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GOLDSEA | ASIAN AMERICAN DEMOGRAPHICS

Parsing Asian America
PART 4 OF 4

[CONTINUED BELOW]

    These inter-Asian stereotypes may have some superficial connection to reality, but it doesn't take much thought to see how hopelessly inaccurate they are in describing real-life Asian Americans. The success stories in GoldSea alone are enough to refute most. Without delving too deeply into my own personal life, I can say that my Corean American husband is more considerate than any man I've met and, given proper justification, I can be every bit as shrewish as any Chinese woman!

SPEAKY ENGLISH?
    Major confusion -- and offense -- arises from the badly mistaken impression that most Asians speak Asian languages at home. Despite the fact that only 41% of the Asian American population was born in the U.S., 67% speak and read primarily or exclusively English. That's because 70% of Asians under 50 who immigrated to the U.S. 12 or more years ago speak English primarily or exclusively. What's more, most Asians who immigrated before the age of 14 -- the so-called knee-high generation -- speak exclusively English. An estimated 52% of Asian Americans don't even have the ability to converse in an Asian langauge. Non-Asians who think they're being clever by addressing an Asian American in Mandarin or Corean is likely to be greeted with annoyance. That likelihood jumps to probability if the Asian American happens to be under 40.
    Among Japanese Americans 90% speak English primarily or exclusively. That's because there has been very little Japanese immigration during the past 30 years. The second highest rate of primary English useage is among Filipino Americans at around 70%. Though English is the official language of the Philippines, in reality less than half the Philippine population speaks English regularly. The rest prefer to speak Tagalog or Chinese. The third highest rate of primary English useage is among Corean Americans at 60%, followed closely by Chinese Americans at 57% and Vietnamese Americans at 50%.
    Primary English useage has more to do with preference and comfort rather than the ability to use English. 85% of Asian Americans across the board can read and write at least at the high-school level, most considerably better. An estimated 78% of Asian Americans read regularly in English, a higher percentage than the 67% who use English as their primary or exclusive language

WILL YOU MARRY ME?
    One statistic used widely as a gauge of acculturation is inter-racial marriage. That's a highly misleading gauge because it confuses the three very different issues of access, assimilation and acculturation.
    By access I mean social access to situations producing routine contact with members of ones own group as opposed to members of other groups. By acculturation I mean the degree of adoption of mainstream American lifestyle. By assimilation I mean abandoning one's own cultural and even racial characteristics in a conscious effort to become indistinguishable from the majority population.
    Until the late 1970s a segment of the American Asian population had strong incentive to assimilate. It was seen as the best way to free oneself from the limitations of being part of a minority group suffering intense social and economic disadvantages, not to mention overt hostility from highly visible racist elements. Especially for Japanese Americans who had suffered the shock and humiliation of being treated like enemy prisoners during World War II, assimilation seemed to offer one path of escaping the negatives associated with being Asian in America. Even scholarly works on the Asian American population used the word "assimilation" as a highly desirable social goal toward which all Asians aspired.
    Even during the first half of the century as they suffered the most intense racial prejudice and discrimination, most Japanese, Chinese and Corean Americans worked hard to preserve their cultural heritages. I have many vivid memories of the festivals and parades, with the attendant traditional music, costumes and foods, that punctuated Japanese American life. I remember feeling proud of my identity as a Japanese American, but I do know that some of my peers, especially the older Japanese Americans of my generation, were seduced by the goal of assimilation. A majority ended up marrying caucasians, contributing to the highest outmarriage rate among Japanese Americans, something in the neighborhood of 78% at its peak in the late 1980s. The rates were considerably lower among Chinese Americans and Corean Americans -- about 50% and 47%, respectively.
    These rates do reflect the differential role played by the goal of assimilation, but they also reflect the equally important access factor. For sansei and yonsei going to college in the 70s and early 80s, the opportunities to study and socialize with other races and nationalities were far greater than the opportunity to do the same with other Japanese Americans. And of course this factor differed for Chinese and Coreans because of different immigration timelines. Only a very small percentage of the Chinese and Corean American population was of marriageable age before the late 80s when the first wave of the knee-high generation left college and entered the workforce.
    The access factor is quite different today. Virtually every Asian American group has a presence in most universities across the U.S., providing opportunities for socializing within one's own group if one chooses to do so. As a result, by 1998 the outmarriage rates had leveled off among Chinese and Coreans and had begun declining among Japanese. And the outmarriage rate has come to mean something quite different than in the past. Whereas before the late 1980s most outmarriages were to Whites, today half of Asian outmarriages are to members of other Asian groups, reflecting the big changes in access.
    The factor becoming far more important than race or ethnicity in Asian American marriage decisions is acculturation. An Asian American born here or educated here is more interested in whether a prospective mate shares similar views on gender roles, family relationships and rasing families than nationality or even ethnicity. In other words, as higher percentages of Asian Americans become acculturated by adopting American social values and lifestyles, other Asians of all nationalities will become a larger portion of the available pool of marriage prospects, resulting in higher outmarriage rates but with a larger percentage being to other Asian groups than to non-Asians. Ultimately, Asian American outmarriage rates will simply parallel the composition of the local population.

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