I spent about 3 months in Gainesville, Florida for a student internship. Gainesville is a little town in north-central Florida and it is best known for being the home of the Gators of the University of Florida. I worked at the Veteran Affairs hospital, and after work my co-interns and I would usually head out into town and schmooze with the college kids and hit up the local bars and get drunk and stupid and partake in all types of debauchery that was probably unbecoming of future health care professionals. Needless to say, Gainesville was a great college town, and my time there was probably the most fun 3-month stretch of my life.

You will never know what it's like to be the only kid with black hair and slanted eyes in your kindergarten class.

You will never know what it's like to be called Chinky Chinaman on the playground at 5 years old.

You will never know what it's like to ask your 1st grade teacher about Vietnam.

Only to have her tell you that all humans are created equal.

(Please.)

What does it mean to be "American?" Is it to enjoy apple pie, baseball, and a confusing system of measurement? To place trust in democracy? To adhere to the values of freedom and justice? Whether you call it "soda" or "pop" (or "Coke" if you're one of those SEC types), the definitions of "American" are many and varied. After all, with such a large land mass and so many regional cultures, it's difficult - perhaps even impossible - to decide on a standard that everyone accepts.

Yet if you think "American" is tough to define, try "Asian." It's like an identity crisis with an identity crisis.

NEW YORK--Asian Americans are identified by their eyes more than any other feature. So, for this community, cosmetic surgery on the eyelids goes to the heart of identity politics and ethnic pride. Eyelid surgery is the country's third most popular cosmetic surgery, surpassed only by liposuction and breast augmentation, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.

The society's board-certified plastic surgeons performed 120,001 cosmetic eyelid surgeries in 1998, twice the number performed in 1992. Cosmetic eyelid surgery, blepharoplasty, is usually meant to reduce signs of aging, but among younger Asian Americans--especially those of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese descent--one method of blepharoplasty has gained significant popularity.

The majority of Asians have upper eyelids that appear to be taut from brow to lashes, rather than segmented by a crease. Asian blepharoplasty patients often request the creation of an upper eyelid crease, or "double eyelid," which uncovers a portion of the natural eye contours, making the eyes slightly larger, rounder and more amenable to makeup, as well as exposing more of the eyelashes.

SAN FRANCISCO -- When she first emigrated, and walked through Chinatown's streets speaking Mandarin, people muttered under their breath. They called Rose Pak a Chinese person who didn't speak Chinese.

As she walks through the same neighborhood three decades later, the scene is decidedly different. Pak points to a store bedecked with brightly colored kites, and another serving won ton and chow mein -- both Mandarin-speaking, she says. A Mandarin pop singer belts out a love song over a sidewalk speaker, and a man greets Pak with "Ni hao," -- Mandarin for 'Hello.'

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam - She is Vietnam's top-ranked female tennis player. Still, Noel Huynh Mai Huynh is criticized by the state-run press and jeered by Vietnamese crowds who do not accept her as one of their own.

It's a personal struggle symbolic of the lingering resentment and distrust between communist Vietnam and the hundreds of thousands who fled the south at the end of the Vietnam War nearly 30 years ago.

"I play tennis for my family," Huynh said during a break from practice at the Southeast Asian Games, a regional competition that runs through Saturday. "There's a lot of pressure because I know a lot of people, they don't like me very much."

Huynh, 18, was born in the U.S. territory of Guam. She is the first Viet kieu, or overseas Vietnamese, to receive dual citizenship from the communist government to compete for Vietnam.

Huynh was 4 years old when her family moved back to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in 1989. She did not speak Vietnamese then but has since mastered the language and now considers herself more Vietnamese than American.

The writer stormed into my office. He shut the door, sat down and said, "Tom, I just can't read you."

I had asked a question about one of his stories. This set him off. He told me that he prided himself on being able to read people. It was a great skill he brought to his reporting. Yet he couldn't penetrate me. Did I like his work or not? Did I like him? Did I hate him?

I really couldn't blame him for his frustration. I've been told I have a poker face — one that rarely betrays what I'm thinking and feeling. Combine that with the fact that I am quiet and reserved, and you've got the makings of a walking, talking Asian stereotype. "

The perpetual foreigners.

That was the phrase used by students at the Greenfield Intercultural Center on Tuesday to describe the social status of third- and fourth-generation Asian Americans.

The discussion, titled "Beyond2," was meant to increase awareness of the cultural divide between earlier and later generation Asian Americans, according to the event's organizer, College and Engineering senior Dana Nakano.

While Asian immigrants and their children tend to be familiar with their native cultures and languages, later generations of Asians tend to become naturally more assimilated into the American lifestyle.

For 20 years, the Korean American Coalition (KAC) has been a stalwart of the Los Angeles Korean American community. The nonprofit community service organization has helped thousands become U.S. citizens and registered thousands more to vote. It has been a vocal advocate for KAs (Korean Americans) in times of emergency like the 1992 L.A. Riots, or when it comes to speaking out against racist caricatures in the media.

Having accomplished much in the Los Angeles area, the Korean American Coalition is now poised to direct its efforts to help KA communities across the country.

“It’s time for KAC to expand the experience so that other areas will benefit from 20 years of experience of KAC,” said Spencer Kim, the former chairman of the organization’s board of directors.

“We have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the original visionaries, such as T.S. Chung and Keith Kim (two of the founders of KAC),” he said. “We’re expanding their visions to others.”

“I remember when I first came out,” recalls Patrick Mangto, “I went to the LA Gay & Lesbian Center. I was amazed by the programming and level of support that they offered the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning community. I felt that I had found a place where I belonged.”

But happiness quickly fell to dismay.

“I realized that they could help my gay identity. However, they could not address my concerns from an Asian perspective. For example, they couldn’t help me create a coming out process that was inclusive of my family. When a person comes out from a Western perspective, it is perceived as an individual act. Whereas coming out from an API viewpoint, it is a courageous act of acceptance by the family which may be stigmatized by the rest of Asian society. If they could not help me on such a fundamental level, I realized that there was a tremendous need within the community.” "

On my family's first visit to China in 1979, my sister got sick in Nanjing and had to be hospitalized. This was a special worry as, being Chinese-American, we were not able to get her into the best hospital in town. That hospital was for white foreigners—for "real" foreigners, including "real" Americans. We were, according to local officials, Overseas Chinese, who had to use the Overseas Chinese hospital. Argue as we might, there was no convincing anyone that such minor details as being born in America and carrying an American passport made you a true American. Blood, it seemed, was blood.

This is a true story that happened to me only a few years ago.   

I'm a 3rd generation Cantonese-American and have pretty much forgotten the language. Hey, I wasn't even raised with it spoken in my household, but I live in a predominantly Asian neighborhood anyway.

Well, Mormons, whom we all know and love (cough), have to save their money during childhood so that they may go on missionary expeditions when they hit seventeen years of age or so. Some even become Urban Mormons, where they trek to distant (?) parts of Suburbia, seeking converts. 

A cadre of young authors reflects the widening mainstream of the Asian-American experience

By Susan Salter Reynolds
©2003 Los Angeles Times
August 5, 2003

When Julie Shigekuni, author of the recently released "Invisible Gardens," was interviewing to teach a first-time course in Asian-American literature at the University of New Mexico, she says this is how she was asked about the insights she would bring to the class: "Amy Tan has already written the Asian- American experience.

"Why should we hire you?"

Tan also haunts Mako Yoshikawa, author of the May release, "Once Removed" (Bantam), an explosive novel about two estranged sisters, a Japanese-American and her American stepsister, who find each other after 17 years. "I feel uncomfortable with the Amy Tan legacy," Yoshikawa says almost reluctantly, like countless young women who say, yeah, I'm grateful to Betty Friedan and all, but jeez, isn't it time to move on?

I dreamt last night, my mind arrested.
In my right was a scalpel,
My left held my scalp.
I wore O.R. scrubs my parents scrubbed in their laundromat.
My sister was a prostitute,
Her pimp was John Lennon.
And all my life they called me doctor, banker, lawyer.

Living in the United States is a luxury. Clean water, huge cars, IKEA. But like rich folks with heart disease, the luxurious lifestyle catches up with us. Affluence can be a trap: I'm never pushed to talk to my neighbors, trust people or have a sense of community -- but I always lock my car doors.

When I traveled in China this summer, I had to open up and humble myself. And I realized there are luxuries even we Westerners can't afford.

I'm a 23-year-old American-born Chinese (ABC) California-girl artist- iconoclast. I went to China with eight other ABCs -- first gen-ers, sixth gen- ers, hapas (half-Asian/Pacific Americans), artists, engineers from UC Berkeley, a party girl from Marin. We're "In Search of Roots Program" interns. Basically, we're all trying to visit our ancestral villages in China. And if we're lucky, we might learn a little about ourselves.

The price to pay for an 'American' nose and eyes is more than the $2,500

"It's so flat!" my aunt would say as she'd pinch the nonexistent bridge of my cousin Jamie's nose. Jamie, barely a year old, would let out a cry and shake her head from side to side trying to free her facial centerpiece from her mother's grip.

In a strange way, my aunt thought she was helping her daughter out in the long run by making her look more "Westernized." A flat nose was an Asian trademark, not American.

When babies are born, family members often gather around and marvel at their cute button noses, half-opened almond-shaped eyes and silken skin.

In most families, that is.

For many Asian families, however, it's not marveling so much as worrying about whether that button nose will ever form a bridge, and whether those half- opened eyes will have a crease in their lids once they're fully open.

Disability is still a taboo topic within many parts of Asian cultures. People with disabilities are often seen as outcasts of society and worthless citizens. In many modern-day Asian countries, the disabled are still regarded as incapable of becoming educated, functioning members of society. Therefore, they are often forgotten and fall beneath the cracks. This old school of superstitious thought teaches that disability is some sort of punishment, and promotes the idea that being different is always a horrible thing.

Asian American identity is experiential rather than biological, grounded in the present as much as or more than in the past

By Rachel Rubin
Excerpted from Cyberspace, Y2K: Giant Robots, Asian Punks
Institute for Asian American Studies
March 2003

Amy Ling defines "Asian American" in a poem as "Asian ancestry/American struggle" [Ling 1].  This couplet captures the duality of experience, the divided heart, that Ling feels characterizes the lived lives of Americans with Asian ancestry.  She continues in this vein to describe a "tug in the gut" and "a dream in the heart" -- definitions that are wonderfully evocative, but elusively (and purposefully) non-concrete.

Indeed, the feeling of being Asian American, the varied and internal processes by which that name acquires particular meaning, for all its ineffability, is actually much easier to pin down than it is to formulate an answer that refers to a map.  Because while Asia is the world's largest continent, accounting for more than a third of the world's land mass and two-thirds of the world's population -- including some 140 different nationalities -- the term "Asian American" has been mostly used to refer to American immigrants from certain Asian nations, but not others.

Furthermore, the term's application has not been entirely consistent, so that "Asian American" can include one list of ethnic groups in the federal census, another list of ethnic groups in a college's Asian American Studies curriculum, yet another list in the political rhetoric of an activist organization or an elected official, and so on.  And when it comes to individuals choosing how to identify themselves, there is a similar range of usage: some consider themselves to be Asian American while others do not, even though they or their parents have immigrated to the United States from a country on the continent of Asia.  Finally, the meaning of the term has changed over time to suit the rhetorical needs of different times....