Speakers address issues in Asian American community

  CLAIRE ZUGMEYER S.F. State professor Him Mark
Lai was part of the history conference discussion focusing
on issues facing Asian Americans.

By Bimal Rajkomar
Daily Bruin Contributor

When Henry Yu takes reporters around campus, he said many look
around, see a group of Asian students hanging out and say
“See, they’re tribal.”

“One may be Korean American, one may be Chinese American,
one may be Pilipino American, but all some people see is “˜all
the Asians hanging together,'” said Yu, professor of
history and Asian American studies. “That has as much to do
with people who don’t realize how diverse Asian Americans are
as well as an effect of racism ““ of seeing the world through
race.”

Yu was one of many professors and writers who spoke at
Saturday’s conference, “The Future of Asian American
History: A Dialogue on Learning and Teaching Asian American History
for the Twenty-First Century.”

While acknowledging the diversity within the Asian American
community, the need for unity is also seen as necessary to fully
engage in the American political system.

“You can’t do this through some transnational
identity ““ you have to do it as an American.” said Yuji
Ichioka, research associate and adjunct professor of history at
UCLA.

“You can be bilingual or bicultural, but you cannot
participate in American policies by being trans-nationalist sitting
on a fence, straddling two societies,” he continued.

Of the topics discussed, the most politically charged focused on
Wen Ho Lee, the nuclear scientist who had been accused of
mishandling nuclear information in Los Alamos National
Laboratories.

Although released Sept. 14 with apologies from U.S. District
Court Judge James Parker and the New York Times, many believe
Wen Ho Lee is a victim of racial profiling.

A resident of the U.S. for 50 years, Professor K.W. Lee, a
journalist who focuses on covering race, reacted emotionally to the
allegations against Wen Ho Lee.

“I identified almost instinctively,” said K.W. Lee.
“The history of Asian America is the history of the racist,
white media. That is my lesson after fifty years in America as a
FOB,” which stand for fresh off the boat.

Besides the personal, the case carried political implications
for Asian Americans, and speakers addressed the perceived lack of
unity within the community.

“We are virtually politically impotent” said
Ichioka. “This (case) tells me that we have very little
political clout in the country.”

Part of the lack of political unity may be due to a forming
class system, according to many scholars at the conference.

“Today, Asian America is divided into a two class society,
we have downtown Asian Americans and uptown Asian Americans.”
Lee said.

He said the “uptown Asians,” the “affluent,
acculturated and aloof,” have distanced themselves from those
in lower socioeconomic classes, and this has divided the
community.

To resolve these class boundaries, Yu said it is important that
those trying to achieve class mobility not lose sight of their
roots.

“One of the common things that happens within Asian
American communities is this division between the FOBs and the ones
who have made it,” he said.

“I think one of the key things is that so many of the
students are from those kinds of backgrounds and its important to
get them to not be ashamed of that background, to address why it is
that they are made to be ashamed of their heritage,” he
continued.

Other Asian American students, Yu said, just do not know much
about the rest of the world because they have grown up in nice
suburbs.

“One of the things that education is supposed to do is
really expose these people to different aspects of the Asian
American communities and the U.S. at large,” Yu said.

An often overlooked topic, speakers noted, was the need to
examine Asian American relations to other minority groups.

“If you go to Little Saigon and look to see who’s
working in the kitchen, often times they are Latinos,” said
Linda T. Voh, assistant professor in the Asian American Studies
Program at UC Irvine. “Very few people have looked into these
cases in a multi-racial setting.”

Multi-racial dynamics have been either largely ignored, or
handled irresponsibly by the media according Lee, who pointed to
the media coverage of the L.A. riots, which he said was pitting
African Americans against Koreans and Chinese.

“I have paid my dues,” Lee said. “I gained
recognition industry-wide, but that is the conclusion that I have
come to, that the white media has been an instrument of oppression
of our people.”

He cited the New York Times coverage of the Wen Ho Lee case,
which presented accusatory statements they later apologized
for.

The study of these issues was the focus of the conference, which
attracted more than 200 people from universities all around
Southern California.