To Asian Americans, Acceptance Remains an Elusive Ideal

The Chinese name for America is “beautiful country.”

Many Asian Americans might wish it were “hospitable country” or “tolerant country” or “easy country” instead.

For all the opportunity Asian Americans have found here since their first main wave of immigration in the mid-19th century, many say it’s still a struggle for acceptance.

From the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II to the plight of New Mexico scientist Wen Ho Lee, California writer Helen Zia interweaves stories of this continuing struggle in “Asian-American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People,” published this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Zia, an Oakland-based friend of the Lee family who attended Lee’s court hearings, knows firsthand how Asian Americans are often mistaken for foreign. Even if they speak English without an accent, their nationality is questioned. Zia tells questioners she’s from New Jersey.

Her mother and father emigrated from China, where her father, a poet and scholar who spoke English, Russian and German, had been on the diplomatic staff of former nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. In the beautiful country, Yee Chen Zia, who died in 1995, ran a failing furniture store, drove a cab and an ice-cream truck, went door-to-door as a Fuller Brush man and made wooden knickknacks--miniature merry-go-rounds.

His U.S.-born daughter, a Princeton graduate, remembers growing up searching for identity in a land where white men called her “China doll” and a black high school friend told her: “You’ve got to decide if you’re black or white.”

“What,” Zia writes, “does it take to be an American?”

She answered her own question in an interview: “It’s not terribly profound, but it has everything to do with democracy in the highest sense of the word. It means to participate in our democracy, our government and, more than that, in our daily life, workplace, schools, communities.”

To groups too shy or dignified to speak out, she warns: Silence fosters misunderstanding.

“They cannot afford not to be visible, vocal, because otherwise all the assumptions about them will fill people’s minds,” Zia said.

It’s doubtful her high school friend would remember Vincent Chin, whose 1982 baseball-bat bludgeoning death remains a rallying point for Asian Americans. Chin, a bridegroom out for his bachelor party in Detroit, was tracked down and killed after a barroom confrontation with two men enraged by Japanese car imports and 300,000 U.S. auto-worker layoffs.

It didn’t matter that Chin was of Chinese, not Japanese, descent.

The assailants got probation, avoiding prison.

A pan-Asian group, American Citizens for Justice, grew out of the Chin case. Citizens of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Philippine descent bonded even though sharp differences have kept Asian subgroups apart in many communities. Many Chinese Americans fled to America because of the repressive Japanese occupation of China preceding World War II. But these groups have learned, living in America, that it pays to stick together.

Some social obstacles noted by Zia:

* Underpayment of Chinese-American workers on the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869--and the railroad’s refusal to let them participate in the completion ceremonies or to ride home on the train to California. They had to walk.

* Suppression of the fact that Japanese-American soldiers liberated the Dachau death camp in Germany during World War II.

* Protests over the casting of a Welshman, Jonathan Pryce, as an Asian character in the Broadway musical “Miss Saigon” despite availability of Asian-American actors.

* Hard feelings between Korean-American shopkeepers and black communities in Los Angeles and New York. Los Angeles riots broke out in 1992 after police were acquitted of brutalizing black motorist Rodney King, and 4,500 stores burned--many owned by Korean Americans.

Afterward, Korean Americans worked to mend community fences.

Jae Yul Kim saw his One Stop Market burn. But now racial harmony is evident.

“Before the riots, I never talk to my customers,” Kim told Zia. “They don’t like me. Now we make jokes, we like each other. I learn to change--I have to.”

Communication is key, agrees Iris Chang, author of “The Rape of Nanking” and “Thread of the Silkworm,” who praised Zia’s book.

“Asian Americans are first and foremost American. But if they want to be true patriotic Americans, they need to speak out,” Chang said by phone from San Jose. “They need to challenge the abuse of government power. They need to foster a healthier democracy by holding their elected officials accountable.”

Zia’s book can help Asian Americans make that democratic leap of faith, Chang suggests.

“It’s a fabulous book,” she said. “There has always been a tendency to see Asian Americans as either invisible or foreign, not truly American. I think her book reminds us of a significant and growing part of our society.”

As for Wen Ho Lee, Zia believes politics led to his prosecution, that the focus on Lee stemmed from a partisan “scandal” over Asian campaign donations.

Because the case against Lee, freed after pleading guilty to one of 59 counts of illegal data downloads at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was just starting as Zia finished writing, her book touches on him only briefly. It catalogs Asian-American outrage over “scapegoating” Lee.

The 60-year-old Taiwan-born Lee lived the Asian-American dream. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he had a U.S. education, a job at a national lab, a wonderful family, a lovely home, loyal friends.

“And yet this could happen to him,” Zia said.

Lee committed “data security infractions,” she said, but others did too--former CIA director John Deutch, for one. Like Lee, Deutch was accused of downloading secrets to an unsecure computer.

“What they did was completely parallel,” Zia said, but Deutch has not been prosecuted.

Many fellow scientists, mostly non-Asian, supported Lee through his nine-month incarceration “even to a greater degree than Asian Americans have,” Zia said. “If there’s any hesitation among Asian Americans, it’s because they’re fearful.”

Lee’s case transcends race, she said.

“It has enormous implications for all of us. I think we need to be concerned about whether we are on the verge of a new McCarthyism. It’s this kind of climate of suspicion that led to the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans--more than half of them children and dirt farmers.”

The wartime internment was rationalized partly on the theory that farmers might plant crops in patterns to guide Japanese bombers to military installations, she said.

The suspicion index may be rising again, she said, to the extent “that even members of Congress, that ‘We the People,’ are willing to say, this man is likely to be a spy and the other man is not.”

“We do have to question whether Wen Ho Lee was held as a political prisoner, in a sense,” she said.

But: “You probably couldn’t have picked a less political person.”

Asian American Writers’ Workshop: https://www.aaww.org/