·
Updated
October 27, 2012, 9:32 a.m. ET
Rise of the Tiger Nation
Asian-Americans are now the country's best-educated, highest-earning and fastest-growing racial group. They share with American Jews both the distinction and the occasional burden of immigrant success.
By LEE SIEGEL
New
U.S. citizens take their oaths in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Last March, an interviewer
archly asked President Barack Obama whether he was aware that he had been
"surpassed" by basketball phenomenon Jeremy Lin "as the most famous Harvard
graduate." The question was misformulated. If there was any surpassing going on,
it was that Mr. Lin had become, briefly, more famous than Mr. Obama as the
country's most exemplary figure from a hitherto marginalized
minority.
Asian-Americans
are now the country's best-educated, highest-earning and fastest-growing racial
group. They share with American Jews both the distinction and the occasional
burden of immigrant success. WSJ's Stu Woo talks to author Lee
Siegel.
Mr. Lin's triumph on the
basketball court is a living metaphor for the social group he comes from. No one
would dispute the opening paragraph of the Pew Research Center's massive study
of Asian-Americans, released over the summer: "Asian-Americans are the
highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United
States. They are more satisfied than the general public with their lives,
finances and the direction of the country, and they place more value than other
Americans do on marriage, parenthood, hard work and career success." Or as Mr.
Lin put it in a video of congratulation he made last spring for the
overwhelmingly Asian-American graduates of New York City's famed Stuyvesant High
School: "Never let anyone tell you what you can't do."
Percentage
of Asian-Americans who believe that hard work leads to success, versus 58% of
the general public
Source:
Pew Research Center
Mr. Lin might well have
been thinking of a troubling backhanded homage to Asian-American success. Once
upon a time, threatened elites at Ivy League schools like Harvard and Yale
secretly established a quota—known as the "numerus clausus"—for the number of
Jews allowed through their exclusive gates. Today, some of these schools stand
accused of discrimination against Asian-American students who, according to
recent studies, must score higher than whites on standardized tests to win a
golden ticket of admission. It seems that, despite their very different
histories in this country, Asian-Americans now share with American Jews both the
distinction and the occasional burden of phenomenal immigrant
success.
Asian-Americans have
become the immigrant group that most embodies the American promise of success
driven by will and resolve. When, six years ago, the Korean-American management
consultant Yul Kwon won the 13th season of "Survivor," it must have been a
social scientist's dream come true. The show's producers had separated that
season's contestants into ethnically and racially divided groups: white, black,
Hispanic and Asian-American. Never mind the sorry lack of taste. The crude
segregation also served as an illumination, bringing to the surface America's
eternal subterranean scrimmage between newly arrived tribes. Mr. Kwon's victory
made abstract social trends vividly concrete. Not only had Asian-Americans gone
beyond Hispanics as the most populous group of new American immigrants. They had
risen to the top in the pursuit of the American dream.
For the purposes of
demographic studies, Asian-Americans are defined as Chinese, Filipino, Indian,
Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, with the Chinese being the largest group and
the Japanese the smallest. The Pew study is rich with statistics: The Indians
and Filipinos lead Asian-Americans in household wealth, Asian-Americans vote
mostly liberal, the Japanese and Filipinos are most likely to marry outside
their group, more Chinese-Americans than any other Asian-American group say they
are doing better materially than their parents were at a similar
age.
And Asian-Americans
increased their numbers faster than any other race between 2000 and 2010,
growing by 46%. From 1980 to 2010, the Asian-American population quadrupled,
with Chinese-Americans becoming by far the largest group. Tom Buchanan, F. Scott
Fitzgerald's racist bully in "The Great Gatsby," would have plotzed (as my
Russian-Jewish relatives might have said). At one point in the novel, Buchanan
expresses his alarm over the "yellow peril": "The idea is if we don't look out
the white race will be—will be utterly submerged."
Although the fictional
character's fears might strike us as alien and repellent today, it is not just a
blessing but also historically peculiar that more Americans don't feel the same
way, especially given Asian-Americans' breathtaking success. America has always
been a place where rapid assimilation of strangers was accompanied by brutal
opposition to same.
To be sure, beginning with
the large waves of Asian-American immigration in the latter half of the 19th
century, the mostly unskilled Asians who worked the farms and mines and built
the railroads met violent, sometimes lethal prejudice. Such hostility was
officially sanctioned by legislation banning, at different times, Chinese women,
all immigrants from China, and then, in 1924, immigrants from any Asian country,
period. The internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor is unique in
American history—no other immigrant group has ever been imprisoned on American
soil en masse because of ethnic guilt-by-association. But since 1965, when the
Immigration and Nationality Act opened the doors to immigrants from Asia, their
assimilation into American life has proceeded without the turbulence often faced
by other groups.
Corbis
Asian
Americans share with American Jews both the distinction and the occasional
burden of immigrant success.
Woody
Allen
Albert
Einstein
Contrast the
Asian-American saga with that of American Jews, the immigrant group most like
them in terms of accomplishment and stability. Central and Eastern European Jews
also began coming to America in the late 19th century, but because they didn't
incite the ferocious racial hatred that Asian-Americans first confronted, they
established themselves more quickly. At the same time, since they were less
culturally reticent and more socially ambitious than Asian-Americans, Jewish
immigrants also faced more egregious obstacles to mobility than Asian-Americans
did when America once again allowed them in.
By the 1930s, when the
only Asian presence in American movies was Charlie Chan, Jews had invented
Hollywood out of whole cloth. Back in New York, Jews began redefining stagecraft
and acting with the founding of the Group Theater in 1931. Though barred early
on from elective office by the Irish, who for a long time had a monopoly on the
insurgent ethnic side of mainstream American politics, Jews had already reached
the highest political echelons as close advisers to President Wilson. In the
1930s, they were the core of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's so-called brain
trust, his inner circle of wise men. By the end of World War II, Jews had
achieved prominence in just about every realm of American life.
Yet furtive prohibitions
against Jews, as well as entrenched anti-Semitic attitudes, thrived even after
the Holocaust, though that unprecedented atrocity had the effect of eventually
ending the Ivy League quotas on Jewish admissions. What socially ambitious Jews
aspired to were the Elysian fields of WASP bastions such as rarefied country
clubs, exclusive professional clubs, white-shoe law firms, prestigious
foundations and the like, and these were the very institutions that resisted
them the most intensely. As late as 1975, Saul Bellow could complain to an
interviewer that "a few years ago it was fashionable to describe Roth, Malamud
and me as the Hart, Schaffner and Marx of writing. The Protestant majority
thought it had lost its grip, so the ghetto walls went up around
us."
As it happened, 1975 was
one year before Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize, after winning the Pulitzer
once and the National Book Award twice. Contrary to Bellow's somewhat delighted
fantasy of persecution, the ghetto walls had come down around Jewish cultural
figures decades before. The perception of anti-Semitism often exceeded its
reality because, after the Holocaust, any expression of hostility toward Jews
got amplified from muted social ugliness into loud moral crime. But there was
another factor at work. Having attained prominence and social power, Jews could
be disproportionately vociferous and visible in their complaints about rejection
and exclusion.
6-in-10
Asian-Americans
say American parents put too little pressure on their children to succeed in
school
Source:
Pew Research Center
Along with their outsider
theological status—something not shared by Asians, many of whom are practicing
Christians—one reason that anti-Semitism persisted even as Jews ascended in
American life was that Jews were frequently in the vanguard of American social
and political dissent, from the anarchist Emma Goldman to Yippie Abbie Hoffman
and beyond. Not only that, but many of the architects of America's archenemy,
Soviet Communism, had been Jews. As the WASP establishment lost ground to Jewish
newcomers, the words "communist" and "Jew" often became synonymous. The
association of Hollywood with lax morality, and of Jews with Hollywood,
heightened a kind of low-grade hum of anti-Jewish feeling, even as it proved the
general acceptance of the Jewish sentiments and sensibility that permeated
American entertainment.
Asian-Americans have
followed the opposite trajectory from Jewish-Americans. Toxic racism and then
prohibitions against immigration prevented them from rising in American society
for nearly a century. And then they did so with unique alacrity. Jewish
immigrants, whether in the 19th century, in the 1930s as refugees from Hitler or
in the 1980s as refugees from the Soviet Union, came here for the most part
without a penny to their name. Today, Asian-Americans arrive in America more
highly educated, and more prosperous, than any other immigrant
group.
Associated
Press
U.S.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu
Yul
Kwon, winner of the 13th season of 'Survivor.'
Getty
Images
Comedian
Margaret Cho
Getty
Images
Author
Amy Chua
Asian-Americans have
tended to avoid realms of activity, like politics and entertainment, where what
might otherwise be considered the liability of transparent emotion—or the
easiness of faking emotion—is a natural asset. Asian cultural prohibitions
against public emoting play a role in these choices. There are, of course,
numerous Asian-American culture figures and a handful of Asian-American national
politicians. But physiognomies whose expressiveness is often lost on Western
eyes and a deeply ingrained modesty have, relatively speaking, kept most
Asian-American groups away from the public glare and thus out of the cross hairs
of American bias and hatred. Insofar as they do play public roles,
Asian-Americans are more likely to do pro bono work as lawyers, or to serve in
public clinics as doctors, than to appear behind a podium at a political debate
or to flicker on the silver screen.
Yet the astounding success
of Asian-Americans raises the dark question of how long they will be able to
resist attracting the furies of fear and envy, especially during times of
economic stress, or of economic and political conflict with countries like
China, where the preponderance of Asian-Americans still come from. If China does
one day become an explicit antagonist, it seems likely that the anxiety among
Chinese-Americans will be even more intense than that of American Jews every
time the allegiances of the American-Jewish lobby are questioned.
Some of the more vehement
attacks on Amy Chua's deliberately provocative 2011 memoir of child rearing,
"Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," were perhaps fueled by resentment of
Asian-American ascendancy, especially in the context of raising "perfect"
children. Confession: I was one of the book's more vocal detractors. Was I, a
Jewish-American writer, driven to pique, in part, by a member of a group that
threatens Jewish-American cultural domination, just as American Jews once
threatened the WASP mandarinate? Well, maybe.
The subtle vying for
success in various realms of American life between Asian-Americans and American
Jews makes one wonder what mores and tastes will look like when Asian-Americans
begin to exert their own influence over the culture. Will the verbal brio and
intellectual bent of Jews, their edgy irony and frank super-competitiveness give
way to Asian discretion, deference to the community, and gifts for less verbal
pursuits like music, science and math? Will things become, as they once were
under WASP hegemony, quieter?
Not if the mercurial
nature of culture has anything to do with it. Think of the wild Korean-American
comedian Margaret Cho, who belongs on the same family tree of comic art as the
wild Jewish-American comedian Sarah Silverman. Jeremy Lin himself, in his video
for the class of 2012 at Stuyvesant, included an antic rap song performed with
an Asian-American friend. And the speaker who addressed the high school's
graduates in person last June was the 32-year-old Chinese-American actor Telly
Leung, a star of the hit TV series "Glee."
Mr. Leung spoke for over
20 minutes, joking, shouting, making ironic quips, teasing and provoking. At one
point, he boasted that he had overthrown his parents' middle-class expectations
of stability and security and made them redefine their idea of the American
dream. He sounded, dare I say it, like a certain type of Jew. Which is another
way of saying that he sounded like everyone who comes to America from somewhere
else and ends up exemplifying, anew, a native irreverence and vitality that is
as old as the American hills.
—Mr.
Siegel is the author of four books and, most recently, the e-book "Harvard is
Burning."
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
