Asian American Life 36 Years Later
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Much has changed but the yearnings remain.

 

Faded denim was big then. So was glitter and disco. Mix the two and you had faded denim disco suits with rhinestones. That was the colorful era in which I went to college.

But there wasn’t much color at UCLA. Asian Americans were few and far between back in the early 70s, nothing like today. One of the few in my dorm was a Korean boy with one arm who played ping pong better than anyone there. There was one other Korean boy who taught Taekwondo to other residents. I ate my meals with three sanseis, a chicano and a White boy from Palo Alto. But the dorm was over 90% White, as was the campus itself.

There was little overt racial animosity. We weren’t enough of a presence to be a threat, just a sprinkling of golden faces in a sea of white. It’s hard to imagine for those who have visited a UC campus recently.

The ideal of racial equality was in vogue then. Social acceptance was a different matter. There were no Asians in the frats on Gailey or the sororities on Hilgard. I don’t think it occurred to anyone that a non-white person might want to turn Greek. Instead we could seek out the one Asian frat or two Asian sororities comprising mostly sanseis and a few Chinese Americans. The Asian Greeks abhored FOBs. A first-generation Asian immigrant generally found easier acceptance among other races.

Asians did enjoy a limited kind of status in the media thanks to Bruce Lee. We were the inscrutable little people capable of visually exciting violence. We were also intriguing to Whites seeking an exotic fling. And we were associated with tasty, healthy food. The violence and anger was still a decade or more in the future, when those tiny tinny Toyotas, Datsuns and Hondas began pushing down Detroit’s sales projections. We were easy to laugh at and even admire within the narrow confines of our stereotypical roles.

We Asian Americans were a bargain then, socially, economically, culturally.

We didn’t ask for much. Yes, some of us were demonstrating for affirmative action or against stereotypes. But in retrospect those demonstrations were merely reassuring to the majority population. We were seeking a bit of majority largesse and indulgence from our marginal position — how quaint and unthreatening! We were easy to tolerate.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge. It’s much easier today for Asian Americans to be complacent. We can point to countless gains relative to the majority despite our small 4.6% share of the population. We dominate UC campuses. We are almost as visible as Whites in the professional world in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose. Even in New York, Houston and San Diego Asian Americans are very visible if not yet prominent.

But we remain all too aware of the milestones that remain before we can truly feel complacent.

We still get more laughs by tapping into stereotypes than poking fun at the society that believes them. There are still more Asian women paired with White men than Asian men with White women. We still yearn to see more Asians playing big roles on the national stage despite our three cabinet-level positions, a handful of major Asian sports stars, and even a few movie stars.

Those yearnings for acceptance, appreciation and recognition will ultimately be satisfied by the steps we take as individuals, not by any largesse or indulgence from society at large. But the reward for each achievement will be shared by every Asian American.

That remains the best thing about being an Asian American today just as it was back when we wore bleached denim.