Asian Americans Slow to Flex Their Political Muscle

Assemblyman Nao Takasugi of Oxnard is a staunch Republican, but this year, the only Asian American in the California Legislature is rooting for a liberal Democrat.

“It’ll be so good to have Mike [Honda] in Sacramento,” said Takasugi of the Santa Clara County supervisor who is favored to win the 23rd Assembly District seat Tuesday. “We would be doubling our strength.”

Takasugi, 74, has been a lonely figure since he joined the Legislature in 1992.

African Americans have their seven-member legislative caucus, and Latino lawmakers have a caucus of 14. But Takasugi is the Asian caucus.

His predicament reflects a long-standing plight of California’s Asian Americans, now 11% of the population and the state’s fastest-growing minority.

Despite their numbers and success in education, professions and business, they have fared poorly in politics, especially in Southern California.

“In the halls of government, Asian Americans are invisible,” laments former Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Woo. “Asian Americans defy political science theory because their educational, financial, professional achievements don’t get transferred to electoral politics,” said UCLA political scientist Don T. Nakanishi, an authority on Asian voting.

The paucity of Asian political participation is especially noticeable in Los Angeles. Asian Americans are 10% of Los Angeles County’s population--outnumbering blacks since the 1990 census--but no Asian American sits on the Board of Supervisors or the City Council. In contrast, three blacks and three Latinos are on the 15-member City Council and one black and one Latino are on the five-member Board of Supervisors.

State Treasurer Matt Fong, a Republican, is the only Asian American holding a statewide elective office.

The 54-member California congressional delegation includes two Asians--Democrat Robert T. Matsui of Sacramento and Republican Jay C. Kim of Diamond Bar--and has four blacks and four Latinos.

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To account for the relative scarcity of Asian American officeholders, observers cite a number of reasons, including language and cultural barriers, the diversity of the Asian American community, the predominance of nonvoting immigrants in that community and the legacy of discriminatory laws that barred most Asians from naturalizing until the 1950s.

They also note that many immigrants came from repressive political systems or were drawn here mostly for economic reasons, so they either don’t feel compelled to join the political process or are too busy working.

This year, however, Asian Americans made a resolute effort to change that.

In Washington state, King County executive Gary Locke is the Democratic nominee for governor. If he wins Tuesday, he will be the first Asian American governor in a mainland statehouse. His success has generated nationwide excitement and fund-raising in the Asian community.

The strong candidacy of Honda has galvanized many Asian Americans, including those like Takasugi who are setting aside partisan politics over the chance to double Asian American representation in Sacramento.

Both campaigns, combined with issues of immigration, welfare and, to a lesser extent, affirmative action, have helped to fuel a grass-roots political awareness movement in California, where 40% of the nation’s Asians live.

The unfolding scandal involving Democratic Party fund-raiser John Huang has brought Asian American political involvement to the center stage of the presidential campaign--though not in the way that many had hoped.

Still, up and down the state, Asian Americans have organized citizenship classes, registered voters and held political debates and fund-raisers with new zeal.

The National Asian Pacific American Voter Registration Campaign enlisted the help of Asian American celebrities to produce television public service announcements targeting young Asian Americans. A star-studded premiere of the 30-second “Voice Your Vote” commercial at the Omni Los Angeles Hotel & Center in mid-October attracted hundreds of “yappies” (young Asian professionals) and college students.

Thus far, at least 75,000 new Asian American voters have registered as a result of the national drive, organizers said.

These steps follow a path well-worn by other groups, such as Jews, blacks and gays and lesbians. But organizing efforts were new to many Asians because of their relatively short history of political activism.

“It has taken us more than 20 years,” said Daphne Kwok, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Organization of Chinese Americans, which coordinated the drive in English and eight Asian languages, including Cambodian and Hmong. “Finally, they kicked us in the behind and got us going,” she said, referring to the recent welfare reform and immigration legislation that adversely affects many Asians.

“What we’re seeing is a community that’s suddenly found itself affected by public policy,” said David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee in San Francisco. His organization, working with neighborhood groups, helped add more than 16,000 to the Asian voter rolls in San Francisco alone.

In that city, where Asians are 30% of the population, 1,000 people packed a school auditorium to hear a political debate sponsored by a Chinese-language radio station.

“Can you imagine 1,000 Chinese coming to hear a political debate on a Sunday afternoon?” said Lee. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

This year’s activity to involve Asians has touched even heretofore politically ambivalent residents of San Francisco’s Chinatown, where for 150 years Chinese immigrants could live without speaking a word of English.

On a crisp October day, an 80-year-old Chinese woman, wearing dark, baggy pants and a wool vest, inched her way to Lee’s fourth-floor office on Grant Avenue.

“I am concerned about John Huang,” the woman said, referring to the Chinese American fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee whose link to foreign Asian donations to the Clinton campaign has created a political uproar in recent weeks. “Is there anything I can do for Mr. Huang?” she wanted to know.

She told Lee that she had become a citizen this year, had registered to vote for the first time and was following political events in Chinese-language newspapers.

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While some Asian Americans worried that recent negative publicity about foreign Asian contributions to the Clinton campaign may foster a negative perception about the political participation of Asian Americans, others say such problems will strengthen the community.

“The flap over the few political donations, while important, masks the larger story, which is the upsurge in political activity in the Asian Pacific American communities,” said Stewart Kwoh, president of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California.

He said news of Huang’s role in questionable campaign contributions had a negative impact, but will only be a “temporary setback.”

More important, Kwoh said, is that “Asians are realizing that, not only are their numbers growing, but the issues that are being debated at the national level are crucial to their futures and that requires their active involvement.”

Still, some question whether new Asian American voters will sustain their interest in the years to come and in the absence of issues that affect them personally.

Civil rights attorney Michael Eng is confident they will.

“Once they are registered to vote, we know they turn out to vote,” said Eng, chairman of Citizenship Outreach Project for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California.

According to a 1996 UCLA study, Asians have the highest voting rate among registered voters.

In the 1994 election, 76% of all Asian American registered voters went to the polls, compared to 73% of whites, 64% of Latinos and 63% of blacks, the study found.

Studies show that Asian Americans differ from other minorities in that their loyalty--unlike predominantly Democratic blacks and Latinos--is not to one party. Democrats slightly outnumber Republicans among Asians, with a sizable number registering as independents.

San Francisco, which smugly calls itself the “City That Knows How,” is one bright spot on the Asian American political landscape.

The city has three Asians on the 11-member Board of Supervisors and an Asian police chief, chief administrative officer and registrar of voters and a host of other top officials.

But even there, the successes have only recently been achieved.

“It’s wonderful to have three of us on the board,” said veteran San Francisco Supervisor Tom Hsieh, 64. “The numbers make all the difference,” said Hsieh, who was the lone Asian on the board until he was joined by Mabel Teng last year and Michael Yaki earlier this year.

In Southern California, political successes of Asian Americans have been limited mainly to school boards and city council seats in small suburban cities such as Alhambra, Monterey Park, Rosemead, Cerritos, Hacienda Heights, Torrance, South Pasadena, Redondo Beach, Walnut, Westminster and Garden Grove.

Monterey Park Councilwoman Judy Chu says she is encouraged by the recent willingness of Asian Americans to run for office.

“We have a small but growing number of Asian American elected officials,” she said. “Los Angeles is a tougher challenge because the [Asian] population is so dispersed. But I don’t think it’s an impossible task.”

It’s certainly not an easy one, according to political experts who cite many reasons for the slow and difficult journey of Asian Americans into mainstream politics.

“The political system clearly was not friendly to us,” said Nakanishi.

Warren Furutani, president of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, said he is still saddened by the indignity his grandparents endured because they could not vote until the 1950s, even though they had been in this country since the turn of the century.

“We lost the first generation, so the onus was on the second,” said Furutani.

But many second-generation Japanese Americans were held in internment camps when their country went to war with the country of their ancestors.

Immigration that opened up after 1965 spurred a phenomenal growth. The U.S. Asian population of 1.5 million in 1970 quadrupled by 1990. The U.S. Census projects that the Asian American population will reach 12 million by 2000.

The new arrivals changed the character of the Asian American tapestry, which had been predominantly of Chinese and Japanese descent.

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New immigrants ranged from educated and middle- and upper-class professionals and entrepreneurs from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and South Korea to illiterate and impoverished rural people of Laos and Cambodia, and refugees from war-torn Vietnam. Many came from repressive political systems, where political involvement was shunned.

Bruce Cain, associate director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, says there is a “residual non-participation” among foreign-born Asian Americans because they came to the United States mostly for economic reasons.

“They don’t see a path to success in America as a political path,” he said. They turn to politics only when issues affect them personally, such as hate crimes or the right to use signs in their native languages, Cain said.

Charles J. Kim, executive director of the Korean American Coalition and himself an immigrant, said it would be asking too much of new arrivals to become active in mainstream politics.

“They are trying to survive--to settle down and build their family,” he said.

“Politics comes after that,” agreed veteran Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-San Jose). “My impressions are that they are still assimilating and working hard to make it.”

Also, for many immigrants from Asia, homeland and intra-ethnic politics are more compelling than mainstream American politics.

For example, the simmering dispute between Japan and the two Chinas over who owns a chain of islands in East China Sea recently spawned demonstrations in Asian communities across the United States.

Political scientist Chae-Jin Lee, of Claremont McKenna College, says immigrants feel uncomfortable about plunging into mainstream politics because of cultural unfamiliarity and linguistic shortcomings, even after years of living in America.

“We don’t want to expose our weaknesses,” said Lee.

“We are reluctant to get out, as if we were fish in a pond. We are active in the pond and are relatively happy among our own people. Once we get out of the pond, we feel isolated, uncomfortable and apprehensive.”

Asian American advances in politics is a slow and uphill journey, but longtime observers see some progress.

In 1978, when Nakanishi compiled the first Asian American political roster, there were few Asian American elected officials outside Hawaii. But this year, there are more than 300 Asian American elected officials--including two U.S. senators, 41 state representatives, 83 city council members and 26 city mayors, he said.

The first Asian American congressman from California was Dalip S. Saund, an Indian mathematician and viticulturist from Riverside who was elected in 1958. In 1962, Alfred H. Song, a Korean American attorney, became the first Asian American to be elected to the state Legislature. Four years later, March Fong Eu, an Oakland Democrat, followed.

Eu later became the first Asian American elected to statewide office when, in 1974, she became secretary of state. In 1976, former San Francisco State President S.I. Hayakawa, a Japanese American semanticist and a Republican, was elected to the U.S. Senate.

To sustain the momentum of this election year, Asian Americans must encourage talented people to run, said Kwoh.

Echoing Kwoh, Westminster City Councilman Tony Lam, the first Vietnamese American to win a public office in the United States, said, “My message to the best and brightest Asians is: Don’t just get a good education, a good job and make money, but think about giving yourself for public service.”

Savvy politicians outside the Asian community are offering the same advice.

“Asian Americans should regularly field candidates in any race in which they think they have a chance of winning,” advised San Francisco Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr., who has actively courted Asian American voters and appointed more Asian Americans in his administration than previous mayors.

“Asians,” he said, “underestimate their true strength.”