From: hirota@sluggo.sdsc.edu (Bryan Hirota)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asian.american
Subject: LA Times. 7-13-92 [long]
Date: 28 Jul 1992 01:45:55 GMT
Organization: San Diego Supercomputer Center
NNTP-Posting-Host: sluggo.sdsc.edu

Greetings once again,  all of you urine-colored people.

This comes straight from the LA times, July 13th 1992 front page.

Enjoy.
============================================================================
Bryan Hirota						     bhirota@ucs.edu
				hirota@sdsc.edu
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SPLINTERED SOCITEY: US ASIANS
   o  The L.A. riots highlighted tensions among Asian-American groups, split
      by longstanding enmitites and generational conflict.  A search is under
      way for a common voice.

For many Asian-Americans,  the Los Angeles riots brought home a sobering
truth:  The one thing that they al lhave in common is that many other Americans
cannot tell them apart.

The fear that joined the wealthy, fourth-generation Japanese-American in Bel-
Air to the war-scarred, welfare-dependent Cambodian refugee in Long Beach was
a wake-up call to anyoine with black hair and almond eyes:  No one is safe
from anti-Asian anger.   But the riots also exacerbated divisions among 
fragmented Asian communities,  reigniting ancient enmities and widening
the schism between new immigrants and third- and fourth-generation Americans.

"This event will go down as one of the most traumatic experiences in Asian-
American history," said Don Nakanishi, director of UCLA's Asian American 
Studies Center.

For Koreans,  the recent upheaval may be as important in defining their sense
of place in American society as incarceration during World War II was for
Japanese-Americans.

Many Koreans say their image of America as a land of equal opportunity and
equal protection under the law will remain shattered long after their broken
shop windowws are repaired.  The vision of the retreating taillights of police
cars and firetrucks fleeing as Koreatown went up in flames has burned into 
their consciousness the need for political power - the ability to demand
services from authorities they support as taxpayers - as well as for economic
success.

But the riots resonate differently among other Asian-Americans, many of whom
were the targets of anti-Korean taunts even before the riots.  Many Chinese-,
Japanese-, and Vietnamese-Americans say their shops were damaged because
rioteers thought they were Korean.  And some have accused Korean immigrants
of making trouble for all Asian-Americans by treating blacks badly.

What is more,  Chinese-Americans complained that Koreans turned them away
from a Koreatown reliefe center, and Chinese-American groups boycotted a 
dinner with President Bush because he visited Koreatown but not Chinatown after
the unrest.

Some Koreans felt deserted by other Asian-Americans, while others had not even 
thought to expect their help.  Rumors swirled during the riots that buttons
were being printed that said: "I'm Not Korean."  On the Saturday after the
riots,  when Korean-American groups held a massive peace rally,  organized
Asian0American groups were notably absent.

As usual,  Filipinos, the second largest Asian-American group in Los Angeles
who lost a number of stores in or near Koreatown, felt invisible and ignored.

For most recent immigrants,  the umbrella term Asian-American is a foreign
concept.  The term was created in the 1960s when mostly Japanese- and Chinese-
Americans, a generation or more removed form the immigrant experience, sought
political and racial solidarity.  Today, ask a Vietnamese refugee what he is
and he will say Vietnamese.  Ask a Korean immigrant, and he will say Korean.
And do not ask what brotherhood the first feels ls with the Chinese, or the
seconds with Japanese:  Their animosity toward each other has roots far
deeper than any tensions between Koreans and blacks.

Widely diverse reactions to the upheal in Los Angeles highlighted strains 
exacerbated in recent decades by a major demographic shift in the city's
Asian population: 20 years ago it was mostly American-born, mostly English-
speaking and predominately Japanese-American.  Today, because of changes
in US immigration law, no single group dominates Los Angeles County's
950,000 Asians (10% of the county's population), who are mostly foreign-born,
and divided by hundreds of languages and dialects.

Many American-born, middle-class Asians resent being lumped together, in
they eyes of others, with "foreigners" with hom they have no contact.  Some
immigrants, on the other hand, think of certain longtime Asian-Americans as
"bananas" - yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

Americans of Asian descent have a poor history of working together.  After
Pearl Harbor,  Chinese wore buttons declaring: "I'm not Japanese, I'm Chinese."
Some Koreans in Los Angeles, who had fought for decades in exile against the
brutal Japanese colonization of their homeland froom 1910 to 1945, agitated
in favor of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans - while fending off
"anti-Japanese" attacks on themselves.

Around the turn of the century,  Hawaiian plantation owners consciously sought
a mix of Japanese, Chinese and Filipino laborers to keep the groups fighting
among themselves,  historian Ronald Takaki says.  Plantation owners used
Koreans to break Japanese-Filipino strikes in the 1920s.

Sometimes it seems as if nothing has changed, "We have no expectations from
Japanese or Chinese," said Yoon Kap Lee as he stood in line at a Koreatown
disaster relief center to apply ofr a loan to rebuild his burned-down liquor
store.  "This is a Korean struggle."

Phllis Chang, one of a relatively small number of fourth-generation Korean
Americans, recalls that when she grew up in the Crenshaw district in the 1960s
and 1970s, "I hung out more with blacks more than Japanese. [Japanese] didn't
like Koreans."

Today, even more than in the past, there is no common agenda.  The career
advancement concerns of many Chinese-American and Japanese-American 
professionals seem irrelevant tooutheast Asian refugees caught in a world
of gangs, drugs and poverty.

Meantime, despite the diversity of Asian-Americans, other Americans hold to
their view of them as a "model minority" - or, less favorable, as an economic
threat.

While Asian-Americans make up nearly as much of the county's population as
blacks, each group taken by itself is fairly small.  As a result, many
view joining together as the best hope for gaining political influence 
(there is not one Asian-American in the state Legislature) and combating
racial violence.

The riots gave new urgency to the fight against anti-Asian violence and to 
efforts to educate people on the diversity of Asian-American communities.

At the same place where Reginald O. Denny was attacked, Takao Hirata, a
Japanese-American born behing barbed wire in a World War II internment camp,
was nearly killed by a mob shouting anti-Korean epithets.  Other Asians 
accross the city were attacked or threatened in the same manner.

Even more sophisticated leaders sometimes seems to confuse different Asian
groups.  When the Rev. Cecil Murray, pastor of First AME Churce, was asked
the solution to black-Korean tensions by ABC "Nightline" host Ted Koppel,
he answered that Japanese prime ministers should stop making racist comments
about blacks.

While many blacks had Latasha Harlins on their minds, many Asian-Americans
were thinking about Vincent Chin.  Both have become symbols of justice
denied:  Harlins was the black teenager shot last year by an immigrant
Korean gorcer whose sentence of probabtion infuritated the black community.
Chin was a Chinese-American beaten to death in 1982 with baseball bats by
white auto workers shouting anti-Japanese epithets.  His killers got only
probation, too.

Like the Chin verdict, the recent violence has spurred moves toward
Asian-American unity.  Community leaders in mid-June formed a broad based
coalition called Asian Pacific Americans for a New L.A. Stewart Kwoh, a
Chinese-American lawyer who helped organize the group, called it
"unprecedented," noting that many of the coalition members had never met
before the riots.

Still, cohesion will be hard to achieve.

Perhaps the most yawning chasm revealed in the riots aftermath was between
people whose grandparents and great-grandparents had immigrated at the turn
of the century, and those who came after 1965, when Asian immigration quotas
were expanded after years of virtual exclustion on the basis of race.

Anti-immigrant feelings, already simmering, flared among American-born Asians -
even anmong some longtime Korean-Americans.  In recent years, these Americans
have been pained by an increase in such statements as, "You speak such good
English," as if they were foreigners.

Many were embarrassed by the racist remarks of some Koreans quoted in the 
media.  Others blamed the black-Korean tensions on immigrants' failure to
comprehend American culture, complaining that they also found Korean shop-
keepers rude.

"If they want to go into a different community they'd better shape up and
understand people.  They're not in Korea any more." said Roy Yokoyama, a 
retired grocer, who like many Japanese-Americans has lived for decades
among blacks in the Crenshaw district.

"Like S.I> Hayakawa said: 'I don't care who you are, learn English!'" said 
Yokoyama, quoting the late U.S. senator, a controversial figure in
the Japanese-American community because he opposed redress for the World War II
internment.  "I did business with nothing but blacks and I never had no
problem.  You think, gee, those Koreans must be doing something wrong,"
Yokoyama said.

Japanese-Americans are the most uniformly assimilated group, the farthest 
removed from the immigrant experience.  By the 1940s, more than two-thirds
of the ethic Japanese in the United States were born here, and today most
working-age Japanese-Americans are third- and fourth generation.  A racial
exclusion law cut off Japanese immigration in 1924, and because of
Japan's post-war wealth, there has been no major influx of immigrants despite
quotas relaxed in 1965.

Most Japanese immigrants like Chinese, Filipinos and some of the handful
of Koreans in the pre World War II period, were peasants when they left the
old country.  These early immigrants experienced the prejudices of an openly
racist America, and in some ways, have more in common with blacks than with 
post-1965 Asian immigrants.

Many first came to Hawaii as indentured plantation laboreres, cutting cane
under the watchful eyes of bullwhip-wielding white foremen on horses who
called workers by number, not name.  Others who worked on railroads or
farms in California were subject to lynchings by police and civilians, and
forbidden to testify against white men in court.

California law prohibited Asian immigrants from owning land from 1913 until
1948.  In the 1920s white women who married Asians were by law stripped of
their U.S. citizenship, and intermarriage remained illegal in California
until 1948.  Chinese immigrants could not become citizens until 1943;
Japanese not until 1952.  After the war, seconds-generation college graduates
were often unable to find jobs in the mainstream economy and ended up
as gardeners and grocers.   Until the early 1960s, Asians found it difficult
to buy houses in much of Los Angeles.  A Japanese-American doctor who was the
first to move into the all-white West Adams district the early 1950s had his
house firebombed.

And so they lived, worked, and schooled their children with other excluded 
groups - blacks and Latinos.  TO the descendants of these early immigrants,
the wealth of some new immigrants and their quick jump to life in white suburbs
is hard to believe.

"Koreans have a lot of [Korean] government help," said Jimmy Jike, an 881
year-old Japanese American, echoing a myth as common among his community as
among blacks.  Jike's father was a cane cutter in Hawaii, a railroad laborer, 
and  a sharecropper in Parlier (near Fresno), where Jimmy Jike was born.

"Our parents didn't have help.  How can an immigrant bring $30,000,
$40,000, $50,000 in cash to start a business - they have to have some help,"
said Jike, unaware that middle-class Koreans can easily obtain five times
that amount just by selling their house in modern day Seoul.

Many Japanese-Americans, who had worked for decades to prove that Asian-
Americans were "just as American" as anyone else, and that citizenship was
independent of race, were aghast to see the Korean government marching over
immediately aftyer the riots to demand "reparations" from the U.S. government
not only for Korean nationals but for Korean-Americans.

Many third- and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans
live in an essentially white world, often marrying Anglos and thinking 
themselves simply as Americans.  To some of these people, living in affluent
suburbs, the Korean-black problem is as distant as fighting in Yugoslavia.

Yet, the criticism that some ASian immigrants and Asian-Amerians have been
directing at Koreans could easily be leveled at many of themselves or at
their ancestors.

Activists such as Jimmy Tokesh 30-year-old-regional direcotr of the Japanese-
American Citizens League, says assimilated Asians should not distance 
themselves from immigrants.  "It's a question of remembering why our
forefathers and mothers came,  and our responsibility to help [the next
people]," he said.

Asian immigrants from different countries usually have little contact
with one another.  When they do, they often cannot pronounce one another's
names, cannot read the signs on one another's stores, are baffled by one
another's foods and have trouble understanding one another's English.

"Filipinos are sharp, but you can't understand them on the phone.  They've
got a mean accent," Yokoyama said.  Peter Alegria, a Filipino immigrant,
admits he has the same problem when he tries to understand other Asian
newcomers.  "I have to adjust my ears," he said.

Alegria, who directs a Pan-Asian resource cetner for senior citizens, says
meetings of his staff are often an experiment in multi-culturalism.
"The Japanese are so businesslike.  Filipinos are fond of friendliness and
want to be jolly... Koreans keep on bowing.  That's a sign of respect for
them."

The rifts within each Asian community are often nearly as deep as between
communities, and sometimes more rancorous.  Chinatown used to be predominately
Cantonese-speaking, but with the influx since 1965 of Chinese from Taiwan,
the mainland and Vietnam, community meetings today sometimes require 
translation into Mandarin.  Ties to Taiwan or to China have created poltical
splits, and class differences between millionaires in San Marino and
garment sweatshop workers downtown ensure that there is no single 
Chinese-American agenda.

Filipinos are split by a hundred dialects and more than 400 organizations 
divided by island of origin or sympathies for or against the late strongman
Ferdinand E. Marcos.  Vietnamese are divided between a mostly educated elite 
who escaped in 1975 and the "boat people" who came after 1979.

Koreans, though widely admired by other Asians for their "unity," are split
among generational lines.  For example, Angela Oh, a Korean-American
laywer who impressed many viewers of ABC's "Nightline" as an articulate and
persuasive spokeswoman for the Korean community, is viewed by some older
Koreans in Los Angeles as a radical who is out of touch with their world,
too devoted to Asian-American causes.

And yet people such as Stuart Ahn, A Korean-American architect, remain
hopeful.  "We see the need for getting together with other Asian groups.
They are giving us comforting words, saying: 'We paid our dues, every
immigrant had to, whether they're Japanese or Italian. Don't feel bad.'
They say: 'After all, the American system works.'"

But Vora Kanthoul, a foudner of a service organization called United 
Cambodian Communities, has a more sober view: "The term Asian-American...
was formed tooshow a unity that is not there.  Most [immigrants and refugees]
don't have that luxury, to think of the Asian-American movement.  They
are too busy making a living."