Identity Formation in the U.S.,
or What Happens When You Forget Where You Come From?

By Ryan Masaaki Yokota

Recently, at a Jessica McClintock rally, where members of the Asian Pacific Coalition, Korean United Students for Education and Services (KAUSES), and Concerned Asian Pacific Students for Action (CAPSA), were protesting for back pay illegally denied from 12 Chinese immigrant women garment workers, a very shocking situation arose, where two Asian males started passing out propaganda to counter the information that we had been relaying to educate the public on the situation.

It turns out that these two Asians were half-Chinese, half-Japanese American brothers, whose mother owned a P.R. firm that Jessica McClintock had hired in order to counter the charges brought up in the protest campaign. It turns out that McClintock, in a very calculated move had hired out the Asian PR firm in an effort to turn Asians against themselves. It was the oldest trick in the hakujin's book: Divide and Conquer.

Yet, I was curious to understand the motivating factors of the situation. Economic considerations couldn't have been the sole reason motivating these Asians to throw away their sense of morality or connection to this issue. Other factors had to exist.

Upon questioning, I found out that these two brothers were 3rd generation residents in the US and I found ample evidence that economically they were decently well off. That helped to explain part of the reason of why they had taken their stance. They obviously couldn't identify with the immigrant workers' plight probably due to class biases and because of generational biases.

Yet, when I asked why they, as immigrants, were taking the side against this immigrant workers' cause by working for McClintock, the younger brother snapped back, and fumed "I'm not an immigrant! I'm an American!"

"It made perfect sense," I said to myself, "that's why."

Not only did these Asians not associate with his struggle out of class backgrounds, and out of a generational loss of memory of their own familial history as immigrants in America, but they were also buying into the myth of the American Dream and probably a lot of the racism that often surrounds recent immigrants (or as some less intelligent people call "F.O.B.'s" or "Fresh Off the Boat"). Racism and discrimination generated against recent immigrants due to language, accent, and cultural traditions and customs become self-hatred and resentment in those children of the next generation that grow up in America. These children often shed their language and "Asian" traditions in the all-out drive to run away from that stigma of being an "F.O.B." With this denial of self, an "Asian" or even an "Asian-American" identity can often become replaced with a hakujin, or mainstream "white" American identity, especially if they have grown up in a predominantly white neighborhood. This probably exemplifies the experience of these two brothers from the PR firm, and it certainly exemplifies my own experience, having grown up in Orange County, in Huntington Beach.

Basically these two brothers represent a very disturbing trend in the API community, where Asian youths fail to receive adequate support and education in the difficult process of identity formation as a Person of Color in America. With this lack of a sense of a strong Asian Pacific Islander identity or community, more and more API's have turned towards identifying with the hakujin in America, and become especially useful as what Malcolm X would call the "house nigger" in the white man's world. These people become recruited by the hakujin to divide the API population from itself, thus becoming S.I. Hayakawas despite the fact that they remain Nips, Gooks, or Chinks in the white man's eyes, and unless they step out of the little nook they've created for themselves (say by going outside of the West Coast, for example), they often fail to see the type of racism that still dominates within white society today.

In a sense, this opinion piece becomes a sort of call to arms for the Asian Nation. Sure, some members of our community have reached some levels of success economically, and that monetary power has given us some advances. Yet we must remember where we came from and also remember that large portions of our community, as the 124,000 Asian residents of L.A. County (or 13% of the API population in LA) still living in poverty demonstrate (as noted in a recent study published by the UCLA Urban Planning program). Even further, the report goes on to discuss the fact that the poverty rate among Vietnamese in LA remains at 25%, among Pacific Islanders, at 24%, and for other Southeast Asian immigrants, at a whopping 45%. This comes in comparison with the 23% poverty rate for Latina/os, the 21% rate for African-Americans, and the 7% rate for non-Hispanic whites. Now is the time for us to help each other out, especially since, as People of Color in America today, nobody else will. Now is the time to study our past to learn the lessons of our people here in America and now is the time to teach our families the stories of the struggle our immigrant forbears had to face. Without the strength of our past we can never really know for ourselves who we are and define ourselves on our own terms, and without the surety of our past we will never be able to stand straight and tall in this land we call Amerika.

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