Entrepreneurs From China Flourish in Africa
Benedicte Kurzen for The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH and LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: New York Times, August 18, 2007
LILONGWE, Malawi — When Yang Jie left home at 18, he was doing what people from China’s hardscrabble Fujian Province have done for generations: emigrating in search of a better living overseas.
What set him apart was his destination. Instead of the traditional adopted homelands like the United States and Europe, where Fujian people have settled by the hundreds of thousands, he chose this small, landlocked country in southern Africa.
“Before I left China,” said Mr. Yang, now 25, “I thought Africa was all one big desert.” So he figured that ice cream would be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. The climate is in fact subtropical, but that has not stopped his ice cream company from becoming the country’s biggest.
Stories like this have become legion across Africa in the past five years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had been terra incognita. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods on the continent, a reflection of deepening economic ties between China and Africa that reached $55 billion in trade in 2006, compared with less than $10 million a generation earlier.
Even when Mr. Yang arrived here in 2001, he said, he could go weeks without encountering another traveler from his homeland. But as surely as his investments in the country have prospered, he said, an increasingly large community of Chinese migrants has taken root, and now runs everything from small factories to health care clinics and trading companies.
During the previous wave of Chinese interest in Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, an era of radical socialism and proclaimed third-world solidarity, European and American companies held sway over economies in most of the continent. Here and there, though, the Chinese made their presence felt, often in drably dressed, state-run work brigades that built stadiums, railroads and highways, crushing rocks and doing other labor by hand.
Today, in many of the countries where the new Chinese emigrants have settled, like Chad, Chinese-owned pharmacies, massage parlors and restaurants serving a variety of regional Chinese cuisines can be found; the Western presence, once dominant, has steadily dwindled, and essentially consists nowadays of relief experts working international agencies or oil workers, living behind high walls in heavily guarded enclaves.
At first, this new Chinese exodus was driven largely by word of mouth, as pioneers like Mr. Yang relayed news back home of abundant opportunities in a part of the world where many economies lie undeveloped or in ruins, and where even in the richer countries many things taken for granted in the developed world await builders and investors.
Conditions like these often deter Western investors, but for many budding Chinese entrepreneurs, Africa’s emerging economies are inviting precisely because they seem small and accessible. Competition is often weak or nonexistent, and for African customers, the low price of many Chinese goods and services make them more affordable than their Western counterparts.
Chinese Expansion
You Xianwen sold his pipe-laying business in Chengdu, in southwest China, this year to move to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to join a startup company with a Chinese partner he had met only online. “Back where I come from we are pretty independent people,” Mr. You, 55, said. “My brothers and sisters all supported my decision to come here. In fact, they say that if things really work out for me, they would like to move to Africa, too.”
Mr. You said he had considered other African countries before settling on Ethiopia, including Zambia. “Luckily I didn’t decide to go there,” he said, explaining that he had been frightened by the recent anti-Chinese protests in that country.
His new business, ABC Bioenergy, builds devices that generate combustible gas from ordinary refuse, providing what Mr. You said would be an affordable alternative source of energy in a country where electricity supplies are erratic and prices high.
Mr. You’s partner here, Mei Haijun, first came to Ethiopia a decade ago to work at a Chinese-built textile factory and has since married an Ethiopian woman, with whom he has a child. “When I first came here you could go two months without seeing another Chinese person,” he said. “But it is a different era now. There’s a flight to China every day.”
The pickup in air traffic between China and countries like Ethiopia now has Chinese companies scrambling to add new routes, as the Chinese government and big Chinese companies increase their stake in Africa.
Much of that activity reflects an intense appetite for African oil and mineral resources needed to fuel China’s manufacturing sector, but big Chinese companies have quickly become formidable competitors in other sectors as well, particularly for big-ticket public works contracts. China is building major new railroad lines in Nigeria and Angola, large dams in Sudan, airports in several countries and new roads, it seems, almost everywhere.
One of the largest road builders, China Road and Bridge Construction, has picked up where the solidarity brigades of an earlier generation left off. The company, which is owned by the Chinese government, has 29 projects in Africa, many financed by the World Bank or other lenders, and it maintains offices in 22 African countries.
On a recent Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Beijing brimming with Chinese contractors, workers from Road and Bridge and other companies swapped notes on the grab bag of countries they work in, and debated about the difficulties of learning Portuguese and French in places like Mozambique and Ivory Coast.
Africans view the influx of Chinese with a mix of anticipation and dread. Business leaders in Chad, a central African nation with deepening oil ties to China, are bracing for what they suspect will be an army of Chinese workers and investors.
“We expect a large influx of at least 40,000 Chinese in the coming years,” said Renaud Dinguemnaial, director of Chad’s Chamber of Commerce. “This massive arrival could be a plus for the economy, but we are also worried. When they arrive, will they bring their own workers, stay in their own houses, send all their money home?”
In Zambia, where anti-Chinese sentiment has been building for several years, merchants at the central market in Lusaka, the capital, said that if Chinese people wanted to come to Africa, they should come as investors, building factories, not as petty traders who compete for already scarce customers for bottom-dollar items like flip-flops and T-shirts.
“The Chinese claim to come here as investors, but they are trading just like us,” said Dorothy Mainga, who sells knockoff Puma sneakers and Harley Davidson T-shirts in the Kamwala Market in Lusaka. “They are selling the same things we are selling at cheap prices. We pay duty and tax, but they use their connections to avoid paying tax.”
Although Chinese oil workers have been kidnapped in Nigeria and in Ethiopia, where nine were killed by an armed separatist movement in May, the growing Chinese presence around the continent has produced few serious incidents.
Misunderstandings are common, however, and resentments inevitably arise. Africans in many countries complain that Chinese workers occupy jobs that locals are either qualified for or could be easily trained to do. “We are happy to have the Chinese here,” said Dennis Phiri, 21, a Malawian university student who is studying to become an engineer. “The problem with the Chinese companies is that they reserve all the good jobs for their own people. Africans are only hired in menial roles.”
Another frequent criticism is that the Chinese are clannish, sticking among themselves day and night.
In Addis Ababa, in what is a typical arrangement for most large companies, the 200 Chinese workers for the Road and Bridge Corporation live in a communal compound, eating food prepared by cooks brought from China and receiving basic health care from a Chinese doctor.
“After a day off you wonder what you’re doing here, so we like to keep working,” said Cheng Qian, the country manager for the road-building company in Ethiopia. He added that his family had never visited him during several years of work here.
African Ambivalence
Sometimes, the Chinese approach has created serious frictions with African workers. At a leading hotel here in Lilongwe, breakfast guests stared as an agitated Chinese traveling salesman, sweating profusely, screamed at his staff minutes before his pitch on nutritional supplements was set to begin.
“You say it is not your fault, but the way you are doing things is just stupid, stupid,” the man sputtered before a clutch of African assistants, who looked humiliated. “You people are unbelievable.”
When the salesman finally left the room, members of the restaurant staff gathered near the door and vented their disgust. “We don’t need people like that to come here and colonize us again,” one said.
After nearly seven years in Malawi, Yang Jie, the ice cream maker, seems to have learned better. Greeting his workers at the ice cream factory, he begins the day by asking, “How did you sleep last night?”
One quickly replied, “Very well,” sounding a bit formal.
“Don’t tell me a lie,” Mr. Yang answered with a sly, friendly smile. “It’s O.K. to tell me your worries.”
Howard W. French reported from Lilongwe and from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Lydia Polgreen from Lusaka, Zambia, and Dakar, Senegal.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Monday, August 6, 2007
Report Details Student Contrast
Report details student contrast
Southeast Asians are less ready for college
San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 8/6/2007
By Lisa M. Krieger Staff Writer
Asian-American students are often viewed as brainy, affluent and over-achieving. But a new government report concludes that several Asian groups are not well-prepared - either academically or financially - to succeed in college.
Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian students typically do well in school, fulfilling the "model minority" stereotype, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office, the research and investigative arm of Congress. Many of their families have saved money for college and do not depend on their children's help at home.
But others - Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Thai and Burmese descent - do not enroll in the rigorous math and reading classes needed to climb the ladder of collegiate success, the report found.
Moreover, Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders who make it to college are more likely to need outside financial support, often living at home and working to help their families, according to the report.
For instance, 68 percent of Chinese college students reported they could afford college without working, compared with only 36 percent of Vietnamese. Almost half of all Vietnamese college students said they helped their families with tutoring, translating, transportation and household chores.
While 42 percent of Korean families saved $20,000 or more for college, only 8 percent of Southeast-Asian families had.
"The report confirms the need to avoid making national generalizations about Asian-American achievements in education and conflating all Asian-American subgroups as if all Asian Americans are homogeneous," said L. Ling-chi Wang, chairman of the ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley. "We need to look at each subgroup separately."
Deborah Reed of the San Francisco-based Public Policy Institute of California concurred.
"Asians and Pacific Islanders tend to have relatively high levels of education and income and relatively low poverty rates," she said.
"(But) when we look at Southeast Asians from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos - the refugee-sending countries - we find lower family income, lower education and higher poverty than for other Asian groups in California."
To be sure, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are, on average, better educated than the average American. Almost half have a four-year college degree, compared with one-third of whites, 17percent of African Americans and 12 percent of Latinos.
And the academic strength of even the most disadvantaged groups grows over time, Reed said.
"When we look at the second generation, we see increasing progress."
The study, conducted from July 2006 through July 2007, used data from the U.S. Census Bureau and two large national education databases. Researchers also visited eight colleges with high numbers of Asian students, and conducted discussion groups on these campuses.
Many of the differences were attributed to the number of years that an ethnic group had been in the United States - or whether immigrants had arrived to escape war and persecution or seek high-tech jobs.
The report, released July 27 before the education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, found wide differences in:
An estimated 68 percent of Asian-Indian and 64 percent of Chinese adults had at least a college degree, compared with 25 percent of Vietnamese, 17 percent of Pacific Islanders and 13 percent of other Indochinese - Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong.
More than 90 percent of Filipino, Indians and Japanese identified themselves as fluent in English. That compares with 70percent of Koreans, 62 percent of Vietnamese and 60 percent of the other Indochinese groups.
About 80 percent of Vietnamese undergraduates reported their parents paid none of their tuition. High numbers of Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders groups lived at home or attended schools within driving distance of home. In contrast, many Chinese, Indian and Korean undergraduates worked to gain job experience or earn spending money.
Simply put, poverty creates barriers to education, whether one is Asian American, Latino or African American, said Paul Fong, a political science professor at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose.
"There's an achievement gap among Filipino Americans, Cambodian Americans and Vietnamese Americans - the haves and have-nots," Fong said.
Staff Writer Kim Vo contributed to this story.
http://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_6552950
Southeast Asians are less ready for college
San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 8/6/2007
By Lisa M. Krieger Staff Writer
Asian-American students are often viewed as brainy, affluent and over-achieving. But a new government report concludes that several Asian groups are not well-prepared - either academically or financially - to succeed in college.
Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian students typically do well in school, fulfilling the "model minority" stereotype, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office, the research and investigative arm of Congress. Many of their families have saved money for college and do not depend on their children's help at home.
But others - Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Thai and Burmese descent - do not enroll in the rigorous math and reading classes needed to climb the ladder of collegiate success, the report found.
Moreover, Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders who make it to college are more likely to need outside financial support, often living at home and working to help their families, according to the report.
For instance, 68 percent of Chinese college students reported they could afford college without working, compared with only 36 percent of Vietnamese. Almost half of all Vietnamese college students said they helped their families with tutoring, translating, transportation and household chores.
While 42 percent of Korean families saved $20,000 or more for college, only 8 percent of Southeast-Asian families had.
"The report confirms the need to avoid making national generalizations about Asian-American achievements in education and conflating all Asian-American subgroups as if all Asian Americans are homogeneous," said L. Ling-chi Wang, chairman of the ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley. "We need to look at each subgroup separately."
Deborah Reed of the San Francisco-based Public Policy Institute of California concurred.
"Asians and Pacific Islanders tend to have relatively high levels of education and income and relatively low poverty rates," she said.
"(But) when we look at Southeast Asians from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos - the refugee-sending countries - we find lower family income, lower education and higher poverty than for other Asian groups in California."
To be sure, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are, on average, better educated than the average American. Almost half have a four-year college degree, compared with one-third of whites, 17percent of African Americans and 12 percent of Latinos.
And the academic strength of even the most disadvantaged groups grows over time, Reed said.
"When we look at the second generation, we see increasing progress."
The study, conducted from July 2006 through July 2007, used data from the U.S. Census Bureau and two large national education databases. Researchers also visited eight colleges with high numbers of Asian students, and conducted discussion groups on these campuses.
Many of the differences were attributed to the number of years that an ethnic group had been in the United States - or whether immigrants had arrived to escape war and persecution or seek high-tech jobs.
The report, released July 27 before the education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, found wide differences in:
An estimated 68 percent of Asian-Indian and 64 percent of Chinese adults had at least a college degree, compared with 25 percent of Vietnamese, 17 percent of Pacific Islanders and 13 percent of other Indochinese - Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong.
More than 90 percent of Filipino, Indians and Japanese identified themselves as fluent in English. That compares with 70percent of Koreans, 62 percent of Vietnamese and 60 percent of the other Indochinese groups.
About 80 percent of Vietnamese undergraduates reported their parents paid none of their tuition. High numbers of Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders groups lived at home or attended schools within driving distance of home. In contrast, many Chinese, Indian and Korean undergraduates worked to gain job experience or earn spending money.
Simply put, poverty creates barriers to education, whether one is Asian American, Latino or African American, said Paul Fong, a political science professor at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose.
"There's an achievement gap among Filipino Americans, Cambodian Americans and Vietnamese Americans - the haves and have-nots," Fong said.
Staff Writer Kim Vo contributed to this story.
http://www.sgvtribune.com/news/ci_6552950
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Las Vegas Caters to Asia’s High Rollers
Las Vegas Caters to Asia’s High Rollers
By GARY RIVLIN
Published: New York Times, June 13, 2007
LAS VEGAS — Without the dreamy postcard views of the neon-pulsing Strip, visitors to the V.I.P. lounge at the top of the Venetian hotel and casino here might think they had taken an elevator to someplace in Hong Kong or Shanghai.
The televisions in this sanctuary reserved for the wealthiest high rollers are tuned to Chinese stations. The newspapers use Chinese characters. The plinking tones wafting through the sprawling lounge are distinctly Chinese and many of the lounge’s supremely solicitous, perpetually bowing staff members come from one Asian country or another. Its head chef is a dim sum master recently imported from Hong Kong.
Then there are the special accommodations offered to gamblers willing to wager several hundred thousand dollars or more: four 8,000-square-feet suites heavy on black lacquer furniture, bronze dragons, jade and appliances imported from China.
Casino operators have long recognized that a large number of Asians, especially Chinese and Chinese-Americans, are avid gamblers. For years, casinos have dispatched special buses to any Chinatown within a day’s drive.
Recently, though, casinos have become much more aggressive in wooing Asians both domestically and abroad. They are aiming not just at the newly wealthy from China, who in recent years have emerged as Las Vegas’s best customers, but also Asian-Americans and recent immigrants from the Pacific Rim.
The vigor of their efforts is stirring the ire of some Asian activists and others. “If the casinos singled out African-Americans and marketed to them as heavily as they do Asians, I’d imagine there’d be this huge political outcry,” said Timothy W. Fong, co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The marketing has been so aggressive, and the penetration so deep, we’re starting to see alarming increases in the rates of problem gambling among Asians.”
These efforts include redesigning large portions of a casino floor to cater to the tastes of Asian guests; advertisements written in Asian dialects and placed in community newspapers in nearby cities; and mailers written in a recipient’s native language. The impact has been especially heavy among recent immigrants, Dr. Fong said.
One trend-setter has been Harrah’s Entertainment, which operates two dozen casinos across the United States, including the Caesars Palaces in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. At the start of 2006, Harrah’s opened a gambling and dining area inspired by the Ming- and Song-dynasty architectural elements at the Showboat in Atlantic City, in what Gary Loveman, its chief executive, described as “the country’s first authentic Asian gaming pit.”
The company imported carved woods from China to house a dozen baccarat tables — the preferred game among many Asian players — and several more for pai gow poker, which is based on an ancient Chinese dominoes game.
Over all, table game revenue at Showboat increased 35 percent last year, to $63 million, up from $46 million, and the casino more than doubled its business among Asian players. Table games include baccarat and pai gow but also craps, blackjack and roulette.
When the installation of an Asian gambling pit caused a similar increase in the table game winnings at Caesars Atlantic City, Mr. Loveman ordered similar changes at casinos across the country.
“There’s this interest in gambling among the Chinese that transcends anything you see in any other socioeconomic or ethnic group,” he said.
Experts are inclined to agree. “Ours is a culture that believes a lot in numbers and superstition and places a large focus on money,” said Dr. Fong, whose parents were born in mainland China. “So much revolves around fortune and fate and testing whether the ancestors have blessed you with a good life.”
Other casinos have followed Harrah’s lead, including the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which created its own Asian gambling pit last July, and the Mohegan Sun in eastern Connecticut, which is building an all-Asian gambling hall complete with a Hong Kong-style food court.
Las Vegas has been undergoing a similar makeover. Asian-themed baccarat salons and noodle bars are now as standard as scantily clad cocktail waitresses, and baccarat generates far more revenue than roulette or craps.
The spread of baccarat, said William P. Weidner, the president of Las Vegas Sands, the parent company of the Venetian, is “entirely a function of its popularity among the Chinese.”
It is also a function, Mr. Weidner said, of a small group of high rollers sometimes called whales — or those Mr. Weidner dubbed the “V-V.I.P.s” — who are willing to wager $50,000 or more on a single hand or roll of the dice and risk several million dollars over a weekend.
About 80 percent of Las Vegas’s biggest whales are from Asia, he said, echoing the estimates of other casino executives. Most of them are baccarat players from China and Hong Kong.
“One difference between our domestic and Asian guests are that our Asian guests spend much more time gambling,” said Mike Zanolli, manager of the 50 butlers the Venetian places at the service of its high rollers. “We see our Asian guest mainly in the baccarat salon,” Mr. Zanolli said, adding that they even take all or most of their meals there.
“The Asian customer on average uses a significantly larger share of their disposable income to game with,” said Mr. Weidner, who so prizes these high rollers that several times he has traveled with an interpreter to Hong Kong to run his casino designs by a feng shui master.
Mark Juliano, the former president of Caesars Las Vegas, says Asians account for even more than 80 percent of the city’s gambling whales.
“The big change I started noticing in 2004, 2005, were the Asians coming from mainland China,” said Mr. Juliano, now the chief operating officer of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Customers from Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong are “becoming more and more dominant.”
Casino companies are not just pulling out the stops to attract Asian high rollers to America, they are also going to where the customers are. Several years ago, the Sands and Wynn Resorts opened large Las Vegas-style casinos in Macao, the former Portuguese colony that is the only place in China where gambling is legal. The Sands is aggressively seeking to expand elsewhere in Asia.
Last year, Macao surpassed the Las Vegas Strip to become the world’s largest gambling center.
“We view Asia as a critical growth area for our company,” Mr. Weidner said.
The wooing of newly rich high rollers from China is of little concern to critics but the broader focus on less-affluent Asian-Americans is a growing worry.
“Gambling has been a part of Asian culture going back thousands of years,” said Kent Woo, the executive director of the NICOS Chinese Health Coalition in San Francisco. “People grew up with gambling in their households. It was part of celebrations, it was part of everyday life. But there’s also a feeling that the casinos are exploiting our culture.”
The reactions among Asian activists to the aggressive marketing by casino companies, Mr. Woo said, “range from concern, to upset, to extreme anger.”
Studies suggest higher rates of problem gambling among Asians than other groups. Several recent studies in New Zealand and Australia have found that Asians living there had higher rates of addiction than non-Asians. Studies of Southeast Asian refugees living in Connecticut and Chinese waiters working in Montreal reached similar findings.
One long-term study under way in California, Dr. Fong of U.C.L.A. said, suggests that Asians are three times as likely as other groups to develop a serious gambling problem. He cautions, though, that the study is based on only a small sample of gamblers in the Los Angeles area.
Still, the evidence in California has been alarming enough to get the state government in 2004 to create an Asian Pacific Islander Problem Gambling Task Force, which is focused on starting treatment and prevention programs catering to those who speak only Chinese and other Asian languages.
“If there’s this hidden problem of addiction that’s not being addressed, and that’s what we think is happening,” Dr. Fong said, “it will slowly eat away at the fabric of the community.”
By GARY RIVLIN
Published: New York Times, June 13, 2007
LAS VEGAS — Without the dreamy postcard views of the neon-pulsing Strip, visitors to the V.I.P. lounge at the top of the Venetian hotel and casino here might think they had taken an elevator to someplace in Hong Kong or Shanghai.
The televisions in this sanctuary reserved for the wealthiest high rollers are tuned to Chinese stations. The newspapers use Chinese characters. The plinking tones wafting through the sprawling lounge are distinctly Chinese and many of the lounge’s supremely solicitous, perpetually bowing staff members come from one Asian country or another. Its head chef is a dim sum master recently imported from Hong Kong.
Then there are the special accommodations offered to gamblers willing to wager several hundred thousand dollars or more: four 8,000-square-feet suites heavy on black lacquer furniture, bronze dragons, jade and appliances imported from China.
Casino operators have long recognized that a large number of Asians, especially Chinese and Chinese-Americans, are avid gamblers. For years, casinos have dispatched special buses to any Chinatown within a day’s drive.
Recently, though, casinos have become much more aggressive in wooing Asians both domestically and abroad. They are aiming not just at the newly wealthy from China, who in recent years have emerged as Las Vegas’s best customers, but also Asian-Americans and recent immigrants from the Pacific Rim.
The vigor of their efforts is stirring the ire of some Asian activists and others. “If the casinos singled out African-Americans and marketed to them as heavily as they do Asians, I’d imagine there’d be this huge political outcry,” said Timothy W. Fong, co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The marketing has been so aggressive, and the penetration so deep, we’re starting to see alarming increases in the rates of problem gambling among Asians.”
These efforts include redesigning large portions of a casino floor to cater to the tastes of Asian guests; advertisements written in Asian dialects and placed in community newspapers in nearby cities; and mailers written in a recipient’s native language. The impact has been especially heavy among recent immigrants, Dr. Fong said.
One trend-setter has been Harrah’s Entertainment, which operates two dozen casinos across the United States, including the Caesars Palaces in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. At the start of 2006, Harrah’s opened a gambling and dining area inspired by the Ming- and Song-dynasty architectural elements at the Showboat in Atlantic City, in what Gary Loveman, its chief executive, described as “the country’s first authentic Asian gaming pit.”
The company imported carved woods from China to house a dozen baccarat tables — the preferred game among many Asian players — and several more for pai gow poker, which is based on an ancient Chinese dominoes game.
Over all, table game revenue at Showboat increased 35 percent last year, to $63 million, up from $46 million, and the casino more than doubled its business among Asian players. Table games include baccarat and pai gow but also craps, blackjack and roulette.
When the installation of an Asian gambling pit caused a similar increase in the table game winnings at Caesars Atlantic City, Mr. Loveman ordered similar changes at casinos across the country.
“There’s this interest in gambling among the Chinese that transcends anything you see in any other socioeconomic or ethnic group,” he said.
Experts are inclined to agree. “Ours is a culture that believes a lot in numbers and superstition and places a large focus on money,” said Dr. Fong, whose parents were born in mainland China. “So much revolves around fortune and fate and testing whether the ancestors have blessed you with a good life.”
Other casinos have followed Harrah’s lead, including the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which created its own Asian gambling pit last July, and the Mohegan Sun in eastern Connecticut, which is building an all-Asian gambling hall complete with a Hong Kong-style food court.
Las Vegas has been undergoing a similar makeover. Asian-themed baccarat salons and noodle bars are now as standard as scantily clad cocktail waitresses, and baccarat generates far more revenue than roulette or craps.
The spread of baccarat, said William P. Weidner, the president of Las Vegas Sands, the parent company of the Venetian, is “entirely a function of its popularity among the Chinese.”
It is also a function, Mr. Weidner said, of a small group of high rollers sometimes called whales — or those Mr. Weidner dubbed the “V-V.I.P.s” — who are willing to wager $50,000 or more on a single hand or roll of the dice and risk several million dollars over a weekend.
About 80 percent of Las Vegas’s biggest whales are from Asia, he said, echoing the estimates of other casino executives. Most of them are baccarat players from China and Hong Kong.
“One difference between our domestic and Asian guests are that our Asian guests spend much more time gambling,” said Mike Zanolli, manager of the 50 butlers the Venetian places at the service of its high rollers. “We see our Asian guest mainly in the baccarat salon,” Mr. Zanolli said, adding that they even take all or most of their meals there.
“The Asian customer on average uses a significantly larger share of their disposable income to game with,” said Mr. Weidner, who so prizes these high rollers that several times he has traveled with an interpreter to Hong Kong to run his casino designs by a feng shui master.
Mark Juliano, the former president of Caesars Las Vegas, says Asians account for even more than 80 percent of the city’s gambling whales.
“The big change I started noticing in 2004, 2005, were the Asians coming from mainland China,” said Mr. Juliano, now the chief operating officer of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Customers from Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong are “becoming more and more dominant.”
Casino companies are not just pulling out the stops to attract Asian high rollers to America, they are also going to where the customers are. Several years ago, the Sands and Wynn Resorts opened large Las Vegas-style casinos in Macao, the former Portuguese colony that is the only place in China where gambling is legal. The Sands is aggressively seeking to expand elsewhere in Asia.
Last year, Macao surpassed the Las Vegas Strip to become the world’s largest gambling center.
“We view Asia as a critical growth area for our company,” Mr. Weidner said.
The wooing of newly rich high rollers from China is of little concern to critics but the broader focus on less-affluent Asian-Americans is a growing worry.
“Gambling has been a part of Asian culture going back thousands of years,” said Kent Woo, the executive director of the NICOS Chinese Health Coalition in San Francisco. “People grew up with gambling in their households. It was part of celebrations, it was part of everyday life. But there’s also a feeling that the casinos are exploiting our culture.”
The reactions among Asian activists to the aggressive marketing by casino companies, Mr. Woo said, “range from concern, to upset, to extreme anger.”
Studies suggest higher rates of problem gambling among Asians than other groups. Several recent studies in New Zealand and Australia have found that Asians living there had higher rates of addiction than non-Asians. Studies of Southeast Asian refugees living in Connecticut and Chinese waiters working in Montreal reached similar findings.
One long-term study under way in California, Dr. Fong of U.C.L.A. said, suggests that Asians are three times as likely as other groups to develop a serious gambling problem. He cautions, though, that the study is based on only a small sample of gamblers in the Los Angeles area.
Still, the evidence in California has been alarming enough to get the state government in 2004 to create an Asian Pacific Islander Problem Gambling Task Force, which is focused on starting treatment and prevention programs catering to those who speak only Chinese and other Asian languages.
“If there’s this hidden problem of addiction that’s not being addressed, and that’s what we think is happening,” Dr. Fong said, “it will slowly eat away at the fabric of the community.”
Monday, May 21, 2007
Taishan's U.S. well runs dry
Taishan's U.S. well runs dry
By David Pierson, Times Staff Writer
May 21, 2007
Taishan, China — DOWN a narrow red dirt road past rice paddies, water buffaloes and abandoned farmhouses is the dab-sized town of Wo Hing. Locals know it as Lop Cham Kee village, or Los Angeles village.
Seventy years ago, young men in this desperately poor region a few hours west of Hong Kong's high-rises emptied out of Wo Hing to cross the Pacific and try their luck in America. Many would end up on Hill Street or Broadway as cooks and waiters or open their own restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley. Their children would become engineers and even city councilmen. Their decision to leave still dominates the lives of those who stayed behind, for better and for worse.
Wo Hing, like many villages in the encompassing city of Taishan, has survived through a combination of backbreaking farming and handouts from America. That dependency on wah kiu — overseas Chinese — has left the villagers vulnerable, however: In the same way the old remnants of L.A.'s Chinatown are fading away, so is the generation from Wo Hing that can be counted on to deliver cash, including donations to build roads and schools.
It clouds an already uncertain future for the 40 residents of this village where water is still fetched from wells and meals cooked over wood fires. They've spent recent years watching the urban centers creep closer to their fields and their children leave for factory jobs.
Farmers all over China are struggling to adapt to the nation's rapid industrialization, but it is especially hard for the inhabitants of many villages in Taishan, who have to learn to move on without the financial advantage they've long enjoyed from America.
"Every one here has some family overseas," said a 60-year-old retiree lounging on a bamboo recliner in the nearby village of Moy Family Garden, giving only his surname, Moy. "I have relatives in Chicago and New York. I'm still waiting for my turn. But I don't have to work here. If I go to America now, who knows? I may have to work hard."
Mei Weiqing, a native of Taishan and wah kiu scholar at Wuyi University in the neighboring city of Jiangmen, said the generosity of those who left has both benefited and hindered Taishan.
"The overseas Taishanese are much more hard-working," he said. "The locals have become lazy. It's a serious problem. In U.S. society, the Taishanese had to live in the lowest end of society. They took the worst jobs. In Taishan, the men won't even consider doing the washing or cooking. American Taishanese learned to do these things to survive."
TO villagers, the wah kiu are heroes. They are feted with whole roast pigs when they visit. On display in the village hall is a marble plaque that lists the amount of money each wah kiu has donated. Villagers help maintain the homes of those who left, bowing with incense twice a month before shrines to pay homage to their ancestors.
"I treat it like my own house," villager Jie Moi Cin said about caring for the home her recently deceased uncle in Los Angeles left behind in the 1940s. "Even if they never send money back again, we couldn't abandon it. But after the old ones pass away, the young ones may not know what to do. Maybe they'll forget about us."
She has reason to be concerned. The visits come at a trickle compared with the 1980s and '90s, when the wah kiu were comfortably retired and ready to share their wealth. Back then, minibuses would drop off dozens of the Americans to a throng of applauding villagers. Today, villagers get phone calls or letters every few months informing them that another aging relative has died. They know that the children and grandchildren of the wah kiu have little to no connection to Wo Hing.
This is how it has worked in Taishan since men started leaving more than 200 years ago. The city and its many villages have staked a part of their livelihood on the goodwill of their overseas countrymen, whose history is rooted deeply in the development of America. They were gold-rushers, they built America's Pacific railways, and they established the first Chinatowns from New York to San Francisco.
Until the 1980s — when Taiwanese and Hong Kong Chinese began to arrive en masse — Taishanese was the chief dialect heard in most Chinatowns. It was the culture that gave America egg foo young and chop suey.
Even today, Taishan proudly bills itself as the "No. 1 Home of Overseas Chinese."
There are 1 million residents in Taishan, but 1.3 million Taishanese in Hong Kong and abroad. An estimated half a million Chinese Americans are of Taishanese descent.
Along with those who fled Taishan for Hong Kong when it was administered by Britain, American Taishanese have led the charge here in helping pay for hospitals, colleges, senior centers, highways, bridges, towers and even the Overseas Taishanese Museum. "American building" is part of the everyday vernacular, and looking in any direction from the city center, it's impossible not to find one.
"In Taishan, almost everyone has a connection to North America," said Mei, the professor. "Every year, more than 8,000 Taishanese continue to leave, mostly to America and Canada. They will try any way to go abroad."
A history of civil strife and poor terrain for farming has always hobbled Taishan and tempted the poorest to leave. The nearby South China Sea beckoned daring men to take their chances elsewhere to feed their families.
This proved bountiful for Taishan for much of the 20th century. Before World War II, many sojourners would return with gold and build towering gothic-styled buildings in their home villages. They erected watch towers to fend off bandits that menaced the area. By Chinese standards of the day, Taishanese related to wah kiu were rich.
Signs of those days now litter the countryside. Not far from Wo Hing, Moy Family Garden rises out of the rice paddies and duck ponds like an ancient ruin. The 108 three-story European buildings with pillars and Venetian facades are squeezed together to form a rectangle with a courtyard in the center.
But in the village itself, three-quarters of the dirt-blackened buildings are now boarded up. Chinese characters above many storefronts have been worn away by time. In the remaining buildings, locals in flip-flops play mah-jongg while chickens as big as turkeys cluck at their feet.
Since national economic reforms began in 1978, the region around Wo Hing has been transformed. On the country road here, dozens of sprawling factories making furniture and pots and pans swallow space next to chicken farms and lumber yards. Wo Hing, on the other hand, has largely remained the same since it was built in 1902. The buildings aligned almost perfectly perpendicular to one another are separated by dirt path alleyways roamed by packs of ragged dogs.
Against the front wall of each home's living room are tall red- and gold-colored shrines on wooden platforms. It's a prime location where Americans might elect to place their flat-screen TVs, but for the villagers, it's where you honor your ancestors.
Paying respects to the place where past generations were born and spirits are still believed to be is what compels Arcadia resident William Wong to return to Wo Hing every other year.
Wong was 14 when he left Taishan in 1947. He now heads the region's overseas association in L.A.'s Chinatown. When the group formed decades ago, there were 2,000 members. Today, there are half that many.
"The younger guys don't join, and we keep losing the senior members," said Wong, 74, a retired Los Angeles County engineer who carries packets of red envelopes stuffed with $10 bills to give to villagers when he visits. "We're trying to bring some college and high school students out there this summer to show them their roots."
Wong returned to Wo Hing for the first time in 1994. The home he was raised in had partially collapsed. For $10,000, he had it rebuilt. It's now the only modern structure here, covered in white and green tiles and boasting a stainless-steel front door.
NOT everyone feels the tug. Ben Wong's parents grew up in the village, but he's only been there once for a brief visit in 1980. The former West Covina councilman, who is not related to William Wong, said he and his children were too immersed in their lives in America to contribute the way his parents did.
"The next generation came along and we didn't find ourselves in that same position as our parents," said Ben Wong, 56. "I got married and had kids and a career. There's still some connection, but it's always difficult for me. I never found time to bring my kids out there, and I regret that to an extent."
The villagers who remain in Wo Hing say they don't have close enough relatives in the United States who can sponsor them. Otherwise, many say, they'd be gone by now.
Some, like 88-year-old Wong Kong Chuan, had their chance to leave, but misfortune got in the way.
"I've been once," he said, explaining that he tried to go to the U.S. to meet relatives in Stockton.
"I tried, but they turned me away," he said of the border guards.
That was 1931. He had journeyed with his uncle, who made it through. That uncle would start a family in the U.S. Pictures of his children standing in front of Griffith Observatory hang on Wong's wall.
"He used to send me $200," he said, losing his breath from the effort of standing and talking. The uncle is dead now, and Wong is still here in Los Angeles village.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-taishan21may21,1,4560222.story
By David Pierson, Times Staff Writer
May 21, 2007
Taishan, China — DOWN a narrow red dirt road past rice paddies, water buffaloes and abandoned farmhouses is the dab-sized town of Wo Hing. Locals know it as Lop Cham Kee village, or Los Angeles village.
Seventy years ago, young men in this desperately poor region a few hours west of Hong Kong's high-rises emptied out of Wo Hing to cross the Pacific and try their luck in America. Many would end up on Hill Street or Broadway as cooks and waiters or open their own restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley. Their children would become engineers and even city councilmen. Their decision to leave still dominates the lives of those who stayed behind, for better and for worse.
Wo Hing, like many villages in the encompassing city of Taishan, has survived through a combination of backbreaking farming and handouts from America. That dependency on wah kiu — overseas Chinese — has left the villagers vulnerable, however: In the same way the old remnants of L.A.'s Chinatown are fading away, so is the generation from Wo Hing that can be counted on to deliver cash, including donations to build roads and schools.
It clouds an already uncertain future for the 40 residents of this village where water is still fetched from wells and meals cooked over wood fires. They've spent recent years watching the urban centers creep closer to their fields and their children leave for factory jobs.
Farmers all over China are struggling to adapt to the nation's rapid industrialization, but it is especially hard for the inhabitants of many villages in Taishan, who have to learn to move on without the financial advantage they've long enjoyed from America.
"Every one here has some family overseas," said a 60-year-old retiree lounging on a bamboo recliner in the nearby village of Moy Family Garden, giving only his surname, Moy. "I have relatives in Chicago and New York. I'm still waiting for my turn. But I don't have to work here. If I go to America now, who knows? I may have to work hard."
Mei Weiqing, a native of Taishan and wah kiu scholar at Wuyi University in the neighboring city of Jiangmen, said the generosity of those who left has both benefited and hindered Taishan.
"The overseas Taishanese are much more hard-working," he said. "The locals have become lazy. It's a serious problem. In U.S. society, the Taishanese had to live in the lowest end of society. They took the worst jobs. In Taishan, the men won't even consider doing the washing or cooking. American Taishanese learned to do these things to survive."
TO villagers, the wah kiu are heroes. They are feted with whole roast pigs when they visit. On display in the village hall is a marble plaque that lists the amount of money each wah kiu has donated. Villagers help maintain the homes of those who left, bowing with incense twice a month before shrines to pay homage to their ancestors.
"I treat it like my own house," villager Jie Moi Cin said about caring for the home her recently deceased uncle in Los Angeles left behind in the 1940s. "Even if they never send money back again, we couldn't abandon it. But after the old ones pass away, the young ones may not know what to do. Maybe they'll forget about us."
She has reason to be concerned. The visits come at a trickle compared with the 1980s and '90s, when the wah kiu were comfortably retired and ready to share their wealth. Back then, minibuses would drop off dozens of the Americans to a throng of applauding villagers. Today, villagers get phone calls or letters every few months informing them that another aging relative has died. They know that the children and grandchildren of the wah kiu have little to no connection to Wo Hing.
This is how it has worked in Taishan since men started leaving more than 200 years ago. The city and its many villages have staked a part of their livelihood on the goodwill of their overseas countrymen, whose history is rooted deeply in the development of America. They were gold-rushers, they built America's Pacific railways, and they established the first Chinatowns from New York to San Francisco.
Until the 1980s — when Taiwanese and Hong Kong Chinese began to arrive en masse — Taishanese was the chief dialect heard in most Chinatowns. It was the culture that gave America egg foo young and chop suey.
Even today, Taishan proudly bills itself as the "No. 1 Home of Overseas Chinese."
There are 1 million residents in Taishan, but 1.3 million Taishanese in Hong Kong and abroad. An estimated half a million Chinese Americans are of Taishanese descent.
Along with those who fled Taishan for Hong Kong when it was administered by Britain, American Taishanese have led the charge here in helping pay for hospitals, colleges, senior centers, highways, bridges, towers and even the Overseas Taishanese Museum. "American building" is part of the everyday vernacular, and looking in any direction from the city center, it's impossible not to find one.
"In Taishan, almost everyone has a connection to North America," said Mei, the professor. "Every year, more than 8,000 Taishanese continue to leave, mostly to America and Canada. They will try any way to go abroad."
A history of civil strife and poor terrain for farming has always hobbled Taishan and tempted the poorest to leave. The nearby South China Sea beckoned daring men to take their chances elsewhere to feed their families.
This proved bountiful for Taishan for much of the 20th century. Before World War II, many sojourners would return with gold and build towering gothic-styled buildings in their home villages. They erected watch towers to fend off bandits that menaced the area. By Chinese standards of the day, Taishanese related to wah kiu were rich.
Signs of those days now litter the countryside. Not far from Wo Hing, Moy Family Garden rises out of the rice paddies and duck ponds like an ancient ruin. The 108 three-story European buildings with pillars and Venetian facades are squeezed together to form a rectangle with a courtyard in the center.
But in the village itself, three-quarters of the dirt-blackened buildings are now boarded up. Chinese characters above many storefronts have been worn away by time. In the remaining buildings, locals in flip-flops play mah-jongg while chickens as big as turkeys cluck at their feet.
Since national economic reforms began in 1978, the region around Wo Hing has been transformed. On the country road here, dozens of sprawling factories making furniture and pots and pans swallow space next to chicken farms and lumber yards. Wo Hing, on the other hand, has largely remained the same since it was built in 1902. The buildings aligned almost perfectly perpendicular to one another are separated by dirt path alleyways roamed by packs of ragged dogs.
Against the front wall of each home's living room are tall red- and gold-colored shrines on wooden platforms. It's a prime location where Americans might elect to place their flat-screen TVs, but for the villagers, it's where you honor your ancestors.
Paying respects to the place where past generations were born and spirits are still believed to be is what compels Arcadia resident William Wong to return to Wo Hing every other year.
Wong was 14 when he left Taishan in 1947. He now heads the region's overseas association in L.A.'s Chinatown. When the group formed decades ago, there were 2,000 members. Today, there are half that many.
"The younger guys don't join, and we keep losing the senior members," said Wong, 74, a retired Los Angeles County engineer who carries packets of red envelopes stuffed with $10 bills to give to villagers when he visits. "We're trying to bring some college and high school students out there this summer to show them their roots."
Wong returned to Wo Hing for the first time in 1994. The home he was raised in had partially collapsed. For $10,000, he had it rebuilt. It's now the only modern structure here, covered in white and green tiles and boasting a stainless-steel front door.
NOT everyone feels the tug. Ben Wong's parents grew up in the village, but he's only been there once for a brief visit in 1980. The former West Covina councilman, who is not related to William Wong, said he and his children were too immersed in their lives in America to contribute the way his parents did.
"The next generation came along and we didn't find ourselves in that same position as our parents," said Ben Wong, 56. "I got married and had kids and a career. There's still some connection, but it's always difficult for me. I never found time to bring my kids out there, and I regret that to an extent."
The villagers who remain in Wo Hing say they don't have close enough relatives in the United States who can sponsor them. Otherwise, many say, they'd be gone by now.
Some, like 88-year-old Wong Kong Chuan, had their chance to leave, but misfortune got in the way.
"I've been once," he said, explaining that he tried to go to the U.S. to meet relatives in Stockton.
"I tried, but they turned me away," he said of the border guards.
That was 1931. He had journeyed with his uncle, who made it through. That uncle would start a family in the U.S. Pictures of his children standing in front of Griffith Observatory hang on Wong's wall.
"He used to send me $200," he said, losing his breath from the effort of standing and talking. The uncle is dead now, and Wong is still here in Los Angeles village.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-taishan21may21,1,4560222.story
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Some Had Made Their Marks, and Many Others Were Just Beginning
Some Had Made Their Marks, and Many Others Were Just Beginning
Published: April 18, 2007
Remembering some of the students and faculty members killed in the Virginia Tech shootings, in these biographical sketches.
Henry Lee, 20
A freshman majoring in computer engineering, he was in elementary school and unable to speak English when his family emigrated from China. When he became an American citizen in 1999, he changed his name from Henh Ly. That same year he graduated from William Fleming High School in Roanoke, Va., and was salutatorian of his class with a 4.47 grade point average. He worked part time at Sears in high school and was honored for his scholastic achievements by the local Burger King, which gave his class vouchers for free Whoppers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18portraits.html?pagewanted=2
Published: April 18, 2007
Remembering some of the students and faculty members killed in the Virginia Tech shootings, in these biographical sketches.
Henry Lee, 20
A freshman majoring in computer engineering, he was in elementary school and unable to speak English when his family emigrated from China. When he became an American citizen in 1999, he changed his name from Henh Ly. That same year he graduated from William Fleming High School in Roanoke, Va., and was salutatorian of his class with a 4.47 grade point average. He worked part time at Sears in high school and was honored for his scholastic achievements by the local Burger King, which gave his class vouchers for free Whoppers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/us/18portraits.html?pagewanted=2
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Ethnic changes in store for Chino Hills
Ethnic changes in store for Chino Hills
Some residents protest, in vain, an Asian market in the upscale community. Others say it will serve their needs.
By Sara Lin, Times Staff Writer
April 12, 2007
An hour before Sunday services at a Lutheran church in Chino Hills, the Rev. Andy Wu joined his congregants in front of plates piled high with boiled Napa cabbage, shiitake mushrooms, stir fried tofu and rice.
Since Wu became an associate pastor in 2002, attendance at lunch and his worship services in Mandarin Chinese have doubled. So has Chino Hills' Asian population, which now makes up about 40% of city residents.
"Five years ago, if I walked into a Vons market and saw an Asian face, I would get very excited," Wu said. "Now, every day we see Asian faces."
But the demographic shift has proved unsettling for some in this upscale San Bernardino County town, and that tension surfaced when a major Asian grocery chain, 99 Ranch Market, announced plans for a Chino Hills store.
The Chino Hills City Council heard an outcry from a small group of residents, including one who wrote that he didn't want to see "little Chinatowns all over the Hills" filled with Asian signs he can't read.
The skirmish mirrors clashes in the San Gabriel Valley in the 1980s when Asian immigrants moved into the traditionally white and Latino suburbs. When a wave of Asian businesses followed, city officials in Monterey Park tried unsuccessfully to pass English-only ordinances, arguing that Chinese-language business signs would confuse firefighters and emergency workers.
Larry Blugrind of Chino Hills told the City Council in a letter that the store would "result in a run-down center that is the equivalent of a Chinese Pic 'N' Save less than a mile from the kind of high-quality shops our city has been trying to attract to this area."
Reached by telephone, Blugrind explained that he enjoyed having a diverse community — his daughter-in-law is Japanese.
"My worry is that 99 Ranch could be a steppingstone for it to become all Asian," he said. "I don't want another Hacienda Heights."
In Chino Hills, the City Council has no say in whether Tawa Supermarkets Inc. can open a 99 Ranch Market. The store is moving into a space formerly occupied by a Ralphs supermarket. It's a simple case of one grocery store taking over for another, said Mayor Gwenn Norton-Perry.
"It's an approved use, and we as a city have no purview over this. That's the bottom line," Norton-Perry said.
But that hasn't stopped angry residents from sounding off to the City Council.
The market's owners downplayed the controversy.
"We don't want to focus on that part," said Jennifer Tsao, a spokeswoman for Tawa, which operates 22 stores throughout California. Inside the store, Tsao said customers could expect clean aisles, signs in English and Chinese, as well as bilingual employees.
The 99 Ranch Market in Chino Hills may have struck a chord with residents because it "makes the Asian American community very visible and displaces businesses that people were comfortable with, in this case a Ralphs," said Linda Vo, an Asian American studies professor at UC Irvine.
From 2000 to 2005, the city of 81,000 saw its Asian population jump from 22% to 39%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's most recent survey. Of those, 10,316 were Filipino and 7,752 were Chinese. Asian Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese and Japanese constitute most of the remaining Asian Americans.
The Asian influx has already had an effect on some public services: The Chino Hills library stocks books written in Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
Similarly, in Orange County, nearly one-third of Irvine residents are Asian Americans. But Irvine's transition was a slower one, with many immigrants moving into newly built neighborhoods, Vo said. There was some mild resentment from the community about the changing demographics but nothing overt, she said.
At the Mediterranean-style plaza in Chino Hills where workers are readying the 99 Ranch Market for a summer opening, a handful of the plaza's 20 shops already seem to reflect the city's changing face.
There's a karate studio, a Chinese buffet and Thai restaurants.
Every Tuesday, restaurant owner Chad Chantaracharat invites Thai monks wearing saffron robes to lunch at his Thai Original BBQ Restaurant. The monks live at a Buddhist temple a few miles away.
Chantaracharat said he had mixed feelings about the new market. The store could attract more business to his restaurant, but he wasn't sure if the market planned to have a small cafe inside serving cheaper meals.
He sympathized with some residents' concerns, saying he has noticed that 99 Ranch Markets in some areas are not that well kept, but said that once people saw the spread of Asian vegetables and fresh seafood — often still swimming in tanks until a customer orders it killed — they'd like the market.
"I think people are going to dig it," he said. "It's something new, and everyone here likes to be trendy."
At Loving Savior of the Hills Lutheran Church, Chinese congregants mostly welcomed the market, saying its unconventional wares would be a boon to the community. The market could also become a much-needed hub for older Asians to meet friends, chat and sip tea.
"I think the market is absolutely a good thing. We've been waiting a long time for this," said Cindy Fu, 40, who recently moved from Chino Hills to Chino. "Every culture has businesses; some are super clean, and some are not. But you can't use just one to judge an entire culture. I think this could be a good opportunity for us to earn a good reputation."
Still, others were afraid that the market could give well-heeled residents of this semirural community at the westernmost edge of San Bernardino County the wrong impression about Asians.
"We've tried very hard to build up ourselves and build up our image to Caucasian people here. I hope 99 Ranch will hold up to that high standard," said Wu.
The new grocery store wasn't the first controversy to arise from the changing faces in Chino Hills neighborhoods.
Three years ago, Hindu leaders proposed a grand temple on former farmland, in part to serve the 500 Indian families there.
But the plans drew protests from some residents who contended the project would turn Chino Hills into a "Third World city" and a haven for terrorists.
After a heated public hearing, the temple's supporters won approval to build, but it ultimately did not win permission to construct the temple's spires that exceeded the city's 43-foot height limit.
City leaders say the community isn't in danger of losing its rural feel: The Sheriff's Department station is surrounded by white post fencing and horse pastures. Forty percent of Chino Hills' 46 square miles is dedicated to open space, Norton-Perry said.
The 99 Ranch Market, as any other grocer, will undergo regular inspections by the county Health Department.
As for the sign, "We can tell them we prefer signs to be in English only, but we can't require it," Norton-Perry said.
Still, some say the spat is much ado about nothing.
"Last I remember, the words '99 Ranch' were in English," said Don Nakanishi, director of UCLA's Asian American Studies Center. "You have El Pollo Loco," he said, referring to the popular Mexican restaurant chain. "Nobody's telling them to translate that."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-chinohills12apr12,0,7537913.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Some residents protest, in vain, an Asian market in the upscale community. Others say it will serve their needs.
By Sara Lin, Times Staff Writer
April 12, 2007
An hour before Sunday services at a Lutheran church in Chino Hills, the Rev. Andy Wu joined his congregants in front of plates piled high with boiled Napa cabbage, shiitake mushrooms, stir fried tofu and rice.
Since Wu became an associate pastor in 2002, attendance at lunch and his worship services in Mandarin Chinese have doubled. So has Chino Hills' Asian population, which now makes up about 40% of city residents.
"Five years ago, if I walked into a Vons market and saw an Asian face, I would get very excited," Wu said. "Now, every day we see Asian faces."
But the demographic shift has proved unsettling for some in this upscale San Bernardino County town, and that tension surfaced when a major Asian grocery chain, 99 Ranch Market, announced plans for a Chino Hills store.
The Chino Hills City Council heard an outcry from a small group of residents, including one who wrote that he didn't want to see "little Chinatowns all over the Hills" filled with Asian signs he can't read.
The skirmish mirrors clashes in the San Gabriel Valley in the 1980s when Asian immigrants moved into the traditionally white and Latino suburbs. When a wave of Asian businesses followed, city officials in Monterey Park tried unsuccessfully to pass English-only ordinances, arguing that Chinese-language business signs would confuse firefighters and emergency workers.
Larry Blugrind of Chino Hills told the City Council in a letter that the store would "result in a run-down center that is the equivalent of a Chinese Pic 'N' Save less than a mile from the kind of high-quality shops our city has been trying to attract to this area."
Reached by telephone, Blugrind explained that he enjoyed having a diverse community — his daughter-in-law is Japanese.
"My worry is that 99 Ranch could be a steppingstone for it to become all Asian," he said. "I don't want another Hacienda Heights."
In Chino Hills, the City Council has no say in whether Tawa Supermarkets Inc. can open a 99 Ranch Market. The store is moving into a space formerly occupied by a Ralphs supermarket. It's a simple case of one grocery store taking over for another, said Mayor Gwenn Norton-Perry.
"It's an approved use, and we as a city have no purview over this. That's the bottom line," Norton-Perry said.
But that hasn't stopped angry residents from sounding off to the City Council.
The market's owners downplayed the controversy.
"We don't want to focus on that part," said Jennifer Tsao, a spokeswoman for Tawa, which operates 22 stores throughout California. Inside the store, Tsao said customers could expect clean aisles, signs in English and Chinese, as well as bilingual employees.
The 99 Ranch Market in Chino Hills may have struck a chord with residents because it "makes the Asian American community very visible and displaces businesses that people were comfortable with, in this case a Ralphs," said Linda Vo, an Asian American studies professor at UC Irvine.
From 2000 to 2005, the city of 81,000 saw its Asian population jump from 22% to 39%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's most recent survey. Of those, 10,316 were Filipino and 7,752 were Chinese. Asian Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese and Japanese constitute most of the remaining Asian Americans.
The Asian influx has already had an effect on some public services: The Chino Hills library stocks books written in Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
Similarly, in Orange County, nearly one-third of Irvine residents are Asian Americans. But Irvine's transition was a slower one, with many immigrants moving into newly built neighborhoods, Vo said. There was some mild resentment from the community about the changing demographics but nothing overt, she said.
At the Mediterranean-style plaza in Chino Hills where workers are readying the 99 Ranch Market for a summer opening, a handful of the plaza's 20 shops already seem to reflect the city's changing face.
There's a karate studio, a Chinese buffet and Thai restaurants.
Every Tuesday, restaurant owner Chad Chantaracharat invites Thai monks wearing saffron robes to lunch at his Thai Original BBQ Restaurant. The monks live at a Buddhist temple a few miles away.
Chantaracharat said he had mixed feelings about the new market. The store could attract more business to his restaurant, but he wasn't sure if the market planned to have a small cafe inside serving cheaper meals.
He sympathized with some residents' concerns, saying he has noticed that 99 Ranch Markets in some areas are not that well kept, but said that once people saw the spread of Asian vegetables and fresh seafood — often still swimming in tanks until a customer orders it killed — they'd like the market.
"I think people are going to dig it," he said. "It's something new, and everyone here likes to be trendy."
At Loving Savior of the Hills Lutheran Church, Chinese congregants mostly welcomed the market, saying its unconventional wares would be a boon to the community. The market could also become a much-needed hub for older Asians to meet friends, chat and sip tea.
"I think the market is absolutely a good thing. We've been waiting a long time for this," said Cindy Fu, 40, who recently moved from Chino Hills to Chino. "Every culture has businesses; some are super clean, and some are not. But you can't use just one to judge an entire culture. I think this could be a good opportunity for us to earn a good reputation."
Still, others were afraid that the market could give well-heeled residents of this semirural community at the westernmost edge of San Bernardino County the wrong impression about Asians.
"We've tried very hard to build up ourselves and build up our image to Caucasian people here. I hope 99 Ranch will hold up to that high standard," said Wu.
The new grocery store wasn't the first controversy to arise from the changing faces in Chino Hills neighborhoods.
Three years ago, Hindu leaders proposed a grand temple on former farmland, in part to serve the 500 Indian families there.
But the plans drew protests from some residents who contended the project would turn Chino Hills into a "Third World city" and a haven for terrorists.
After a heated public hearing, the temple's supporters won approval to build, but it ultimately did not win permission to construct the temple's spires that exceeded the city's 43-foot height limit.
City leaders say the community isn't in danger of losing its rural feel: The Sheriff's Department station is surrounded by white post fencing and horse pastures. Forty percent of Chino Hills' 46 square miles is dedicated to open space, Norton-Perry said.
The 99 Ranch Market, as any other grocer, will undergo regular inspections by the county Health Department.
As for the sign, "We can tell them we prefer signs to be in English only, but we can't require it," Norton-Perry said.
Still, some say the spat is much ado about nothing.
"Last I remember, the words '99 Ranch' were in English," said Don Nakanishi, director of UCLA's Asian American Studies Center. "You have El Pollo Loco," he said, referring to the popular Mexican restaurant chain. "Nobody's telling them to translate that."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-chinohills12apr12,0,7537913.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Monday, April 2, 2007
Diversity program mostly benefits Asians
Diversity program mostly benefits Asians
Beverly Hills High looks to L.A. Unified to increase minority enrollment but can't ask applicants about race or ethnicity.
By Joel Rubin, Times Staff Writer
April 2, 2007
In 1969, when nearly every student at Beverly Hills High School was white, school officials went looking for some help diversifying the campus. They found it in the polyglot Los Angeles school system that surrounds the tony, iconic city.
Under a system of "diversity permits," the high school began enrolling scores of minority students from Los Angeles each year. For decades, the permit program aimed to bring in a deliberate mix of black, Latino and Asian students from outside the city limits.
Today, however, the vast majority of the students enrolled with diversity permits at Beverly Hills High are high-performing Asian students.
The dramatic shift stems from California's stringent anti-affirmative action law, approved by voters in 1996. Concerned with running afoul of the sweeping ban, Beverly Hills school officials have followed what amounts to a "don't ask, don't tell" policy on the diversity permits. Students who apply are not allowed to identify their race or ethnicity.
The program has become as competitive as the Ivy League, with about 8% of the students who applied last year being accepted. Critics say the program has shifted by default from a program aimed at increasing racial and ethnic diversity to one that simply brings smart, well-rounded students into the district.
"We were looking to expand diversity but didn't have any racial information," said Dan Stepenosky, the former principal at Beverly Hills High. "We were operating blind, to be honest."
Not only does the high number of Asian students raise questions about the purpose of the program, but it also illustrates the inability of the Los Angeles Unified School District to keep its high-performing students in its schools.
The permit program offers another option, along with private schools or even moving outside the district, for parents dissatisfied with the academics and concerned about safety on L.A. Unified campuses.
"Why wouldn't I take advantage of this opportunity?" said Teresa Roth, whose two sons are half Asian and attend Beverly Hills High on diversity permits. "In LAUSD, they don't care if your kid is gifted, if he plays sports, if he is well-rounded. They couldn't have cared less. I felt quite let down."
Roth, who lives in Westwood, said she started looking for a way out of the L.A. school system after applying unsuccessfully to enroll her older son, David, in one of the district's selective magnet high schools. Sending her sons to a large, traditional Los Angeles Unified high school, she said, was not an option she was willing to consider.
The Beverly Hills High diversity permits, Roth said, offered a free, quality education on a safe campus. Several Asian students who attend Beverly Hills High on the permits gave similar reasons.
In California, students cannot enroll in schools outside their districts without special permits.
Of the 159 Los Angeles Unified students who attend Beverly Hills High on diversity permits, 108 — more than two out of three — are Asian, according to L.A. Unified statistics. Only 16 of the students are Latino and 19 are black.
Those numbers do nothing to balance diversity at Beverly Hills High, where — excluding those with permits — minority students are also mostly Asian.
About 17% of the 2,362 students at the school are of Asian extraction, about 4% are Latino and about 5% are African American. Nearly 70% of the students are white, a category that includes 450 students of Persian descent.
The disproportionate number of Asians who receive the permits also stands in stark contrast to the racial breakdown of the 12 L.A. Unified middle schools that participate in the permit program. More than half of the students at those schools are Latino, one-quarter are African American and fewer than 8% are Asian.
Beverly Hills Unified School District Supt. Kari McVeigh acknowledged that the numbers are skewed, but she defended the permits. The Los Angeles students, she said, bring an element of diversity to the sheltered, upscale world of Beverly Hills regardless of their race.
"This is very much a small town surrounded by a large city, and kids here experience life very much through the lens of a small town," she said. "Any time you can … have different kids who come together from different experiences, it's a good idea. The permit program allows us to do that."
She also conceded that money is one of the motivating factors for keeping the program alive.
Because the amount of public funds a school receives is based on the number of students enrolled, Beverly Hills High uses the diversity permits — and other types of permits — to fill empty seats and maximize funding. This year, the district will receive nearly $1 million for enrolling the diversity-permit students.
"Taking in nonresident students is always an issue for some people," McVeigh said. "But it's a crucial source of income for us. It helps us provide the types of programs we are known for."
The influx of Asian students apparently began in 2000, when the permit program came under scrutiny. The program's admissions policy, district lawyers advised the Beverly Hills school board, violated the state law that bars public institutions from considering race in admissions.
Board members moved to do away with the program altogether but backed down in the face of well-organized protests by parents. To avoid possible lawsuits, however, the board decided that a student's race or ethnicity could no longer be considered when awarding permits. Instead, students were chosen based on an application, which included grades, test scores, essays and extracurricular activities.
Neither school district could provide ethnic or racial breakdowns of the students who attended Beverly Hills High before the changes in the program went into effect. But parents, former students and permit rosters indicate that it was a more diverse program then.
Most of the students who receive the permits today are Asians enrolled in gifted programs at two Los Angeles middle schools, John Burroughs and Palms, L.A. Unified figures show.
"Of course it's Asian students" who receive most of the permits, said Robin Day, assistant principal at Palms. "They are the students who are most driven and have the highest grades.
"Their parents are very on top of" the application process too, Day said. "It's a chance at Beverly Hills, and that's attractive to many people."
Indeed, Beverly Hills High — with its smaller class sizes, better resources, impressive test scores and higher number of Advance Placement and arts courses — outshines most traditional Los Angeles Unified high schools.
Had they remained in L.A. Unified, for example, many of the permit students would have been slated to attend Los Angeles High School — a struggling, 4,300-student campus that is nearly 79% Latino and 8% Asian.
The school has been on a federal government watch list for poor student performance for several years, and more than two-thirds of students last year tested "below basic" or "far below basic" on the state's standardized English and math exams.
"Because all the discussion is on the kids who are failing, there is no equal effort to search for and serve the most talented in the district and provide them with a rigorous education," said Los Angeles school board member David Tokofsky.
Board President Marlene Canter, who largely represents schools on the Westside, agreed. She said L.A. Unified needs to be more responsive to parents who have the option to leave the district. The district should double its number of selective, specialty magnet schools and allow parents a greater say in reforms to their middle and high schools, she said.
"Our public education system on the Westside is going to die if we don't nurture it," she said. "Parents want to know that they will have a program that will be exciting for their kids…. Right now, there is the perception that the grass is greener elsewhere."
Canter added that she was very concerned when she learned about the diversity permit program and questioned whether the district should continue to cooperate with Beverly Hills High.
Proponents of the permits say that scrapping the program would be a loss but that changes are needed.
Melinda Weathersby was in the first group of students in 1969 who received the permits. In 2000, with two of her children enrolled with permits, she led the fight to save the program when the school board tried to cut it.
Now, Weathersby, who is black, believes Beverly Hills High officials need to recruit Latino and black students more aggressively. She also wants the school district to select a few students from each of the participating Los Angeles middle schools in an effort to enroll a more diverse group.
"You have 12 schools, and you can't find one or two students at each who qualify?" she said. "It is called equity."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-permit2apr02,1,1992980,full.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california&ctrack=3&cset=true
Beverly Hills High looks to L.A. Unified to increase minority enrollment but can't ask applicants about race or ethnicity.
By Joel Rubin, Times Staff Writer
April 2, 2007
In 1969, when nearly every student at Beverly Hills High School was white, school officials went looking for some help diversifying the campus. They found it in the polyglot Los Angeles school system that surrounds the tony, iconic city.
Under a system of "diversity permits," the high school began enrolling scores of minority students from Los Angeles each year. For decades, the permit program aimed to bring in a deliberate mix of black, Latino and Asian students from outside the city limits.
Today, however, the vast majority of the students enrolled with diversity permits at Beverly Hills High are high-performing Asian students.
The dramatic shift stems from California's stringent anti-affirmative action law, approved by voters in 1996. Concerned with running afoul of the sweeping ban, Beverly Hills school officials have followed what amounts to a "don't ask, don't tell" policy on the diversity permits. Students who apply are not allowed to identify their race or ethnicity.
The program has become as competitive as the Ivy League, with about 8% of the students who applied last year being accepted. Critics say the program has shifted by default from a program aimed at increasing racial and ethnic diversity to one that simply brings smart, well-rounded students into the district.
"We were looking to expand diversity but didn't have any racial information," said Dan Stepenosky, the former principal at Beverly Hills High. "We were operating blind, to be honest."
Not only does the high number of Asian students raise questions about the purpose of the program, but it also illustrates the inability of the Los Angeles Unified School District to keep its high-performing students in its schools.
The permit program offers another option, along with private schools or even moving outside the district, for parents dissatisfied with the academics and concerned about safety on L.A. Unified campuses.
"Why wouldn't I take advantage of this opportunity?" said Teresa Roth, whose two sons are half Asian and attend Beverly Hills High on diversity permits. "In LAUSD, they don't care if your kid is gifted, if he plays sports, if he is well-rounded. They couldn't have cared less. I felt quite let down."
Roth, who lives in Westwood, said she started looking for a way out of the L.A. school system after applying unsuccessfully to enroll her older son, David, in one of the district's selective magnet high schools. Sending her sons to a large, traditional Los Angeles Unified high school, she said, was not an option she was willing to consider.
The Beverly Hills High diversity permits, Roth said, offered a free, quality education on a safe campus. Several Asian students who attend Beverly Hills High on the permits gave similar reasons.
In California, students cannot enroll in schools outside their districts without special permits.
Of the 159 Los Angeles Unified students who attend Beverly Hills High on diversity permits, 108 — more than two out of three — are Asian, according to L.A. Unified statistics. Only 16 of the students are Latino and 19 are black.
Those numbers do nothing to balance diversity at Beverly Hills High, where — excluding those with permits — minority students are also mostly Asian.
About 17% of the 2,362 students at the school are of Asian extraction, about 4% are Latino and about 5% are African American. Nearly 70% of the students are white, a category that includes 450 students of Persian descent.
The disproportionate number of Asians who receive the permits also stands in stark contrast to the racial breakdown of the 12 L.A. Unified middle schools that participate in the permit program. More than half of the students at those schools are Latino, one-quarter are African American and fewer than 8% are Asian.
Beverly Hills Unified School District Supt. Kari McVeigh acknowledged that the numbers are skewed, but she defended the permits. The Los Angeles students, she said, bring an element of diversity to the sheltered, upscale world of Beverly Hills regardless of their race.
"This is very much a small town surrounded by a large city, and kids here experience life very much through the lens of a small town," she said. "Any time you can … have different kids who come together from different experiences, it's a good idea. The permit program allows us to do that."
She also conceded that money is one of the motivating factors for keeping the program alive.
Because the amount of public funds a school receives is based on the number of students enrolled, Beverly Hills High uses the diversity permits — and other types of permits — to fill empty seats and maximize funding. This year, the district will receive nearly $1 million for enrolling the diversity-permit students.
"Taking in nonresident students is always an issue for some people," McVeigh said. "But it's a crucial source of income for us. It helps us provide the types of programs we are known for."
The influx of Asian students apparently began in 2000, when the permit program came under scrutiny. The program's admissions policy, district lawyers advised the Beverly Hills school board, violated the state law that bars public institutions from considering race in admissions.
Board members moved to do away with the program altogether but backed down in the face of well-organized protests by parents. To avoid possible lawsuits, however, the board decided that a student's race or ethnicity could no longer be considered when awarding permits. Instead, students were chosen based on an application, which included grades, test scores, essays and extracurricular activities.
Neither school district could provide ethnic or racial breakdowns of the students who attended Beverly Hills High before the changes in the program went into effect. But parents, former students and permit rosters indicate that it was a more diverse program then.
Most of the students who receive the permits today are Asians enrolled in gifted programs at two Los Angeles middle schools, John Burroughs and Palms, L.A. Unified figures show.
"Of course it's Asian students" who receive most of the permits, said Robin Day, assistant principal at Palms. "They are the students who are most driven and have the highest grades.
"Their parents are very on top of" the application process too, Day said. "It's a chance at Beverly Hills, and that's attractive to many people."
Indeed, Beverly Hills High — with its smaller class sizes, better resources, impressive test scores and higher number of Advance Placement and arts courses — outshines most traditional Los Angeles Unified high schools.
Had they remained in L.A. Unified, for example, many of the permit students would have been slated to attend Los Angeles High School — a struggling, 4,300-student campus that is nearly 79% Latino and 8% Asian.
The school has been on a federal government watch list for poor student performance for several years, and more than two-thirds of students last year tested "below basic" or "far below basic" on the state's standardized English and math exams.
"Because all the discussion is on the kids who are failing, there is no equal effort to search for and serve the most talented in the district and provide them with a rigorous education," said Los Angeles school board member David Tokofsky.
Board President Marlene Canter, who largely represents schools on the Westside, agreed. She said L.A. Unified needs to be more responsive to parents who have the option to leave the district. The district should double its number of selective, specialty magnet schools and allow parents a greater say in reforms to their middle and high schools, she said.
"Our public education system on the Westside is going to die if we don't nurture it," she said. "Parents want to know that they will have a program that will be exciting for their kids…. Right now, there is the perception that the grass is greener elsewhere."
Canter added that she was very concerned when she learned about the diversity permit program and questioned whether the district should continue to cooperate with Beverly Hills High.
Proponents of the permits say that scrapping the program would be a loss but that changes are needed.
Melinda Weathersby was in the first group of students in 1969 who received the permits. In 2000, with two of her children enrolled with permits, she led the fight to save the program when the school board tried to cut it.
Now, Weathersby, who is black, believes Beverly Hills High officials need to recruit Latino and black students more aggressively. She also wants the school district to select a few students from each of the participating Los Angeles middle schools in an effort to enroll a more diverse group.
"You have 12 schools, and you can't find one or two students at each who qualify?" she said. "It is called equity."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-permit2apr02,1,1992980,full.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california&ctrack=3&cset=true
Thursday, March 15, 2007
More U.S. schools offering Chinese language programs
More U.S. schools offering Chinese language programs
By Adam Gorlick, The Associated Press
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Article Launched:03/14/2007 12:00:00 AM PDT
EASTHAMPTON, Mass. - In Alaska, students are calling their teacher "lao shi." In Illinois, they're learning that one plus one equals "er." And in western Massachusetts, kindergarten students who can sing their ABCs will soon start honing Mandarin accents.
As China's economic power grows, Chinese is becoming the new language of the future.
At least 27 states offer Chinese language classes in either elementary, middle or high schools. And at least 12 public and private schools across the country teach most subjects in Mandarin Chinese, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington.
"It's about jobs and a world economy," said Richard Alcorn, who with his wife won state approval last month for the first Chinese immersion charter school in Massachusetts.
"There are unbelievable opportunities to do business in China, so there's a need for Americans to learn the language so we're not left out."
Alcorn runs a business importing English versions of Chinese books. He is still looking for a location for the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion School, which is scheduled to open in the fall with a 75 percent of the curriculum to be taught in Chinese.
Some of the push for Chinese instruction is coming from families who want their children to learn the language of their heritage.
"But the major force behind it is coming from parents who don't speak Chinese and want their children to be exposed to it," said Zhining Chin, a coordinator at the Eisenhower Elementary School, a public Chinese immersion school set to open in September in Hopkins, Minn. "They recognize the importance of China as a world power."
Shuhan Wang, executive director of Chinese language initiatives for the New York-based Asia Society, said the surge in Chinese language classes started around 2003.
"Anyone who reads the newspaper realizes that you can't ignore Asia anymore," she said. "American education has always been Euro-centric, and now we're realizing how inadequate our perspective on Asia has been."
In the decade following the Cold War, Americans largely maintained their suspicions about the world's most populous country.
The federal government distributed about $9 million last year to schools to support efforts to teach Chinese and other "critical languages" such as Arabic, Russian, Hindi and Farsi.
President Bush also announced a separate national security initiative to offer instruction in those languages, but Congress has yet to fund the $114 million program.
http://www.dailybulletin.com/search/ci_5430432
By Adam Gorlick, The Associated Press
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Article Launched:03/14/2007 12:00:00 AM PDT
EASTHAMPTON, Mass. - In Alaska, students are calling their teacher "lao shi." In Illinois, they're learning that one plus one equals "er." And in western Massachusetts, kindergarten students who can sing their ABCs will soon start honing Mandarin accents.
As China's economic power grows, Chinese is becoming the new language of the future.
At least 27 states offer Chinese language classes in either elementary, middle or high schools. And at least 12 public and private schools across the country teach most subjects in Mandarin Chinese, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington.
"It's about jobs and a world economy," said Richard Alcorn, who with his wife won state approval last month for the first Chinese immersion charter school in Massachusetts.
"There are unbelievable opportunities to do business in China, so there's a need for Americans to learn the language so we're not left out."
Alcorn runs a business importing English versions of Chinese books. He is still looking for a location for the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion School, which is scheduled to open in the fall with a 75 percent of the curriculum to be taught in Chinese.
Some of the push for Chinese instruction is coming from families who want their children to learn the language of their heritage.
"But the major force behind it is coming from parents who don't speak Chinese and want their children to be exposed to it," said Zhining Chin, a coordinator at the Eisenhower Elementary School, a public Chinese immersion school set to open in September in Hopkins, Minn. "They recognize the importance of China as a world power."
Shuhan Wang, executive director of Chinese language initiatives for the New York-based Asia Society, said the surge in Chinese language classes started around 2003.
"Anyone who reads the newspaper realizes that you can't ignore Asia anymore," she said. "American education has always been Euro-centric, and now we're realizing how inadequate our perspective on Asia has been."
In the decade following the Cold War, Americans largely maintained their suspicions about the world's most populous country.
The federal government distributed about $9 million last year to schools to support efforts to teach Chinese and other "critical languages" such as Arabic, Russian, Hindi and Farsi.
President Bush also announced a separate national security initiative to offer instruction in those languages, but Congress has yet to fund the $114 million program.
http://www.dailybulletin.com/search/ci_5430432
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
China's global go-getters
China's global go-getters
By Don Lee, Times Staff Writer
March 12, 2007
Erenhot, China — ARMORED dinosaurs once ruled this Gobi Desert area near the Mongolian border. Millions of years later, it became the domain of Genghis Khan and his clan. Now the land belongs to Jin Xiancong and the people from Wenzhou.
Jin ships 10,000 VCRs each month into neighboring Mongolia, runs his own logistics firm and builds office properties. He will soon be mining iron and other minerals in the region, where winter temperatures can drop to 40 degrees below zero. Summers are so hot and dry that people get nosebleeds.
Jin was just 23 when he arrived in 1993 with little more than two large sacks stuffed with hairpins and trinkets to peddle to Chinese, Mongolian and Russian tourists. "My parents told us, 'Go out and explore,' " says the brush-cut Jin, whose four brothers and sisters are scattered in Italy making and selling apparel. "The farther you can reach, the stronger you get."
Like modern-day Marco Polos, the people of Wenzhou are extending the frontiers of China's booming economy. Hundreds of entrepreneurs from the southeastern Chinese city 1,200 miles away have flocked here, opening retail stores and developing hotels and apartments, even a $1-million nightclub featuring topless Mongolian dancers. (The club is named SOS, presumably after the distress signal.)
Undaunted by treacherous terrain, harsh climate and hostile governments, Wenzhou natives are spreading Chinese commerce not only here but across the globe. They are mining molybdenum in North Korea, acquiring cow leather from African tribes, selling shoes in Iraq and exporting Arctic shrimp and turbot from Iceland.
Even after two decades in Reykjavik, Iceland, seafood trader Xiang Youyi, 45, still finds it tough to endure two months of near-total darkness every year. "This place isn't suitable for living," he says, only to add: "I have opportunities here."
Almost 2 million people from Wenzhou, a metropolitan area of 7.5 million about 250 miles south of Shanghai in Zhejiang province, have left their homes over the years in search of riches. The migration goes back at least a century, but accelerated with Communist China's opening up to the West nearly 30 years ago.
"Wherever there is business opportunity, there are Wenzhou people," says Zhong Pengrong, a prominent Chinese economist in Beijing. He calls them a people of "four thousand spirits" — they walk through a thousand rivers and mountains, speak a thousand words to promote their goods, dare to solve problems in a thousand ways and endure a thousand hardships.
"Unlike many other businesspeople in China who became rich overnight," Zhong says, "almost all the Wenzhou people built up their wealth from nothing and amassed their fortune through years of hardship."
NOW, nearly half a million of them are staking their claims in 70 foreign countries, including 100,000 in the United States, mostly New York, where they've opened dozens of supermarkets and dollar stores. They like New York City because they don't need a car to get around, says Lin Ter-Hsien, who started out with a tiny gift shop in Brooklyn, then imported gloves from South Korea and hats from India and now invests in Los Angeles real estate. Lin splits his time between Alhambra, New Jersey and Wenzhou.
In Tanzania, Hu Qiaoming keeps a loaded pistol near his bedside because robbery is rampant. Even with a stable of dogs, an electric fence around his compound and alarms that will bring police within minutes, the 52-year-old entrepreneur doesn't take chances. A couple of years ago, he says, robbers killed two guards protecting the house next door.
Since arriving in the East African nation in 1993, Hu and his wife have opened shoe plants there and in Kenya, Congo, Zambia and Malawi. He keeps shotguns in his factories too, although they can't protect him from the sub-Saharan heat and long rains, political turmoil and disease.
Hu's employees have been ravaged by malaria, and his wife, Xu Shuping, has a four-inch scar running down her left arm, a reminder of the tumble their car took as it was hurtling along rugged roads.
Still, the couple made $3 million in profit last year. They have homes in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Wenzhou and Diamond Bar. If he could do it over again, Hu says, he wouldn't change a thing. "Many of the Africans who used to be barefooted are now wearing my shoes," he says, speaking from Wenzhou, where he was visiting for the lunar New Year holiday.
Scholars attribute such entrepreneurial verve to geographic isolation. Wenzhou is hemmed in by jagged mountains on three sides and the East China Sea on the fourth. Lacking arable land, many villagers must travel to prosper.
Wenzhou traders have been at the forefront of Communist China's market-driven economic reforms — launching businesses, raising capital and making investments — but their tradition of private enterprise goes much further back. During the Southern Song Dynasty about 850 years ago, a school of thought known as Yongjia (the old name of Wenzhou) espoused that government should embrace commercial society to develop the nation.
The Yongjia school, led by scholar Ye Shi, was ridiculed by the dominant Confucian philosophers of the day, whose view of social rank had teachers and bureaucrats at the top and the merchant class at the bottom.
More recently, Wenzhou's spirit of capitalism might have been further nurtured by the spread of Christianity in the city in the same way the Protestant work ethic pushed America's economic development. In an officially atheist country, Wenzhou is home to more than 2,000 churches, a legacy of the Nanking Treaty of 1842, which required China to open up nearby Ningbo Port to missionaries.
"Their spirit of putting up with hardship is in harmony with the Protestant spirit," says Xie Jian, executive vice president of Wenzhou University's City College. He says the church's emphasis on mutual trust and aid also may have been a factor in Wenzhou's famed network of private lending.
The city is a hub of informal money channels. Many Wenzhou people bypass state-owned banks, preferring instead to borrow money from relatives, friends and business associates, even though interest rates are much higher.
The loans are typically sealed with handshakes, but Wenzhou people say defaults are very low because borrowers fear ostracism. Such deals have financed tens of thousands of factories in the city and surrounding areas that produce a good chunk of the world's shoes, buttons, eyeglass frames, razors and cigarette lighters.
But these low-value industries aren't enough to sustain several million residents, and many Wenzhou people would rather be their own bosses.
Wenzhou's streets are teeming with new cars, including scores of BMWs and Mercedeses. Rows of fancy villas are being built. But not all the streets are paved with gold. The city mostly looks like other mid-size Chinese cities, with their dusty air, grimy factories and slabs of dreary apartment buildings. Wenzhou's per-capita income of $3,000, about double the nationwide average, would be higher but many neighborhoods are left with mostly old and young people.
Outside their city, many Wenzhou businesspeople help one another. After peddling calendars in New York subway stations, Yu Xilong, 42, raised more than $20,000 by borrowing $500 each from fellow Wenzhou emigrants in town. With that, the middle-school graduate opened a fruit and vegetable stall in a large market on East Broadway.
That was 1993. Today, he owns his own big supermarket on East Broadway, as well as another in Flushing, a section of Queens where he and most Wenzhou natives in New York live.
"I never had to write down a single IOU," Yu says. "We Wenzhou people value credit more than our lives."
ABOUT 100,000 Wenzhou natives now live here in China's Inner Mongolia. Like others from their hometown, they shun politics but have taken pains to dispel the notion that they are carpetbaggers. Some have given up their Wenzhou hukou, or residence cards, and switched to those of their adopted homes.
Erenhot is on China's only railway route to Mongolia, but it wasn't until 1992 that authorities in Beijing allowed the town to operate as an open international hub. Then, only about 8,000 people lived in Erenhot.
The city's population now hovers around 100,000 — with 40,000 migrants coming in to work on construction sites and other jobs, many of them created by Wenzhou merchants.
Ying Hongju, 37, arrived here three years ago, after roaming China's rugged far western Xinjiang region and the northeast.
Ying left his village when he was 15, but all his travels didn't prepare him for Erenhot. In winter, powerful gusts of bai mao feng — literally "white hairy wind" — can blind drivers and knock their cars off roads. On summer evenings, he says, hot air seems to rise up from the ground.
"My lips and nose bled," he says, adding that there's nothing fun to do here. He winces when someone mentions SOS, the name of the Wenzhou bar with the Mongolian dancers. "I don't like it here," Ying says.
But he stays for business. Ying and two partners recently raised $15 million and, in five months, built the International Trade City mall, a block-long, three-story wholesale market that houses 527 tenants who sell silk fabrics, rabbit and fox furs and other commodities. The mall, festooned with red signs in Chinese and Russian, opened last summer and is fully occupied.
"Next year, I'm going to Russia and Mongolia for business," says Ying, whose two children live in Wenzhou with their grandparents while Ying's wife travels between two homes in Inner Mongolia.
For Jin Xiancong, his wife and their two children, Erenhot is home. Not that they've forgotten their first winter, when the couple huddled around a coal-burning stove in a 15-foot room where they lived. That was behind their counter, where they sold hairpins and ribbons for a dime each. Jin remembers his black mustache turning to ice outside, making him look like Santa Claus.
"I would be talking and my eyebrows would freeze," recalls his wife, Xu Xihong. "I just focused on making money."
They made money that winter of 1993. The town was growing and Wenzhou people were repairing shoes and selling watch batteries and items such as buttons, then lacking in this remote outpost.
"My friends said anything that's red and green would sell well," says Jin, sitting in his 40-room Golden Leaf Hotel.
Like most Wenzhou businesspeople, Jin does not want to disclose much about his company's sales and his personal wealth. But he and his wife own four apartments and several shops in Erenhot, and they pull in tens of thousands of dollars more through trading and investments.
On summer weekends, their children go horseback riding nearby in the Mongolian grasslands. Jin and his wife rarely take vacations, although once a year the entire family returns to Wenzhou. Jin couldn't recall exactly when he last saw his four siblings. The oldest left in 1992, paying $15,000 to a so-called snakehead to sneak him into Italy. Jin was the next to leave home. Then the others followed, all to Europe.
Jin says he isn't done roaming the Mongolian region. He wants to find oil and dig up iron ore.
On a recent frigid afternoon, Jin feasted on strips of beef and sheep stomach boiled in soup, then walked along Dinosaur Park, a large field with statues of the sauropods that trampled the area eons ago.
For now, Jin says, he is content to stay in Erenhot. But he sees himself eventually moving back to Wenzhou.
The air outside was below zero. He paused, then recited an old Chinese saying: "A fallen leaf will return to its roots."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
don.lee@latimes.com
*
Cao Jun in The Times' Shanghai Bureau contributed to this report.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nomads12mar12,1,7296495,full.story
By Don Lee, Times Staff Writer
March 12, 2007
Erenhot, China — ARMORED dinosaurs once ruled this Gobi Desert area near the Mongolian border. Millions of years later, it became the domain of Genghis Khan and his clan. Now the land belongs to Jin Xiancong and the people from Wenzhou.
Jin ships 10,000 VCRs each month into neighboring Mongolia, runs his own logistics firm and builds office properties. He will soon be mining iron and other minerals in the region, where winter temperatures can drop to 40 degrees below zero. Summers are so hot and dry that people get nosebleeds.
Jin was just 23 when he arrived in 1993 with little more than two large sacks stuffed with hairpins and trinkets to peddle to Chinese, Mongolian and Russian tourists. "My parents told us, 'Go out and explore,' " says the brush-cut Jin, whose four brothers and sisters are scattered in Italy making and selling apparel. "The farther you can reach, the stronger you get."
Like modern-day Marco Polos, the people of Wenzhou are extending the frontiers of China's booming economy. Hundreds of entrepreneurs from the southeastern Chinese city 1,200 miles away have flocked here, opening retail stores and developing hotels and apartments, even a $1-million nightclub featuring topless Mongolian dancers. (The club is named SOS, presumably after the distress signal.)
Undaunted by treacherous terrain, harsh climate and hostile governments, Wenzhou natives are spreading Chinese commerce not only here but across the globe. They are mining molybdenum in North Korea, acquiring cow leather from African tribes, selling shoes in Iraq and exporting Arctic shrimp and turbot from Iceland.
Even after two decades in Reykjavik, Iceland, seafood trader Xiang Youyi, 45, still finds it tough to endure two months of near-total darkness every year. "This place isn't suitable for living," he says, only to add: "I have opportunities here."
Almost 2 million people from Wenzhou, a metropolitan area of 7.5 million about 250 miles south of Shanghai in Zhejiang province, have left their homes over the years in search of riches. The migration goes back at least a century, but accelerated with Communist China's opening up to the West nearly 30 years ago.
"Wherever there is business opportunity, there are Wenzhou people," says Zhong Pengrong, a prominent Chinese economist in Beijing. He calls them a people of "four thousand spirits" — they walk through a thousand rivers and mountains, speak a thousand words to promote their goods, dare to solve problems in a thousand ways and endure a thousand hardships.
"Unlike many other businesspeople in China who became rich overnight," Zhong says, "almost all the Wenzhou people built up their wealth from nothing and amassed their fortune through years of hardship."
NOW, nearly half a million of them are staking their claims in 70 foreign countries, including 100,000 in the United States, mostly New York, where they've opened dozens of supermarkets and dollar stores. They like New York City because they don't need a car to get around, says Lin Ter-Hsien, who started out with a tiny gift shop in Brooklyn, then imported gloves from South Korea and hats from India and now invests in Los Angeles real estate. Lin splits his time between Alhambra, New Jersey and Wenzhou.
In Tanzania, Hu Qiaoming keeps a loaded pistol near his bedside because robbery is rampant. Even with a stable of dogs, an electric fence around his compound and alarms that will bring police within minutes, the 52-year-old entrepreneur doesn't take chances. A couple of years ago, he says, robbers killed two guards protecting the house next door.
Since arriving in the East African nation in 1993, Hu and his wife have opened shoe plants there and in Kenya, Congo, Zambia and Malawi. He keeps shotguns in his factories too, although they can't protect him from the sub-Saharan heat and long rains, political turmoil and disease.
Hu's employees have been ravaged by malaria, and his wife, Xu Shuping, has a four-inch scar running down her left arm, a reminder of the tumble their car took as it was hurtling along rugged roads.
Still, the couple made $3 million in profit last year. They have homes in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Wenzhou and Diamond Bar. If he could do it over again, Hu says, he wouldn't change a thing. "Many of the Africans who used to be barefooted are now wearing my shoes," he says, speaking from Wenzhou, where he was visiting for the lunar New Year holiday.
Scholars attribute such entrepreneurial verve to geographic isolation. Wenzhou is hemmed in by jagged mountains on three sides and the East China Sea on the fourth. Lacking arable land, many villagers must travel to prosper.
Wenzhou traders have been at the forefront of Communist China's market-driven economic reforms — launching businesses, raising capital and making investments — but their tradition of private enterprise goes much further back. During the Southern Song Dynasty about 850 years ago, a school of thought known as Yongjia (the old name of Wenzhou) espoused that government should embrace commercial society to develop the nation.
The Yongjia school, led by scholar Ye Shi, was ridiculed by the dominant Confucian philosophers of the day, whose view of social rank had teachers and bureaucrats at the top and the merchant class at the bottom.
More recently, Wenzhou's spirit of capitalism might have been further nurtured by the spread of Christianity in the city in the same way the Protestant work ethic pushed America's economic development. In an officially atheist country, Wenzhou is home to more than 2,000 churches, a legacy of the Nanking Treaty of 1842, which required China to open up nearby Ningbo Port to missionaries.
"Their spirit of putting up with hardship is in harmony with the Protestant spirit," says Xie Jian, executive vice president of Wenzhou University's City College. He says the church's emphasis on mutual trust and aid also may have been a factor in Wenzhou's famed network of private lending.
The city is a hub of informal money channels. Many Wenzhou people bypass state-owned banks, preferring instead to borrow money from relatives, friends and business associates, even though interest rates are much higher.
The loans are typically sealed with handshakes, but Wenzhou people say defaults are very low because borrowers fear ostracism. Such deals have financed tens of thousands of factories in the city and surrounding areas that produce a good chunk of the world's shoes, buttons, eyeglass frames, razors and cigarette lighters.
But these low-value industries aren't enough to sustain several million residents, and many Wenzhou people would rather be their own bosses.
Wenzhou's streets are teeming with new cars, including scores of BMWs and Mercedeses. Rows of fancy villas are being built. But not all the streets are paved with gold. The city mostly looks like other mid-size Chinese cities, with their dusty air, grimy factories and slabs of dreary apartment buildings. Wenzhou's per-capita income of $3,000, about double the nationwide average, would be higher but many neighborhoods are left with mostly old and young people.
Outside their city, many Wenzhou businesspeople help one another. After peddling calendars in New York subway stations, Yu Xilong, 42, raised more than $20,000 by borrowing $500 each from fellow Wenzhou emigrants in town. With that, the middle-school graduate opened a fruit and vegetable stall in a large market on East Broadway.
That was 1993. Today, he owns his own big supermarket on East Broadway, as well as another in Flushing, a section of Queens where he and most Wenzhou natives in New York live.
"I never had to write down a single IOU," Yu says. "We Wenzhou people value credit more than our lives."
ABOUT 100,000 Wenzhou natives now live here in China's Inner Mongolia. Like others from their hometown, they shun politics but have taken pains to dispel the notion that they are carpetbaggers. Some have given up their Wenzhou hukou, or residence cards, and switched to those of their adopted homes.
Erenhot is on China's only railway route to Mongolia, but it wasn't until 1992 that authorities in Beijing allowed the town to operate as an open international hub. Then, only about 8,000 people lived in Erenhot.
The city's population now hovers around 100,000 — with 40,000 migrants coming in to work on construction sites and other jobs, many of them created by Wenzhou merchants.
Ying Hongju, 37, arrived here three years ago, after roaming China's rugged far western Xinjiang region and the northeast.
Ying left his village when he was 15, but all his travels didn't prepare him for Erenhot. In winter, powerful gusts of bai mao feng — literally "white hairy wind" — can blind drivers and knock their cars off roads. On summer evenings, he says, hot air seems to rise up from the ground.
"My lips and nose bled," he says, adding that there's nothing fun to do here. He winces when someone mentions SOS, the name of the Wenzhou bar with the Mongolian dancers. "I don't like it here," Ying says.
But he stays for business. Ying and two partners recently raised $15 million and, in five months, built the International Trade City mall, a block-long, three-story wholesale market that houses 527 tenants who sell silk fabrics, rabbit and fox furs and other commodities. The mall, festooned with red signs in Chinese and Russian, opened last summer and is fully occupied.
"Next year, I'm going to Russia and Mongolia for business," says Ying, whose two children live in Wenzhou with their grandparents while Ying's wife travels between two homes in Inner Mongolia.
For Jin Xiancong, his wife and their two children, Erenhot is home. Not that they've forgotten their first winter, when the couple huddled around a coal-burning stove in a 15-foot room where they lived. That was behind their counter, where they sold hairpins and ribbons for a dime each. Jin remembers his black mustache turning to ice outside, making him look like Santa Claus.
"I would be talking and my eyebrows would freeze," recalls his wife, Xu Xihong. "I just focused on making money."
They made money that winter of 1993. The town was growing and Wenzhou people were repairing shoes and selling watch batteries and items such as buttons, then lacking in this remote outpost.
"My friends said anything that's red and green would sell well," says Jin, sitting in his 40-room Golden Leaf Hotel.
Like most Wenzhou businesspeople, Jin does not want to disclose much about his company's sales and his personal wealth. But he and his wife own four apartments and several shops in Erenhot, and they pull in tens of thousands of dollars more through trading and investments.
On summer weekends, their children go horseback riding nearby in the Mongolian grasslands. Jin and his wife rarely take vacations, although once a year the entire family returns to Wenzhou. Jin couldn't recall exactly when he last saw his four siblings. The oldest left in 1992, paying $15,000 to a so-called snakehead to sneak him into Italy. Jin was the next to leave home. Then the others followed, all to Europe.
Jin says he isn't done roaming the Mongolian region. He wants to find oil and dig up iron ore.
On a recent frigid afternoon, Jin feasted on strips of beef and sheep stomach boiled in soup, then walked along Dinosaur Park, a large field with statues of the sauropods that trampled the area eons ago.
For now, Jin says, he is content to stay in Erenhot. But he sees himself eventually moving back to Wenzhou.
The air outside was below zero. He paused, then recited an old Chinese saying: "A fallen leaf will return to its roots."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
don.lee@latimes.com
*
Cao Jun in The Times' Shanghai Bureau contributed to this report.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nomads12mar12,1,7296495,full.story
Asians Flex Muscles in California Politics
Asians Flex Muscles in California Politics
By CINDY CHANG
Published: February 27, 2007
Correction Appended
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 26 — When Leland Yee ran for the San Francisco school board in 1986, Asian-American elected officials in California were rare and misconceptions about them rampant. Mr. Yee, who immigrated from China at age 3 and has a doctorate in child psychology, recalled that some people at the time wondered if he knew how to speak English properly.
State Senator Leland Yee is among a growing number of Asian-American public officials in California. At a State of the State speech by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Lee spoke with Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas.
Mr. Yee won that election and went on to serve four years in the State Assembly before being elected in November to the State Senate. He is California’s first Asian-American senator in more than 30 years, and its first of Chinese descent.
California’s 4.4 million Asians constitute the state’s second-largest ethnic minority group (after Latinos) and the largest Asian population in the country, but they have been underrepresented in elected office. Now they are moving beyond fund-raising, where they have long been a force, to elect representatives of their own.
Last year for the first time, Asian candidates across the state were supported by a major political action committee, the Asian American Small Business P.A.C. In addition, the California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus, a coalition of Democratic legislators of Asian ancestry, helped organize crews of bilingual volunteers to knock on doors and make sure Asian voters made it to the polls.
There are now nine Asian-Americans in the State Legislature, compared with one 10 years ago. In November, a Chinese-American, John Chiang, was elected state controller. Four of the five members of the Board of Equalization, which administers the state’s tax policies, are Asian-American, including Mr. Chiang.
“If you look back a decade or two ago, there was a considerable amount of talk about Latinos being the sleeping giant in politics, that they’d reached a certain level of potentially having impact,” said Paul Ong, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written about Asians’ growing influence in the state. “Asians are at that point.”
If Asians can continue to build on their recent successes and muster voter turnout close to their share of the population, “they will literally be the balance of power in most elections,” said Garry South, a Democratic political consultant who informally advised several Asian-American candidates last fall.
The Census Bureau projects that the number of Asians statewide will nearly double in the next two decades. Of the state’s 2005 estimated population of 35 million, Latinos accounted for 36 percent, or about 12.5 million; Asians 12 percent, or 4.4 million; and blacks 6 percent, or 2.2 million.
Should the number of Asian-American elected officials continue to grow, the issues many of them have pursued — bilingual language assistance, equitable admissions standards at state universities and affordable health care — will become increasingly visible.
Despite efforts by political candidates and nonprofit groups, though, Asian immigrants are registered to vote at rates much lower than the general population. Only recently have Asian-Americans begun to develop the fund-raising and campaign operations that have helped blacks and Latinos solidify their bases.
According to a study by S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside, only 37 percent of Asian-Americans in California voted in the 2004 elections, compared with 68 percent of blacks and 73 percent of whites. Latino turnout, at 32 percent, was even lower.
The disparity can partly be explained by lower rates of citizenship: only 67 percent of Asians and 59 percent of Latinos living in California at the time were citizens. But even those who were citizens had much lower rates of voter registration than other ethnic groups.
“I don’t doubt that they’re doing better than they were before, but I don’t think that they’ve reached any sort of critical mass or threshold,” said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, a nonprofit that promotes civic participation among Latinos. “I don’t think they conceive of themselves yet as coherent and cohesive as one needs to.”
Still, progress on turnout and an increased willingness on the part of non-Asians to vote for Asian candidates helped spur the gains of the past decade, analysts say.
It took years, but the Asian-American political community has recovered from a series of demoralizing fund-raising scandals in the 1990s, including a controversial 1996 appearance at a Buddhist temple in the Los Angeles area by Vice President Al Gore.
Already, some non-Asian politicians are paying attention. The Democratic campaigns for governor of Gray Davis in 2002 and Steve Westly last year — both of which Mr. South helped to run — featured advertisements on Asian-language television stations and news conferences geared toward Asian media.
But there is still a long way to go, Asian politicians and political analysts agree, with much depending on the progress Asian-Americans make in strengthening the nascent organizations they have built to support candidates and get out the vote.
Though the number of Asian-American local and state officials is growing, there are only two Asian representatives from California in Congress, of seven Asian-American members in all.
“We’re still two to four election cycles from fulfilling expectations,” said Assemblyman Alberto Torrico, chairman of the California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus.
Correction: March 1, 2007
An article on Tuesday about the increase in the number of California office holders who are Asian-Americans misstated the number of Asian-Americans on the five-member Board of Equalization. There are four, not three.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/us/27asian.html?ex=1330232400&en=710baee89ee0a5c3&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
By CINDY CHANG
Published: February 27, 2007
Correction Appended
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 26 — When Leland Yee ran for the San Francisco school board in 1986, Asian-American elected officials in California were rare and misconceptions about them rampant. Mr. Yee, who immigrated from China at age 3 and has a doctorate in child psychology, recalled that some people at the time wondered if he knew how to speak English properly.
State Senator Leland Yee is among a growing number of Asian-American public officials in California. At a State of the State speech by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Lee spoke with Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas.
Mr. Yee won that election and went on to serve four years in the State Assembly before being elected in November to the State Senate. He is California’s first Asian-American senator in more than 30 years, and its first of Chinese descent.
California’s 4.4 million Asians constitute the state’s second-largest ethnic minority group (after Latinos) and the largest Asian population in the country, but they have been underrepresented in elected office. Now they are moving beyond fund-raising, where they have long been a force, to elect representatives of their own.
Last year for the first time, Asian candidates across the state were supported by a major political action committee, the Asian American Small Business P.A.C. In addition, the California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus, a coalition of Democratic legislators of Asian ancestry, helped organize crews of bilingual volunteers to knock on doors and make sure Asian voters made it to the polls.
There are now nine Asian-Americans in the State Legislature, compared with one 10 years ago. In November, a Chinese-American, John Chiang, was elected state controller. Four of the five members of the Board of Equalization, which administers the state’s tax policies, are Asian-American, including Mr. Chiang.
“If you look back a decade or two ago, there was a considerable amount of talk about Latinos being the sleeping giant in politics, that they’d reached a certain level of potentially having impact,” said Paul Ong, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written about Asians’ growing influence in the state. “Asians are at that point.”
If Asians can continue to build on their recent successes and muster voter turnout close to their share of the population, “they will literally be the balance of power in most elections,” said Garry South, a Democratic political consultant who informally advised several Asian-American candidates last fall.
The Census Bureau projects that the number of Asians statewide will nearly double in the next two decades. Of the state’s 2005 estimated population of 35 million, Latinos accounted for 36 percent, or about 12.5 million; Asians 12 percent, or 4.4 million; and blacks 6 percent, or 2.2 million.
Should the number of Asian-American elected officials continue to grow, the issues many of them have pursued — bilingual language assistance, equitable admissions standards at state universities and affordable health care — will become increasingly visible.
Despite efforts by political candidates and nonprofit groups, though, Asian immigrants are registered to vote at rates much lower than the general population. Only recently have Asian-Americans begun to develop the fund-raising and campaign operations that have helped blacks and Latinos solidify their bases.
According to a study by S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside, only 37 percent of Asian-Americans in California voted in the 2004 elections, compared with 68 percent of blacks and 73 percent of whites. Latino turnout, at 32 percent, was even lower.
The disparity can partly be explained by lower rates of citizenship: only 67 percent of Asians and 59 percent of Latinos living in California at the time were citizens. But even those who were citizens had much lower rates of voter registration than other ethnic groups.
“I don’t doubt that they’re doing better than they were before, but I don’t think that they’ve reached any sort of critical mass or threshold,” said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, a nonprofit that promotes civic participation among Latinos. “I don’t think they conceive of themselves yet as coherent and cohesive as one needs to.”
Still, progress on turnout and an increased willingness on the part of non-Asians to vote for Asian candidates helped spur the gains of the past decade, analysts say.
It took years, but the Asian-American political community has recovered from a series of demoralizing fund-raising scandals in the 1990s, including a controversial 1996 appearance at a Buddhist temple in the Los Angeles area by Vice President Al Gore.
Already, some non-Asian politicians are paying attention. The Democratic campaigns for governor of Gray Davis in 2002 and Steve Westly last year — both of which Mr. South helped to run — featured advertisements on Asian-language television stations and news conferences geared toward Asian media.
But there is still a long way to go, Asian politicians and political analysts agree, with much depending on the progress Asian-Americans make in strengthening the nascent organizations they have built to support candidates and get out the vote.
Though the number of Asian-American local and state officials is growing, there are only two Asian representatives from California in Congress, of seven Asian-American members in all.
“We’re still two to four election cycles from fulfilling expectations,” said Assemblyman Alberto Torrico, chairman of the California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus.
Correction: March 1, 2007
An article on Tuesday about the increase in the number of California office holders who are Asian-Americans misstated the number of Asian-Americans on the five-member Board of Equalization. There are four, not three.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/us/27asian.html?ex=1330232400&en=710baee89ee0a5c3&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Some in Chino Hills nervous about ethnic shift
Some in Chino Hills nervous about ethnic shift
10:00 PM PST on Tuesday, February 6, 2007
By DOUGLAS QUAN
The Press-Enterprise
The opening of a large Asian-oriented supermarket in Chino Hills is getting a mixed reception from residents, a possible sign of things to come as more companies clamor for the hearts -- and appetites -- of the Inland region's increasingly diverse population.
Tawa Supermarket Inc., an Asian grocery chain with 22 stores in California, is planning to open a 99 Ranch Market in a vacated Ralph's store in April or May.
Some Chino Hills residents said they worry the store's arrival could lead to a concentration of other Asian-oriented businesses and a proliferation of Asian-language signs and traffic similar to what exists in some Los Angeles County communities.
"It will turn into anther Rowland Heights," said Carolyn Matta, 67, referring to the unincorporated community 35 miles west of Riverside where the population is 55 percent Asian. "We're not going to be welcomed in our neighborhood."
Supporters said the store sells fresh seafood, produce and specialty items that can't be found elsewhere. The complaints smack of racism and ignorance, some of them said.
"Let us put our bigotry aside and welcome the Indians, Hindus, Asian, and other ethnicities into our neighborhoods," Michael Newton of Chino wrote in a letter to the Chino Hills Champion newspaper.
Alan Lee, Tawa's vice chairman, said that of the company's 22 stores throughout California, some attract up to 25,000 visitors a week, and they integrate well in the communities they serve.
"We are a full-service market" catering to Asians and non-Asians, Lee said.
Timothy Fong, a professor and director of Asian-American studies at Cal State Sacramento, said many of the complaints are similar to those heard during the '80s, when an influx of Asian-oriented businesses in Monterey Park, the first "suburban Chinatown," caused an uproar and the City Council attempted to pass English-only ordinances but failed.
"Monterey Park went through a lot of upheaval that a lot of people regret," Fong said.
Demographic Shift
The Tawa Supermarket chain's push into the Inland region was inevitable given the area's growing and affluent Asian population, retail experts and economists said.
While the overall Asian population remains small -- nearly 5 percent in Riverside County and almost 6 percent in San Bernardino County, according to the Census Bureau's 2005 American Community Survey -- some pockets have grown tremendously.
In Chino Hills, a former farming community now marked by new housing and shopping developments, low crime and lots of green space, the Asian population climbed from 22 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2005, Census figures show. The city cites a figure of 28 percent, using a different source.
The opening of the store "is a reflection of changing demographics," said Mayor Gwenn Norton-Perry, adding that she plans to shop at the new store.
Asian-Americans are drawn to the Inland region's new homes and good schools, said Edward Chang, a UCR professor of ethnic studies.
Tawa isn't the only big player in the Asian grocery industry pushing into the Inland region. The Hannam Chain, which operates five Market World stores in Southern California catering largely to a Korean clientele, hopes to open a sixth store in Rancho Cucamonga by summer, said Vice President Steve Kim.
That city's Asian population rose from 6 percent in 2000 to 8 percent in 2005.
Experts said they predict more of these types of stores to open in other Inland cities in coming years, including Corona, whose Asian population jumped from 8 percent to 11 percent from 2000 to 2005.
What they lack in numbers, they make up for in affluence, said Julia Huang, president of interTrend, a Long Beach marketing firm that helps companies target the Asian-American community.
"At the end of the day, it's the buying power," she said.
The 2005 census figures show that nationally Asian-Americans had a median household income of $61,094, higher than any other group.
Opposition
While some regard the eastward expansion of these supermarkets as Capitalism 101 -- go where the demand is -- others view their arrival as a threat.
"We have diversity in Chino Hills and I am HAPPY with the degree of diversity we now have in Chino Hills," Larry Blugrind wrote in a letter to the City Council. "In Rowland Heights, THERE IS NO DIVERSITY -- IT'S ALL ASIAN!!!"
Darrin Lee wrote in a letter to the local newspaper that he fears a loss of the aesthetic qualities in the neighborhood.
"I see the 99 Ranch Market with its soiled concrete pathways and smeared windows covered with posters in Chinese writing. I smell the odor of spoiled seafood in the trash Dumpster out back," he wrote.
In a phone interview, Lee said the issue is not about xenophobia but ensuring that the store adheres to community standards.
Samuel Park, owner of a neighboring dry cleaning store, said he worries how the new store will impact his business, since most of his customers are non-Asian.
The 99 Ranch store can attract more customers by hiring employees who reflect the makeup of the community, he suggested.
Lee, Tawa's vice chairman, said 99 Ranch stores are similar to other large chains.
Signs will be printed in English and the company welcomes job applications from everyone, he said.
Lee said he hopes traffic from the 99 Ranch will benefit neighboring businesses and vice versa.
"We'll be a good neighbor... we'll be a plus to the city, the community," he said.
Tony Gallimore, manager of a neighboring hobby store, said he has never shopped at a 99 Ranch and looks forward to seeing what they have to offer. Increased traffic should be good for business, he said.
"We're all expecting a spillover (of customers) ... and bring up sales a bit."
However, the prediction that the new store will attract other Asian-oriented businesses is not off-base, some experts said.
When a major Asian-oriented grocer moves in, ancillary businesses, such as boutiques or medical offices, catering to an Asian clientele tend to follow, said John Husing, a Redlands-based economist.
In Rowland Heights, the 99 Ranch store is surrounded by many Asian-oriented businesses, including dim-sum eateries and clothing boutiques.
But at the World Market store in Diamond Bar, neighbors include a PetSmart and a Jo-Ann craft store.
"I don't think Chino Hills will become Rowland Heights overnight" because the Asian population is not as large, said Vilma Chau, a senior vice president at Lee & Associates, a commercial real estate firm.
At the World Market in Diamond Bar and the 99 Ranch in Rowland Heights, most aisle signs and shelf labels have English translations. Spicy kimchi soup shares the same aisle as Ragu sauce. Chili bamboo shoots are stacked near Aunt Jemima-brand syrup.
Western pop music plays over the speakers at the World Market. Promotional announcements at 99 Ranch are spoken in Chinese and English.
Rob Jaworoski, 45, a Chino Hills resident and 99 Ranch fan, said the fruit and vegetables typically cost half what you'd pay at a mainstream store.
"I think if people give it a chance and see how good it is, they'll be happy," he said.
Old Arguments
It's unfair to label all critics as bigoted, but some of the criticisms probably are driven by an underlying anti-Asian sentiment, said Cal State Sacramento's Fong.
The sentiment is rooted in a fear that Latinos are taking over culture and Asians are taking over the economy, he said.
There are some lessons from the 1980s that residents in Chino Hills can learn from, Fong said.
The Asian-American community could try to integrate more fully into the community, by joining social clubs, for instance.
Meanwhile, established residents should accept that it's not so simple anymore to demand assimilation from newcomers.
"Change is inevitable," Fong said. "If white yuppies were moving in, would they be complaining? I doubt it."
http://www.pe.com/localnews/rivcounty/stories/PE_News_Local_D_asian07.25558b4.html
10:00 PM PST on Tuesday, February 6, 2007
By DOUGLAS QUAN
The Press-Enterprise
The opening of a large Asian-oriented supermarket in Chino Hills is getting a mixed reception from residents, a possible sign of things to come as more companies clamor for the hearts -- and appetites -- of the Inland region's increasingly diverse population.
Tawa Supermarket Inc., an Asian grocery chain with 22 stores in California, is planning to open a 99 Ranch Market in a vacated Ralph's store in April or May.
Some Chino Hills residents said they worry the store's arrival could lead to a concentration of other Asian-oriented businesses and a proliferation of Asian-language signs and traffic similar to what exists in some Los Angeles County communities.
"It will turn into anther Rowland Heights," said Carolyn Matta, 67, referring to the unincorporated community 35 miles west of Riverside where the population is 55 percent Asian. "We're not going to be welcomed in our neighborhood."
Supporters said the store sells fresh seafood, produce and specialty items that can't be found elsewhere. The complaints smack of racism and ignorance, some of them said.
"Let us put our bigotry aside and welcome the Indians, Hindus, Asian, and other ethnicities into our neighborhoods," Michael Newton of Chino wrote in a letter to the Chino Hills Champion newspaper.
Alan Lee, Tawa's vice chairman, said that of the company's 22 stores throughout California, some attract up to 25,000 visitors a week, and they integrate well in the communities they serve.
"We are a full-service market" catering to Asians and non-Asians, Lee said.
Timothy Fong, a professor and director of Asian-American studies at Cal State Sacramento, said many of the complaints are similar to those heard during the '80s, when an influx of Asian-oriented businesses in Monterey Park, the first "suburban Chinatown," caused an uproar and the City Council attempted to pass English-only ordinances but failed.
"Monterey Park went through a lot of upheaval that a lot of people regret," Fong said.
Demographic Shift
The Tawa Supermarket chain's push into the Inland region was inevitable given the area's growing and affluent Asian population, retail experts and economists said.
While the overall Asian population remains small -- nearly 5 percent in Riverside County and almost 6 percent in San Bernardino County, according to the Census Bureau's 2005 American Community Survey -- some pockets have grown tremendously.
In Chino Hills, a former farming community now marked by new housing and shopping developments, low crime and lots of green space, the Asian population climbed from 22 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2005, Census figures show. The city cites a figure of 28 percent, using a different source.
The opening of the store "is a reflection of changing demographics," said Mayor Gwenn Norton-Perry, adding that she plans to shop at the new store.
Asian-Americans are drawn to the Inland region's new homes and good schools, said Edward Chang, a UCR professor of ethnic studies.
Tawa isn't the only big player in the Asian grocery industry pushing into the Inland region. The Hannam Chain, which operates five Market World stores in Southern California catering largely to a Korean clientele, hopes to open a sixth store in Rancho Cucamonga by summer, said Vice President Steve Kim.
That city's Asian population rose from 6 percent in 2000 to 8 percent in 2005.
Experts said they predict more of these types of stores to open in other Inland cities in coming years, including Corona, whose Asian population jumped from 8 percent to 11 percent from 2000 to 2005.
What they lack in numbers, they make up for in affluence, said Julia Huang, president of interTrend, a Long Beach marketing firm that helps companies target the Asian-American community.
"At the end of the day, it's the buying power," she said.
The 2005 census figures show that nationally Asian-Americans had a median household income of $61,094, higher than any other group.
Opposition
While some regard the eastward expansion of these supermarkets as Capitalism 101 -- go where the demand is -- others view their arrival as a threat.
"We have diversity in Chino Hills and I am HAPPY with the degree of diversity we now have in Chino Hills," Larry Blugrind wrote in a letter to the City Council. "In Rowland Heights, THERE IS NO DIVERSITY -- IT'S ALL ASIAN!!!"
Darrin Lee wrote in a letter to the local newspaper that he fears a loss of the aesthetic qualities in the neighborhood.
"I see the 99 Ranch Market with its soiled concrete pathways and smeared windows covered with posters in Chinese writing. I smell the odor of spoiled seafood in the trash Dumpster out back," he wrote.
In a phone interview, Lee said the issue is not about xenophobia but ensuring that the store adheres to community standards.
Samuel Park, owner of a neighboring dry cleaning store, said he worries how the new store will impact his business, since most of his customers are non-Asian.
The 99 Ranch store can attract more customers by hiring employees who reflect the makeup of the community, he suggested.
Lee, Tawa's vice chairman, said 99 Ranch stores are similar to other large chains.
Signs will be printed in English and the company welcomes job applications from everyone, he said.
Lee said he hopes traffic from the 99 Ranch will benefit neighboring businesses and vice versa.
"We'll be a good neighbor... we'll be a plus to the city, the community," he said.
Tony Gallimore, manager of a neighboring hobby store, said he has never shopped at a 99 Ranch and looks forward to seeing what they have to offer. Increased traffic should be good for business, he said.
"We're all expecting a spillover (of customers) ... and bring up sales a bit."
However, the prediction that the new store will attract other Asian-oriented businesses is not off-base, some experts said.
When a major Asian-oriented grocer moves in, ancillary businesses, such as boutiques or medical offices, catering to an Asian clientele tend to follow, said John Husing, a Redlands-based economist.
In Rowland Heights, the 99 Ranch store is surrounded by many Asian-oriented businesses, including dim-sum eateries and clothing boutiques.
But at the World Market store in Diamond Bar, neighbors include a PetSmart and a Jo-Ann craft store.
"I don't think Chino Hills will become Rowland Heights overnight" because the Asian population is not as large, said Vilma Chau, a senior vice president at Lee & Associates, a commercial real estate firm.
At the World Market in Diamond Bar and the 99 Ranch in Rowland Heights, most aisle signs and shelf labels have English translations. Spicy kimchi soup shares the same aisle as Ragu sauce. Chili bamboo shoots are stacked near Aunt Jemima-brand syrup.
Western pop music plays over the speakers at the World Market. Promotional announcements at 99 Ranch are spoken in Chinese and English.
Rob Jaworoski, 45, a Chino Hills resident and 99 Ranch fan, said the fruit and vegetables typically cost half what you'd pay at a mainstream store.
"I think if people give it a chance and see how good it is, they'll be happy," he said.
Old Arguments
It's unfair to label all critics as bigoted, but some of the criticisms probably are driven by an underlying anti-Asian sentiment, said Cal State Sacramento's Fong.
The sentiment is rooted in a fear that Latinos are taking over culture and Asians are taking over the economy, he said.
There are some lessons from the 1980s that residents in Chino Hills can learn from, Fong said.
The Asian-American community could try to integrate more fully into the community, by joining social clubs, for instance.
Meanwhile, established residents should accept that it's not so simple anymore to demand assimilation from newcomers.
"Change is inevitable," Fong said. "If white yuppies were moving in, would they be complaining? I doubt it."
http://www.pe.com/localnews/rivcounty/stories/PE_News_Local_D_asian07.25558b4.html
Class Divide in Chinese-Americans’ Charity
Class Divide in Chinese-Americans’ Charity
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: The New York Times, January 20, 2007
As a schoolteacher in New York’s Chinatown in the 1960s, when the government’s war on poverty seemed focused on blacks and Latinos, Virginia Kee noticed that many of her Asian pupils were too poor to pay $2 for a class trip. To connect community needs with public money, Ms. Kee helped found what is now the Chinese-American Planning Council, one of the largest social service agencies for Asians in the country.
These days, in an era of shrunken public dollars and booming philanthropy, as universities and museums showcase multimillion-dollar gifts by Chinese-Americans, Ms. Kee worries about a different kind of disconnect: a divide between the explosive growth of Chinese-American wealth and the unmet needs of a new generation of Chinese immigrants who have streamed to the city since the 1990s.
In the society pages, out of reach, Ms. Kee said, she sees figures of Chinese-American success at benefits that raise half a million dollars for the Frick Collection or $3 million for breast cancer research.
“We’re out of their orbit,” Ms. Kee observed wistfully. “We get donations from poor people that we’ve helped. We don’t get donations from the rich, who should be helping the poor.”
No comprehensive numbers exist to track charity by ethnic groups, let alone donors of Chinese heritage. Many people of all ethnicities keep their donations private.
But concerns about an uptown-downtown split are widely echoed by Asian-American groups serving the working poor in the sprawling Chinatowns of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan; by scholars of philanthropy; and by Asian donors who have bucked the tide.
Those concerns have grown along with the influx of immigrants from China, up 53 percent in New York in the 1990s alone; today, among foreign-born New Yorkers, the Chinese outnumber every nationality but Dominicans.
Of course, many other immigrant groups have shown similar patterns of giving. The first generation typically sends money back to needy relatives and hometowns, while later strivers mark their success with gifts to mainstream institutions patronized by America’s patricians, or give to art and education to enhance wider appreciation of their cultural heritage. Even Jewish philanthropy, now often admired as a model of ethnic solidarity, was long divided by resentment between wealthy German Jews and penniless Jewish newcomers from Eastern Europe.
But the Chinese diaspora in America has been even more fragmented by language, lineage, class and political history. In 1949, when the founding of Israel served as a unifying event for many Jews, the rise of Communist China further polarized the Chinese in America, noted Henry Tang, 65, a founder of the Committee of 100, an organization of prominent Americans of Chinese ancestry.
For people in his generation, Mr. Tang said, loyalties and outlook differ radically depending on where and when they trace their Chinese roots. There is little commonality between, say, the children of the wealthy elite who left Shanghai before World War II and the descendants of Cantonese peasants who migrated to the United States in the 19th century and were ghettoized by anti-Chinese laws. The differences can be even sharper, he said, for those raised in Hong Kong, Taiwan or a rural province of mainland China.
“When you say, ‘Donate money to help the Chinese,’ ” Mr. Tang explained, “they’re conflicted that their monies will not be helping people of their own. Like, some people will say, ‘I grew up in Taiwan, and you’re asking me to help these people from Fujian’ ” — the coastal province that has generated the latest wave of immigrants, both legal and illegal.
“Others will say, ‘I’m a Hong Kong person, and your mission here is to serve people from everywhere else.’ Or you may get an A.B.C. — American-born Chinese — saying, ‘Well, I really want to help the people in downtown San Francisco.’ ”
As immigration soared after the 1965 overhaul of immigration laws and Asians reached 5 percent of the American population, the picture was further complicated by a pan-Asian structure of giving fostered by the United Way. Umbrella organizations like the Asian American Federation lump together groups that have warred with each other in recent history — Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, as well as the Chinese, who officially reached 2.5 million in 2000, with 374,000 in New York City.
“When you represent all Asian ethnic groups, you don’t represent any Asian ethnic groups,” said Wayne Ho, director of the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families. “It’s really hard to get individual donations.”
A working paper on Asian-American philanthropy produced at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute in 2004 cited anecdotal evidence that “many Chinese-Americans do not give at all, and those that do, give to their university, or to their church, but not to ethnic causes.” The author, Andrew Ho, who recently earned an M.B.A. along with a master’s in public policy, added in an interview that especially among the well-off in their 30s and 40s, “those ties that bind us all as Chinese are not there,” making suburban fund-raising difficult for organizations trying to help new immigrants.
Such groups typically hope for a continuing relationship with the prominent Asian-Americans honored at their annual galas, but report mixed results. For example, two Asian groups that honored Vera Wang, the American-born fashion designer, in the 1990s said they had been unable to get her to attend benefits since. (Ms. Wang declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed for this article.)
But the rising affluence of a younger generation of Asian professionals shaped by American ideals and New York diversity is prompting fresh efforts to bridge the gaps.
“I make easily 10 times what my parents would make in a lifetime,” said Jimmy Pang, 34, an investment banker who grew up in what he called “the hodgepodge” of Elmhurst, Queens, and saw his parents, a waiter and a garment worker, scrimp to pay his Catholic school tuition. “I could just be one of the lucky ones, so I think it’s good to give back.”
Mr. Pang was a founding member of AsiaNextGen, a small “giving circle” of young Asian-American professionals who want to be catalysts for change. Started in 2004 by five friends who each donated $4,000, the group gave $20,000 to the Queens Child Guidance Center to hire a part-time social worker. This year, they plan to choose a program for the elderly.
The sums are modest, said Mr. Pang, who helps manage a $20 billion asset fund in Hong Kong for his company. But leading members like Gary Lee, a Wall Street analyst raised in Whippany, N.J, and Michelle Tong, the director of donor relations for the Asian American Federation, believe they are pioneers of a more vocal, hands-on Asian-American philanthropy.
“The majority of the Asian ethnic groups, they don’t want to draw attention to themselves,” said Ms. Tong, who joked that she absorbed outspokenness with the lox and bagels she ate growing up in Bergen County, N.J. “Once they’ve achieved a certain level, some of them tend to distance themselves from where they come from. They want to show that they’ve made it, they want to blend in with the mainstream. They don’t go back to Chinatown.”
Exceptions tend to underscore the importance of individual connections. Many of those interviewed cited the way a clinic that had been established in Chinatown by volunteers in 1971 became the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center. It was renamed for Mr. Wang, the co-founder of Computer Associates, after he gave $1 million for its expansion in 1999.
But initially he rejected the clinic’s application for money, recalled Marie Lam, one of the founding volunteers and the board chairwoman. Mr. Wang, the donor as well of a $52 million Asian and Asian-American cultural center on the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York, changed his mind after a mutual friend intervened, she said.
Mr. Wang said he did not recall the initial request from the health center, “but was pleased to learn more about it and what they were doing, and how my donations could make a significant difference.”
Ms. Lam herself, a Hong Kong doctor’s daughter who earned a degree in social work at the University of California at Berkeley and married a New Jersey businessman, said she might never have connected to ailing immigrants in Lower Manhattan. But she happened to volunteer at a Chinatown health fair, and was moved to find sick old men stranded without families by the effect of old immigration laws and reluctant to apply for Medicaid.
“I’ve seen the hardships people go through,” she said. “I’ve gotten some of my friends and acquaintances interested. But people want to see a bang for their buck.”
Some observers, like Kenneth J. Guest, an anthropologist at Baruch College who has studied the latest immigrant stream from Fujian province, see a divide even within Chinatown between the newcomers, who have little education, and those who run the nonprofit organizations.
“There’s some very strong prejudice within the Cantonese community,” he said, drawing a parallel with assimilated German Jews who looked down on Jewish newcomers from Russia. “It’s interesting to see what the 30-somethings will do.”
Today, almost a third of Manhattan’s Chinatown residents live in poverty, including 40 percent of children and 35 percent of the elderly, census data show, and only about 7 percent of households receive public aid. At the other extreme, a 2004 study by the Spectrem Group of Chicago, financial consultants, found that Asians accounted for 5 percent of affluent households in the United States, up from 1 percent two years earlier; they had an average net worth of $2.9 million, typically earned rather than inherited.
“The Chinese-American community really has an opportunity because there’s a critical mass that wasn’t there before,” said Jessica Chao, a vice president at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. “A critical mass of wealth and opportunity, and a critical mass of awareness of the social issues that impact poverty.”
For social service organizations like Ms. Kee’s, the emerging link may be the people they helped as children. Danny Ong Yee and Norman Louis, boyhood friends who attended the council’s child-care programs, are now, respectively, the founding trustee and the executive director of the Ong Family Foundation, which provides annual grants of $5,000 to $50,000 to nonprofit organizations, including the council.
“We were not the royal class; we were the peasant class,” Mr. Louis said. “My mother did not know how to read or write; she was a seamstress. My father worked in a restaurant. Danny’s father worked in a laundry.”
Mr. Yee, formerly a partner of Goldman Sachs, now lives in Hong Kong, but cherishes his Chinatown roots, Mr. Louis added.
“We want to give all the new immigrants and American-born children the same opportunities,” he said. “We want to open it up to them.”
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: The New York Times, January 20, 2007
As a schoolteacher in New York’s Chinatown in the 1960s, when the government’s war on poverty seemed focused on blacks and Latinos, Virginia Kee noticed that many of her Asian pupils were too poor to pay $2 for a class trip. To connect community needs with public money, Ms. Kee helped found what is now the Chinese-American Planning Council, one of the largest social service agencies for Asians in the country.
These days, in an era of shrunken public dollars and booming philanthropy, as universities and museums showcase multimillion-dollar gifts by Chinese-Americans, Ms. Kee worries about a different kind of disconnect: a divide between the explosive growth of Chinese-American wealth and the unmet needs of a new generation of Chinese immigrants who have streamed to the city since the 1990s.
In the society pages, out of reach, Ms. Kee said, she sees figures of Chinese-American success at benefits that raise half a million dollars for the Frick Collection or $3 million for breast cancer research.
“We’re out of their orbit,” Ms. Kee observed wistfully. “We get donations from poor people that we’ve helped. We don’t get donations from the rich, who should be helping the poor.”
No comprehensive numbers exist to track charity by ethnic groups, let alone donors of Chinese heritage. Many people of all ethnicities keep their donations private.
But concerns about an uptown-downtown split are widely echoed by Asian-American groups serving the working poor in the sprawling Chinatowns of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan; by scholars of philanthropy; and by Asian donors who have bucked the tide.
Those concerns have grown along with the influx of immigrants from China, up 53 percent in New York in the 1990s alone; today, among foreign-born New Yorkers, the Chinese outnumber every nationality but Dominicans.
Of course, many other immigrant groups have shown similar patterns of giving. The first generation typically sends money back to needy relatives and hometowns, while later strivers mark their success with gifts to mainstream institutions patronized by America’s patricians, or give to art and education to enhance wider appreciation of their cultural heritage. Even Jewish philanthropy, now often admired as a model of ethnic solidarity, was long divided by resentment between wealthy German Jews and penniless Jewish newcomers from Eastern Europe.
But the Chinese diaspora in America has been even more fragmented by language, lineage, class and political history. In 1949, when the founding of Israel served as a unifying event for many Jews, the rise of Communist China further polarized the Chinese in America, noted Henry Tang, 65, a founder of the Committee of 100, an organization of prominent Americans of Chinese ancestry.
For people in his generation, Mr. Tang said, loyalties and outlook differ radically depending on where and when they trace their Chinese roots. There is little commonality between, say, the children of the wealthy elite who left Shanghai before World War II and the descendants of Cantonese peasants who migrated to the United States in the 19th century and were ghettoized by anti-Chinese laws. The differences can be even sharper, he said, for those raised in Hong Kong, Taiwan or a rural province of mainland China.
“When you say, ‘Donate money to help the Chinese,’ ” Mr. Tang explained, “they’re conflicted that their monies will not be helping people of their own. Like, some people will say, ‘I grew up in Taiwan, and you’re asking me to help these people from Fujian’ ” — the coastal province that has generated the latest wave of immigrants, both legal and illegal.
“Others will say, ‘I’m a Hong Kong person, and your mission here is to serve people from everywhere else.’ Or you may get an A.B.C. — American-born Chinese — saying, ‘Well, I really want to help the people in downtown San Francisco.’ ”
As immigration soared after the 1965 overhaul of immigration laws and Asians reached 5 percent of the American population, the picture was further complicated by a pan-Asian structure of giving fostered by the United Way. Umbrella organizations like the Asian American Federation lump together groups that have warred with each other in recent history — Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, as well as the Chinese, who officially reached 2.5 million in 2000, with 374,000 in New York City.
“When you represent all Asian ethnic groups, you don’t represent any Asian ethnic groups,” said Wayne Ho, director of the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families. “It’s really hard to get individual donations.”
A working paper on Asian-American philanthropy produced at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute in 2004 cited anecdotal evidence that “many Chinese-Americans do not give at all, and those that do, give to their university, or to their church, but not to ethnic causes.” The author, Andrew Ho, who recently earned an M.B.A. along with a master’s in public policy, added in an interview that especially among the well-off in their 30s and 40s, “those ties that bind us all as Chinese are not there,” making suburban fund-raising difficult for organizations trying to help new immigrants.
Such groups typically hope for a continuing relationship with the prominent Asian-Americans honored at their annual galas, but report mixed results. For example, two Asian groups that honored Vera Wang, the American-born fashion designer, in the 1990s said they had been unable to get her to attend benefits since. (Ms. Wang declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed for this article.)
But the rising affluence of a younger generation of Asian professionals shaped by American ideals and New York diversity is prompting fresh efforts to bridge the gaps.
“I make easily 10 times what my parents would make in a lifetime,” said Jimmy Pang, 34, an investment banker who grew up in what he called “the hodgepodge” of Elmhurst, Queens, and saw his parents, a waiter and a garment worker, scrimp to pay his Catholic school tuition. “I could just be one of the lucky ones, so I think it’s good to give back.”
Mr. Pang was a founding member of AsiaNextGen, a small “giving circle” of young Asian-American professionals who want to be catalysts for change. Started in 2004 by five friends who each donated $4,000, the group gave $20,000 to the Queens Child Guidance Center to hire a part-time social worker. This year, they plan to choose a program for the elderly.
The sums are modest, said Mr. Pang, who helps manage a $20 billion asset fund in Hong Kong for his company. But leading members like Gary Lee, a Wall Street analyst raised in Whippany, N.J, and Michelle Tong, the director of donor relations for the Asian American Federation, believe they are pioneers of a more vocal, hands-on Asian-American philanthropy.
“The majority of the Asian ethnic groups, they don’t want to draw attention to themselves,” said Ms. Tong, who joked that she absorbed outspokenness with the lox and bagels she ate growing up in Bergen County, N.J. “Once they’ve achieved a certain level, some of them tend to distance themselves from where they come from. They want to show that they’ve made it, they want to blend in with the mainstream. They don’t go back to Chinatown.”
Exceptions tend to underscore the importance of individual connections. Many of those interviewed cited the way a clinic that had been established in Chinatown by volunteers in 1971 became the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center. It was renamed for Mr. Wang, the co-founder of Computer Associates, after he gave $1 million for its expansion in 1999.
But initially he rejected the clinic’s application for money, recalled Marie Lam, one of the founding volunteers and the board chairwoman. Mr. Wang, the donor as well of a $52 million Asian and Asian-American cultural center on the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York, changed his mind after a mutual friend intervened, she said.
Mr. Wang said he did not recall the initial request from the health center, “but was pleased to learn more about it and what they were doing, and how my donations could make a significant difference.”
Ms. Lam herself, a Hong Kong doctor’s daughter who earned a degree in social work at the University of California at Berkeley and married a New Jersey businessman, said she might never have connected to ailing immigrants in Lower Manhattan. But she happened to volunteer at a Chinatown health fair, and was moved to find sick old men stranded without families by the effect of old immigration laws and reluctant to apply for Medicaid.
“I’ve seen the hardships people go through,” she said. “I’ve gotten some of my friends and acquaintances interested. But people want to see a bang for their buck.”
Some observers, like Kenneth J. Guest, an anthropologist at Baruch College who has studied the latest immigrant stream from Fujian province, see a divide even within Chinatown between the newcomers, who have little education, and those who run the nonprofit organizations.
“There’s some very strong prejudice within the Cantonese community,” he said, drawing a parallel with assimilated German Jews who looked down on Jewish newcomers from Russia. “It’s interesting to see what the 30-somethings will do.”
Today, almost a third of Manhattan’s Chinatown residents live in poverty, including 40 percent of children and 35 percent of the elderly, census data show, and only about 7 percent of households receive public aid. At the other extreme, a 2004 study by the Spectrem Group of Chicago, financial consultants, found that Asians accounted for 5 percent of affluent households in the United States, up from 1 percent two years earlier; they had an average net worth of $2.9 million, typically earned rather than inherited.
“The Chinese-American community really has an opportunity because there’s a critical mass that wasn’t there before,” said Jessica Chao, a vice president at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. “A critical mass of wealth and opportunity, and a critical mass of awareness of the social issues that impact poverty.”
For social service organizations like Ms. Kee’s, the emerging link may be the people they helped as children. Danny Ong Yee and Norman Louis, boyhood friends who attended the council’s child-care programs, are now, respectively, the founding trustee and the executive director of the Ong Family Foundation, which provides annual grants of $5,000 to $50,000 to nonprofit organizations, including the council.
“We were not the royal class; we were the peasant class,” Mr. Louis said. “My mother did not know how to read or write; she was a seamstress. My father worked in a restaurant. Danny’s father worked in a laundry.”
Mr. Yee, formerly a partner of Goldman Sachs, now lives in Hong Kong, but cherishes his Chinatown roots, Mr. Louis added.
“We want to give all the new immigrants and American-born children the same opportunities,” he said. “We want to open it up to them.”
About Asian-Americans
About Asian-Americans, USA Today 1/18/07
Many of the 14 million Asian-Americans in the USA are high-powered consumers and business people whose dollars are increasingly coveted by corporate advertisers. For example, Asian-Americans:
•Boast spending power of $427 billion, expected to grow to $623 billion by 2010.
•Have a median household income of $58,000 in 2004 ?the highest income level among all ethnic groups.
•Owned 1.1 million businesses in 2002, with sales receipts of $343 billion.
•Have the highest percentage (49%) of bachelor's degrees of all ethnic groups.
•Have the highest percentage (46%) of people in professional and managerial jobs among all ethnic groups.
Sources: Census Bureau, The IW Group, Selig Center for Economic Growth
Many of the 14 million Asian-Americans in the USA are high-powered consumers and business people whose dollars are increasingly coveted by corporate advertisers. For example, Asian-Americans:
•Boast spending power of $427 billion, expected to grow to $623 billion by 2010.
•Have a median household income of $58,000 in 2004 ?the highest income level among all ethnic groups.
•Owned 1.1 million businesses in 2002, with sales receipts of $343 billion.
•Have the highest percentage (49%) of bachelor's degrees of all ethnic groups.
•Have the highest percentage (46%) of people in professional and managerial jobs among all ethnic groups.
Sources: Census Bureau, The IW Group, Selig Center for Economic Growth
Asian American voters flex muscles
Asian American voters flex muscles
Rebounding from a scandal, they see gains in both the electorate and the winners' circle.
By David Pierson, Times Staff Writer
November 11, 2006
As he savored his victory this week in the race for state controller, John Chiang couldn't help but reflect on how grim the political landscape had been for Asian Americans just a decade ago.
Back then, a fundraising scandal involving then-Vice President Al Gore and a Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights embroiled the Democratic Party and in some eyes cast suspicion on Asian American donors and politicians.
But in the decade since, the fortunes of Asian American politicians have rebounded in dramatic fashion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOR THE RECORD: In an earlier version, John Chiang was incorrectly referred to as treasurer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday's election marked a watershed moment for the community, with more than two dozen Asian Americans running for state office. Nineteen candidates won, giving Asian Americans a record representation in Californian public office with a total of 20 elected officials. (Before the election, there were 17.)
Democrat Chiang's victory garnered the most headlines. But the election also resulted in a major shift at the State Board of Equalization: Four of its five members will be Asian American. They are termed-out Democratic Assemblywoman Judy Chu; board incumbent Betty Yee, a Democrat; newcomer Michelle Steel, a Republican; and Chiang, a member by virtue of being controller. The non-Asian is Republican incumbent Bill Leonard.
"There's a new generation of Asian Americans getting involved in the community, governance and public policy," said Chiang. "It speaks volumes about the resiliency of the community that a decade ago, it was under attack."
The victories come on the heels of a study released by the Asian American Pacific Legal Center that showed the Asian American electorate grew by nearly a third in Los Angeles County and more than two-thirds in Orange County in the last few years.
Chu and others say that, aside from general population growth, registration drives and efforts to translate voter and campaign material in recent years have helped increase the size of the Asian American electorate. She also credited the popularity of absentee ballots. Of 22 million eligible voters in California, about 2.5 million are Asian Americans.
"I think after a while, success breeds more success or at least encourages people to give politics a go," said Don Nakanishi, director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. "I don't think running for office is in anyone's cultural DNA, even though a lot of Asian Americans will say they never had a tradition of political participation back in Asia."
In 1996, the political outlook for Asian Americans had soured. A controversy began with Gore's visit to a temple in Hacienda Heights that linked the Democratic National Committee to Asian American donors who were suspected of having illegally provided the party with money from China.
The temple visit became part of a larger national fundraising controversy; ultimately, the party returned about $3 million in donations and several fundraisers were charged.
The scandal had a chilling effect in the local Asian political community, Chiang and others said. Some politicians and candidates declined to take money from Chinese American donors, and some Asian American candidates struggled to gain support, they said.
"They made them [feel like] outcasts," Chiang said.
The fact that many Asian American candidates for statewide office are now appealing to a broad swath of voters is a testament to the changed environment.
Although candidates can win office in some city and school board elections by appealing mostly to Asian voters, victory in statewide and legislative campaigns requires coalition-building.
Some, including Chu, have developed ties to Latino politicians and labor groups, and Chiang said his parents' story of hardworking immigrants seeking better lives in the United States for their children resonates with any voter.
And as Asian candidates reach out to the mainstream, non-Asian candidates are increasingly courting Asian voters.
Nakanishi sees it in campaign mailers in which candidates make their pitches in Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese.
This outreach is evident in Southern California, which has the nation's largest and most diverse Asian American population.
The Asian Pacific American Legal Center's study documented dramatic Asian American voter participation gains in L.A. and Orange counties but also showed that percentages did not equal the two counties' overall turnout numbers.
In the 2004 general election, 78% of registered voters in L.A. County and 73% of registered voters in Orange County voted.
By comparison, 71% of registered Asian American voters in L.A. County and 68% of those in Orange County voted.
Although L.A. County's electorate grew by 11% and Orange County's by 12% between the 2000 and 2004 general elections, the Asian American electorate in L.A. County grew by 29% and Orange County's grew by 68% in those years.
"To politicians, it says Asian Americans are becoming engaged in the political process. They're increasingly a population elected officials need to attend to," said Dan Ichinose, project director for the survey.
That means offering language assistance during campaigns and at the polls, Ichinose said.
The survey found that 40% of Asian American voters in L.A. County and 37% of Asian American voters in Orange County were deemed to have limited English proficiency. Koreans and Vietnamese voters struggled the most with English, the survey showed.
The majority of Asian American voters in the two counties were foreign born. In L.A. County, they represented 67% of 271,497 Asian Americans who voted in the 2004 general election.
In Orange County, foreign-born voters made up 80% of the 137,583 Asian Americans who voted in the same election.
Christine Chen, executive director of APIAVote, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that encourages civic participation by Asian Pacific Islander Americans, said all eyes were on California's changing Asian American electorate.
"We look at what happens in California and what can be replicated in other areas," Chen said.
"It's such a large population and there are so many more nonprofit organizations," she said.
Chen noted that the rest of the country has been catching on.
Most recently, Jim Webb, who won a Virginia Senate seat, employed Korean American actor Daniel Dae Kim, from the television show "Lost," to court the Asian American vote in a TV advertisement.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*
Voters
Recent years have seen sharp growth in the Asian American electorate in Southern California. The breakdown by ethnic groups:
Asian American voters, 2004 general election
Los Angeles County Group Voters Percent
Filipino 78,770 29%
Chinese 74,496 27%
Korean 35,109 13%
Japanese 31,130 11%
Vietnamese 24,712 9%
Asian Indian 12,616 5%
Cambodian 3,706 1%
---
Orange County Group Voters Percent
Vietnamese 52,508 38%
Filipino 25,358 18%
Chinese 16,999 12%
Korean 12,612 9%
Japanese 9,860 7%
Asian Indian 7,097 5%
Cambodian 1,811 1%
Note: Does not include all Asian American groups; numbers do not add up to 100%.
Source: Asian Pacific American Legal Center.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-asian11nov11,1,6555086.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california
Rebounding from a scandal, they see gains in both the electorate and the winners' circle.
By David Pierson, Times Staff Writer
November 11, 2006
As he savored his victory this week in the race for state controller, John Chiang couldn't help but reflect on how grim the political landscape had been for Asian Americans just a decade ago.
Back then, a fundraising scandal involving then-Vice President Al Gore and a Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights embroiled the Democratic Party and in some eyes cast suspicion on Asian American donors and politicians.
But in the decade since, the fortunes of Asian American politicians have rebounded in dramatic fashion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOR THE RECORD: In an earlier version, John Chiang was incorrectly referred to as treasurer.
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Tuesday's election marked a watershed moment for the community, with more than two dozen Asian Americans running for state office. Nineteen candidates won, giving Asian Americans a record representation in Californian public office with a total of 20 elected officials. (Before the election, there were 17.)
Democrat Chiang's victory garnered the most headlines. But the election also resulted in a major shift at the State Board of Equalization: Four of its five members will be Asian American. They are termed-out Democratic Assemblywoman Judy Chu; board incumbent Betty Yee, a Democrat; newcomer Michelle Steel, a Republican; and Chiang, a member by virtue of being controller. The non-Asian is Republican incumbent Bill Leonard.
"There's a new generation of Asian Americans getting involved in the community, governance and public policy," said Chiang. "It speaks volumes about the resiliency of the community that a decade ago, it was under attack."
The victories come on the heels of a study released by the Asian American Pacific Legal Center that showed the Asian American electorate grew by nearly a third in Los Angeles County and more than two-thirds in Orange County in the last few years.
Chu and others say that, aside from general population growth, registration drives and efforts to translate voter and campaign material in recent years have helped increase the size of the Asian American electorate. She also credited the popularity of absentee ballots. Of 22 million eligible voters in California, about 2.5 million are Asian Americans.
"I think after a while, success breeds more success or at least encourages people to give politics a go," said Don Nakanishi, director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. "I don't think running for office is in anyone's cultural DNA, even though a lot of Asian Americans will say they never had a tradition of political participation back in Asia."
In 1996, the political outlook for Asian Americans had soured. A controversy began with Gore's visit to a temple in Hacienda Heights that linked the Democratic National Committee to Asian American donors who were suspected of having illegally provided the party with money from China.
The temple visit became part of a larger national fundraising controversy; ultimately, the party returned about $3 million in donations and several fundraisers were charged.
The scandal had a chilling effect in the local Asian political community, Chiang and others said. Some politicians and candidates declined to take money from Chinese American donors, and some Asian American candidates struggled to gain support, they said.
"They made them [feel like] outcasts," Chiang said.
The fact that many Asian American candidates for statewide office are now appealing to a broad swath of voters is a testament to the changed environment.
Although candidates can win office in some city and school board elections by appealing mostly to Asian voters, victory in statewide and legislative campaigns requires coalition-building.
Some, including Chu, have developed ties to Latino politicians and labor groups, and Chiang said his parents' story of hardworking immigrants seeking better lives in the United States for their children resonates with any voter.
And as Asian candidates reach out to the mainstream, non-Asian candidates are increasingly courting Asian voters.
Nakanishi sees it in campaign mailers in which candidates make their pitches in Chinese, Korean or Vietnamese.
This outreach is evident in Southern California, which has the nation's largest and most diverse Asian American population.
The Asian Pacific American Legal Center's study documented dramatic Asian American voter participation gains in L.A. and Orange counties but also showed that percentages did not equal the two counties' overall turnout numbers.
In the 2004 general election, 78% of registered voters in L.A. County and 73% of registered voters in Orange County voted.
By comparison, 71% of registered Asian American voters in L.A. County and 68% of those in Orange County voted.
Although L.A. County's electorate grew by 11% and Orange County's by 12% between the 2000 and 2004 general elections, the Asian American electorate in L.A. County grew by 29% and Orange County's grew by 68% in those years.
"To politicians, it says Asian Americans are becoming engaged in the political process. They're increasingly a population elected officials need to attend to," said Dan Ichinose, project director for the survey.
That means offering language assistance during campaigns and at the polls, Ichinose said.
The survey found that 40% of Asian American voters in L.A. County and 37% of Asian American voters in Orange County were deemed to have limited English proficiency. Koreans and Vietnamese voters struggled the most with English, the survey showed.
The majority of Asian American voters in the two counties were foreign born. In L.A. County, they represented 67% of 271,497 Asian Americans who voted in the 2004 general election.
In Orange County, foreign-born voters made up 80% of the 137,583 Asian Americans who voted in the same election.
Christine Chen, executive director of APIAVote, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that encourages civic participation by Asian Pacific Islander Americans, said all eyes were on California's changing Asian American electorate.
"We look at what happens in California and what can be replicated in other areas," Chen said.
"It's such a large population and there are so many more nonprofit organizations," she said.
Chen noted that the rest of the country has been catching on.
Most recently, Jim Webb, who won a Virginia Senate seat, employed Korean American actor Daniel Dae Kim, from the television show "Lost," to court the Asian American vote in a TV advertisement.
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Voters
Recent years have seen sharp growth in the Asian American electorate in Southern California. The breakdown by ethnic groups:
Asian American voters, 2004 general election
Los Angeles County Group Voters Percent
Filipino 78,770 29%
Chinese 74,496 27%
Korean 35,109 13%
Japanese 31,130 11%
Vietnamese 24,712 9%
Asian Indian 12,616 5%
Cambodian 3,706 1%
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Orange County Group Voters Percent
Vietnamese 52,508 38%
Filipino 25,358 18%
Chinese 16,999 12%
Korean 12,612 9%
Japanese 9,860 7%
Asian Indian 7,097 5%
Cambodian 1,811 1%
Note: Does not include all Asian American groups; numbers do not add up to 100%.
Source: Asian Pacific American Legal Center.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-asian11nov11,1,6555086.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california
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