Asian American identity is experiential rather than biological, grounded
in the present as much as or more than in the past
By Rachel Rubin
Excerpted from Cyberspace, Y2K: Giant Robots, Asian Punks
Institute for Asian American Studies
March 2003
Amy Ling defines "Asian American" in a poem as "Asian
ancestry/American struggle" [Ling 1]. This couplet captures the
duality of experience, the divided heart, that Ling feels characterizes the
lived lives of Americans with Asian ancestry. She continues in this vein
to describe a "tug in the gut" and "a dream in the heart" --
definitions that are wonderfully evocative, but elusively (and purposefully)
non-concrete.
Indeed, the feeling of being Asian American, the varied and internal
processes by which that name acquires particular meaning, for all its
ineffability, is actually much easier to pin down than it is to formulate an
answer that refers to a map. Because while Asia is the world's largest
continent, accounting for more than a third of the world's land mass and
two-thirds of the world's population -- including some 140 different
nationalities -- the term "Asian American" has been mostly used to
refer to American immigrants from certain Asian nations, but not others.
Furthermore, the term's application has not been entirely consistent, so that
"Asian American" can include one list of ethnic groups in the federal
census, another list of ethnic groups in a college's Asian American Studies
curriculum, yet another list in the political rhetoric of an activist
organization or an elected official, and so on. And when it comes to
individuals choosing how to identify themselves, there is a similar range of
usage: some consider themselves to be Asian American while others do not, even
though they or their parents have immigrated to the United States from a country
on the continent of Asia. Finally, the meaning of the term has changed
over time to suit the rhetorical needs of different times....
In addition to being constituted by a large number of nationalities, the term
"Asian American" is further complicated by the fact that it can refer
to immigrants, their children, their grandchildren, or even subsequent
generations. Since the mid-1800s, when Chinese workers came to build the
cross-continental railroad, multiple generations of Asian immigrants have made
their way to the United States; and from the very beginning, Asian immigration
was linked to restriction and racial anxiety. In fact, the notion of
controlling immigration based on ethnic and national factors was born in
xenophobic fear of Chinese immigrants; welcomed at first as a source of cheap
labor, Asian immigrants were soon the subject of pressures to stop the influx of
workers. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, denied admission to
Chinese laborers, and subsequent laws in the next two decades further extended
the act. The Chinese Exclusion Act also made explicit a provision that had
been invoked vaguely since the first American naturalization law of 1790
announced that only "free whites" could naturalize: Chinese immigrants
were "aliens ineligible for citizenship."
The rhetoric surrounding this legislation identified the Chinese and Japanese
as forever alien, as "heathens," as so immutably different from white
Americans that they could never assimilate into American society and adopt
"American" ways. It was here that the precedent was set that
immigration to the United States was something that could and should be
regulated by the government based on group definitions. This approach to
controlling who entered the United States represented a significant departure
from earlier notions of immigrant desirability based on individual
qualifications. The exclusion of Asian immigrants from American
citizenship culminated in 1924 with the Quota Act that declared that "no
alien ineligible for citizenship" could be admitted to the United States.
Restrictions against Asian immigration began to loosen somewhat following
World War II. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed, and the 1952
McCarran-Walter Act, while restrictionist in nature, nonetheless gave token
quotas to all Asian countries. A bit earlier, in 1945, the War Brides Act
allowed wives and children of members of the American armed services to enter
the United States, without being subjected to evaluation by racial or national
criteria. These moves are generally considered to represent a progressive
wedge in anti-Asian exclusion; however, historian Rachel Buff has recently
pointed out that such measures actually opened up systematic opportunities for a
kind of sexual imperialism, in which United States military men created personal
circles of influence, which they then claimed as "American" and
incorporated into the United States [Buff]. Buff's quite groundbreaking
analysis reveals a power dynamic within Asian immigration, acted out on a sexual
and domestic plane, that Asian American[s] took up in force a half-century
later.
Asian mass immigration did not return until 1965, when the so-called
"new Asian immigration" followed the liberalization of the quota
system under the Hart-Celler Act. By 1970, Asians were the fastest-growing
group of immigrants to the United States. By 1980, nearly half of all
immigrants to the United States came from Asia.
The "new" immigration would completely change the nature of Asian
American communities, which previously had been made up largely of Chinese- and
Japanese-Americans. Now, the variety of Asian groups expanded; soon, the
fastest-growing Asian ethnic groups in the United States were those previously
not represented. The "new" Asian immigrants came from South
Korea, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Singapore and Malaysia.
The "new immigration" was marked by two visible groups of
immigrants. First, in contrast to the earlier generations, came what
historian Reed Ueda has called "a human capital migration" of highly
educated professionals and technical workers. [Ueda] These elites
from India, the Philippines, China and Korea worked in health care, technical
industries, and managerial positions.
The "new" immigration also brought waves of low-skilled and poor
immigrants from Asia. One million refugees from Northeast and Southeast
Asia came to the United States from the end of World War II to 1990.
Chinese refugees fled to the United States following World War II. The
devastation of the Vietnam War brought refugees from Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos
(including minority subgroups such as the ethnic Chinese from Vietnam and the
ethnic Hmong from Laos and elsewhere). Unlike the Chinese railroad workers
of a century earlier, these "new" immigrants were planning to stay
permanently in the United States. They therefore naturalized in large
numbers, brought over extended families, and formed new Asian communities as
well as transforming and revitalizing older ones.
The history of Asian immigration gives some sense of how complicated and
fraught the definition of "Asian American" can be. The idea of a
pan-Asian identity, implied by the term "Asian American," dates back
to the political activism of the 1960s; the term was first used as an organizing
tool to facilitated discussions around issues of racism in the United States and
issues of global politics in Asian countries, such as the recognition of China,
the Vietnam War, the presence of American military rule in South Korea, and so
forth. (Indeed, the original Gidra also was born out of
anti-Vietnam war movement, and stressed the movement's particular importance for
Asian Americans; articles such as "GIs and Asian Women" and "The
Nature of GI Racism," for instance, addressed the implications for race
relations in the United States of the United States Army's tactic of
dehumanizing Asians -- particularly Asian women -- as a way to create
psychological conditions that would allow the killing of Vietnamese.)
The geopolitics of Asian immigration to the United States is, therefore,
responsible for the very notion that there is such a thing as "Asian
American" identity. In the various countries of origin, an
"Asian" identity would not be primary; people might identify as
"Korean" or "Chinese" or "Indian" -- or, even more
likely, according to even more specific categories of religion, caste, region,
and so forth. While there are certainly cultural as well as environmental
similarities among various Asian nations, lumping together the dozens of
ethnicities of the huge continent can obscure much more than it explains.
But as part of the compound "Asian American," "Asian"
gains relevance and specificity as a social or cultural identifier. In
large part, this is because of the way that "mainstream" American
vision has categorized Asians from without, and speaks to the "other"
conferred upon them; after all, "Asian" still has not fully replaced
the word "Oriental," formerly the general term and rejected during the
1960s and 1970s as reflecting a colonialist mentality.
("Oriental" means "Eastern" or having to do with the
East. Since directions are relative, the word "Oriental" betrays
Eurocentrism; in other words, Asia is east of what?)
In short, while there is a big difference -- not to mention many miles --
between, say, a Buddhist from Tibet and a Japanese Hawaiian, or between someone
from the Indonesian islands and someone from Kazakhstan, that distance has
tended to be collapsed in the public imagination once these immigrants arrive in
the United States. (This conflation has at times occurred against the
efforts of Asian immigrants themselves, as during World War II, when some
Chinese and Koreans wore buttons claiming "I'm Chinese, not Japanese,"
and still faced abuse or ostracization.)
But immigrants from the various Asian countries also have had their own
reasons for embracing an Asian American identity. A strategic essentialism
can facilitate the cultural empowerment that permits Americans like the editors
of Gidra (in both incarnations) to speak of an "Asian"
experience in the first place -- not to mention building the solidarity that
could allow for Asian representation in elected bodies of government....
Singer/songwriter Chris Ijima explains this dynamic:
We were able to construct an APA [Asian Pacific American] identity
precisely because our shared experience as Asians in America -- always cast as
foreigners and marginalized as outsiders -- allowed us to bridge ethnic lines
and allowed a platform and commonality to engage and understand other people
and their struggles.... You ask whether there is an
"authentic" Asian American sensibility. Asian American
identity was originally conceived to allow one to "identify" with
the experiences and struggles of other subordinated people -- not just with
one's own background. [Ling 320-321]
Ijima's words emphasize that Asian American identity is a deliberate and
motivated thing: experiential rather than biological, grounded in the present as
much as or more than in the past....
Works Cited
[Buff] Rachel Buff. Personal communication with the author.
[Ling] Amy Ling, ed. Yellow Light: The Flowering of Asian
American Arts. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.
[Ueda] Reed Ueda. Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History.
New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1994.
See also: Organizing Principles: Racist Love