Language, Identity, and Stereotype Among Southeast Asian American Youth

The Other Asian

Angela Reyes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351560856
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book—an ethnographic and discourse analytic study of an after-school video-making project for 1.5- and second-generation Southeast Asian American teenagers—explores the relationships among stereotype, identity, and ethnicity that emerge in this informal educational setting.

Working from a unique theoretical foundation that combines linguistic anthropology, Asian American studies, and education, and using rigorous linguistic anthropological tools to closely examine video- and audio- recorded interactions gathered during the video-making project (in which teen participants learned the skills for creating their own video and adult staff learned to respect and value the local knowledge of youth), the author builds a compelling link between micro-level uses of language and macro-level discourses of identity, race, ethnicity, and culture. In this study of the ways in which teens draw on and play with circulating stereotypes of the self and the other, Reyes uniquely illustrates how individuals can reappropriate stereotypes of their ethnic group as a resource to position themselves and others in interactionally meaningful ways, to accomplish new social actions, and to assign new meanings to stereotypes.

This is an important book for academics and students in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and applied linguistics with an interest in issues of youth, race, and ethnicity, and/or educational settings, and will also be of interest to readers in the fields of education, Asian American studies, social psychology, and sociology.

1
The Other Asian: Emergence of an Identity

I feel like post-Vietnam wave of immigrant, that we really don’t have the Asian American identity that’s been identified [as] the Asian American experience ... We should be able to identify ourselves and categorize ourselves into the “Other Asian” ... For [Asian Americans] it’s all like idealizing of the American value, of hard work and money. But then for the Other Asian, my kind came here for liberation, to liberate, to be like free as opposed to come here to see America as a prospect. We came here because it was bad in our country, and it’s better here for us. So our reason to be here is to start a whole new life, but not start a whole new life and put ourselves as part of the American pie. That’s how I see it. We’re not here to say we want to be a part of this. We’re here because we’re running away from what happened. We didn’t get run away, we got chased out, not even by our own people, by America itself. The whole bombing, Nixon and stuff, the bombing in Cambodia allowed Pol Pot to come in. Really though, I see it like we don’t even want to be here.

-Sokla,¹ 2002

When I was casually invited by my friend Bi to volunteer at a new after-school video-making project for Southeast Asian refugee youth in Philadelphia, it felt more like I accidentally stumbled into an open, vibrant space bustling with teenagers who were scattered across a bright teal blue floor. More than a dozen young men, clad in baggy pants and loose designer shirts, dominated the room, chatting, sketching, and break dancing as hip hop music pulsed moderately in the background. A half dozen 20-something adults were milling about, some exchanging names and laughs with the teenagers, others fumbling for flyers, markers, and other materials. A trio of young women clung together. For one activity I was assigned to join them. On a large piece of paper, the girls were asked to write about and draw pictures of themselves, providing information such as their names and where they or their families immigrated from. Ny said that although she came from Thailand, she was ethnically “mixed” Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian. Amy explained that she was Chinese but from Southeast Asia; she used to live in California. Kai said she was Lao but born in a refugee processing center in the Philippines. Kai used to be in a gang and told us a story about taunting prostitutes, then clambering over a fence as high heels were thrown at her and her friends. I was delighted but puzzled by how forthcoming these teenagers were with me, a complete stranger until about a half hour earlier. They seemed to feel comfortable and safe. It must have been something about the space, the energy, the people. I smiled slightly as it struck me: Everyone here was Asian American.

It turned out that Sokla was there sort of by accident too. He didn’t know he was signing up to participate in a video-making project; he just heard there was a party in Chinatown. Nearly 4 years after I first met him in that teal blue room, Sokla told me about how it was also somewhat of an accident that he ended up in the United States. In the opening quote, Sokla explained that unlike other Asian Americans, who voluntarily immigrated, refugees from Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam) did not intentionally set out to move to the United States; a war largely outside of their control was to blame. His family fled from Cambodia to a refugee camp on the Cambodian-Thai border where Sokla was later born. After securing a family sponsor on his mother’s side, they moved to the United States when he was 5 years old. Sokla often created new identity labels to set his coming-to-America experience as a Southeast Asian refugee apart from that of other Asian immigrants, particularly Chinese and Japanese Americans. When guest speakers at the video-making project insisted that the youth participants were Asian American, for example, many of them refused this label and instead asserted that they were simply “Asian,” either because they were not born in the United States or because they primarily ate Asian foods, spoke Asian languages, and associated with Asian people. As the argument continued, Sokla finally said, “Just say I’m the new wave of Asian Americans.” A few years later, Sokla coined yet another new label, the “Other Asian,” to capture this same idea. By drawing on the Other Asian refugee experience with warfare and destitution as “other” than the Asian American immigrant belief in opportunity and meritocracy, Sokla explained to me the very problems with a panethnic Asian American identity. I smiled slightly as it struck me: Not everyone here was Asian American.

ASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY: HISTORICAL, POLITICAL, AND INTERACTIONAL PERSPECTIVES

Complicating the panethnic capacity of the term “Asian American,” Sokla pointed out something scholars in Asian American studies have long noted: As a panethnic unifying marker in theory, Asian American can also be understood as one of divisiveness in practice. Initially, the label “Asian American” was imposed by U.S. governmental agencies and news media to lump diverse Asian ethnic groups (e.g., Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian) into one monolithic category, thus eliding the profound cultural and linguistic differences between them (Espiritu, 1992). Other umbrella terms, such as “Hispanic” or “Latino,” “Black” or “African American,” and “American Indian” or “Native American,” were also created and used to assemble diverse peoples into one of four groups to assist in the regulation and allocation of governmental services (Lowry, 1982). During the civil rights movement in the 1960s, however, minority activists began embracing these panethnic labels in the belief that building large coalitions inclusive of several ethnic groups would help advance political struggles for power and resources (Espiritu, 1992). Based on shared experiences with racism and disenfranchisement, Asian American activists appropriated the Asian American label to create a unified identity that allowed diverse Asian ethnic groups to join together and produce more numbers behind a united voice. The social life of the term “Asian American,” then, exemplifies how panethnic identity is a product of various historical and political processes and not the result of shared cultural ties (Lopez & Espiritu, 1990).

Although the Asian American label was once imposed and then embraced, the initial debate about how a panethnic identity is even possible with such inner group heterogeneity has never been resolved. Lowe (1996) explains how the formation of an Asian American identity in response to racial politics is still problematic:

[W]hile Asian American cultural identity emerges in the context of the racial-ized exclusion of Asian immigrants from enfranchisement in the political and cultural spheres of the United States, important contradictions exist between an exclusively Asian American cultural nationalist construction of identity and the material heterogeneity of the Asian American constituency, particularly class, gender, and national-origin differences among peoples of Asian descent in the United States, (p. 38)

Lowe (1996) argues that the diversity between and within Asian ethnic groups complicates a unified formation of Asian American identity. This fragmentation is largely due to both external and internal power struggles: external because the U.S. government and media assign racial labels to Asian ethnic groups; internal because various Asian ethnic groups fight for inclusion in or exclusion from the panethnic label. Although some agree that Asian Americans are people of East Asian (Korean, Chinese, etc.), Southeast Asian (Lao, Cambodian, etc.), and South Asian (Indian, Sri Lankan, etc.) descent in the United States, the term “Asian American” is still commonly understood by many people, including Sokla, as only representing the interests of Chinese and Japanese Americans (Espiritu, 1992, pp. 50-51). For Sokla, his conviction was rooted in what he perceived as a fundamental distinction between Asian Americans and the Other Asian, a distinction based on immigration history and socioeconomic status. Because his experiences and politics were not represented or shared by an Asian American agenda, he often chose to exclude himself from the label.

Similar issues surround other groups. Should South Asian Americans form a separate group apart from Asian Americans? Are Filipino Americans Asian American, Pacific Islander American, or something else? Should Pacific Islanders (Samoan, Micronesian, etc.) who immigrated to the United States be lumped together with Asian Americans? Should the term “Asian American” be replaced by Asian Pacific American, Asian Pacific Islander American, or Asian and Pacific Islander American? Although asking such questions often elicits passionate responses, there are no definitive answers. The central issue here is that the panethnic Asian American identity is a shifting, social negotiation rather than an enduring, fixed entity. Bureaucrats, scholars, activists, and everyday people like Sokla contribute to this contentious debate, which will likely continue for many years to come.

In addition to larger historical and political processes that shape the formation of identity, everyday social interaction is an equally powerful force through which people position themselves as certain types of people. Much linguistic anthropological research reveals that far from being fixed attributes of individuals, identities are achieved through the constant interplay between larger mac-rolevel processes—which influence the social categories available to individuals—and local interactional processes—which allow individuals to construct their identities within these larger constraints (e.g., Bailey, 2002; Bucholtz & Hall, 2003; Rampton, 1995a). Repertoires of identities are taken as the norm, and people play with a variety of linguistic devices through which identities are accomplished in interaction (e.g., M. Goodwin, 1999; Kroskrity, 1993).

For example, Southeast Asian refugees, like Sokla, have access to a multitude of labels that provide a range of ways to construct their identities. At one time or another, Sokla has identified as “Asian,” “Other Asian,” “Cambodian,” “American,” even “Asian American.” Such labels are not simply denotational names for groups; they achieve complex levels of meaning within specific contexts of use (Rymes, 1996). For example, Sokla may identify as “Cambodian” to claim an ethnic identity when talking to other Asian Americans, as “Asian American” to assert a political identity when talking to European Americans, or as the “Other Asian” to emphasize distinctions between Asian American groups when talking to a researcher. The use of labels can even accomplish multiple effects: Identifying as “Asian” can simultaneously deny allegiance to an American identity and distance oneself from self-identified Asian Americans.

Yet to reveal what meanings and identities actually emerge in interaction, close analysis of situated discourse is crucial. With this perspective on language use, I argue that it was not that Sokla opposed the Asian American label itself; rather, his opposition was shaped by aspects of the interactional context: who he was talking to, where the conversation took place, what topics were being discussed, and so on. Taking a linguistic approach to identity in this study, I examined conversations at the after-school video-making project and discovered that Sokla and several other teenagers often used stereotypes as resources for constructing their identities and relationships with others. This book explores this intersection of language, identity, and stereotype.

ASIAN AMERICAN STEREOTYPES: SOCIETAL CIRCULATION AND LOCAL EMERGENCE

Similar to the formation of Asian American identity, Asian American stereotypes are also produced through historical, political, and interactional processes. Social scientific research on stereotypes dates back to Lippmann (1922), who referred to them as pictures in the heads of individuals looking out into their social world. He argued that people interact directly not with objective reality but with the representations they have created about that reality. Since Lippmann, most stereotype research has been carried out by social psychologists (e.g., Leyens, Yzerbyt, & Schadron, 1994; Maass & Arcuri, 1992; Stangor & Schaller, 1996), who generally agree on two core characteristics of stereotypes: their necessity and their sharedness. First, without stereotypes, people would move about the world in a rather inefficient manner, unable to draw on prior understandings of objects or people. Fetching a glass of water, for example, would be a slow task if people could not access the stereotype of water as transparent, drinkable liquid. Second, for typifications—links made between attributes (e.g., transparent) and entities (e.g., water)—to develop into stereotypes, they must be shared at the level of groups or societies. Although it is not entirely clear to what degree a typification must be shared for it to qualify as a stereotype, social psychologists agree that the mass media is a powerful mechanism through which stereotypes are disseminated across national and global scales (e.g., Katz & Bradley, 1933; Wilson & Gutierrez, 1985).

Linguistic anthropologists offer a promising approach to understanding how stereotypes are formed and disseminated through the concept of circulation (Agha, 2003; Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Silverstein & Urban, 1996). Language use is central to how a typification develops into a stereotype through its circulation in a speech chain network consisting of senders and receivers (Agha, 2003). In a speech chain, a sender transmits a message to a receiver, who in turn becomes a sender who transmits it to another receiver and so on. The existence of a stereotype, then, relies on continuous streams of speech chains; otherwise, a stereotype can fade if speech chains break, they become filled with countermessages, or their senders and receivers die out.² A single transaction between a sender and receiver can be as small as a dyadic interaction between, for example, a speaker and a hearer in face-to-face conversation. A single transaction can also disseminate instantly across societies between, for example, a news broadcast and millions of viewers. Such wide-scale transmission in various mass media—such as film, music, newspapers, and advertisements—is rarely neutral because those who control the messages and the media through which messages circulate play a powerful role in the political economy of texts (Gal, 1989; Irvine, 1989). Accounting for both the stability and fragility of stereotypes, this model of circulation acknowledges the significance of different levels of dissemination, from wide-scale speech chains controlled by a privileged few to small-scale speech chains among a local community, such as the participants at the after-school video-making project, which is the focus of this study.

Scholars in Asian American studies have also contributed to the research literature on stereotypes. Given the political activism that gave rise to the field, Asian Americanists focus on stereotypes of persons—namely Asian Americans—and view such stereotypes as largely negative and false ideas used by the dominant majority to oppress minority groups. Research in this area examines how Asian American stereotypes reflect the unique ways in which Asian Americans are positioned in U.S. racial discourses. Because the national obsession with race is usually framed in Black-White terms, scholars argue that Asian Americans are left to be perceived as either forever foreigners or honorary Whites (Tuan, 1998)—as not belonging in the United States or as similar to the dominant majority.

Forever Foreigner Stereotype

The stereotype of the forever foreigner draws on discourses of Orientalism, ideologies which shape the image of Asian and Middle Eastern peoples as Other and thus unassimable due to innate East-West differences that cannot be resolved (Said, 1978). Despite that people of Asian descent have been in the United States since at least the California gold rush in 1848 (Takaki, 1989)—and as early as 1571, when the Spanish brought Chinese shipbuilders to California and Filipino seamen to Louisiana (Fong, 1998)—Asian Americans continue to be perceived as the foreigner-within (Lowe, 1996). That Asian Americans are not accepted as American is illustrated by just one of many examples from my fieldwork: One day, a European American woman asked Na-run, a Thai Cambodian Chinese American girl, where she was from, speaking in a slowly articulated manner as if assuming that Narun’s first language was not English. After Narun replied “South Philly,” the woman appeared irritated and asked again, “No, where are you really from?” Unfortunately, this unwillingness to accept that someone who looks Asian can also be American is not unfamiliar to many Asian Americans, even though some have families that have been in the United States for five or more generations.

Playing no small role in nurturing the forever foreigner stereotype is the mass media, which often depicts Asian Americans as an alien presence that threatens, disrupts, and pollutes the internal structure of cultural formation in the United States (R. Lee, 1999). Two early films portraying Asian immigrants—Cecil B. De Mille’s The Cheat (1915) and D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919)—although popular in their time, have recently been criticized for perpetuating the permanent alien image (Marchetti, 1993; Moy, 1992). These and other later films, such as Sayonara (1957) by Joshua Logan, portray Asians as the “yellow peril” through the sexual threat of miscegenation, tainting White racial “purity” with foreign blood (Hagedorn, 1994; Marchetti, 1993). Though largely absent from contemporary entertainment media, Asian Americans do occasionally appear; however, they are rarely depicted as second generation Americans but instead as conniving or socially awkward foreigners with accented English or a proclivity for martial arts (Fong, 1998; Hamamoto, 1994; R. Lee, 1999). This imbalanced and misleading representation of Asian Americans—nearly half of whom are American born (Reeves & Bennett, 2004)—helps maintain the image of the forever foreigner in U.S. racial discourses.

News media coverage of the thriving Japanese auto industry in the 1980s and of the campaign finance scandals involving foreign Asian donors in the 1990s are just two more recent examples continuing a long tradition of perceived Asian threats. Such fear often results in discriminatory U.S. policies, policies that date back to the Chinese Exclusion Law in 1882, when Chinese immigrant laborers were seen as threatening the employability of White Americans (Takaki, 1989). This Asian-as-foreign-threat perception is applied not only to Asians in Asia but also to Asian Americans, as illustrated by the brutal killing of Vincent Chin in 1982 by White unemployed Detroit autoworkers who thought he was Japanese. That Chin was Chinese American was of little concern to these men who assumed he was foreign and thus a threat to their livelihood.

Fig. 1.1 illustrates a pair of oppositions that situates the forever foreigner stereotype of Asian Americans in U.S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Other Asian: Emergence of an Identity
• 2 “No Kiss, No Money”: Constructing Identities With Asian Newcomer Stereotypes
• 3 “Aite” and “Na Mean”: Constructing Identities With African American Stereotypes
• 4 From Storeowners to Minivan Drivers: Building Panethnicity With Asian American Stereotypes
• 5 “Yo, Yo, He Cambo”: Dismantling Panethnicity With Asian American Stereotypes
• 6 Implications for Minority Youth in Alternative Education and Grassroots Video
• References
• Appendix: Transcription Conventions
• Author Index
• Subject Index