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I’m a Chinese college undergraduate student and I’m doing a homework research about Americans’ Attitudes toward Chinese Americans. I don’t know if I see the fact or if my view is fair or not. And I won’t feel unhappy if you really don’t like Chinese. I just want to hear the truth. Please tell me what you really feel. Thx a lot!!
Btw if I have some language mistakes, plz don’t hesitate to correct me.：）
below is part of my thesis
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It is still a common occurrence today that Chinese Americans are facing discrimination from Whites or even other minorities in American society. Even those who have never spoken Chinese continue to be regarded as foreigners. This phenomenon is mainly attributed to several aspects:
1 Historical Reason
As one of the Asian groups, Chinese immigrants settled in the new continent far more later than African, Mexican or Jewish Americans. In addition, as shown in the pie chart, Asian/Pacific Islanders only compose less than 3.7% among the whole population, and a great number of Americans cannot even tell Chinese Americans from other Asian Americans. Apparently not all the Americans have many chances to have touch with or know about Chinese Americans.
2 Thoughts Conflicts
As always associated with their hometown, Chinese Americans are thought to be dominated by the 5,000-year-old culture or communism. The most frequently mentioned criticism was that Asian Americans keep to themselves. “They stick together.” “They are cliquish / clannish.” Non-Asian participants saw Asian Americans as being less likely to be full participants in the entire community as other Americans. They were seen to be more inward looking. (Committee of 100) Chinatown could probably be a proof of Chinese’s “sticking together”. It is understandable why Chinese Americans are less interested in politics and why Americans are reluctant to have a Chinese to be their president.
3 Economic Issues
Because of China’s emergence as a global economic power, not only China but also Chinese Americans are considered to be a threat to America in economic field. Even within the States, many of them claim that Chinese Americans are taking away too many job opportunities from Americans. The cheap labor market in China, as well as the bad reputation for toxic food and low-qualified goods import, apparently has much influence on ordinary Americans’ lives through a growing trade unbalance, which result in the emergence of personal hatred as well as the unfriendly laws and regulations enacted by the White House government.
i personally DO like your country and to tell you the truth i really want to live in the US too. please stop attacking me with your words like "Marxist professor". I do not mean to make the US look evil and I do not know anything about antiAmericanism. I feel sorry if my thesis look like that.
plus the word xenophobic means hate or fair foreigners but chinese americans are not foreigners to you. They are part of americans.
Most of you are still thinking they are chinese chinese,
I think another part of it has to do with the language barrier. Other minorities, for the most part… their languages have a similar alphabet. But I think a major part of the discrimination we Chinese still face in this country has to do with jealousy about the widespread success of Chinese or other Asians in America. Asians are taught to work hard for their successes. We’re not taught to lean on affirmative action, which tends to leave out Asians when they help out all the other minorities. So with the success and hard work, comes jealousy from the Americans who feel that their jobs shouldn’t go to supposed foreigners. Of course, you have open-minded Americans too, as well as hard-working Americans, but for the most part in this society, Americans tend to blame rather than to work hard themselves to make themselves more worthy for a position. I’m sure all the Asian Americans from big cities recognize that minority scholarships are never given out to an Asian. There’s that tendency to think we are the model minority, that because we have our successes, that somehow we don’t face the discrimination. However, that ignorance leads to even more discrimination. By the way, I also believe that Asian females and Asian males face very different obstacles in this country. Asian females are viewed as exotic. Asian males are viewed as a threat. One of the reasons, and there are many, include the fact that several of the American wars in the past century involved facing an Asian enemy, and in this country, one Asian is like any other. A Japanese or Korean is thought of as Chinese in this country. They view us as one and the same. So basically, all Asians face the discrimination, which is why all of us Asians tend to unite because we’ve been through the same battles.
Another thing I should mention… Asians are viewed as timid, which is why plenty of Americans think they can freely make fun of Asians in ways they would not make fun of other races. Do you think they would dare make prank calls to soul food restaurants and try to speak with an African accent on public radio? No way. They’d either be fired, or there would be rioting. Yet when radio stations do similar things to the Asian race, it’s viewed as not so bad. There was a DJ at Tower 98 (local FM radio station in Toledo) who decided to prank call several Chinese restaurants, and used those calls to mock the English spoken by those Chinese restaurant workers. My efforts to take action against them nearly got me fired (Tower 98’s ownership group – Clear Channel – started making up lies about me to my corporate ownership), and I learned I had to let others (much thanks to the Bowling Green Asian student organization for leading the fight) do much of the actual work getting national groups involved. I still to this day refuse to listen to Tower 98, and I believe the DJ is no longer working there, although I think it was for an unrelated reason.
By the way, just to clarify, I was born in North America. I love the United States. I love all the good people who I have come in contact with, but that doesn’t mean that a ton of ignorant people don’t exist in this country. The discrimination is not so prevalent in communities where there are larger Asian populations (big cities/California), but then most of this country is NOT the big city. The fabric of this country is largely the medium-to-smaller-sized cities, and those people are NOT used to seeing an Americanized Asian, which is why it’s really hard for them to all of a sudden change and see us as one of them.
On a similar note, it’s the same way for other races if they were to go to Asia. Let’s face it: the only news of American minorities in other foreign countries isn’t usually the best news (at least before Barack Obama). So it’s pretty natural that people who have lived in Asia all their lives may have some incorrectly-perceived notions of various American minorities. And that’s the exact same way it works in America when it comes to Asians, because they think of us as taking their jobs, taking their money, and becoming more successful in their country even though there are plenty of Asians who were born here in America. It takes an open-minded American (and there are plenty of those, despite all that I have said… I have come across many friendly people) to see past the Asian appearance.
As far as responding to an earlier post on internment camps, the question wasn’t about which country discriminates more against Asians. Two wrongs don’t make a right. America had internment camps for Asians that somehow rarely make the U.S. History textbooks. Asians built the railroads for this country, yet were still looked down upon. The Vincent Chin incident is the Asian version of the Rodney King incident, yet only Asian Americans know about this. Does it make America amazing that they didn’t commit genocide? I’ll say thank goodness there was no genocide, and thank goodness America is a democracy, and again, I love this country, but it’s ignorance to suggest there is no discrimination against Asians going on.
Plus, let’s face it, democracy or not, America pushes its own propaganda just like any other country. China has an amazing opening ceremony for the Olympic games, and there was such a large push to hate on the fake fireworks that were such a minor part of what made that ceremony so great. Any objective viewer could see that the Beijing opening ceremonies trumped Atlanta’s about ten thousand times over.