CUNY Conference on Asian American / Asian Students:
"Aspects of Social Interaction"

Date: Friday, April 30, 2004
Time: 8:15 AM to 3:00 PM

Place: CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Martin E. Segal Theatre

Transcript

Keynote Speaker

• Dr. Victor Nee; Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology, Director, Center for the Study of Economy and Society, Cornell University

  Topic: “Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration”

Hiroko Karan: Thank you Ms. Henderson, and thank you all the distinguished guests who come here to greet this morning [inaudible].

Now it’s my great pleasure to introduce the keynote speaker, Dr. Victor Nee. Dr. Nee is Goldman Smith Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center of the Study of Economics and Society at Cornell University. He is the author of this book, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration, published by Harvard University Press in 2003. His area of research focuses on economic sociology, new institutional analysis, [inaudible], and immigration and race. I got all this from the website. And he has published extensively and teaches sociology at Cornell University. Without further adieu, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our keynote speaker, Dr. Victor Nee.

Victor Nee: Thank you very much. It’s an honor and pleasure to be here to present the keynote presentation for this important conference. And, also, I would like to thank the sponsors for this conference, the organizers, and then Professor Betty Lee Sung whom I met many years ago, and I can say that she looks exactly the same as 30 years ago, by my memory.

And I am talking today about a theme which was highlighted in Dr. Henderson’s comment, that the American mainstream has in the past and is today also being remade through the influence of immigration, and my book with Richard Alba offers a re-thinking of the central concepts, the theory of assimilation. In light of today’s new high-volume immigration from non-European countries, principally Latin America and Asia, and the question that it asks, “What can we learn from the earlier immigration to this country, of the late 19 th and early 20 th century, from Europe and also from East Asia, that it casts a light to shed, insights about current immigration, and the prospects that are faced by the immigrants of today. How do I move the slide? Okay, next.

I would like to say that there is a growing concern among social and cultural conservatives in the worry about the new immigration, particularly from Mexico, and this is most forcibly articulated in the recent article by Professor Samuel [Huntingdon] in foreign policy, which was entitled, “Who We Are”, which attacks Mexican immigration. And this gives voice to the new cultural and social conservatism, which is manifested in a traditional from of nativism.

And the new nativism worries that the American identity and cultural cohesion is being somehow undermined by immigrant minorities, who do not and will not assimilate like earlier immigrants from Europe. For [Huntington], Mexican immigration poses a special problem because of its’ sheer size (20% of legal immigration), its geographical concentration in the American southwest, the contiguous borders between the United States and Mexico, and the history of the two countries with the annexation of much of the southwest by the United States through military conquest, and the very large inequalities in standard of living between Mexico and the United States. So the worry is this, and, posed by [Huntington] in a very forceful way, that the threat is an internal clash of civilization created with the rise of two nations, European Americans and non-white descendents of the new immigration. So this is a fairly stark, heads-up call by [ Huntington], worrying about the future of American identity and cultural cohesion. Next slide. I’ll just go like this for the next slide.

So, I want to present the main findings today in my keynote address, that we developed in Remaking the American mainstream, which takes issue with the argument of the threat to American identity, cultural cohesion in the broad sense, but mainly to say that [Huntington] has raised an issue that is not new, virtually for every immigrant group that came to the United States that did not speak English, the same arguments were made of the Italian immigration, the German immigration, the earlier East Asian immigrations; virtually every group that came here, there was worry that the fact that they didn’t speak English, and the fact that, worried that, whether they would assimilate and therefore threaten America’s national identity. Benjamin Franklin, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, worried about Philadelphia, which was majority German speaking, and worried that the Germans would cause a shift away from English speaking to German speaking. So this is a longstanding concern, and I would, our book shows that in light of all the known facts of earlier immigration and the current one, that Professor [Huntington] ought not worry so much. And that’s certainly the key findings are three, assimilation is taking place, the pace of assimilation varies considerably both within and across ethnic groups, resulting in divergent outcomes with some groups and individuals assimilating more rapidly, and others much more slowly. Some groups assimilating within the first generation, second generation, other groups it’s a long, slow inter-generational move towards some form of incorporation through assimilation into the American civil society.

And the last finding, broadly speaking, is that neighbor immigration experiences a significantly slower inter-generational rate of assimilation and entry into the mainstream than human capital integration. The late European immigration to the United States, and the early East Asian immigration, began in the mid 19 th century were almost exclusively labor migrants coming to fuel the American expansion in the West Coast, and also the American Industrial Revolution. Today’s immigration is much more varying. We have people coming, in large numbers, who are highly educated, with high volumes of human capital, who move into our high-technology industries and advanced sectors of the American economy, and we also have very, very large migration of traditional labor migrants, coming to the United States, say, from Mexico, with hardly primary school education, very low stock of human capital, into a high-technology society, and clearly there low level of formal schooling, not only affects their prospect as the immigrants, limits them to work at the service sector, low-skilled, semi-skilled areas of work, but it also affects their children’s prospect in the sense that one of the key mechanisms of the transfer of cultural capital, or human capital, is through the family, between parents and children. And if the parents have barely a primary school education, then one can only surmise that that has a limitation on second generation. So those are the broad findings that I want to report. Let’s go to the next slide.

Let’s define what is assimilation. First, assimilation is the decline of an ethnic distinction. It is as ethnic distinction attenuates experience, the occasions for which it is relevant diminish and contracts to fewer and fewer domains of social life. That is to say, at Cornell University, we admit students of many races, many ethnic groups, many of them are first-generation immigrants. Once we admit them to Cornell, whether, whatever their ethnic origins, they are Cornell University students, we treat them with the same respect, regard, and concern. So it’s not their ethnic identity that shapes the way we interact with the students, but the fact that they are students at Cornell University, and so at Cornell and at CUNY, one’s ethnic distinction is certainly something we notice, but we don’t treat you on the basis of your ethnic or racial status, at least we try not to allow those things to affect the way that as Professors and Administrators, we regard the student.

Lastly, assimilation involves the entry into the mainstream of American civil society, and we have certainly seen that this has happened, and I will point this out in my remarks on the earlier immigration. Next slide.

Well, the question is, what causes assimilation now that we have defined assimilation? First, immigrants and their children have an interest in assimilating because rewards and status symbols are embedded in mainstream institutions in civil society. So certainly, immigrant children strive to get college educations at the school that, the best school that they can attend, and because this mechanism of college education, higher education, is the mechanism from which one derives other rewards.

The other cause, the second broad cause of immigration assimilation, is that following World War II and especially the Civil Rights Movement in this country in the 1960’s, the extension of formal equality of Whites to non-Whites made a difference. It mattered, and because it lowered the institutional barriers of entry into the mainstream institutions and into society, and it did so because institutional change has increased the cost in a non-trivial way of discrimination by outlawing racism, it delegitimizes racism as well, even though it’s practiced, it’s a little more costly to be outright racist. People can pursue that, but it is costly, especially if you’re in the public light. And certainly, corporations, if they were to discriminate, there is a cost to that, both in the threat of class action suits, but also, imagine a high-technology firm in the United States, an engineering firm that refuses to hire foreign engineers, foreign-born engineers. They would be certainly working at a great disadvantage to other firms that are willing to hire the best engineers that they can possibly employ, whether they are foreign-born, white, not white, men, women.

So, clearly, the causes of assimilation are such that they are based on the interests of the immigrants and the descendents of the immigrants as well as that there has been an important title change in the institutional framework of the United States, which has lowered the barriers of entry and which has legitimized and provided legitimate, predictable chances of entry into mainstream institutions by people who are formerly excluded on the basis of their race and ethnic identity.

I’d like to move to the next slide, which presents four common misunderstandings about assimilation, and I’d like to deal with each of these in sequence in the rest of my formal presentation.

The first common misunderstanding is that somehow, assimilation robs the person of their ethnic identity, forcing them to reject it. That is a misunderstanding. The second misunderstanding is that assimilation somehow erodes creativity based on ethnic experience. The third common misunderstanding is that assimilation somehow works for descendents of European immigration, but does not extend to Asians and other non-whites. And lastly, the fourth point is that somehow the new second-generation of immigrant minorities, non-whites, are on the road to segmented, or downward assimilation. This is an argument that was forcefully argued by Professor [Alejandro Cortez] at Princeton University, and one which even he has backed away from as the evidence comes in of the broadness of assimilation in the past and that is currently underway in the United States today. Next slide.

Well, I want to first address the question, “Does assimilation require a rejection of ethnic identity?” And certainly this is not the case, certainly not the case based on my own experience, certainly that assimilation does in fact liberate one to be a full participant in American cultural life, that much of ethnic literature, Italian, white-ethnic, Asian American literature, African American literature, is overwhelmingly in English, almost exclusively published in English.

And that if you look at the great outburst of Asian American literary creativity by writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, whose plays have been shown off-broadway, [Amy Tan], “The Joy Luck Club”, David Henry Hwang, [“The Dance and the Railroad: My American Son”]. This literature is clearly written by people who are very assimilated, and often are married to spouses who are not of their ethnic group, and they write with American colloquial expression that is true to their ethnic experience, and so they are speaking and writing about their soul in English, and they are publishing and their literature is becoming part of a canon of contemporary American literature, and classics in American literature, as it has been for other immigrant groups. Norman Mailer’s, much of American literature after World War II will be construed as an ethnic literature, written by white-ethnics and Asian American and African American ethnics.

And lastly, ethnic studies, which Dr. Betty Lee Sung has been a pioneer in, the faculty, students often are assimilated, U.S. born, or certainly immigrants, who have, who founded and established ethnic studies. I remember many years ago as a graduate student at Harvard in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, that basically, that the students who started the first student-taught Asian American studies classes, which I was a part of, were second, third-generation, first-generation assimilated Asian Americans. So, the next slide.

I want to, then, go through the evidence from the past to see what we can learn about assimilation from past experience of immigration from the late 19 th, early 20 th century. And we can see in this slide, documenting the shift to English monolingualism, that cultural conservatives like [Huntington] asserting that today’s immigration threatens the erosion of English language speaking, that based on the past experience, this is unwarranted, because we can see a huge shift to English monolingualism on the part of descendents of earlier immigration. As this slide shows, that it’s about 20% for descendents of European immigrants born in the early part of the 20 th century, but it drops to about 5% for those who are descendents of the later period, and for Japanese Americans, we can see a similar type of decline in ability to speak Japanese. We don’t have it for Chinese because many Chinese are not from earlier immigration but from today’s immigration, so it’s harder to make a distinction between them, but it is clear we can do that for Japanese Americans because there has been such a small number of Japanese immigrants coming today to the United States. Let’s move to the next slide.

Here we look at the pattern of intermarriage. According to the 1990 census, half the book was written before the 2000 census was available but we are looking at it now and these patterns continue to hold, that half of U.S. born whites have spouses whose ethnic backgrounds show no element in common with their own, and only a fifth have spouses with identical ethnic backgrounds with themselves, so that intermarriage is now commonplace among whites, but also among Asian Americans who are descended from the earlier immigration. And we can see that the intermarriage rate for Chinese-born in 1956 to 1965 is about the same as that for Germans, and intermarriage with Japanese is about the same for Irish and English. So the intermarriage rate among Japanese Americans is so high that Japanese Americans are clearly on the road to amalgamation in the fact that there is such a low volume of immigration today. In the 2000 census, a huge percentage of the people who identified as Japanese Americans, over 70%, are mixed racial heritage, so that really shows the extent to which the earlier immigrants and descendents of those have followed a common pattern of incorporation through immigration, which is the primary mechanism, historically and today, of the incorporation of the descendents of immigration into American society. The next slide, please.

And here we show, and I’ll go over this briefly, one of the indicators of assimilation and what are the melting pots of contemporary postwar United States in suburbia, and we can see that for the most part, the descendents of foreign immigration have moved to the suburbs, and we see this is less true of Japanese Americans and other groups. But still, there is a pattern of movement into the suburbs there as well.

Now, that’s what we have seen for the past, that in the past, immigration and the descendents of immigrants have been incorporated into the American mainstream, changing the mainstream. A friend of mine said that, in class, he teaches in Chicago, a student, Korean-American student said, “Well I want to be American like everybody else, I want to eat bagels for breakfast and coffee, drink for breakfast.” Well, bagels certainly would not have been part of the English breakfast at the time of colonial America, but it shows you that the idea, conception of what is inclusive has changed substantially.

Now, let’s go to the next slide, please. And now, we are now looking at the new post-1965 immigration. Recall in 1965, the American Congress passed an Immigration Act that changed the legal status of immigration permanently. And so far it hasn’t been challenged, it’s part of our institutional framework, that ended the history of racist immigration law, and opened up immigration equally to eastern, western hemisphere and provided the same quota for each country. And this was a truly radical departure from American immigration history, and that, we can see, as a result of the passage of this act, that immigration in large numbers has resumed in the United States, but that still, relatively speaking, illegal immigrants still remain, at a lower level than the earlier period of mass immigration from Europe of the late 19 th and early 20 th century. Next slide please.

Where do new immigrants come from? Clearly the largest single group of immigrants are from Mexico, and this is just numbers for the legal immigration, and if you add that illegal immigration from Mexico is very, very substantial. But you can see that, just below that, the Asian immigrants constitute a large group, and if you combine the numbers, you have the largest, a very large, the second largest overall group after Hispanic, Latino immigration, but the largest numerical groups following Mexicans are Asian groups. And this is why 24,000 enrolled in the City College of New York are of Asian, Asian-American heritage. And so that’s an astounding number, I was really surprised to learn that number this morning. Shall we go to the next slide?

Now, let’s look at the shift to English speaking or English monolingualism taking place in the current immigration, and here we have data, looking at inter-generational change, and we can see that for the immigrant generation, for all these different groups, they clearly are not monolingual in English. Immigrant parents are, barely, most of them are barely able to speak English, coming from China, from Korea, from Vietnam, and the Latin countries. But we can see the shift, a dramatic shift on the part of U.S. born Asian Americans to English speaking at home, which means that they are losing the ability, or have lost the ability to speak the language of their parents. And it’s not surprisingly, 90% for Filipinos, but look at for Koreans, or Chinese, or Indians. This is a dramatic shift for English language speaking, and even for Mexican-Americans, which was the main concern of Professor Huntington, you see a dramatic shift to English monolingualism from the first generation to the second generation. Over 40% of U.S. born Mexican Americans are speaking English at home because they can’t really, they don’t feel comfortable or they can’t speak Spanish at home with their parents. And for New York City, look at Dominicans, and this is the lowest group, but still over, about 40% of Dominicans, U.S.-born, speak English at home. Let’s go to the next slide.

As we focus on the shift from second to third generation, the study of the shift to English language speaking for European Americans shows that this shift is over a three-generational shift, this, that by the third generation, European Americans, descendants of European American immigrants can only speak English, and this is also true of East Asians to a lesser extent by third-generation. And we can see, in the current immigration findings, and we’re at an early stage of it, we are just beginning to see the third-generation, but the third-generation shift is very pronounced and follows this general pattern that we have learned from earlier immigration. The second generation, only about 30% of Chinese speak only English at home, but by the third generation, over 90% are speaking only English at home. And we can see this pattern in Koreans, and also look at that for Mexican third-generation, that it does not prove that they are not Mexican Americans are not learning English. They are, and that by the third generation, a very substantial number, a majority of Mexican Americans can only speak English. So, let’s move on to the next slide.

Here we see socio-economic indicators that sociologists like to use to see how groups are fairing, and we can see that there is a shift taking place towards the suburbs [inaudible]. This is non- Hispanic whites, Asians, and white-Latinos, and U.S. born blacks, which includes Caribbean blacks. And you can see that, in the suburbs, as you would expect, you have a higher household income, and then as you can see here, that similar patterns are taking place with respect to suburbanization, that are similar to non-Hispanic whites. Let’s move on to the next slide.

Now, taking a closer look at Professor [Huntington’s] concern about Mexican Americans, if we look at the difference in the shift to English language speaking according to proximity to the Mexican border. And you can see that, even those Mexicans who are born in the United States, living right next to the border, along the border towns, [96%], almost, speak English, and this is about the same whether they live next to the border or away from the border. I was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune recently, and this reporter went to a border town and interviewed Mexican-Americans after [Huntington’s] article and talked with them, and he told me that he was astonished by the numbers of men in that town, 2000, who had Purple Hearts and who had served in World War II, in the Korean War, in the Vietnam War, and currently serving in Iraq. So these are people who are patriots, living right next to the border of the U.S. and Mexico, and for a town that is almost mainly, almost entirely Mexican-American, and we can see that this shift, even along the border towards English monolingualism, that by the third generation, if you’re living in a border town, 31% percent can only speak English of the third generation, and as Mexicans move to the interior of the U.S. that the trend increases towards English monolingualism. Now I think that bilingualism is a nice thing to be able to do. I wish I were bilingual, but I’m not. It’s so hard to be a true bilingual, and one of the most frustrating aspects of being a citizen of this country is not being able to speak either the language of your parents or English, and you really miss out with respect to identity and with the ability to take part in cultural life, whether that of the immigrant community or of the mainstream society. And bilingualism, I tell you, it’s a brilliant person who can be truly bilingual growing up in America, because we’re such a huge [monolinguistic] culture. Let’s go to the next slide.

Now, sociologists like to look at the indicators, socio-economic indicators of how well people are doing. And one of the key [inaudible] of capital in this high-technology society is human capital, human competence, cultural and skill-wise, and it happens that certainly cultural competence is gained through education, but also the reasoning, the analytical competence through which one can acquire technical skills through higher education. And we see here a pattern of labor immigration, huge among Mexicans, and a huge percent of Mexicans do not have high school educations by the first generation. And Mexican immigration is predominantly labor immigration, but you can see that Asian immigration has the labor migrant part of it, many immigrants from China come as labor migrants, but a very high percentage of human capital immigrants in the first immigrant generation here, and so this is a telltale sign because the [inaudible], the need for non-hispanic whites of human-capital immigration.

Now look at the educational attainment of the second generation. It’s clearly even for Mexicans a movement upward for, in the second generation, with very substantial number getting college education, but also evidence of high-school dropouts, here, right here, these are people who are Mexican second-generation who are dropping out of high school. But high school dropout rate for the other immigrant groups, Caribbean blacks and South American, East Asian, is lower than that for non-Hispanic whites. And look here in terms of the college attainment for the second generation immigrants, you can see that immigration is a self-selecting process, it often attracts a vigorous and active people and itself is passed on to the second generation. Eventually, there is a regression, [inaudible], and people by the fourth or fifth generation, the vigor of the immigrant generation, maybe even by the second generation, it gets declined and people fall into the [inaudible]. But certainly, the U.S. born of the new immigration showed signs of the vigor of immigration, immigration has been seen as a source of vitality and energy for American society. Let’s move on to the next slide.

And here we see occupation, your work, who you are, what you do. Americans love to ask each other, “What do you do?” We’re workaholics, we work harder than every other people of the world, Europeans have two months’ vacation, I feel guilty if I take a week off for my vacation, it’s hard for me to do. But we can see that once again, in the immigrant generation for Latin American [inaudible] is largely a labor migration in the service [inaudible] labor category. But for Europeans and Asians, it’s [inaudible] with a very large representation in the professional and managerial categories, executive category. But look at the second generation, here we can see the second generation vitality again, gained from the parents, immigrant parents say, “we came here, sacrificed for you, you’ve got to produce for yourself!” How many people have heard that, and you can see that this pattern of inter-generational mobility is universal for even the Mexicans, but especially you can see this for Asians and south Asians and Americans. And so what we can see from this is clear patterns that are familiar ones that apply to earlier immigration experience in America taking place with new immigration. And once again, the cause of this, very much, is that it is in the interests of immigrants and their children to assimilate, but also that they have predictable chances. It’s not to say that racism is not there, it is there, alive and well, but it is more costly to practice it, and certainly it’s illegal to practice it, and not legitimate to do so, to openly advocate racist views in public is illegitimate. And that makes a difference because it lowers the barrier for entry and provides predictable chances for success. Not everybody succeeds, but that’s true for all groups.

Now, let’s go to the next slide. Intermarriage is now quite uncommon among whites, that is, intermarriage with non-whites. About 2% of White Americans intermarry, so it is uncommon, higher than before, but from the perspective of minority groups, intermarriage is higher because there’s a smaller group, and we can see, looking at the change from the 1980’s to the 1990’s census, that there has been an increase in the odds of intermarriage, and we can see patterns of educational homogeny, that is, that people of the same educational background tend to like each other more, meet each other more, and therefore intermarry across races so that we see commonplace on university campuses, couples who are inter-racial, and that many of them do marry and have children.

And so, and this is a case that has been researched by [inaudible Dr. Chen], that show that the odds, if you’re Asian American with a college education, of marrying someone outside of your own background are 60%, and that is a substantial number and one of the most graphically growing, demographic groups, in the United States based on the 2000 census, are people of mixed race heritage between Asians and Whites, [inaudible] who are under 18 years old, about 750,000 in the United States of mixed race White/Asian ancestry who are under 18. So this pattern here suggests that the racial or ethnic boundaries between Whites and Asians are becoming weaker, that is, less tension or conflict involved in social interactions between Whites and Asians. And also, we see patterns similar to what we see among Asians, but this really does show decline of ethnic boundaries, because it shows that whether you’re college educated or not, the trend is very substantial, the odds are over 40% of intermarriage for foreign-born and native born, and this is not so true for Latinos, but still 20% of Latinos are, and 20% of African Americans with college educations [inaudible] 20% odds of marrying someone outside of their group.

So, what are the broad conclusions? We’ll go to the next slide please, that I’d like to emphasize about today’s talk.

First, the current integration continues a familiar pattern of inter-generational assimilation, evidenced in the shift to English speaking, broad socio-economic trends of mobility and gradual incorporation into the American mainstream. Second, that the rate of assimilation is notably slower for the children of labor migrants than that of human capital immigration. Third, in a high-technology society, downward or segmented assimilation [inaudible], is a feature of labor immigration, and this is again pointed out by the incidents of the kids who did not speak English ending up in prison or street gangs among the immigrant children. So there is downward mobility, but the main trend is for inter-generational, socio-economic mobility, and very rapid, at this, for the children of human capital immigrants.

When I first started teaching at Cornell in 1977, Cornell was predominantly, 90%, White campus [inaudible], and today we see Cornell is 35%, 40% are non-White and many of them are children of immigrants or themselves immigrants. And so Cornell has become more diverse and has become a more interesting place for that. And, the last point is that, and an important point, because there’s such misunderstanding on this point, that assimilation empowers and enables all groups’ participation in America’s emerging multi-ethnic civil society, that this is the mechanism by which people become a participant in the society and that the rules of the game is, as a participant, you have formal, legal equality. Surely, the struggle is over formal-substantive equality of whites, and that [inaudible] can only be done by the people who have assimilated and who can be advocates for the cause of equality of rights, men, women, white, non-white, focusing on individual attributes rather than large ethnic attributes and distinctions. And so that’s, I’m very pleased to be a part of this event and look forward to discussion and stimulating discussion at this conference.

Hiroko Karan: Thank you, Dr. Nee. That was a very interesting talk, I was just wondering where I might fit into those statistics, [inaudible] my generation, [inaudible] that it’s not older generation now, it’s younger generation, [inaudible]. But I think one of the questions of [inaudible], some questions, maybe a few questions.

Female Audience Member: [inaudible] And she is under the impression that immigrant, Pre-K, Kindergarten, first grade children, should be immersed [inaudible] very strongly, very efficiently taught, they raised the question about the rupture of communication with their parents because they spend most of their day at school, they stay after school, and she was saying that that being [inaudible]. So I would like to ask you what you think about that, because I’m from Mexico, [inaudible]. And my experience with most languages is that they are transferable [inaudible]. [inaudible] . So I would love your expertise, your opinion on this issue.

Victor Nee: Thank you, I think that’s a very important question. My general viewpoint is of course it’s the ideal, if all Americans knew fluently a second language, it’d be wonderful, we live in a global world, society that’s shrinking and it would be great if we could, each of us, speak another language other than English, fluently, or maybe not so fluently. But I think it’s very difficult to go to achieve in a society of bilingual [inaudible]. It may be easier for Europeans, because as a Swede or as a German, they start early, English, in elementary school, and Europe is smaller and people are travelling more. But it’s more difficult for a continental society like the United States to achieve perfect bilingualism, so my own sense, and my observation is that English as a second language programs often times slow the process of learning English for the immigrant children, and it is very difficult and expensive to maintain for public school systems, that, say especially in California, where budgets are being squeezed very much, to offer quality foreign language teaching throughout the public school system for all the ethnic groups, immigrant groups. Some schools have to offer 50 languages, and that’s very, very expensive, and so I would rather see the resources spent elsewhere, while encouraging the talented, brilliant students, who are able to learn a second language, to do so but not make it, make it a voluntary program rather than a mandated program. I certainly support it, but to keep in focus, on getting the skills, the cultural and technical skills, including the many cultural skills that would enable, empower the young people to be participants in the society in which they live. And nothing is more tragic than to see students who cannot speak English or are afraid to speak English because they worry about their confidence, and they cannot speak their parents’ language, they can’t speak any language. And it’s that group that we have to worry about. That’s a very, very diminishing sense of your personal confidence if you cannot speak a language well enough to express yourself one way or the other.

Male Audience Member: Yes, Dr. Nee, congratulations for your success on a very persuasive, convincing speech and study and research. I feel very glad and very satisfied as a volunteer, community volunteer, [inaudible] Asian American. I’m also frustrated that mainstream hasn’t heard the new voice, the Asian American voice about these comments, especially you distinguish that you usually, [inaudible] very reassuring for mainstream people, because [inaudible] immigrant Chinese, [inaudible], they lump together all these immigrants’ problem, and you distinguish very clearly and reassuringly and conceptualize the whole spectrum, just like [inaudible] Dr. Tam indicated, the foreign students, there are so many very unique between the national students, recent immigrants, and native-born students. [inaudible] assimilation process among all immigrants.

My question is, Dr. Nee, since you are already gained such a higher status and conceptualization of empowering strength, I want to [inaudible] for mainstream legislation, bilingual, immigration, or many other related elements. Because you are so convincing, so powerful, and very reassuring voice for [inaudible] and mainstream people.

Victor Nee: Thank you for that very flattering question. And, I will try my best to answer the question. I do think that, at least based on my own experience, coming up from graduate school, there was then no voice in the late 1960’s for Asian Americans, immigrants who were U.S.-born, and since that time, there has been a tremendous flowering of Asian American literature led by people like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Henry Huang, and the cultural area as well, but in the social sciences, through the contributions of Betty Lee Sung, my first book came out about the same time that Betty Lee Sung’s book came out, it was published in 1973, Pantheon Books, I was a graduate student [inaudible], and that was a book which was a social history of Chinese Californians and [inaudible] was a statement that Chinese were denied the right to naturalize, immigration was illegal, so that Chinese immigrants were stopped by the INS in the streets of San Francisco, and would say, “Me long time Californ”, to try to persuade the immigration officer that they were born in America and they ought not be deported. And so, there has been a voice, you can see it, it’s there, and it’s a small voice, but it’s a growing voice, and so just to, surely there’s not enough voice, but I can clearly see very important, substantial voice of Asian Americans experience through literature, through arts, and in social sciences, and it’s an important change.

Hiroko Karan: I’m sure that a lot of people want to have questions, but time is limited, I know you had a question [inaudible] before, other people, at the break time please interact with Dr. Nee and…

Victor Nee: Those of you that would like a printout of the powerpoint slide, I brought some along [inaudible].

Hiroko Karan: One more question.

Female Audience Member #2: [inaudible]

Victor Nee: I appreciate that, and certainly, you’re a genius, to be purely bilingual. At Cornell, I meet with [inaudible], who taught me Chinese once a week, and [inaudible], Chinese tutorial, so you’re smarter than me. But no, I think it’s very hard, and I admire people who are able to do so, but I worry about the people who can’t express themselves in any language, and so I think given that they’ve made a choice, their parents made a choice to move to the United States, that that choice implies wanting to be able be part of this culture, this society, otherwise they would not move here.

Conference Chairperson:
Hiroko Karan

Conference Co-Chairperson:
Frank Shih

Conference Committee:
Dave Bryan, Selena Cantor, Loretta Chin, Sambhavi Lakshminarayauan, Moon Sung, Thomas Tam,
Marie Ting, Raymond Wang, and Susie Lew Wang

Conference Coordinator:
Phillip Li

Contact Info:

Tel: 212-869-0182
Fax: 212-869-0181
E-Mail: events@aaari.info