Word: asianization
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...Asian Americans say part of the reason it is so hard to reach an equilibrium is that they are seen as what sociologists call "forever foreigners." Their looks lead to a lifetime of questions like "No, where are you really from?" As a teenager in the affluent and overwhelmingly white Chicago suburb of Riverwoods, Ill, Vanessa DeGuia, now 26, endured incident after incident that made her aware that others regarded her as foreign, despite how her birth certificate read. One classmate told her, "You're my brown friend. You're so exotic." Another came over for dinner, took a bite...
...kids?who by nature desperately want to belong?the feeling of alienation can be so painful that they will do almost anything to make it go away, to fit in. For years, Mark Hong, 31, shunned the only other Asian kid he knew in Davenport, Iowa, and hung out with the popular?and other than him, entirely white?crowd at school: the jocks. "I repelled anything that was Asian because it represented everything that was not cool at the time. Asians did kung fu and worked at Asian restaurants," he explains. That his Korean-born dad was actually an engineer...
Racial alienation and ethnic mockery are commonplace in the immigrant-kid experience, and the stories these Asian Americans tell of their childhood are "the same kind of talk about social exclusion that you might have found among Italians and Jews in the 1930s," says Harvard sociologist Mary Waters. But previous generations of immigrants' kids, including those Italians and Jews, lived in neighborhoods with built-in social support structures?people who looked like them, ate like them, prayed like them. They had what Marissa Dagdagan, 28, a daughter of Filipino-born doctors, who grew up in Burr Ridge, Ill, says...
Many children of the Asian immigrants who came over in the 1960s and 1970s say they didn't find that kind of self-affirmation until, like Fareha Ahmed, they got to college. Raymond Yang was one of only three Asians in a class of 420 at his high school in East Northport, N.Y. "I always felt like I was between worlds, especially in high school," says Yang, 28, whose parents are Chinese. That interim place felt like his and his alone?until he got to Brown University. When Yang was a freshman in 1995, there were 854 other Asian Americans...
...social awakening often kindles a cultural one. Once in the return part of the curve, many Asian Americans go from downplaying their differences to highlighting them. In fourth grade, Akira Heshiki, who grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, dropped out of the Japanese-language school she attended each Saturday because she didn't feel Japanese. Instead she treasured the moments when her high school classmates told her, "I always forget you're Japanese." But once at Oregon's Reed College, where more than 10% of the students were Asian American, she began to embrace her heritage. She started the Asian student...