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
Thursday, March 15, 2007
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
Teens find a connection in returning to Chinatown
Teens find a connection in returning to Chinatown
By Juliana Barbassa, The Associated Press
San Bernardino County Sun
Article Launched:10/29/2006 01:00:00 AM PDT
SAN FRANCISCO - Passengers pour from a crowded bus onto a Chinatown sidewalk. The thin frame of a teenage boy is jostled like a rag doll by women with babies, school kids with backpacks, elderly shoppers picking through bins of flopping fish, and tourists looking for bargains among the plastic Buddhas.
A crowd of teens gathered in the dark basement of the Chinese Historical Society on a Friday night bursts into laughter as the familiar scene from their daily lives plays out on video. They made the short movie to reflect their impressions of a neighborhood that is much more to them than dim sum and souvenir shops.
Chinese-American teens in San Francisco have a complicated relationship with the biggest of the nation's many Chinatowns.
On the one hand, it's a place of comfort and familiarity. But the noise, crowds and smells wafting from open-air produce stands selling dried mushrooms or fresh herbs can seem old-fashioned to a generation hooked on iPods and YouTube, and chaotic compared to the suburbs where some now live.
Yet whether they live in the densely packed blocks or visit regularly to find a physical connection to their culture, history and friends with similar backgrounds, Chinatown still is home to the teens who cherish what it represents even as they make fun of it on film.
"Universally, kids will seek a place of comfort," says Ben Wong, director of the Chinatown Beacon Center, a community organization that offers education and leadership programs for youth. "They naturally connect based on ethnicity, language, socio-economic status. If they leave, they come back. It's a place of connection."
For more than 150 years, the neighborhood has sheltered immigrants. It's one of San Francisco's biggest tourist draws, but still offers a first toehold, a network of support and the reassurance of familiar languages and customs to new arrivals.
This is what sets it apart from other ethnic neighborhoods that within decades can go from a dynamic community to little more than a collection of restaurants and quaint signs. The Chinese have been a part of San Francisco from the city's inception, and the neighborhood is a physical reminder of those roots. It has become a tourist attraction, but visitors have to compete for sidewalk space with recent immigrants looking for spices or foods they can't find anywhere else.
The young people who live and congregate here confront the same challenges faced by inner-city youth of all backgrounds: difficulty accessing good health care, a quality education, tight quarters. In hotels where one room can house a whole family, there's a lack of recreational opportunities and spaces kids can consider their own, said Jan Lin, a professor at Occidental College and author of "Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change."
There are drawbacks, but there is also a sense of community that draws teenagers like Vinson Chen, 17, who helps his parents run a general store in Chinatown although he lives across town in the comparatively tidy and spacious Sunset district.
The Chinese were an integral part of San Francisco's wild Gold-Rush days, but for decades segregationist practices forced them to pack their lives into a dozen or so square blocks. They provided for themselves what the outside world would not: schools, markets, medical care and entertainment, building a home in a country that was intent on making them feel unwelcome.
The 1906 earthquake destroyed the old Chinatown, along with most of downtown San Francisco. Some local leaders saw it as an opportunity to sweep the enclave away altogether.
"The cities in the immediate vicinity of the San Francisco Bay never in the past had such opportunity as now to forever do away with the huddling together of Chinese in districts," the Oakland Enquirer wrote days after the destruction.
Instead, the neighborhood was rebuilt, this time in an elaborate Oriental style whose curved eaves and colorful lanterns were designed to attract tourists even as it continued to house traditional family associations, herb shops and restaurants.
Even as immigrants established themselves and moved to outlying neighborhoods, San Francisco and especially Chinatown grew to become "a center of Chinese and Chinese-American culture," says historian Judy Yung, who grew up in the neighborhood during the 1950s and recently published "San Francisco's Chinatown - Images of America."
Today, the largest number of ethnic Chinese in the city live in the Sunset district. But when a leading Board of Supervisors candidate seeking to represent the Sunset held his first fundraiser, it was not in that part of San Francisco but in Chinatown.
"Whether you're living in the Sunset or other parts of the city, you'll return to Chinatown because that remains the cultural and political center of the Chinese-American community," says David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee and a professor of political science at San Francisco State University.
http://dailybulletin.com/search/ci_4568176
By Juliana Barbassa, The Associated Press
San Bernardino County Sun
Article Launched:10/29/2006 01:00:00 AM PDT
SAN FRANCISCO - Passengers pour from a crowded bus onto a Chinatown sidewalk. The thin frame of a teenage boy is jostled like a rag doll by women with babies, school kids with backpacks, elderly shoppers picking through bins of flopping fish, and tourists looking for bargains among the plastic Buddhas.
A crowd of teens gathered in the dark basement of the Chinese Historical Society on a Friday night bursts into laughter as the familiar scene from their daily lives plays out on video. They made the short movie to reflect their impressions of a neighborhood that is much more to them than dim sum and souvenir shops.
Chinese-American teens in San Francisco have a complicated relationship with the biggest of the nation's many Chinatowns.
On the one hand, it's a place of comfort and familiarity. But the noise, crowds and smells wafting from open-air produce stands selling dried mushrooms or fresh herbs can seem old-fashioned to a generation hooked on iPods and YouTube, and chaotic compared to the suburbs where some now live.
Yet whether they live in the densely packed blocks or visit regularly to find a physical connection to their culture, history and friends with similar backgrounds, Chinatown still is home to the teens who cherish what it represents even as they make fun of it on film.
"Universally, kids will seek a place of comfort," says Ben Wong, director of the Chinatown Beacon Center, a community organization that offers education and leadership programs for youth. "They naturally connect based on ethnicity, language, socio-economic status. If they leave, they come back. It's a place of connection."
For more than 150 years, the neighborhood has sheltered immigrants. It's one of San Francisco's biggest tourist draws, but still offers a first toehold, a network of support and the reassurance of familiar languages and customs to new arrivals.
This is what sets it apart from other ethnic neighborhoods that within decades can go from a dynamic community to little more than a collection of restaurants and quaint signs. The Chinese have been a part of San Francisco from the city's inception, and the neighborhood is a physical reminder of those roots. It has become a tourist attraction, but visitors have to compete for sidewalk space with recent immigrants looking for spices or foods they can't find anywhere else.
The young people who live and congregate here confront the same challenges faced by inner-city youth of all backgrounds: difficulty accessing good health care, a quality education, tight quarters. In hotels where one room can house a whole family, there's a lack of recreational opportunities and spaces kids can consider their own, said Jan Lin, a professor at Occidental College and author of "Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change."
There are drawbacks, but there is also a sense of community that draws teenagers like Vinson Chen, 17, who helps his parents run a general store in Chinatown although he lives across town in the comparatively tidy and spacious Sunset district.
The Chinese were an integral part of San Francisco's wild Gold-Rush days, but for decades segregationist practices forced them to pack their lives into a dozen or so square blocks. They provided for themselves what the outside world would not: schools, markets, medical care and entertainment, building a home in a country that was intent on making them feel unwelcome.
The 1906 earthquake destroyed the old Chinatown, along with most of downtown San Francisco. Some local leaders saw it as an opportunity to sweep the enclave away altogether.
"The cities in the immediate vicinity of the San Francisco Bay never in the past had such opportunity as now to forever do away with the huddling together of Chinese in districts," the Oakland Enquirer wrote days after the destruction.
Instead, the neighborhood was rebuilt, this time in an elaborate Oriental style whose curved eaves and colorful lanterns were designed to attract tourists even as it continued to house traditional family associations, herb shops and restaurants.
Even as immigrants established themselves and moved to outlying neighborhoods, San Francisco and especially Chinatown grew to become "a center of Chinese and Chinese-American culture," says historian Judy Yung, who grew up in the neighborhood during the 1950s and recently published "San Francisco's Chinatown - Images of America."
Today, the largest number of ethnic Chinese in the city live in the Sunset district. But when a leading Board of Supervisors candidate seeking to represent the Sunset held his first fundraiser, it was not in that part of San Francisco but in Chinatown.
"Whether you're living in the Sunset or other parts of the city, you'll return to Chinatown because that remains the cultural and political center of the Chinese-American community," says David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee and a professor of political science at San Francisco State University.
http://dailybulletin.com/search/ci_4568176
The border is everywhere
The border is everywhere
Illegal immigrants come by land, sea and air
Mason Stockstill, Staff Writer SAN PEDRO When 29 undocumented Chinese nationals were found trying to enter the United States through the Port of Los Angeles in April, it wasn't the Border Patrol that caught them.
San Bernardino County Sun
Article Launched:12/19/2005 12:00:00 AM PST
SAN PEDRO -- When 29 undocumented Chinese nationals were found trying to enter the United States through the Port of Los Angeles in April, it wasn't the Border Patrol that caught them.
The men had arrived in a cargo container carried on a Panamanian vessel that had last stopped in China and Hong Kong. Port security personnel spotted them wandering around a cargo area.
The security officers called the U.S. Coast Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which later described the scene as familiar: a 40-foot shipping container filled with empty food packages, water bottles and receptacles overflowing with human waste.
Smuggling fees for immigrants from China can run as much as $60,000 per person. Although tougher security in the post-9/11 world has decreased the smuggling of immigrants by sea, the practice continues.
"It isn't all that uncommon," said Tony Migliorini, a spokesman with the Coast Guard. "We have caught them several times."
The phenomenon of would-be immigrants shipped in sealed containers drives home a fact faced daily by officials around California and the rest of the nation: The battle over illegal immigration is no longer fought only at the line separating the United States from Mexico.
As the tide of undocumented aliens swells, the border is everywhere.
It's a stiff challenge for personnel at ports of entry along U.S. coastlines and at international airports throughout the country. With so much commerce and so many people entering and leaving the country each day, inspecting every man, woman and package that enters the United States would be a daunting task.
Instead, officials use intelligence and improved communication to identify potential threats, focusing limited resources where they're likely to accomplish the most.
But sometimes, someone or something slips through the cracks.
By air and by sea
At the nation's airports, Customs and Border Protection the agency that includes the Border Patrol is charged with maintaining security and making sure no one enters the country who isn't supposed to.
The agency was created in 2003, after the Department of Homeland Security reorganized immigration, border enforcement and customs services. Since then, security at airport checkpoints has improved, said Ana Hinojosa, area port director for CBP in Los Angeles.
Information on travelers is now more readily available to customs officers, Hinojosa said sometimes before flights to the United States ever leave the ground. CBP also has officers stationed at overseas airports, working with foreign governments to screen passengers and keep those deemed "high risk" from boarding U.S.-bound flights.
Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, illegally entering the country through an airport was attempted far more frequently. More than 1.8 million people were apprehended between October 1999 and September 2000 at U.S. airports.
Now, new programs such as US-VISIT which links travelers' visas with fingerprints and digital photographs make it harder for anyone to enter the country without valid documents. But many still try. Customs officers catch impostors "all the time," Hinojosa said.
"In the past, it was easier for brothers or cousins to swap each other's paperwork and come in," she said. "That's no longer an option for them, because we verify their fingerprints."
The government also has implemented a program requiring travelers connected to certain "special interest" countries to undergo stricter screening and questioning upon arrival.
Similarly, information on cargo shipped to the United States is closely monitored by CBP, but only a small fraction of it is ever physically inspected.
Containment problem
Considering the amount of cargo arriving each day, incidents in which immigrants are found inside a container are rare. But many say the fact they happen at all shows the nation's seaports need much tighter security.
Of the thousands of containers coming into U.S. seaports every day, few are opened or scanned to see what's inside. In 2004, the total was 6 percent of all seafaring cargo.
CBP requires information on all cargo coming into the country more than 24 hours before it's loaded onto vessels at foreign ports. That information what's being shipped, where it's coming from and which company is shipping it is used to determine the ships and containers that will be searched with X-ray scans and radiation-detection equipment.
"It gives us 24 hours before that container's actually going to be boarded to screen it and determine whether or not there's any high-risk factor," Hinojosa said.
Additionally, about 40 percent of incoming cargo is transported by companies that participate in a government-certified security program. CBP officers go overseas to be sure the firms involved in the program have instituted higher levels of security.
Customs officials say those programs, taken together, mean 100 percent of cargo entering the country is screened in one way or another.
But that still leaves the port infrastructure in the United States. In 2002, Congress passed the Maritime Transportation Security Act, which was intended to improve security at and around ports. Among the changes it mandated were the use of biometric identification cards, vessel tracking and secure port perimeters.
Although all of the nation's seaports meet the minimum level of security required by the act, many port operators say funding from the federal government to cover those improvements has been slow in coming.
"The government has done a lot with security, especially on the air side, but it's now time to more effectively fund the maritime side," said Aaron Ellis of the Association of American Port Authorities. "We need to make sure our seaports are treated as fairly as our airports."
Many seaports have paid for security improvements out of their operating budgets, then found themselves shut out of federal grants available for reimbursement, Ellis said.
Port security is important to ensure no one can enter a seaport and slip explosives or something else aboard a container scheduled for departure, Ellis said. Also, port security personnel are on the front lines in the immigration battle, like the ones who found the 29 Chinese nationals at the Port of Los Angeles this year.
Watching the waters
That those 29 got ashore before being discovered shows how difficult it can be to stop illegal immigrants and contraband from entering the country, said the Coast Guard's Migliorini.
With more than 12,000 miles of coastline, 300-plus ports, daily arrivals of dozens of foreign ships and 76 million recreational boaters to monitor, the Coast Guard is a busy agency.
The emphasis on anti-terror operations that followed the terrorist attacks of 2001 changed the way the force works. The Coast Guard has increased security patrols around seaports, begun sending armed officers to board incoming and outgoing vessels, and started flying helicopters armed with machine guns in some areas off the East Coast.
Enforcing U.S. immigration laws at sea remains one of the Coast Guard's missions. Each year, thousands of immigrants usually from island nations such as Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic are halted before they reach U.S. soil. Many, however, succeed in landing at U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico.
"If we come across some illegal-immigrant or smuggling operations, we're going to attempt to find those and stop them," Migliorini said.
Depending on whether potential migrants make it to U.S. soil or are intercepted while still in the water, they can be immediately deported or turned over to Citizenship and Immigration Services for processing. At that point, refugees can claim asylum and remain in the country if they meet certain requirements.
In recent years, human smuggling from China has become a larger problem for the Coast Guard. Migliorini said it's not unusual to find a ship nearing U.S. waters with dozens of Chinese nationals crammed together in the cargo hold.
That's where the cargo containers come into play. Although many migrants have been apprehended in the United States and at ports in other nations, it's possible that more made it successfully through the various security measures in place.
"It's hard to tell how often it's happening and if we're catching them every time," Migliorini said. "If they remain in the container and then drive off without anybody knowing, it's hard to know if we missed them."
http://dailybulletin.com/search/ci_3322145
Illegal immigrants come by land, sea and air
Mason Stockstill, Staff Writer SAN PEDRO When 29 undocumented Chinese nationals were found trying to enter the United States through the Port of Los Angeles in April, it wasn't the Border Patrol that caught them.
San Bernardino County Sun
Article Launched:12/19/2005 12:00:00 AM PST
SAN PEDRO -- When 29 undocumented Chinese nationals were found trying to enter the United States through the Port of Los Angeles in April, it wasn't the Border Patrol that caught them.
The men had arrived in a cargo container carried on a Panamanian vessel that had last stopped in China and Hong Kong. Port security personnel spotted them wandering around a cargo area.
The security officers called the U.S. Coast Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which later described the scene as familiar: a 40-foot shipping container filled with empty food packages, water bottles and receptacles overflowing with human waste.
Smuggling fees for immigrants from China can run as much as $60,000 per person. Although tougher security in the post-9/11 world has decreased the smuggling of immigrants by sea, the practice continues.
"It isn't all that uncommon," said Tony Migliorini, a spokesman with the Coast Guard. "We have caught them several times."
The phenomenon of would-be immigrants shipped in sealed containers drives home a fact faced daily by officials around California and the rest of the nation: The battle over illegal immigration is no longer fought only at the line separating the United States from Mexico.
As the tide of undocumented aliens swells, the border is everywhere.
It's a stiff challenge for personnel at ports of entry along U.S. coastlines and at international airports throughout the country. With so much commerce and so many people entering and leaving the country each day, inspecting every man, woman and package that enters the United States would be a daunting task.
Instead, officials use intelligence and improved communication to identify potential threats, focusing limited resources where they're likely to accomplish the most.
But sometimes, someone or something slips through the cracks.
By air and by sea
At the nation's airports, Customs and Border Protection the agency that includes the Border Patrol is charged with maintaining security and making sure no one enters the country who isn't supposed to.
The agency was created in 2003, after the Department of Homeland Security reorganized immigration, border enforcement and customs services. Since then, security at airport checkpoints has improved, said Ana Hinojosa, area port director for CBP in Los Angeles.
Information on travelers is now more readily available to customs officers, Hinojosa said sometimes before flights to the United States ever leave the ground. CBP also has officers stationed at overseas airports, working with foreign governments to screen passengers and keep those deemed "high risk" from boarding U.S.-bound flights.
Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, illegally entering the country through an airport was attempted far more frequently. More than 1.8 million people were apprehended between October 1999 and September 2000 at U.S. airports.
Now, new programs such as US-VISIT which links travelers' visas with fingerprints and digital photographs make it harder for anyone to enter the country without valid documents. But many still try. Customs officers catch impostors "all the time," Hinojosa said.
"In the past, it was easier for brothers or cousins to swap each other's paperwork and come in," she said. "That's no longer an option for them, because we verify their fingerprints."
The government also has implemented a program requiring travelers connected to certain "special interest" countries to undergo stricter screening and questioning upon arrival.
Similarly, information on cargo shipped to the United States is closely monitored by CBP, but only a small fraction of it is ever physically inspected.
Containment problem
Considering the amount of cargo arriving each day, incidents in which immigrants are found inside a container are rare. But many say the fact they happen at all shows the nation's seaports need much tighter security.
Of the thousands of containers coming into U.S. seaports every day, few are opened or scanned to see what's inside. In 2004, the total was 6 percent of all seafaring cargo.
CBP requires information on all cargo coming into the country more than 24 hours before it's loaded onto vessels at foreign ports. That information what's being shipped, where it's coming from and which company is shipping it is used to determine the ships and containers that will be searched with X-ray scans and radiation-detection equipment.
"It gives us 24 hours before that container's actually going to be boarded to screen it and determine whether or not there's any high-risk factor," Hinojosa said.
Additionally, about 40 percent of incoming cargo is transported by companies that participate in a government-certified security program. CBP officers go overseas to be sure the firms involved in the program have instituted higher levels of security.
Customs officials say those programs, taken together, mean 100 percent of cargo entering the country is screened in one way or another.
But that still leaves the port infrastructure in the United States. In 2002, Congress passed the Maritime Transportation Security Act, which was intended to improve security at and around ports. Among the changes it mandated were the use of biometric identification cards, vessel tracking and secure port perimeters.
Although all of the nation's seaports meet the minimum level of security required by the act, many port operators say funding from the federal government to cover those improvements has been slow in coming.
"The government has done a lot with security, especially on the air side, but it's now time to more effectively fund the maritime side," said Aaron Ellis of the Association of American Port Authorities. "We need to make sure our seaports are treated as fairly as our airports."
Many seaports have paid for security improvements out of their operating budgets, then found themselves shut out of federal grants available for reimbursement, Ellis said.
Port security is important to ensure no one can enter a seaport and slip explosives or something else aboard a container scheduled for departure, Ellis said. Also, port security personnel are on the front lines in the immigration battle, like the ones who found the 29 Chinese nationals at the Port of Los Angeles this year.
Watching the waters
That those 29 got ashore before being discovered shows how difficult it can be to stop illegal immigrants and contraband from entering the country, said the Coast Guard's Migliorini.
With more than 12,000 miles of coastline, 300-plus ports, daily arrivals of dozens of foreign ships and 76 million recreational boaters to monitor, the Coast Guard is a busy agency.
The emphasis on anti-terror operations that followed the terrorist attacks of 2001 changed the way the force works. The Coast Guard has increased security patrols around seaports, begun sending armed officers to board incoming and outgoing vessels, and started flying helicopters armed with machine guns in some areas off the East Coast.
Enforcing U.S. immigration laws at sea remains one of the Coast Guard's missions. Each year, thousands of immigrants usually from island nations such as Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic are halted before they reach U.S. soil. Many, however, succeed in landing at U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico.
"If we come across some illegal-immigrant or smuggling operations, we're going to attempt to find those and stop them," Migliorini said.
Depending on whether potential migrants make it to U.S. soil or are intercepted while still in the water, they can be immediately deported or turned over to Citizenship and Immigration Services for processing. At that point, refugees can claim asylum and remain in the country if they meet certain requirements.
In recent years, human smuggling from China has become a larger problem for the Coast Guard. Migliorini said it's not unusual to find a ship nearing U.S. waters with dozens of Chinese nationals crammed together in the cargo hold.
That's where the cargo containers come into play. Although many migrants have been apprehended in the United States and at ports in other nations, it's possible that more made it successfully through the various security measures in place.
"It's hard to tell how often it's happening and if we're catching them every time," Migliorini said. "If they remain in the container and then drive off without anybody knowing, it's hard to know if we missed them."
http://dailybulletin.com/search/ci_3322145
Walls of broken dreams
Walls of broken dreams
1930s Chinese poetry reflects disillusion in American dream
Phillip Zonkel, Staff Writer
U-Entertainment
Article Launched:05/31/2006 12:00:00 AM PDT
IN 1985, RICHARD Turner, an Orange resident and professor of fine art at Chapman University, visited San Francisco's Angel Island Immigration Station, a California state park, and saw intricate poems carved and painted on the walls of the men's barracks. They were created by Chinese immigrants who were detained on the 470-acre island in the middle of San Francisco Bay under Chinese exclusionary laws in the early 20th century.
The poems — long forgotten until they were rediscovered accidentally in 1970 by a park ranger — express grief, frustration, nostalgia and the broken dreams of the languishing victims.
The works inspired Turner's sculpture, "Bridge to Angel Island," which flanks the entrance to the art gallery of the University Art Museum on the Cal State Long Beach campus. It consists of four panels comprised of glass, steel and wood — materials similar to those of the barracks. The panels, which have been at the site since 1994, contain etchings, carvings and sandblasted calligraphy replicas of four Angel Island poems written in Chinese characters.
One reads:
The insects chirp outside the four walls. The inmates often sigh. Thinking of affairs back home, unconscious tears wet my lapel.
Another reads:
America has power, but not justice. In prison, we were victimized as if we were guilty. Given no opportunity to explain, it was really brutal. I bow my head in reflection but there is nothing I can do.
The panels, although mounted on a conjoined grid, are monolithic and tombstone-like memorials.
Turner wanted the represented poems in their original Chinese.
"The viewer is in the shoes of a Chinese immigrant who can't read English," he says. "The viewer becomes for a moment in a small sense an outsider."
These poems mirror the feelings of many Chinese immigrants who were housed at Angel Island. PROCESSING CENTER From 1910 to 1940, Angel Island Immigration Station served as a processing and detainment center. The station processed about 1 million immigrants (Japanese, Russian, Indian, Korean, Australian and Filipino), including 175,000-200,000 Chinese. The station was closed in 1940, but was used by the U.S. Army as a prisoner of war processing camp during World War II. It was permanently shut down after WWII.
Despite its innocent sounding name, Angel Island was more of a devil's island. It was the West Coast's insidious version of Ellis Island. It was established through federal legislation aimed at stemming the tide of immigration — the physical embodiment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prevented Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. The law was enacted in response to complaints about the influx of Chinese laborers, who had come to work on the railroads. In some cases, traveling U.S. citizens of Chinese descent had to endure the same procedures and some were not granted permission to re-enter America.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first U.S. legislation to ban a specific ethnic group. It was repealed in 1943, when China became America's ally in World War II, and replaced with a quota system that allowed only 105 Chinese per year into the U.S.
Chinese were not on equal-immigration footing with other ethnicities until the laws were completely rewritten in the mid 1960s.
Unlike Ellis Island, where most immigrants only stayed several hours, Angel Island held Chinese immigrants for an average of two or three weeks, some for nearly two years, as officials verified their immigration status with grueling interrogation interviews.
Historical accounts of life at the station showed great disparity between treatment of Asian and non-Asian immigrants, who were held in separate quarters. Asian detainees, housed in sections of the two-story barracks building that were meant to accommodate 100 but often held 500, were given substandard food, saltwater showers and limited recreation behind barbed-wire fences.
Views from triple-stacked bunks only hinted at the lush greenery and deep blue ocean just outside their confines. Detainees were kept on the north side of Angel Island, facing away from the bustling city that promised them so much opportunity. EXPRESSIVE POEMS Languishing from indefinite stays, prison-like quarters and humiliating medical examinations, many Chinese turned to poetry to vent.
"These walls are talking," says Erika Gee, education director at the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.
The raw, poignant language reveals the poet's intimate feelings and state of mind.
"Poetry with a personal feeling is a bedrock in Chinese literature," says Charles Egan, associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. "It dates back as far as 500 B.C. when the 'Shijing' or 'Book of Poetry' was compiled.
"Poetry was seen as a natural product of emotional experience, so there was always a premium placed on expressing yourself, especially in a time of high emotion.
"This is not gibberish," Egan says. "It's good poetry. "These people received at least some education. They use historical allusion and classic language. There are references to classic literature and mythology."
In traditional China, writing poetry was a social practice, with groups of people getting together to transcribe their feelings. The authors also posted their work on public walls.
The poems at Angel Island suggest the writers were well-educated and well-organized, possibly working in "poetry clubs" that were selective about what became mural-like carvings on the wall, Egan says.
"There's a call and response going on in the poetry," he says.
Homer Lee, who was 16 when he arrived at Angel Island in 1926, remembered seeing groups of older men — many of them schoolteachers — huddled together to discuss and display their poetry on the walls during his six-month detainment.
"They tell the truth of their lives and the future of their lives on the wall," says the 95-year-old, who now lives in Berkeley.
Dismissed as graffiti by guards and officials at the time, the writings frequently were painted over and/or filled with putty, which obscured them for decades until a park ranger rediscovered them in the 1970s.
RESCUED FOR HISTORY
At the time, the dilapidated barracks were scheduled for destruction, but were saved from demolition. In 1997, Angel Island Immigration Station became a National Historic Landmark. It is one of only two sites related to Asian-American history (the other is the Japanese-American Internment Camp Manzanar) that hold national-landmark status.
"There is no other historical presence like this in the United States for Chinese Immigrants," says Daphne Kwok, executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.
The poems have been the focus of a $50 million, three-phase state parks restoration project under way at the Angel Island Immigration Station. A mix of federal, state and private money funds the project.
Before work began last August, a team of scholars combed the station's barracks and hospital, locating every visible piece of writing on the walls. It was the first-ever attempt at creating such a record, and scholars are using it to find out more about the life of detainees.
Until now, the most comprehensive account was the 1980 book "Island," which published 135 Angel Island poems. But the collection, based on 1930s-era manuscripts by two detainees who reportedly copied poems off the walls, never was physically corroborated. The project located most of those poems and found about 60 new ones.
In 1979, researchers started the process of conducting oral histories with 30 detainees, who wanted to remain anonymous, and translating the poems.
Historian Judy Yung, a co-author of "Island" who conducted oral histories of former detainees, says researchers have been unable to locate any of the poets. Unlike writings by detainees of other nationalities, most of the Chinese work was unsigned.
"There was a sense of secrecy and shame to what happened at Angel Island," Yung says. "It doesn't matter who wrote them, but that the poems speak certain truths and speak certain feelings that we all understand."
Former detainees did not share their stories of incarceration with their children, wanting to put their unpleasant experience behind them. Chinese immigrants who came under false names lived in fear of government retribution and even possible deportation.
"Some (former detainees) want to forget or minimize what happened," says Georges Van Den Abbeele, professor of humanities at UC Davis, who is directing the third phase of the oral history project. "All these things conspire to make it difficult" to record the stories.
"It's not one of the more pleasing parts of American history; it's pretty negative, and it's a forgotten chapter," he says. "But it's important to get the story told."
Angel Island Immigration Station will reopen to the public in the summer of 2007 after completion of the first phase of restoration, featuring a new exhibit with the scholars' findings.
The exhibit spotlights the Chinese poetry, but it also includes writings from other Asian, Russian, South American and Middle Eastern immigrants who passed through the station, as well as World War II prisoners of war later held there.
While those writings were mainly just short messages and name inscriptions, Egan says the diversity shown hopefully will help visitors understand the Angel Island experience as "a real American story out there that has a large resonance."
http://dailybulletin.com/search/ci_3880042
1930s Chinese poetry reflects disillusion in American dream
Phillip Zonkel, Staff Writer
U-Entertainment
Article Launched:05/31/2006 12:00:00 AM PDT
IN 1985, RICHARD Turner, an Orange resident and professor of fine art at Chapman University, visited San Francisco's Angel Island Immigration Station, a California state park, and saw intricate poems carved and painted on the walls of the men's barracks. They were created by Chinese immigrants who were detained on the 470-acre island in the middle of San Francisco Bay under Chinese exclusionary laws in the early 20th century.
The poems — long forgotten until they were rediscovered accidentally in 1970 by a park ranger — express grief, frustration, nostalgia and the broken dreams of the languishing victims.
The works inspired Turner's sculpture, "Bridge to Angel Island," which flanks the entrance to the art gallery of the University Art Museum on the Cal State Long Beach campus. It consists of four panels comprised of glass, steel and wood — materials similar to those of the barracks. The panels, which have been at the site since 1994, contain etchings, carvings and sandblasted calligraphy replicas of four Angel Island poems written in Chinese characters.
One reads:
The insects chirp outside the four walls. The inmates often sigh. Thinking of affairs back home, unconscious tears wet my lapel.
Another reads:
America has power, but not justice. In prison, we were victimized as if we were guilty. Given no opportunity to explain, it was really brutal. I bow my head in reflection but there is nothing I can do.
The panels, although mounted on a conjoined grid, are monolithic and tombstone-like memorials.
Turner wanted the represented poems in their original Chinese.
"The viewer is in the shoes of a Chinese immigrant who can't read English," he says. "The viewer becomes for a moment in a small sense an outsider."
These poems mirror the feelings of many Chinese immigrants who were housed at Angel Island. PROCESSING CENTER From 1910 to 1940, Angel Island Immigration Station served as a processing and detainment center. The station processed about 1 million immigrants (Japanese, Russian, Indian, Korean, Australian and Filipino), including 175,000-200,000 Chinese. The station was closed in 1940, but was used by the U.S. Army as a prisoner of war processing camp during World War II. It was permanently shut down after WWII.
Despite its innocent sounding name, Angel Island was more of a devil's island. It was the West Coast's insidious version of Ellis Island. It was established through federal legislation aimed at stemming the tide of immigration — the physical embodiment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prevented Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. The law was enacted in response to complaints about the influx of Chinese laborers, who had come to work on the railroads. In some cases, traveling U.S. citizens of Chinese descent had to endure the same procedures and some were not granted permission to re-enter America.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first U.S. legislation to ban a specific ethnic group. It was repealed in 1943, when China became America's ally in World War II, and replaced with a quota system that allowed only 105 Chinese per year into the U.S.
Chinese were not on equal-immigration footing with other ethnicities until the laws were completely rewritten in the mid 1960s.
Unlike Ellis Island, where most immigrants only stayed several hours, Angel Island held Chinese immigrants for an average of two or three weeks, some for nearly two years, as officials verified their immigration status with grueling interrogation interviews.
Historical accounts of life at the station showed great disparity between treatment of Asian and non-Asian immigrants, who were held in separate quarters. Asian detainees, housed in sections of the two-story barracks building that were meant to accommodate 100 but often held 500, were given substandard food, saltwater showers and limited recreation behind barbed-wire fences.
Views from triple-stacked bunks only hinted at the lush greenery and deep blue ocean just outside their confines. Detainees were kept on the north side of Angel Island, facing away from the bustling city that promised them so much opportunity. EXPRESSIVE POEMS Languishing from indefinite stays, prison-like quarters and humiliating medical examinations, many Chinese turned to poetry to vent.
"These walls are talking," says Erika Gee, education director at the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.
The raw, poignant language reveals the poet's intimate feelings and state of mind.
"Poetry with a personal feeling is a bedrock in Chinese literature," says Charles Egan, associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. "It dates back as far as 500 B.C. when the 'Shijing' or 'Book of Poetry' was compiled.
"Poetry was seen as a natural product of emotional experience, so there was always a premium placed on expressing yourself, especially in a time of high emotion.
"This is not gibberish," Egan says. "It's good poetry. "These people received at least some education. They use historical allusion and classic language. There are references to classic literature and mythology."
In traditional China, writing poetry was a social practice, with groups of people getting together to transcribe their feelings. The authors also posted their work on public walls.
The poems at Angel Island suggest the writers were well-educated and well-organized, possibly working in "poetry clubs" that were selective about what became mural-like carvings on the wall, Egan says.
"There's a call and response going on in the poetry," he says.
Homer Lee, who was 16 when he arrived at Angel Island in 1926, remembered seeing groups of older men — many of them schoolteachers — huddled together to discuss and display their poetry on the walls during his six-month detainment.
"They tell the truth of their lives and the future of their lives on the wall," says the 95-year-old, who now lives in Berkeley.
Dismissed as graffiti by guards and officials at the time, the writings frequently were painted over and/or filled with putty, which obscured them for decades until a park ranger rediscovered them in the 1970s.
RESCUED FOR HISTORY
At the time, the dilapidated barracks were scheduled for destruction, but were saved from demolition. In 1997, Angel Island Immigration Station became a National Historic Landmark. It is one of only two sites related to Asian-American history (the other is the Japanese-American Internment Camp Manzanar) that hold national-landmark status.
"There is no other historical presence like this in the United States for Chinese Immigrants," says Daphne Kwok, executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.
The poems have been the focus of a $50 million, three-phase state parks restoration project under way at the Angel Island Immigration Station. A mix of federal, state and private money funds the project.
Before work began last August, a team of scholars combed the station's barracks and hospital, locating every visible piece of writing on the walls. It was the first-ever attempt at creating such a record, and scholars are using it to find out more about the life of detainees.
Until now, the most comprehensive account was the 1980 book "Island," which published 135 Angel Island poems. But the collection, based on 1930s-era manuscripts by two detainees who reportedly copied poems off the walls, never was physically corroborated. The project located most of those poems and found about 60 new ones.
In 1979, researchers started the process of conducting oral histories with 30 detainees, who wanted to remain anonymous, and translating the poems.
Historian Judy Yung, a co-author of "Island" who conducted oral histories of former detainees, says researchers have been unable to locate any of the poets. Unlike writings by detainees of other nationalities, most of the Chinese work was unsigned.
"There was a sense of secrecy and shame to what happened at Angel Island," Yung says. "It doesn't matter who wrote them, but that the poems speak certain truths and speak certain feelings that we all understand."
Former detainees did not share their stories of incarceration with their children, wanting to put their unpleasant experience behind them. Chinese immigrants who came under false names lived in fear of government retribution and even possible deportation.
"Some (former detainees) want to forget or minimize what happened," says Georges Van Den Abbeele, professor of humanities at UC Davis, who is directing the third phase of the oral history project. "All these things conspire to make it difficult" to record the stories.
"It's not one of the more pleasing parts of American history; it's pretty negative, and it's a forgotten chapter," he says. "But it's important to get the story told."
Angel Island Immigration Station will reopen to the public in the summer of 2007 after completion of the first phase of restoration, featuring a new exhibit with the scholars' findings.
The exhibit spotlights the Chinese poetry, but it also includes writings from other Asian, Russian, South American and Middle Eastern immigrants who passed through the station, as well as World War II prisoners of war later held there.
While those writings were mainly just short messages and name inscriptions, Egan says the diversity shown hopefully will help visitors understand the Angel Island experience as "a real American story out there that has a large resonance."
http://dailybulletin.com/search/ci_3880042
U.S. Asians drawn to life in Irvine
U.S. Asians drawn to life in Irvine
Good schools, low crime rates, well-paying jobs lure many, especially Chinese Americans.
By David Kelly, Times Staff Writer
October 29, 2006
In the world of highly manicured Orange County communities, few are polished to the luster of Irvine. The master-planned, upscale city of cookie-cutter homes and broad boulevards looks every inch the stereotype of suburban living — orderly, safe and homogenous.
Yet just beneath the surface lies another Irvine, one of Buddhist temples and teahouses, a city with bustling Chinese markets and a university where nearly half the students are Asian. Once the epitome of conservative, white suburbia, Irvine is now a place where a person can spend a lifetime never having to speak English.
"I used to think I would retire someday and move to Chinatown," said Yvonne Wang, who moved to Irvine from New Jersey in 1994. "Now Irvine is like Chinatown."
Attracted by good schools, low crime and well-paying jobs, Irvine has become a destination for Asian American professionals, especially Chinese Americans. It's home to one of the country's biggest Chinese language schools, the largest Buddhist temple and monastery in Orange County, a Chinese orchestra and clubs for artists, students and senior citizens. More Chinese Americans live in Irvine than any other city in the county.
"A lot came in the last decade. The education system has clearly been a magnet; people don't end up living here by accident," said Irvine Mayor Beth Krom. "We are a Pacific Rim community, so it's natural to see more Asian people."
According to U.S. census estimates, 36.7% of Irvine's 185,000 residents are Asian American. Of that, 21,757 are Chinese, up from 14,973 in 2000. Koreans, Vietnamese and Japanese constitute most of the remaining Asian Americans. Irvine schools, where classrooms are often heavily Chinese American, have become among the most competitive in the region.
"I have heard parents say they don't want to send their kids here because they aren't high achievers," said Jung Kang, who teaches Chinese at University High School. "The students are very competitive, but that is an incentive for others to do better."
Yet despite the heavy influx of Chinese, there is no Chinatown or strictly Chinese neighborhoods. Such enclaves are more often found in lower-income immigrant areas, places that don't exist in Irvine. New arrivals here tend to be doctors, lawyers, engineers and academics with the language skills and money that many traditional immigrants don't have.
And they are catered to in typical Orange County fashion, with neatly kept shopping centers and strip malls. The largest is Culver Plaza, home to Chinese banks, restaurants, tea shops and the sprawling 99 Ranch Market, which carries pickled lettuce, quail eggs, live catfish and moon cakes.
For culture, Chinese plays and operas are performed at the Irvine Barclay Theater.
Nancy Cheng, 75, a teacher and nurse, came to Irvine from Villa Park because she was constantly attending Chinese functions here.
"I never spoke so much Chinese in my life until I moved to Irvine," she said.
The rapid transformation of the town from a predominantly white enclave to an increasingly Asian one can startle even the Chinese Americans.
"I came from San Bernardino, where I was the only Chinese girl in my school," said Belinda Vong, a member of UC Irvine's Chinese Assn. "I felt special. Not anymore."
Kevin Lee is president of the association. He said UCI, which is 40% Asian, is often referred to as University of Chinese Immigrants.
"When you leave Irvine, it hits you that this is really a bubble," he said. "A lot of Asians here take their culture for granted."
Not those who came first. They remember when there were only a handful of Chinese Americans, when there were no clubs, when buying ingredients for dinner meant driving to Los Angeles and the idea of staging a Chinese opera was simply unthinkable.
"Ten years ago there was not one Chinese store. When I first came there were a few, mostly Taiwanese, residents. China had not opened up yet," said Jimmy Ma, a leader in the Chinese American community. "The big reason people came was because of the schools. Chinese stress education. That's how we compete."
Ma and others rented high school classrooms for a Chinese language school. When the rent was raised, they decided to build their own facility. After years of planning, the $12-million, 44,000-square-foot South Coast Chinese Cultural Center opened in April.
The center's Chinese school now has more than 1,000 students. It also offers Japanese and Korean language classes, along with Chinese dance, art, basketball and badminton courts. Students can also get academic tutoring and SAT preparation.
"We want our children to combine the good part of both cultures — Chinese and American," said Joy Chao, who runs after-school programs at the center.
The school system has had to adapt to Asian immigrants. They have hired Chinese, Korean and Japanese-speaking staff. They hold regular meetings with parents to explain how the schools operate. Often, educators say, parents are keenly interested in what sort of academic performance is required to get their students into Harvard, Yale or Stanford.
"People talk about culture and they focus on the exterior, superficial things like food and festivals, but it's really about a person's worldview," said Melodee Zamudio, who coordinates language programs for the Irvine school district. "Many of these kids come from a culture where education is such a precious gift, and you bring honor to the family by studying hard."
At University High, 41% of the students are Asian American, the vast majority Chinese Americans, said assistant principal Chuck Keith. The Academic Performance Index is 891, putting it among the top 2% in the state.
"I think the Asian family is a factor in that score," Keith said. "I think it is part of the culture of our school and I see kids rise to meet those expectations."
Asian American students admit there is pressure to perform academically, though some say it's easier here than where they came from.
"My parents are very serious about school. They don't push extracurricular activities," said Charles Jawa, 16. "If I want to do it, fine, but studying comes first."
Jacob Chen, 11, moved from Taiwan three years ago.
"It's much better here than Taiwan," he said. "In Taiwan they give you four times as much homework."
Some Chinese Americans privately complain that other parents ask them what grades their children get or what college they will attend. Others send their children to schools with fewer Chinese students, hoping it will be less competitive. Many struggle for a balance.
"It's an extremely competitive place even at the preschool level," said Isabel Mah, 39, as she waited for her 5-year-old son to finish Chinese class at the Chinese cultural center. "I want my kid to be a kid but I want him to do well in school."
As Chinese influence grows, local political leaders are learning that international disputes can now erupt at home.
That's what happened in June when Mayor Krom went to China to establish a sister city arrangement with Xuhui, a region of Shanghai. She said a city staffer signed the agreement before she saw it. The deal required Irvine to recognize the One China Policy — meaning China and Taiwan were one, not two, countries. It also demanded that Irvine officials not travel to Taiwan where they have a sister-city relationship with Taoyuan.
Shortly after, nearly 200 protesters, originally from Taiwan, showed up at a City Council meeting, angry at what they saw as Irvine's kowtowing to China.
The council quickly rescinded the sister-city deal and said it would renegotiate another only if it was strictly nonpolitical.
"Regardless of what was signed, we don't take our marching orders from other countries," Krom said.
Taiwanese and mainland Chinese residents of Irvine insist there is no tension between them.
"We treat the Taiwan-China debate like religion — you don't talk about it," said Rose Cheung.
Her friend Susie Chu said, "It's a fact, there are differences between the two."
Chu and Cheung belong to the Irvine Evergreen Chinese Senior Assn., a group of about 400 senior citizens engaged in a wide array of cultural activities.
"My mom is 86 and never thought she could live in a place like Irvine and not have to speak English," Chu said.
Despite their growing numbers, the Chinese Americans worry how they are perceived by the community.
"I think we have set a good example," said Yvonne Wang, 70, president of the Evergreen association. "We have been very constructive to society here."
Cheung nodded.
"We still have our individuality," she said. "But collectively we are very conscious about how we present ourselves."
Across town, along a busy street of low-slung warehouses, the sloping red roof of the Pao Fa Temple rises. Guarded by stone dragons at the door, it is calm and quiet inside. Incense burns. Buddhist nuns with shaved heads and brown robes chant sutras in the Great Hall, where 3,000 golden Buddhas stare down on them.
The $5-million temple, one of the biggest in the nation, opened in 2002. Irvine was selected, according to a nun, because the abbot received a sign during meditation to put it here.
After a recent service, a collection of worshipers — men on one side, women on the other — silently ate in the spartan cafeteria.
When she finished, Ying Chow, 62, stepped into the library. She revels in time spent at the temple, remembering when she had to drive to Hacienda Heights to attend services.
"Most of my friends are in Irvine now. It has become a real community for the Chinese. But it's still surprising to see this temple here," she said, folding her hands and smiling. "Orange County has really changed. I feel good about it, I feel very special."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-irvine29oct29,1,339208.story
*
A multitude of Asian groups
Asian Americans account for almost 37% of Irvine's population, and people of Chinese ancestry account for more than a third of the city's Asian Americans. Irvine estimates the city's total population at 185,000, while the 2005 census data estimate is 172,182.
*
In Irvine, the percentage of the population that is Asian American is 36.7%,
in Orange County 16%, and in the state 12.4%
Chinese in Irvine
Irvine's residents of Chinese ancestry make up a higher proportion of the city's Asian population than in either the county or the state.
Chinese as a percentage of all Asians, by region
Of California's Asians - 25.5%
Of Orange County's Asians - 15.8%
Of Irvine's Asians - 34.5%
Sources: U.S. census data; 2005 American Community Survey
Good schools, low crime rates, well-paying jobs lure many, especially Chinese Americans.
By David Kelly, Times Staff Writer
October 29, 2006
In the world of highly manicured Orange County communities, few are polished to the luster of Irvine. The master-planned, upscale city of cookie-cutter homes and broad boulevards looks every inch the stereotype of suburban living — orderly, safe and homogenous.
Yet just beneath the surface lies another Irvine, one of Buddhist temples and teahouses, a city with bustling Chinese markets and a university where nearly half the students are Asian. Once the epitome of conservative, white suburbia, Irvine is now a place where a person can spend a lifetime never having to speak English.
"I used to think I would retire someday and move to Chinatown," said Yvonne Wang, who moved to Irvine from New Jersey in 1994. "Now Irvine is like Chinatown."
Attracted by good schools, low crime and well-paying jobs, Irvine has become a destination for Asian American professionals, especially Chinese Americans. It's home to one of the country's biggest Chinese language schools, the largest Buddhist temple and monastery in Orange County, a Chinese orchestra and clubs for artists, students and senior citizens. More Chinese Americans live in Irvine than any other city in the county.
"A lot came in the last decade. The education system has clearly been a magnet; people don't end up living here by accident," said Irvine Mayor Beth Krom. "We are a Pacific Rim community, so it's natural to see more Asian people."
According to U.S. census estimates, 36.7% of Irvine's 185,000 residents are Asian American. Of that, 21,757 are Chinese, up from 14,973 in 2000. Koreans, Vietnamese and Japanese constitute most of the remaining Asian Americans. Irvine schools, where classrooms are often heavily Chinese American, have become among the most competitive in the region.
"I have heard parents say they don't want to send their kids here because they aren't high achievers," said Jung Kang, who teaches Chinese at University High School. "The students are very competitive, but that is an incentive for others to do better."
Yet despite the heavy influx of Chinese, there is no Chinatown or strictly Chinese neighborhoods. Such enclaves are more often found in lower-income immigrant areas, places that don't exist in Irvine. New arrivals here tend to be doctors, lawyers, engineers and academics with the language skills and money that many traditional immigrants don't have.
And they are catered to in typical Orange County fashion, with neatly kept shopping centers and strip malls. The largest is Culver Plaza, home to Chinese banks, restaurants, tea shops and the sprawling 99 Ranch Market, which carries pickled lettuce, quail eggs, live catfish and moon cakes.
For culture, Chinese plays and operas are performed at the Irvine Barclay Theater.
Nancy Cheng, 75, a teacher and nurse, came to Irvine from Villa Park because she was constantly attending Chinese functions here.
"I never spoke so much Chinese in my life until I moved to Irvine," she said.
The rapid transformation of the town from a predominantly white enclave to an increasingly Asian one can startle even the Chinese Americans.
"I came from San Bernardino, where I was the only Chinese girl in my school," said Belinda Vong, a member of UC Irvine's Chinese Assn. "I felt special. Not anymore."
Kevin Lee is president of the association. He said UCI, which is 40% Asian, is often referred to as University of Chinese Immigrants.
"When you leave Irvine, it hits you that this is really a bubble," he said. "A lot of Asians here take their culture for granted."
Not those who came first. They remember when there were only a handful of Chinese Americans, when there were no clubs, when buying ingredients for dinner meant driving to Los Angeles and the idea of staging a Chinese opera was simply unthinkable.
"Ten years ago there was not one Chinese store. When I first came there were a few, mostly Taiwanese, residents. China had not opened up yet," said Jimmy Ma, a leader in the Chinese American community. "The big reason people came was because of the schools. Chinese stress education. That's how we compete."
Ma and others rented high school classrooms for a Chinese language school. When the rent was raised, they decided to build their own facility. After years of planning, the $12-million, 44,000-square-foot South Coast Chinese Cultural Center opened in April.
The center's Chinese school now has more than 1,000 students. It also offers Japanese and Korean language classes, along with Chinese dance, art, basketball and badminton courts. Students can also get academic tutoring and SAT preparation.
"We want our children to combine the good part of both cultures — Chinese and American," said Joy Chao, who runs after-school programs at the center.
The school system has had to adapt to Asian immigrants. They have hired Chinese, Korean and Japanese-speaking staff. They hold regular meetings with parents to explain how the schools operate. Often, educators say, parents are keenly interested in what sort of academic performance is required to get their students into Harvard, Yale or Stanford.
"People talk about culture and they focus on the exterior, superficial things like food and festivals, but it's really about a person's worldview," said Melodee Zamudio, who coordinates language programs for the Irvine school district. "Many of these kids come from a culture where education is such a precious gift, and you bring honor to the family by studying hard."
At University High, 41% of the students are Asian American, the vast majority Chinese Americans, said assistant principal Chuck Keith. The Academic Performance Index is 891, putting it among the top 2% in the state.
"I think the Asian family is a factor in that score," Keith said. "I think it is part of the culture of our school and I see kids rise to meet those expectations."
Asian American students admit there is pressure to perform academically, though some say it's easier here than where they came from.
"My parents are very serious about school. They don't push extracurricular activities," said Charles Jawa, 16. "If I want to do it, fine, but studying comes first."
Jacob Chen, 11, moved from Taiwan three years ago.
"It's much better here than Taiwan," he said. "In Taiwan they give you four times as much homework."
Some Chinese Americans privately complain that other parents ask them what grades their children get or what college they will attend. Others send their children to schools with fewer Chinese students, hoping it will be less competitive. Many struggle for a balance.
"It's an extremely competitive place even at the preschool level," said Isabel Mah, 39, as she waited for her 5-year-old son to finish Chinese class at the Chinese cultural center. "I want my kid to be a kid but I want him to do well in school."
As Chinese influence grows, local political leaders are learning that international disputes can now erupt at home.
That's what happened in June when Mayor Krom went to China to establish a sister city arrangement with Xuhui, a region of Shanghai. She said a city staffer signed the agreement before she saw it. The deal required Irvine to recognize the One China Policy — meaning China and Taiwan were one, not two, countries. It also demanded that Irvine officials not travel to Taiwan where they have a sister-city relationship with Taoyuan.
Shortly after, nearly 200 protesters, originally from Taiwan, showed up at a City Council meeting, angry at what they saw as Irvine's kowtowing to China.
The council quickly rescinded the sister-city deal and said it would renegotiate another only if it was strictly nonpolitical.
"Regardless of what was signed, we don't take our marching orders from other countries," Krom said.
Taiwanese and mainland Chinese residents of Irvine insist there is no tension between them.
"We treat the Taiwan-China debate like religion — you don't talk about it," said Rose Cheung.
Her friend Susie Chu said, "It's a fact, there are differences between the two."
Chu and Cheung belong to the Irvine Evergreen Chinese Senior Assn., a group of about 400 senior citizens engaged in a wide array of cultural activities.
"My mom is 86 and never thought she could live in a place like Irvine and not have to speak English," Chu said.
Despite their growing numbers, the Chinese Americans worry how they are perceived by the community.
"I think we have set a good example," said Yvonne Wang, 70, president of the Evergreen association. "We have been very constructive to society here."
Cheung nodded.
"We still have our individuality," she said. "But collectively we are very conscious about how we present ourselves."
Across town, along a busy street of low-slung warehouses, the sloping red roof of the Pao Fa Temple rises. Guarded by stone dragons at the door, it is calm and quiet inside. Incense burns. Buddhist nuns with shaved heads and brown robes chant sutras in the Great Hall, where 3,000 golden Buddhas stare down on them.
The $5-million temple, one of the biggest in the nation, opened in 2002. Irvine was selected, according to a nun, because the abbot received a sign during meditation to put it here.
After a recent service, a collection of worshipers — men on one side, women on the other — silently ate in the spartan cafeteria.
When she finished, Ying Chow, 62, stepped into the library. She revels in time spent at the temple, remembering when she had to drive to Hacienda Heights to attend services.
"Most of my friends are in Irvine now. It has become a real community for the Chinese. But it's still surprising to see this temple here," she said, folding her hands and smiling. "Orange County has really changed. I feel good about it, I feel very special."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-irvine29oct29,1,339208.story
*
A multitude of Asian groups
Asian Americans account for almost 37% of Irvine's population, and people of Chinese ancestry account for more than a third of the city's Asian Americans. Irvine estimates the city's total population at 185,000, while the 2005 census data estimate is 172,182.
*
In Irvine, the percentage of the population that is Asian American is 36.7%,
in Orange County 16%, and in the state 12.4%
Chinese in Irvine
Irvine's residents of Chinese ancestry make up a higher proportion of the city's Asian population than in either the county or the state.
Chinese as a percentage of all Asians, by region
Of California's Asians - 25.5%
Of Orange County's Asians - 15.8%
Of Irvine's Asians - 34.5%
Sources: U.S. census data; 2005 American Community Survey
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