted to leave Hong Kong to make a better living somewhere else,” said Margaret Soo Hoo, 54. “When he first came here, he was a houseboy.”

By 1935, Soo Hoo had made enough money to join an uncle and three cousins in co-ownership of the Chinese Gardens Cafe. He was able to bring his family over from Hong Kong in 1947, and in 1949 he became the sole owner of the restaurant.

In the 1940s, Margaret Soo Hoo said, the restaurant was a gathering place for members of the local Chinese community.

“Everybody was busy, but when they were not busy they played fan-tan in the back. You know, the Chinese gambling game,” she said. “It was a pastime. A lot of them did not understand English, so there was no other recreation.”

Margaret married Edward Soo Hoo’s son Larry in China and came to Ventura in 1960 at the age of 22.

“I had made up my mind,” she said. “I was going to come here no matter what--it takes a foreigner to understand. There were better opportunities. I went through one war, one revolution. That’s enough for one generation.”

Soo Hoo and her husband became the owners of the Chinese Gardens Cafe in the mid-1960s. Ventura city officials had earlier considered tearing the place down. Soo Hoo said the insecurity led her husband, from whom she is separated, to move to Thousand Oaks and open Larry’s Bar and Grill.

But Margaret Soo Hoo has hung in--through another threatened destruction in 1980--with the help of her parents and a stepmother, who now work for her. And over the years she has developed a loyal clientele.

“The only time I close are birthdays, weddings and funerals,” she said. “Even in sickness I can’t close. I owe it to the public.”