Gathering Places
Gathering Places
AT THE National Asian Pacific American Conference on Law and Public Policy at Harvard recently, I met a young Harvard law student from Hawaii named Jennifer who was experiencing a couple of firsts: her first New England winter and her first exposure to being, as an Asian-Pacific American, in a minority. Adjusting to the first was easier than to the second, coming from this state in which she is in anything but a minority. ASIAN AMERICANS
We’re still proving
ourselves after all this timeJennifer was appalled to learn about hate crimes against Asian-Pacific Americans. In the last two years alone they have included three Asian Americans murdered in Pittsburgh, a Filipino-American mail carrier shot to death in Los Angeles, and three Asian Americans murdered and several others wounded in Chicago and Bloomington, Ind.
All were committed by white supremacists who hated, in no particular order, immigrants, Jews, foreigners and non-whites.
Perhaps more telling, she was struggling with doubts about the need for this kind of minority conference. Didn't it isolate or even alienate Asian- Pacific Americans from the majority of Americans by focusing on differences?
Her confusion was not surprising. Coming from Hawaii with its multicultural society and predominantly Asian and Pacific Islander communities, the concept of being a member of a minority is indeed strange. Moreover, with two Asian- American Cabinet members in the Bush administration, several national political leaders, including the governor of a large state, and more state and federal court judges, prominent doctors, lawyers, engineers, journalists, designers, artists, chefs and actors than ever before, haven't Asian-Pacific Americans made it? Transcended this racial pigeonholing? Escaped the need to engage in reverse racial profiling? Eliminated a need for affirmative action?
Jennifer asked about my perspective as an Asian American who has been active in these issues for many years and who, as a former Clinton political appointee, experienced first-hand the controversies over campaign finances, technology exports to China and suspected spy Wen Ho Lee.
I SAID THAT Asian-Pacific Americans have made wonderful progress in many fields but in another, more fundamental, sense we have made little progress in the 150 years since we first began coming to the United States. No matter how many generations we have been here, we are still regarded as foreigners, a perception that has been perpetuated by politicians and the media, among others.That was one of the underlying themes of the conference organized by Asian-Pacific American students from Harvard's law school and Kennedy School of Government to bring together people who have shaped law and public policy.
Speakers included luminaries such as playwright David Henry Hwang, CNN anchor Joie Chen, New York state solicitor general Preeta Bansal, and kamaaina Guy Aoki, head of the Media Action Network of Asian Americans in Los Angeles. They looked back at the anti-Asian hysteria, the "yellow peril" fears that resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act in the early 20th century and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, fears that were reignited by politicians seeking votes and a media hungry for controversy.
In particular, there were accusations that the Democratic National Committee had peddled White House influence to overseas Asians in 1996. In the haste to identify contributions from foreigners, hundreds of American citizens of Asian heritage who had contributed to the DNC were singled out by their ethnicity, interrogated, and required to prove that they were American citizens. Americans of Chinese ancestry were accused of having dual loyalties and of facilitating the transfer of sensitive information to China, including communication satellite technology and, in the famously discredited case of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, nuclear weapons secrets.
SADLY, THE VOLATILE nature of U.S.-China relations made it easy for those seeking votes from, or to sell newspapers to, a fearful American public to perpetuate the myth of the Asian American as "un-American."
The bottom line, I told Jennifer, was that the day people stop complimenting me on how well I speak English, and the guy standing next to me at the airport bar asks me what state, not what country, I'm from, is the day when conferences focusing on Asian-Pacific American issues may no longer be necessary.
Hoyt Zia, formerly chief counsel for the Export Administration
at the the U.S. Department of Commerce, is executive director of the
Pacific Telecommunications Council in Honolulu.