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Tilted Cat Head
Administrator
Location: Manhattan, NY
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I was just reading something and a Time Magazine article caught my eye...still have to fully digest the article and comment.
Quote:
LINK
Sunday, Jan. 08, 2006
Between Two Worlds
Born in the U.S.A. to Asian Parents, a Generation of Immigrants' Kids Forges a New Identity
By NADIA MUSTAFA, JEFF CHU
They are strangers, but they already know one another's stories. So when Mona Rahman, 24, tells the other five people at a New York City dinner table about how her superstrict parents never let her sleep over at friends' houses, there are chuckles of recognition. There are equally empathetic, if more sober, nods when Grace Chang Lucarelli, 32, speaking in a soft Texan drawl, recalls "people making fun of me" because she was one of the few Asian Americans in her town. The people around the table grew up in rural Texas, suburban New Jersey, upstate New York, small-town Virginia and the real O.C. But they are the children of parents who immigrated to the U.S. from India, the Philippines, Korea, Bangladesh and Taiwan. What they share, says Korean American Suzette Won Haas, 31, is the sense of "feeling like the hyphen in between" the Asian and the American in Asian-American.
That particular identity was made possible 40 years ago, in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act. Exclusion laws passed in the early 1900s had reduced Asian immigration to a trickle. In 1965, the year the Civil Rights Act came into effect, says New York University sociologist Guillermina Jasso, "the racist elements of immigration law were abolished." Annual per-country quotas shot from 100—yes, 100—for most Asian nations to 20,000, with preferences for close relatives of U.S. citizens and those skilled in fields with labor shortages, like medicine. The new law unleashed a wave of immigrants who came to the U.S. to further their education or get a better job. By 1980 more than 190,000 Indians—some 90% of them college educated—had arrived. About 13,000 Korean doctors, pharmacists and nurses got green cards. The Filipino population in the U.S. nearly quintupled, to 500,000; so many medical professionals emigrated that politicians in Manila warned of brain drain.
The American story is, of course, made up of successive influxes of immigrants who arrive in the U.S., struggle to find a place in its society and eventually assimilate. But the group of post-1965 Asians was different from the Jews, Irish and Italians who had landed earlier. The Asian immigrants' distinctive physiognomy may have made it more difficult for them to blend in, but at the same time, their high education and skill levels allowed them quicker entrée into the middle class. Instead of clustering tightly in urban ethnic enclaves, they spread out into suburbia, where they were often isolated. And it was there that their kids, now 20 to 40 years old, grew up, straddling two worlds—the traditional domain their recently arrived parents sought to maintain at home and the fast-changing Western culture of the society outside the front door. The six people at the New York City dinner are members of that second generation and—full disclosure—so are we, the authors of this article.
"The post-1965 generation really is different," says David Reimers, a historian of immigration at N.Y.U. "The process of assimilation has been much faster." The inspiration for the notion of the "model minority," the generation's members have been most recognized for their high academic achievements, a reflection of their parents' drive for a certain kind of success. But that is only part of their story. Shuttling between two worlds—and seeming to fit into neither—many felt as if "they had no community," says Chang-rae Lee, a Korean-American novelist who has written about this generation's journey. "They had to create themselves." In doing so, they have updated the old immigrant story and forged a new Asian-American identity, not wholly recognizable in any of their parents' native lands but, in its hybrid nature, vibrantly American.
If you were to draw a diagram of acculturation, with the mores of immigrant parents on one side and society's on the other, the classic model might show a steady drift over time, depicting a slow-burn Americanization, taking as long as two or three generations. The more recent Asian-American curve, however, looks almost like the path of a boomerang: early isolation, rapid immersion and assimilation and then a re-appreciation of ethnic roots.
As a child growing up in Pennington, N.J., Fareha Ahmed watched Bollywood videos and enthusiastically attended the annual Pakistan Independence Day Parade in New York City. By middle school, though, her parents' Pakistani culture had become uncool. "I wanted to fit in so bad," Ahmed says. For her, that meant trying to be white. She dyed her hair blond, got hazel contact lenses and complained, "I'm going to smell," when her mom served fragrant dishes like lamb biryani for dinner. But at Villanova University in Philadelphia, Ahmed found friends from all different backgrounds who welcomed diversity and helped her, she says, become "a good balance of East meets West." Now 23, she and her non-Asian roommates threw a party to mark the Islamic holiday 'Id al-Fitr in November, then threw another for Christmas—which her family never celebrated. "I chose to embrace both holidays instead of segregating myself to one," she says.
Asian Americans say part of the reason it is so hard to reach an equilibrium is that they are seen as what sociologists call "forever foreigners." Their looks lead to a lifetime of questions like "No, where are you really from?" As a teenager in the affluent and overwhelmingly white Chicago suburb of Riverwoods, Ill, Vanessa DeGuia, now 26, endured incident after incident that made her aware that others regarded her as foreign, despite how her birth certificate read. One classmate told her, "You're my brown friend. You're so exotic." Another came over for dinner, took a bite of a Filipino egg roll made by Vanessa's mom, spat it out and asked if it was made of dog. "I never felt like I belonged," DeGuia says. "Though I was born in this country and English was my first language, I was always seen as a foreigner."
For kids—who by nature desperately want to belong—the feeling of alienation can be so painful that they will do almost anything to make it go away, to fit in. For years, Mark Hong, 31, shunned the only other Asian kid he knew in Davenport, Iowa, and hung out with the popular—and other than him, entirely white—crowd at school: the jocks. "I repelled anything that was Asian because it represented everything that was not cool at the time. Asians did kung fu and worked at Asian restaurants," he explains. That his Korean-born dad was actually an engineer at Caterpillar had no effect on Hong's teenage mind, which was focused on one goal: "I wanted to be cool."
Racial alienation and ethnic mockery are commonplace in the immigrant-kid experience, and the stories these Asian Americans tell of their childhood are "the same kind of talk about social exclusion that you might have found among Italians and Jews in the 1930s," says Harvard sociologist Mary Waters. But previous generations of immigrants' kids, including those Italians and Jews, lived in neighborhoods with built-in social support structures—people who looked like them, ate like them, prayed like them. They had what Marissa Dagdagan, 28, a daughter of Filipino-born doctors, who grew up in Burr Ridge, Ill, says she did not—"people like me that I could corroborate with."
Many children of the Asian immigrants who came over in the 1960s and 1970s say they didn't find that kind of self-affirmation until, like Fareha Ahmed, they got to college. Raymond Yang was one of only three Asians in a class of 420 at his high school in East Northport, N.Y. "I always felt like I was between worlds, especially in high school," says Yang, 28, whose parents are Chinese. That interim place felt like his and his alone—until he got to Brown University. When Yang was a freshman in 1995, there were 854 other Asian Americans enrolled—a full 15% of the undergraduate student body. "It was sort of culture shock. I had never met kids like me," he says. "We all grew up feeling the tension between trying to be Asian and trying to be American. We really bonded over the idiosyncrasies of being between two cultures." During his senior year, he roomed with five other Chinese Americans, and his close friends included children of Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Indian and Korean immigrants.
The social awakening often kindles a cultural one. Once in the return part of the curve, many Asian Americans go from downplaying their differences to highlighting them. In fourth grade, Akira Heshiki, who grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, dropped out of the Japanese-language school she attended each Saturday because she didn't feel Japanese. Instead she treasured the moments when her high school classmates told her, "I always forget you're Japanese." But once at Oregon's Reed College, where more than 10% of the students were Asian American, she began to embrace her heritage. She started the Asian student union with two classmates. Its members discussed what it meant to be Asian American, organized anti-sweatshop protests and supplied books on diversity issues, which they felt were lacking from Reed's library. Heshiki even dropped the English name her parents had given her—May—in favor of her middle name, which is Japanese for bright. "I started using it because I wanted people meeting me to have to—for one minute—struggle or acknowledge I was a little different," says Heshiki, 31, now a lawyer in Portland, Ore.
Grayce Liu's cultural renaissance began when she read Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, a novel that parses the complex relationships of Chinese mothers and daughters. Growing up in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Liu dated only white boys. She hated speaking Mandarin, the language her parents used at home. She added a y to her name and changed the pronunciation to Gray-cee to distinguish herself from two other Asians at school named Grace. "I didn't want to be like other Asians," she recalls. But The Joy Luck Club turned her into a "born-again Asian." It gave her new insights into why her mom was so hard on her and why the ways she showed love—say,through food—were different from those of the families Liu saw on TV, who seemed to say "I love you" all day long. Liu even signed up for Mandarin and Chinese-history courses at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Today she is an actor and producer, and her latest project is a kids' TV show called Bakaboo. Its goal: to teach Mandarin to American-born Chinese.
Seeing their children embrace their heritage is gratifying for the parents who withstood years of youthful rebellion and implied shame. "I was very moved by Grace's efforts," says Grayce Liu's mother Sue, who still calls her daughter by her given name. "She was finally appreciative of all the things I tried to do for her." The hardship these parents and kids have in reaching that kind of understanding reflects more than just the usual generational divide. There is also a cultural crevasse larger than that faced by immigrants' kids whose families at least share a Western civilization that makes American customs a little less alien. Sam Chang's Korean parents were horrified when he got involved in student government at his high school in Phoenix, Ariz. They viewed his extracurricular activities as frivolous diversions from the main goal of his getting into a top college. "When I came home freshman year as president, they had no idea what that meant," says Chang, now 26 and a law student at the University of Arizona. It took congratulations from other parents for them to appreciate their son's coronation as homecoming king his senior year. "They just wanted me to finish school and go to Harvard," Chang says.
Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake, a novel about Indian immigrants and their U.S.-born son, has observed the struggles of Asian Americans like Chang up close. "Asian kids are not just choosing a different way of doing things," she says. "They're choosing an entirely different [cultural] vocabulary. They're dealing with oil and water." Nowhere is that incompatibility more deeply felt than in romance. Most Asian-immigrant parents encourage their children to find partners of the same ethnicity, and many of the kids see the advantages of doing so. As June Kim, a Korean-American copywriter in Philadelphia who is engaged to another Korean American, Shane Kim, sees it, "there are certain things you don't have to explain—cultural nuances, how our families work, our roles within our families." Yet 40% of Asian Americans ages 25 to 34 marry people of other ethnicities, compared with 12% of African Americans in the same age group. Both Grace Chang Lucarelli and her sister married white men. Although their Taiwanese parents weren't pleased at first, Lucarelli says they understood the odds. "They took us to Texas," she says, of her upbringing in the small town of Terrell. "What did they expect?"
Nidhi Khurana, 25, has dated Indian Americans, but for the past three years, she has been seeing an African-American man. "It definitely caused a rift with my parents," she says. "They were very confused." Her father Sunil, a gastroenterologist who came to the U.S. in 1977, admits that accepting the interracial romance "was hard. We are very active in the Indian community, [and] everybody watches you. Also, you grow up in a certain culture, and you expect that to continue."
Of course, such tension is common to generations of immigrants. But Jack Tchen, director of Asian/Pacific/American Studies at N.Y.U., says these second-generation immigrants are beginning to find a middle ground and to "define a new modern form of Asian modernity, not necessarily the same as American modernity." That is what sociologists call identity building, and for the second generation, it is based not on a common ethnicity, faith or language (except English) but on shared experience.
Which is what the six around the New York City table are discovering. For nearly three hours, they tell stories about their families, their work, their heartaches, their joys. They discuss their Asian identities and American habits. And they confess how hard it has been to walk an often lonely path. Says Mohip Joarder, 27, an Indian-American computer programmer from Spring Valley, N.Y., "I've never felt like there were people I could talk freely to about this stuff."
The talk about themselves provides some insights about their parents too. Rob Ragasa, 31, a Filipino-American high school teacher raised in New Jersey, reflects on how his parents—conservative as they always seemed to him—had to be pretty daring to immigrate. "They had to come here and struggle. They had to be the first," he says, then pauses for a moment. "Maybe we are like our parents," he adds finally. "We are going to be pioneers too." And maybe they already are.
With reporting by Kristin Kloberdanz/Chicago, With reporting by Amanda Bower/San Francisco
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