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
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