The Spy Stereotype

We don’t know how we stand yet on this month’s firing of Taiwan-born scientist Wen Ho Lee, because too much is yet unknown: Did he pass secrets to China while visiting there in the 1980s? Does the classified House report implicate Lee directly? If so, why hasn’t he been charged with a crime? In fact, where is he?

The public doesn’t know; either do pundits. Yet that hasn’t stopped an outcry for “increased security,” which could too easily be interpreted as “let’s not hire any Asian Americans, because they’re all the same.”

This policy, in fact, was in place at most military installations before the late 1960s. And even after Asian Americans gained access, they were viewed as sneaky and suspicious. A retired Korean American engineer recalls that a friend in the 1970s “told me that he showed his security ID to the admiral, but he was rejected from seeing documents” anyway.

“He complained to me ... this is kind of discrimination. He quit and now he’s a professor in Korea in engineering.”

Such stories are familiar to most Asian Americans of a certain age and to their children. Until this month, they seemed part of an archaic past. Yet Wen Ho Lee’s case suggests otherwise. He was not a foreigner. He was a U.S. citizen who had worked at Los Alamos for more than 20 years. Like many of the 10 million Americans of Asian descent, he took trips to Asia, in this case China and Hong Kong. He was fired for failing to inform his superiors of contact with “a sensitive country,’’ failing to properly safeguard classified material’’ and “apparently attempting to deceive’’ officials.

But what, exactly, did he fail to safeguard? How did he try to trick officials? Such details are what Republicans insinuate is in the report prepared by a special House committee chaired by Republican representative Chris Cox, which the Clinton administration reportedly doesn’t want the public to see.

We say: Bring it on. Although we know that this fight in the minds of D.C. powers is as much about Clinton vs. the Republicans as it is about us, we are the ones paying the price, and seeing what allegations actually exist is the first step to dealing with them. Even in the worst-case scenario—unequivocal proof is found that Lee gave China critical directions in how to build a better nuclear bomb—no justification exists for placing all Asian Americans under an umbrella of suspicion, under a spy stereotype.

Look at Our Business
In this issue, we introduce a new monthly section covering the largest facet of many of our lives—how we earn our money and how we spend it. The new section, Our Business, will focus on trends in how Asian Americans invest, what careers they choose, what pitfalls many can face. The debut section focuses especially on tax strategies—a subject that touches all of us as April 15 draws near.

In upcoming sections, we plan to focus especially on areas where Asian Americans have assumed a growing role in transforming America, such as high-tech and the Internet. Among the section’s reporters will be Perla Ni, a Harvard Law School graduate who also covers legal issues and San Francisco City Hall. Ni was among those offering input into Rigel Juratovac’s redesign of our Web site, which is now complete: Check it out at www.asianweek.com.

Let Ni know what you think about the site, business or tech topics. She can be reached at 415-397-0220 Ext. 22 or through email at perlani@yahoo.com. You can also write her care of AsianWeek, 809 Sacramento St., San Francisco, CA 94108.