Strangers In Paradise

By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

At the western edge of America, where the continent falls into the Pacific as it follows the sun, the coast has always seemed an image of Eden, a garden of earthly delights. "There is an island called California, on the right hand of the Indies, very near the Earthly Paradise," wrote a 16th century Spanish fantasist in a novel that gave the Golden State its name. California and other stretches of the Pacific shore would become the fated and fateful destinations of adventurous journeys westward by European settlers, cowboys, miners, Forty- Niners and dreamers. There the travelers would pass, or so they hoped, from their old lives -- and the Old World -- into a heaven on earth. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in 1879 at the end of a long trip West, "At every turn we could see farther into the land and our own happy futures . . . For this was indeed our destination; this was the 'good country' we had been going to so long."

In spite of the seemingly inexorable European settlement of the Pacific Coast, there are strangers in the Western paradise. Other peoples too have sought the "good country," though instead of crossing the continent, they have crossed an ocean; instead of looking back to Europe, they trace their bloodlines to Asia. The profound impact they have made on the West is a case study of the changes that will sweep the nation as it gradually moves beyond the melting pot. As Asians bring vitality and a renewed sense of purpose to the region, is history repeating itself with a twist? Just as Europeans took the region from Native Americans, is the West being won all over again by Korean entrepreneurs, Japanese financiers, Indian doctors, Filipino nurses, Vietnamese restaurateurs and Chinese engineers?

What often passes for Asian ghettos bustle with the pride and promise of middle-class America with an exotic cast. Churches hold services in English -- and Korean, Chinese and Tagalog. The curved eaves of Buddhist temples share suburbia with the flat roofs of ranch-style homes. Asian shopping malls are stocked with everything from disposable diapers to dried sea cucumbers that sell for up to $1,000 per lb. Signs in English and Spanish compete with those in the Korean Hankul alphabet and in Chinese ideograms. When Roman letters appear, they are often tricked out in the rococo accents of Vietnamese.

The ties that bind the West Coast to Asia are not merely cultural but also financial. At the news of the earthquake that ravaged the San Francisco Bay area last October, Wall Street barely blinked. But in Tokyo, Manila and Hong Kong, stock markets dipped nervously. The Pacific coastland is a 20th century Asia Minor, a continent in miniature, with a diversity of mores and languages not matched anywhere else. Among those who have sunk roots are Cambodians, Thais, Filipinos, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Vietnamese, Indochinese hill people, and Chinese from the People's Republic, Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Most hold on to vibrant links across the Pacific Basin. East may be East and West West, but in this case the West seems more and more East as well.

Even as they stake their claims to the American West, Asians are encountering problems: racism, the ambivalence of assimilation, the perils of prosperity, ethnic jealousies and the sometimes dire inequities of a laissez- faire society. Asians in general are still strangers in the Western paradise, and they are keenly aware of their status.

Many have found success and prosperity in their new home. A decade ago, a 1 1/2-mile strip of Bolsa Avenue between Garden Grove and Westminster in Orange County, Calif., was a ragged quilt of vacant lots and small stores, bean fields and discount emporiums. Today the stretch is as alive as payday in a port city -- specifically, Saigon. Between 20,000 and 50,000 Vietnamese flock each weekend to 800 shops and restaurants, buying herbal medicine and dining out on snail-tomato-rice-noodle soup. In the mornings people may attend Buddhist ceremonies in makeshift temples; in the evenings they can applaud Elvis Phuong, who, complete with skintight pants and sneer, does Presley Vietnamese-style.

More than 80,000 refugees have made the area, known locally as Little Saigon, the center of one of the largest Vietnamese enclaves outside Indochina. Says Frank Jao, the Vietnamese-American developer of Bolsa Avenue: "The Chinese, the Japanese, the Italians and the Jews grouped together when they came to the U.S. There seemed to be no reason why the Vietnamese wouldn't follow the same tradition."

Southern California is full of Asian immigrants who are doing just that. Across the intersection of Crenshaw and Olympic boulevards in Los Angeles is Koreatown, with its thousands of Korean businesses: mom-and-pop curio stores, multinational banks, tiny storefronts, gleaming glass buildings. Upwards of 300,000 Korean Americans live in or near Koreatown.

Some 15 miles away, near the intersection of Coldwater Canyon and Roscoe boulevards, in the San Fernando Valley working-class section of North Hollywood, Buddhist monks pray in a Thai temple pungent with incense and dominated by a 10-ft. statue of Buddha. On weekends Thai families turn the temple's parking lot into a festival straight out of Bangkok.

To the east of Los Angeles is Monterey Park, a city of 60,000 people, approximately half of whom are of Chinese descent. The rest of the population is 32% white and 16% Hispanic. After a Chinese-American developer placed an ad in Hong Kong and Taiwan newspapers, an explosion of real estate sales occurred in Monterey Park. Dozens of shopping centers sprouted to cater to new Chinese residents.

Asians fill the professions and the universities. Already Asia has replaced Europe as the leading foreign source of U.S. engineers, doctors and technical workers. The 400 Silicon Valley electronics firms owned by Asian Americans last year earned revenues of $2.5 billion. From 1975 to 1985, the number of full-time Asian faculty members in colleges throughout the U.S. nearly doubled, to 19,000. Asians make up 10% of California's population but 12.2% of the state's university enrollment. At the University of California's Berkeley campus, the proportion is 20.8%. In February the University of California named Chang-lin Tien, a Chinese American, as head of the prestigious campus. Still, Asian parents complain of quotas that limit the access of their children to the top schools.

With the influx from across the Pacific have come Asian trade and Asian money. New immigrants do business with friends and relatives in their home countries, tapping into Tokyo and the expanding capital markets of Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore and Bangkok. Healthy stakes in real estate, banking, medicine, engineering, commerce and finance give Asians in America the appearance of a gilded community. According to the latest U.S. Census, Japanese Americans and Asian Indians possessed the largest average family incomes among all ethnic groups, including whites.

Yet there is no pan-Asian prosperity, just as there is no such thing as an "Asian American." There are comfortably middle-class, fourth-generation Japanese Americans, and there are prospering new immigrants from Taiwan and South Korea, all driven by an admirable work ethic. There are also fragmented Filipino families headed by women, and Hmong tribesmen who know little of technology and are dependent upon public assistance. "There are people without hope in the Asian-American community," says Michael Woo, the lone Asian member of the Los Angeles city council. It is a strange notion to those whose only awareness of Asian Americans is of whiz-kid scholars and hardworking greengrocers.

The record of the largest Asian ethnic group in the U.S. is ambivalent, with success stories alternating with tales of the underclass. Numbering nearly 1 million in California alone, Filipinos have found their situation complicated by the practice of pressing the Philippine immigration level -- currently close to 50,000 a year -- to the fullest in order to bring along as many relatives as possible, including those who have little education and work experience.

Furthermore, prosperous Asian-American families are not immune to fragmentation, even among the Koreans, who are perhaps the most entrepreneurial of the new immigrants. Long hours at the store and the office have taken their toll. The all-consuming work ethic has robbed some Korean youths of parental supervision and, by extension, a sense of identity. Says Youngbin Kim, program coordinator for the Korean Youth Center in Los Angeles: "We see a lot of problems with identity and self-esteem. These kids look Korean, but they don't want to be Korean. They only sense that they are Asian, and then they join Asian gangs." In fact, gangs of Korean teenagers from affluent homes have replaced an earlier generation of Korean gangs that dealt mainly with turf protection and peaked in the mid-'80s. The new gangs focus on criminal activity and are made up of Filipinos and Vietnamese as well.

The most troubled Asian Americans are the ones from Indochina. The 40,000 Cambodians in Southern California have settled primarily in one area, Long Beach, 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. They have few marketable skills and thus enter the work force at the lowest levels. Often they have only the most basic of business instincts -- including imitation. In one of the quirks of assimilation, many Cambodians in Southern California have gone into the doughnut business, following the lead of a countryman whose success at the trade was widely publicized; some 500 doughnut shops in Los Angeles County are owned or operated by Cambodians.

Survivors of a genocidal war, Cambodians carry traumatic psychological burdens. Sometimes it seems as if the war has quite literally followed them across the sea. In the municipal cemetery in Stockton, Calif., a few graves are marked by odd, poignant gifts: plastic dolls, balloons, soft-drink cans, plates of fruit, piles of pennies. They are the offerings of bereaved Cambodian parents to the spirits of four children who were murdered in last year's rampage by a mentally deranged drifter at the city's Cleveland elementary school. Though Stockton police maintain that the episode was not racially motivated, the Indochinese in California's Central Valley believe otherwise. Almost a year before the shooting, school officials had to paint over anti-Asian graffiti, including signs that said GOOKS GO HOME. Fights break out almost daily between Cambodian and Hispanic students at one high school. Says Sarmon Sor: "My daughter was shot, my son stabbed. I used to be happy here. Now all I do is worry. I worry all the time."

Whatever the cause, racism in one form or another, subtle or blatantly obvious, plagues many Asian Americans. Sometimes strong biases brought over by the immigrants themselves -- including racial prejudice, clannishness and a $ reluctance to make problems public -- hamper their assimilation into the majority. More often, however, Asians are the victims of discrimination. The very visible success of some Asian immigrants and the power of Asian finance have triggered a backlash.

In Los Angeles, as in other cities across the U.S., tension has arisen between Korean Americans and members of the black community, who resent the influx of "foreign" businesses that take money out of their neighborhoods. In a wider context, even though Canadians until recently owned more of California than Japanese did, it is the latter who are looked upon as encroachers. "I've heard more anti-Japanese sentiment in working-class bars than I can remember," says Richard Kjeldsen, a University of Southern California financial specialist on the Pacific Rim. Japan bashing easily becomes Asian bashing. The most famous case is the 1982 murder of Chinese American Vincent Chin by Detroit autoworkers who thought he was Japanese. As late as 1985 and 1986, violence against Asians jumped 50% in Los Angeles County. Says Henry Der of Chinese for Affirmative Action: "We're still vulnerable because of what we look like."

While Asians are often thoroughly assimilated into American culture after a generation, many say that no matter how integrated they become, they will never be considered bona fide Americans because of an "otherness" factor based entirely on race. The claims of an American meritocracy also ring hollow to some skilled immigrants. Says Dr. Jagjit Sehdeva, a member of the Los Angeles human-relations commission: "It is almost impossible for medical graduates from India to find residency positions in hospitals here. Many wind up in lower-paying jobs as lab technicians or hospital orderlies." Says Dr. Stanley Sue, director of the National Research Center on Asian American Mental Health: "Some people want you to be American, but then they treat you differently. Why, then, would you want to assimilate?"

Fitting in can be a traumatic, sometimes infuriating experience. Amy Tan, author of the best-selling novel The Joy Luck Club, recalls being ashamed that her homelife was not quite that of her white peers. "The Chinese food was wonderful when it was family," she remembers. "But when my friends came over, I was embarrassed." Selling movie projects in Hollywood, director Wayne Wang (Chan Is Missing, Eat a Bowl of Tea) finds some studio executives "patronizing or confused." Says he: "If you speak English with a French accent, they say, 'That's cute.' But if you speak it with a Chinese accent, people say, 'That's awful. He's killing our language.' "

Asians also sense that a "glass ceiling" prevents them from rising to the top ranks in corporate America. To the extent that U.S. executives often equate leadership with assertiveness, Asians' traditional reticence and self- effacement have proved detrimental to corporate advancement. "We mind our own business and keep our noses to the grindstone," says David Lam, head of Expert Edge Technology in Palo Alto, Calif. "Doing a good job has turned into a bad thing." Now that Asians see themselves as players, they want to be part of the corporate game. Says Harry Kitano, professor of social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles: "Twenty or 30 years ago, we didn't expect to be promoted. A lot of people suffered in silence."

The retreat into silence also hampered the immigrants' quest for political influence. "All the things that are required in Western politics go against Asian culture," says Judy Chu, mayor pro tempore of Monterey Park. Asian Americans turn out at the voting booth even less frequently than whites or blacks: a 1986 study of Southern California voters showed that only 30% of eligible Asian voters registered, compared with 80% of whites.

Yet when Asians try out political roles, the "otherness" factor again comes into play. The family of Lon Hatamiya, a Japanese-American attorney, has lived in the agricultural region around Sacramento for more than 80 years. But when Hatamiya decided to run in next June's primary for a seat in California's 120-member state legislature, most voters seemed to regard him as an alien. "They look at us as if we're recent immigrants," he says. No one seemed to notice that the local roots of his white opponent do not go back as far as those of the Hatamiya clan.

Asians have made impressive forays into California politics. Since 1975, California's secretary of state has been March Fong Eu, a Chinese American. Two of the state's Congressmen are Norman Mineta and Robert Matsui, Japanese Americans. Another Japanese American, the noted philologist and educator S.I. Hayakawa, has served as U.S. Senator.

Still, the history of Asian settlement on the West Coast has been one of displacement and suppression. After completing the transcontinental railway in the 19th century, Chinese immigrants were rewarded with race riots, * demagoguery and the Immigration Exclusion Act of 1882, which cut off the Chinese influx. Local hostility forced Asian Indians out of Washington State in 1907. During World War II, Japanese Americans were forced to liquidate their assets and relocate to detention camps, taking only the belongings they could carry by hand; a similar fate did not befall residents of German or Italian ancestry.

Today social and political integration remains fraught with ambiguity. Seen as a "model minority" rather than as a group of separate communities requiring specific kinds of help, Asian Americans are often shut out of affirmative-action programs. Asian Americans say the label is used to taunt blacks and Hispanics, that it implies, "The Asians have made it, so why can't you?" Says Reed Ueda, a Japanese-American professor of history at Tufts University in Massachusetts: "It's a way of manipulating other minorities. It tends to isolate Asians and brings resentment." Unfortunately, the typical response from Asian Americans to being held up as an example is to denigrate their own very real strengths -- industriousness, perseverance, sacrifice -- making it almost shameful for them to try to excel. Says Ueda: "It gets to the point where a lot of Asian-American leaders don't like to focus on success."

In the 16th century Chinese comic novel Journey to the West, a motley group of pilgrims, at the end of a magical, sometimes terrifying quest, arrive at the Western Paradise of Buddha to receive sacred books imparting enlightenment. To their chagrin, they discover that in order to secure their prize, they must grease the palms of Buddha's disciples. Buddha himself is rather condescending. Paradise has turned out to be less than perfect and more than a little disconcerting. What was it they set out to find, and why is it yet to be found? Even as their numbers and their influence expand, Asian Americans are pondering those very questions.

With reporting by Scott Brown/Los Angeles and Tupper Hull/Stockton