In Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki writes: “There are no Asians in Asia, only people with national identities, such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Vietnamese, and Filipino. But on this side of the Pacific, there are Asian Americans.”
Our Asian American identity reflects our community’s diversity and incorporates a multicultural American spirit. It is the source of our community’s richness, but it can also be a source of misunderstanding from many non-Asians.
This month, Northwest Asian Weekly reports on Joyce Shui, a Chinese American mother who sought a pan-Asian education for her daughter, enrolling her in an afternoon Japanese immersion school (see Nation briefs).
Unfortunately, her white ex-husband objected, and took the mother and daughter to court. Even more unfortunate, the white arbitrator ruled with the father that the Japanese education might “stunt” the daughter’s growth. The father also complained that he would be linguistically and culturally isolated from the five year old.
Those kinds of viewpoints are insulting. They reflect the viewpoint that APAs cannot be Asian and American at the same time. Moreover, it promotes a kind of linguistic segregation where our Asian-ness is equated with the inability to speak English.
You can see it everywhere when government agencies and big corporations consider “outreach” to Asian Americans as the equivalent of translating their brochures and ad campaigns into Asian languages.
They miss the point that we connect our pan-Asian-ness through the use of the English language. In fact, it is only because we are Americans that we can fully embrace our pan-Asian heritage.
It is important for Asian Pacific Americans to not take the easy way out and pigeonhole ourselves into one category or another, but rather insist on being all that we really are.
Although this issue ends our feature “AsianWeek 25,” (a retrospective on our coverage for the last quarter century), this episode particularly reminded us of a passage from February 1997:
“We are at the dawn of a new truly pan-Asian American community. Asian American children can grow up with the comfort of being connected to their roots, but at the same time be accepted and honored as a uniquely American creation.”
To that we add: more power to the Joyce Shuis of the world.