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Asian Americans' challenge: Reap opportunity, preserve heritage

By Ruben Navarrette | Dallas Morning News
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Asian Americans have learned there is a downside to being called the "model minority." For one thing, America's expectations run high.

They include one rarely spoken about: the expectation that Asian Americans will not kick up as much fuss as other minorities.

That is not all bad. While having endured their share of racial prejudice and discrimination, Asian Americans have avoided becoming part of the grievance choir.

Unlike Latinos or African Americans, the Asian community in the United States has shown little interest in working the political system to get its share of benefits. As a result, Asian Americans are - with the exception of notables like Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii and Gov. Gary Locke of Washington - not particularly well-represented in the ranks of the nation's elected officials. And so they often wind up little more than an afterthought in the seemingly never-ending national dialogue over race relations.

It is through study and hard work that they have achieved at miraculous levels. According to the Current Population Survey, a sampling device of the 2000 Census, an estimated 42 percent of Asian-American families have annual incomes of $75,000 or more.

And although - like most other newcomers - Asian immigrants come to the United States with their own languages, customs and cultures intact, the perception is that their descendants gladly assimilate into the dominant culture with no regret.

Not so fast.

A new generation of Asians and Pacific Islanders - a group that, while accounting for a bit more than 3 percent of the total U.S. population, now represents the fastest-growing minority in the country - may be having second thoughts about surrendering that which sets them apart from other Americans, most notably their languages and cultures.

That is what is now playing out in the Southwest, where the growth of the Asian-American population over the past 10 years has been impossible to ignore.

Take Texas, where 500,000 Asian Americans constitute the fourth-largest Asian population in the country, behind New York, California, and Hawaii. In Colin County, near Dallas, the Asian population has increased an incredible 360 percent since 1990.

As elsewhere in the Southwest immigrants from China and other Asian countries are being drawn by opportunities in the competitive high-tech industry.

In Texas, many of those opportunities are in Richardson, a Dallas suburb and "techopolis" that boasts more than 700 high-tech firms. About a sixth of Richardson's population is made up of Asian Americans, many of them recent immigrants.

And so it is fitting that Richardson play host to an ongoing discussion about what Asian-American immigrants and their children are giving this country, and what they are trying to hold on to.

The group undertaking that discussion is the Richardson-based Association of Chinese Professionals, a 500-member organization made up of high-tech workers, engineers and other white-collar types. This is no ordinary confederation. According to the group's president, Jan Mai Wong, most members have a master's degree and an estimated 20 percent have a Ph.D.

Highly educated and financially secure, most are married with children.

While the lives of these professionals are no doubt better here than they might have been back in China, there is no cure for homesickness or the longing for family members left behind.

Many members, Wong says, worry that their children will "lose" the Chinese language and culture, and grow up without an appreciation for China or its rich history.

Those worries are understandable, but, in the case of Asian Americans, they provide an interesting challenge. Having avoided for more than a century the paralysis that comes from continually seeing oneself as a victim, they now must figure out a way to continue to get as much as they can from America and give as much as possible in return - all without giving away too much of themselves in the process.