The Perils of Success

By JAMES WALSH

In every way that counts, Took Took Thongthiraj is the personification of American promise. Engaging, intelligent and an achiever, the 22-year-old UCLA senior radiates confidence. "I'm 100% American and 100% Asian," she declares. "A lot of Asian Americans feel forced to choose between the two, which is a message they get from their parents. But I've worked hard to create a cultural hybrid for myself."

The youngest of six daughters born to a Thai couple who immigrated to Southern California nearly 30 years ago, Thongthiraj has posted a perfect grade-point average of 4.0 at UCLA. She hopes to go on to win a master's degree and a Ph.D., with the eventual aim of teaching women's and Asian- American studies at the university level. Her story sounds like every parent's dream come true, but it is hardly unique. Around the country, young people of Asian descent seem to embody the tongue-in-cheek demographics of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average." Working-world Asians, meanwhile, have produced a veritable galaxy of stellar performers in the U.S., from the arts and sciences to business and finance. Like immigrating Jews of earlier generations, they have parlayed cultural emphases on education and hard work into brilliant attainments.

What does make Thongthiraj unusual is her determination to win something more elusive than a career: to fashion a new identity out of the conflicting allegiances and double-edged stereotypes that plague the Asian-American psyche. Material success has bred resentment, envy, even backlashes of violence from such other subnationalities as blacks and Latinos; last year's Los Angeles riot was a vivid reminder of that vulnerability. The image of Asians as immigrant role models has also disguised the enduring poverty of some, as well as the political feebleness of the minority as a whole.

Grace Yun, director of the New York City-based Inter-Relations Collaborative, describes this role-model "myth" as a "source of enormous concern." She deplores the idea that Asian Americans don't have any problems: "Thirty-six percent of the Vietnamese-American community in 1990 was below the poverty line. You see computers being advertised by little Asian geniuses. This is very damaging. One of the devastating by-products is anti-Asian violence."

The story is not new. From the time Chinese Forty-Niners joined the California Gold Rush, Asians have tended to see America in terms of the old Cantonese name for San Francisco: Gao Gam Saan (Old Gold Mountain), or a land of economic opportunity above all. Nativist harassment of the newcomers, coupled with openly racist citizenship and immigration laws, encouraged the impulse to get ahead financially without bothering about assimilation into the mainstream society. Politics was something to be avoided. As an old Far Eastern maxim goes, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.

At UCLA, Thongthiraj is helping change that view. She is director of the Asian Pacific Coalition, an umbrella group of 19 ethnic organizations on campus. In promoting cultural awareness and aiding new immigrants, especially hard-luck cases from Indochina, the coalition encourages them to articulate a more assertive political voice and American identity.

Like most other younger U.S.-born Asians, Thongthiraj feels at home in American civilization. Even so, she is not willing to forsake her special heritage. "There is something in the Asian family that promotes success," she acknowledges. "Parents feel you have to get established. They push a filial sense of duty and a message to fulfill parental expectations. What I do reflects on my family."

As a rule, Asians in America have reflected extremely well, especially those who have drawn from the wellsprings of the older civilizations of India, China, Japan and Korea. Though they make up just 2.9% of the country's population, Asians have produced outstanding success stories: cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Midori; writers Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club) and Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men); Sonny Mehta, editor of the distinguished Knopf book- publishing house; and filmmaker Wayne Wang (Dim Sum). Consider also: Chang- Lin Tien, the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley; Paul Terasaki, a UCLA professor of surgery who developed tissue typing for organ transplants; and Vinod Khosla, one of the founding partners of the computer- workstation manufacturer Sun Microsystems.

Asian faces are as prominent in the mass media today as they were all but invisible in the past. Besides Connie Chung, who co-anchors the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, Asian-American journalists seem to be fixtures in almost every big-city local-news telecast. The time is long gone when white Americans would expect visages with a Far Eastern cast to belong to restaurant or laundry operators who confused their rs and ls: younger-generation Asians in California often speak like Valley Girls and hum tunes from the Top 40.

Yet a certain image of exoticness lingers. Douglas Kwon, 28, a recent law- school graduate in Atlanta, has views on politics and marriage that differ markedly from those of his Korean parents. But he has also grown cynical about the prospects of truly fitting in. From the taunts he drew as a schoolboy to the persistent query he gets as an adult ("Where are you from -- no, really?"), he concludes, "The bottom line is everyone is racist; everyone carries certain stereotypes around with them, and nothing is ever going to change that." Peter Son, 25, also a member of Atlanta's fast-growing Korean community, says that some semblance of the old-country folkways must be preserved, if only to remain sane: otherwise, he points out, "we will just end up as foreigners in a strange land with no identity."

Like a slowly developing photo, however, the outlines of a clearer identity are beginning to emerge. So strong is the presence of Asian Americans on the West Coast that politics can no longer afford to overlook them. Michael Woo, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for mayor of Los Angeles this year, demonstrated the fund-raising resources of prospering Asians by drumming up campaign contributions across the country. While Woo's defeat was a blow to morale, Asians can boast three members of Congress from California: U.S. Representatives Robert Matsui from Sacramento, Norman Mineta from San Jose and Jay Kim from Diamond Bar, east of Los Angeles.

As of three years ago, California was home to 2.85 million Asian Americans, about 38% of the nation's total. Between the 1970 and 1990 censuses, their numbers in Los Angeles County alone increased fivefold. Paul Ong, a UCLA urban-planning professor and author, predicts that by the year 2020, Asians in California will number 8.5 million, accounting for about 20% of the state's population.

They already make up disproportionately large shares of university classes, a development that has stuck a bamboo pole into the affirmative-action machinery. Fully 41% of the entering freshman class at UCLA this autumn consists of students of Asian descent. At Berkeley they total 33.6% of enrollments, which has prompted calls for an admissions policy limiting their numbers. Not all rivals for the fruits of education are convinced that such an invidious system would be fair play. Some black intellectuals who have a stronger faith in self-reliance have argued that competing minorities would be better off raising their own academic standards rather than clamping a lid on Asian-American industriousness.

| Stop signs are fairly common in the job market, though. In large corporations, very few Asians have reached senior-executive rank. The reason, in part at least, seems to be a kind of cultural Great Wall that blinds management to what Asians expect in the workplace. Says J.D. Hokoyama, president of the national nonprofit organization known as LEAP (Leadership Education for Asian-Pacifics): "In America a worker comes into my office and asks for a promotion. Asians don't do that."

Many, in fact, fail to get ahead in any way. In Westminster, the "Little Saigon" in Southern California's Orange County, 140,000 Vietnamese refugees are crammed into 5 sq. mi. often under deeply impoverished circumstances. Without the resources and planning that other Asian families have used in resettling, many of them work at dead-end jobs or, as a last resort, subsist on government handouts, which profoundly shames them. Says Nghia Tran, 30, executive director of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County: "As refugees, this population represents a special set of needs, and sometimes they are not met. This is where we get our delinquency problems, with Vietnamese youths getting involved in gangs." The loss of the support systems afforded by an extended-family network in the old country also isolates the elderly and leaves them in lonely anguish.

A willingness to tackle what must be done helps sustain most newcomers. Sun Microsystems' Khosla, 38, an Indian engineer with an M.B.A., worked through holidays and vacations for two years to build up his company, which sold $4.3 billion worth of computer workstations last year. Quasi-retired as a multimillionaire for eight years now, he remarks, "Growing up in India made your expectations of reward much lower. So, you are prepared to work harder and make more sacrifices."

While that ethic does not necessarily resolve identity conflicts, times are changing. Says Stephen Chen, a 20-year-old liberal arts major at Atlanta's Emory College: "When first-generation Asians talk about Caucasians, they tend to say 'Americans.' That leaves the impression that we're foreigners and always will be, and we have to accept that -- which I don't agree with." Elaine Kim, professor of Asian-American studies at Berkeley, comments, "It used to be that you had to be assimilating or foreign. Now we have young Asian-American writers who are refusing that choice. What they are trying to do, and succeeding at it, is to create a new self-defining way of being Asian American."

In the meantime, many shining examples of this minority in the golden land try to bear up under the occasional unwitting offense. Says Berkeley chancellor Tien, a first-generation Chinese American: "Just today I was walking on campus when someone saw me and asked, 'Are you from Japan?' I said, 'No, I'm your chancellor.' " With lines like that, the education of America can't be far off.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles, Scott Norvell/Atlanta and Sribala Subramanian/New York