Asian Americans Bristle at Democrats’ ‘Interrogation’

David Hwang was enraged, recalling the phone call he got shortly before Christmas about his $1,000 contribution to the Democratic National Committee.

“What an insult!” fumed Hwang, president of the Taiwanese American Citizens League. “It’s an insult not only to me personally but to all Asian Americans.”

The caller, from an accounting firm hired by the DNC, wanted his citizenship, Social Security number, source of the contribution and authorization to run a credit check, he said.

The South Bay engineer, a U.S. citizen who for years has given time and money to help elect Democrats, was so upset that he cut the phone call short and penned a blistering letter. “I protest your discriminatory action against me and Asian Americans,” he wrote. If the committee did not feel comfortable with the donation, he demanded its return.

Hwang, a delegate to the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago and a member of the Democratic Party State Central Committee, is still upset about the incident.

So are numerous other Los Angeles-area Asian Americans who were questioned about their qualifications to contribute to the Democratic Party--part of a DNC fund-raising audit due to be released Friday.

“If they had done this to any other ethnic group, there would be a firestorm of controversy,” said John J. Chung, president of the Los Angeles-based Korean American Bar Assn. “These tactics are sending the message: ‘If you’re an Asian, you have to prove that you are entitled to participate.’ This is a barrier erected in front of Asians solely based on their name.”

Former DNC Chairman Donald Fowler said the committee’s probe involved several hundred donors from the past two years whose backgrounds had not been “vetted thoroughly” when the contributions were accepted. “They were not exclusively Asians or persons with non-European names,” Fowler said.

Although Fowler says he wrote to many of those who were questioned to clear up any misunderstanding, the unfolding Democratic fund-raising scandal--largely involving foreign-linked donors to the Clinton campaign--remains painful for many Asian Americans. It reminds some that, despite high educational and professional achievements, they still in some ways are at the margins of society. The message they perceive is: If you have an Asian face and name, you cannot be accepted as a full-fledged American.

Widening Controversy

The widening controversy involving former DNC fund-raiser John Huang has adversely affected Asian American political aspirations more than any other single issue, observers say. They say it has tarnished their collective image, may have cost a Cabinet appointment and could spark legislative efforts to limit their ability to contribute to candidates.

The episode is widely seen as the same kind of guilt by association that resulted in the World War II internment of Japanese Americans even as many fought for America. Asian American leaders worry about the issue’s ramifications for the community, which only this year, a century and a half after Asians settled on the West Coast, celebrated the election of Gary Locke of Washington, the first Asian American governor to occupy a mainland statehouse.

Galvanized by issues of immigration, welfare and affirmative action, more than 75,000 Asian Americans registered to vote nationwide last year, and they went to the polls in record numbers.

Yet, there is little to show for their efforts.

“We’re not even at the table to pick up the crumbs,” said Chinese American attorney Anthony Ching, whose $5,000 contribution prompted DNC questioning.

“The controversy has a taint of racism,” said Harry Low, a Chinese American civic leader and one of the first Asian American judges. “It confirms that things haven’t changed as much as you hoped for.”

Civil rights attorney Donald Tamaki, a third-generation Japanese American, says simply, “It hurts.”

“It makes all Americans of Asian ancestry suspect,” he added.

Non-Asian observers, too, are watching the situation with keen interest.

“All of us from various ethnic communities need to defend the Asian American community,” said American-born James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, who tires of being asked where he comes from.

“They won’t ask the Joneses and the Smiths whether they’re citizens,” he said. “You get a room full of Zogbys, Chungs and Gonzalezes, and they ask, ‘Wait a minute, who is a citizen here and who is not?’ ”

Echoes from American history reverberate in the controversy.

“It harks back to earlier days of ‘yellow peril’--insidious Asians pulling strings and manipulating,” said Joe Hicks, an African American who is executive director of the Multicultural Collaborative, a consortium of community organizations in Los Angeles.

Hicks said the lesson from this controversy is that if Asian Americans can be singled out, so can other groups.

Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, Western regional director of the American Jewish Committee, says he wants a coalition of voices from across ethnic lines to tell the DNC: “If you take money from people you should not have taken money from, that’s your problem. That’s not an Asian American problem.”

Charles Woo, a toy manufacturer near downtown Los Angeles, says he feels betrayed and saddened by the predicament of Asian Americans. Woo gave $7,500 to the DNC last year. That contribution has come to haunt him.

Instead of a thank-you, the first communication he received from the DNC was “an interrogation” involving his personal and financial affairs, Woo said.

Former DNC Chairman Fowler later called Woo and apologized.

In an attempt to assuage hard feelings, Fowler’s successor, Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, came to Los Angeles last week and met with seven Asian American leaders.

The gathering included Woo, Asian American leader Stewart Kwoh and former Monterey Park Mayor Lily Lee Chen, who also had been questioned about her DNC donation. Romer told them that auditors were checking all donations over $10,000, and cases with “insufficient” information.

But a source familiar with the situation said auditors were specifically checking all contributions linked to fund-raiser Huang.

Absence of Appointments

Asian American leaders say one result of the controversy is the conspicuous absence of high-level Asian American appointments in the administration.

Highly placed Asian American sources said Clinton did not appoint UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien to the Cabinet because of the controversy.

Tien, an internationally recognized mechanical engineer who helped solve the heat shield problems of the space shuttle Columbia, was one of two finalists for energy secretary, sources said.

The White House did not return calls about the Tien issue.

To Asian Americans, their absence from the top echelons of the Clinton administration belies the president’s promise of a Cabinet reflecting the face of America.

“Tien was the consensus Asian American candidate,” Low said. “He is clean, brilliant and his stand on affirmative action showed a profile in courage that deserved a recognition of a Cabinet post.”

Tien acknowledged having “many conversations with those working on Cabinet appointments” and members of the transition team, but he declined to elaborate. “I am a realist,” he said. “Timing was not right from the administration point of view to appoint an Asian American.”

Asian Americans are crushed that respected members of their community, such as Tien, are stigmatized by a scandal caused in large part by foreign-linked donors who have little or no connection to their community.

For example, a snapshot shows Bill Clinton seated between Asian business tycoons James T. Riady and Ted Sioeng at a July 22 fund-raiser at the Century Plaza Hotel, co-chaired by Huang.

Riady is a longtime Clinton friend and an executive of Indonesia’s giant Lippo Group, which has been at the center of the fund-raising turmoil. Sioeng, owner of the Chinese-language International Daily News based in Monterey Park and the Metropolitan Hotel in Hollywood, has a financial empire, sources say, that stretches from California to China.

Riady and Sioeng are not U.S. citizens. Yet Clinton chose to sit next to them rather than Asian Americans who were there to honor him. The seating arrangement irked some, particularly since the event’s organizers billed it as the first fund-raiser for a president sponsored exclusively by Asian Americans.

“Weren’t Asian American donors good enough to sit next to the president?” asked a Chinese American donor. “As far as they were concerned Asians and Asian Americans were interchangeable.”

Asian American leaders say Clinton’s friendship with wealthy Asian donors and their access to the White House have not served the nation’s fastest growing minority community well.

“His exposure to these people has skewed how he views Asian Americans,” said Henry Der, deputy state superintendent of schools. “I say that because those interests in many ways are very different from the interests of Asian Americans here. . . . There are real important issues, such as education and affirmative action. But Clinton doesn’t see that as part of the Asian American equation. Asian Americans are not on his radar screen other than as cash cows.”

Attorney Ching, a member of Chinese Americans United for Self Empowerment, said Asian Americans were duped by the political fund-raisers.

“Their agenda was to promote their own or overseas business interests, and not the Asian American community,” he said. “We unwittingly helped their agenda by supporting their fund-raising efforts in the hope that Clinton would appoint more Asian Americans.”

And Asian Americans, who gave the Clinton campaign about $6 million--most of it in small contributions through Huang, and about $1.2 million of which was returned--say they got nothing in return.

Soul-Searching in the Community

Inside the Asian American community, this experience has engendered deep soul-searching.

But the public reaction of important Asian American civic institutions has been “deafening silence,” according to Ching.

“There is a lack of moral courage and leadership in the Asian American community,” he said.

Few are willing to openly criticize what they view as DNC manipulation of the Asian American community by dangling illusory appointments in the administration, he said.

Asian Americans inside the administration, Ching said, won’t say anything publicly because they want to protect their jobs, would-be appointees don’t want to jeopardize their chances and community leaders worry about their own careers and agency agendas.

This combination of self-interest and timidity has prompted historian L. Ling-chi Wang of UC Berkeley to organize Asian Americans for Campaign Finance Reform. By going publicly against the Asian American mainstream, Wang has alienated some old comrades from the seminal Asian American movement of a quarter-century ago.

“An even more important issue here is political corruption and the way the Asians are being used by the Democrats,” Wang said.

Wang accused Huang of exploiting the Asian American community as a vehicle for his own agenda. Huang did not respond to phone calls from The Times.

“He has single-handedly undone Asian American efforts since the late 1960s to rid themselves of the stereotype of Asian Americans as ‘foreigners,’ ” Wang said.

Times staff writers Alan C. Miller and Jack Nelson contributed to this story.