The Asian American Movement

2. Who Am I? Creating an Asian American Identity and Culture

44 2 Who Am I? Creating an Asian American Identity and Culture If the Asian American is to live in a very complex America and an even more complex world, and if he is to be able to assert his own humanity in these spheres, he must know his own cultural history as an Asian American . -An Asian American student ( 1968) Where are you reallv from? Often asked of Asian Americans, this question implies that they are strangers in the land, as European Americans seldom accept an American locality as an answer. The question haunted many of those who participated in the Movement , especially young middle-class Asian Americans who were twice alienated from American society. As with other members of their generation , they were suffering from the spiritual malaise that came with life in what young people in the 1960s and 1970S regarded as a culturally sterile and one-dimensional society dominated by complex and corrupt institutions that sought to "coopt" them .' In the eyes of these disaffected youths , none was more powerful and perverse than the U.S. government, which was pursuing what many young people perceived as a misguided foreign policy in Southeast Asia and conscripting them into the U. S. military to enforce it. They began to question anything that was beyond their personal control. In addition , young Asian Americans were hurting from the effects of racial prejudice . They reluctantly acknowledged that though they felt like Americans , Copyrighted Material Who Am I? : 45 behaved like Americans, and shared the prevailing cultural values and norms, the majority of their fellow countrymen treated them, including those born and raised in the United States, as unwelcome foreigners. Excluded by mainstream society, they were in American culture, but not of it. On the heels of this realization came a disillusionment the depth of which revealed how thoroughly Asian Americans had embraced the nation's ideals, especially the principle of equality and the dignity of common people. They believed , as generations of American schoolchildren have been taught, that they enjoyed an inalienable right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"only to discover that the U. S. Constitution applied only to white Americans. Quite understandably, they felt that their country had deceived them and had betrayed its commitment to racial equality and social justice, feelings that moved them toward radicalism. Having tried to assimilate into mainstream culture, only to be rejected as "unassimilable sojourners," they sought alternatives. Instead of seeking to be integrated into the institutions and processes of the wider society, many of them realized that a more attainable aim was to make a place for themselves in America's ethnic pluralist society through the development of a unique ethnic identity and counterculture. The Movement gave them an unprecedented means of developing a pan-Asian consciousness, changing them from Asian ethnics into Asian Americans. YeUow Identity An early effort to develop an Asian American identity and culture was the "Asian American Experience in America-Yellow Identity" conference held on II January 1969 at the University of California, Berkeley. An estimated nine hundred Asian Americans , mainly Chinese and Japanese Americans from the West Coast, participated in this extraordinary event to learn about "AsianAmerican history and destiny, and the need to express Asian American solidarity in a predominantly white society." 1 If nothing else, the "active participation and vocal spontaneous exchanges throughout the day unmistakably exploded the myth of 'mellow yellow.' ".1 But what began as a first-of-a-kind educational forum turned into an unexpected political convention when student panelists and "some out-spoken students from S.F. State College quickly shifted the subject-matter of the Conference to the struggle at State College" and took over the conference4 They tried to get the conferees to adopt a resoCopyrighted Material 46 : Chapter 2 lution supporting the Third World strike at San Francisco State. Meanwhile, the three groups (Nisei Students Club, Chinese Students Club, and Chinese Students Association) that had sponsored the conference publicly dissociated themselves from any resolutions that might be adopted. Though the conference ended in political disarray, it did make Asian Americans realize that it would take more than a single event to achieve ethnic solidarity. Indeed, it eventually took myriad meetings by small groups of Asian Americans across the country to develop a collective consciousness. Asian Americans soon began to gather together in consciousness-raising groups to address the issue of identity. During the...