Asians Seek Political Roles in New York

This city, as diverse as any in the world, has had a black mayor and two Jewish mayors. Its City Council includes natives of Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.

Yet no Asian American has ever served as mayor, on the City Council or in any citywide office--a “shocking” situation, one candidate says, considering that nearly 1 in 10 New Yorkers is of Asian descent.

But with new city term limits forcing incumbents from office in droves, 2001 offers the best opportunity yet for Asian Americans to break through.

“Friends of mine said, ‘Kwong, you’ve got to run. There’s term limits, there’s a wide open field,’ ” said Kwong Hui, a political novice who is one of three Chinese American candidates running for City Council in Manhattan’s 1st District, which includes Chinatown.

Three more Asian Amerians are running in the 20th District in Flushing, Queens, which has a very large Asian population. A few are running in other districts in Queens, the city’s most diverse borough.

John Liu has raised the most money of any council candidate in any district--$131,370 as of his January filing with the city Campaign Finance Board--and is considered the front-runner in the 20th District. Liu, who ran for council once before, said he’s shocked voters have never elected an Asian American to a prominent city office.

Liu said Asians, like immigrants before them, are on a “learning curve.”

“When you first immigrate to the United States . . . it takes a while before you’re firmly established financially, educationally,” he said. “It takes a while before you reach the point in the curve where you start joining political institutions, and we are at that point now.”

Until now, many Asian Americans were not registered voters and others did not go to the polls regularly. In the 1997 mayoral race, just 4% of voters were of Asian descent, up from 2% in 1993.

Party affiliation is another factor. To participate in primary elections, voters must register with a party and can vote only in that party’s primary.

Since the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, the race that really counts in most districts is the Democratic primary. And Asian Americans have traditionally not registered as Democrats in as high numbers as other ethnic and racial groups in New York such as blacks, Latinos and Jews.

“Every time we’ve sent out monitors for the primary elections there are always people who want to vote but are told they can’t,” said Margaret Fung, executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Also, many Asian Americans have registered as independents, not realizing they would be prevented from voting in primaries, she said.

In other parts of the country, candidates of Asian descent have been elected to office even where there are not large blocs of Asian American voters.

In 1996, Gary Locke, who is Chinese American, was elected governor of Washington state, where the Asian population is 5.9%. Norman Y. Mineta, a Japanese American who is President Bush’s secretary of Transportation, was elected mayor of San Jose, Calif., in 1971, when the city’s Asian American population was only 3%.