Word: asianization
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That particular identity was made possible 40 years ago, in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act. Exclusion laws passed in the early 1900s had reduced Asian immigration to a trickle. In 1965, the year the Civil Rights Act came into effect, says New York University sociologist Guillermina Jasso, "the racist elements of immigration law were abolished." Annual per-country quotas shot from 100?yes, 100?for most Asian nations to 20,000, with preferences for close relatives of U.S. citizens and those skilled in fields with labor shortages, like medicine. The new law unleashed...
...American story is, of course, made up of successive influxes of immigrants who arrive in the U.S., struggle to find a place in its society and eventually assimilate. But the group of post-1965 Asians was different from the Jews, Irish and Italians who had landed earlier. The Asian immigrants' distinctive physiognomy may have made it more difficult for them to blend in, but at the same time, their high education and skill levels allowed them quicker entrée into the middle class. Instead of clustering tightly in urban ethnic enclaves, they spread out into suburbia, where they were often...
...seeming to fit into neither?many felt as if "they had no community," says Chang-rae Lee, a Korean-American novelist who has written about this generation's journey. "They had to create themselves." In doing so, they have updated the old immigrant story and forged a new Asian-American identity, not wholly recognizable in any of their parents' native lands but, in its hybrid nature, vibrantly American...
...were to draw a diagram of acculturation, with the mores of immigrant parents on one side and society's on the other, the classic model might show a steady drift over time, depicting a slow-burn Americanization, taking as long as two or three generations. The more recent Asian-American curve, however, looks almost like the path of a boomerang: early isolation, rapid immersion and assimilation and then a re-appreciation of ethnic roots...
...going to smell," when her mom served fragrant dishes like lamb biryani for dinner. But at Villanova University in Philadelphia, Ahmed found friends from all different backgrounds who welcomed diversity and helped her, she says, become "a good balance of East meets West." Now 23, she and her non-Asian roommates threw a party to mark the Islamic holiday 'Id al-Fitr in November, then threw another for Christmas?which her family never celebrated. "I chose to embrace both holidays instead of segregating myself to one," she says...