Why we need Heritage Month
By Emil Guillermo
I went up to the first Asian American guy I saw this month and gave him my standard greeting in May. I stuck out my hand, beamed, and said, loudly, “Hey, Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month!”
It was loud enough so that all the non-Asian types around me could experience it too. That’s what the month is supposed to be about. Letting people know about us.
Instead, I learned about us. This man, an acquaintance, was caught totally by surprise. He’s like a lot of Asian Americans in the Bay Area: bright, successful to a point, living in silent satisfaction. I figured maybe he thought I was a Spanish guy, with a name like Guillermo.
Still, his embarrassment over my greeting stunned me. A “Merry Christmas” he would’ve handled. Maybe even a “Happy Columbus Day.” People respect Columbus. He gave them a day off. But a “Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month?” Forget it.
The man didn’t mention anything more about it. Instead, he tried to pretend that I never even mentioned it. And then he gave me a look as if I had the “cooties” or something approximating mad cow disease. Or, since I’m vegetarian, a case of mad tofu. It’s an amok derivative, whatever it is.
That has been my lone APA Heritage Month experience. There haven’t been many for me this year. But I’m still trying to get in the spirit.
When I lived in Washington, D.C., there were Heritage Month experiences practically every minute of May.
It used to make me glad to see June come around. Now here we are, approaching Memorial Day, which may as well be in honor of what has been an utterly dead Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.
The name has always been a problem. Who calls themselves Asian Pacific American?
Hardly anybody.
I was recently speaking to a Filipino student group at the University of San Francisco when I asked that question. Who considers themselves Asian Pacific American or Asian American or Asian Pacific Islander? Not a single student raised a hand.
They called themselves “Filipino” flat out. Or “Filipino American.” The troubling thing is that Filipinos, at 1,406,770 (according to the latest census), are the second largest group among Asian Pacific Americans and the largest group in California.
When a large group within the APA category doesn’t identify with “Asian Pacific American,” how do we expect non-Asians to figure it out?
It’s really our unique problem. Politicians gave us the handle so they could identify us, categorize us, and find a bureaucratic way to address us. But while “Asian Pacific American” is the marquee of the big hotel that houses us, we prefer our separate rooms: Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Bangladeshi, Burmese, Indonesian, Malayan, Okinawan, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Tongan, Tahitian, Northern Mariana Islander, Palauan, and Fijian. Not to mention, the Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Asian Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Guamanian. Oh, and close the door behind you.
This is unfortunate since we need each other.
We may not like the strange phrase “Asian Pacific American,” but we need it to bring us together. Whites didn’t become the majority by insisting on being called Welsh American or Dutch American or Danish American. There are roughly 7.3 million Asian Pacific Americans, 3 percent of the U.S. population. We barely show up as it is. As individual groups we’re like flies on a big horse. But all together, we might actually get to ride the horse. Just by uttering “Asian Pacific American,” we evolve from fly to cowboy.
The Wild West is an apt metaphor for race in this country. Race will remain the hot-button issue for some time to come, partly because we are entering unexplored territory. How many people have really had to deal with the Hmong explosion?
Instead, we get a rehash of tried-and-true topics. For example, ABC just did a huge series on race during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Of course, the network didn’t talk about Asian Americans, probably thinking there weren’t enough APA Nielsen families to bring in the big advertising bucks. Or maybe it remembered the All-American Girl fiasco. So ABC stuck to what it knows. The report, “America in Black and White,” came complete with its own manufactured facts-I mean, poll. Here’s the lead: “Americans-black and white alike-overwhelmingly agree that racism is a national problem.”
Wow. Racism is a national problem! Stop the presses! It would be news if everyone thought we were a “color-blind” society.
But notice the inherent racism in the very first words of the lead, “Americans-black and white alike.” Asians aren’t American? Do we count at all? Nope. They didn’t ask.
And who do we root for? Blacks? Whites?
The closest we came to inclusion in the report was with the question, “Do you think blacks and other minorities are discriminated against in hiring or not?”
More whites said yes than you would have thought: 49 percent. Seventy-seven percent of blacks said yes. Five years ago, 86 percent of blacks said yes. A reduction, perhaps.
The follow-up question was, “Do you think blacks and other minorities should receive preference in hiring to make up for past inequalities, or not?”
The majority of whites (80 percent) and, for the first time in ABC’s polling history, the majority of blacks (56 percent) said no.
The answers can be explained in at least a couple of ways: the emergence of more successful blacks or the self-help attitudes of Farrakhan. Is that progress?
The American race situation is a lot more complicated than that. Old-style thinking is black and white. It won’t help you in the diversity of 2000 and beyond. The world is colorized beyond even Ted Turner’s wildest residual dreams.
The poll highlighted another point: blacks and whites, the main event in the race debate, were really quite ignorant of one another. Well, here’s a news flash for both groups: If they don’t learn quickly about Asians, or Latinos, for that matter, the race situation in the U.S. is going to get a whole lot worse.
And that’s a big reason why Asian Pacific American Heritage Month has to be a bigger deal than it is. It’s for us and them.
Emil Guillermo is an independent journalist, a former host of NPR’s All Things Considered, and a regular contributor to AsianWeek. E-mail him at emil@amok.com.