Language in the USA Part 6 pptx

246 thom huebner and linda uyechi

There were forty of us Hmong and none of us knew a word of English. My

boss used to joke with me. He asked me, “Why do you never speak? If you

just say coffee, then I will get you some coffee.” I did not want to talk, but he

kept bothering me. I finally asked my boss for some coffee, but he told me,

“All you have to do is pour it in a cup. You do it yourself.” [Chan 1994:

58]

Jou Yee Xiong, a Hmong refugee, describing her job in a

California pharmaceutical company

No matter how many years I am here – even till I die – I will always speak

English with an accent. That is a fact that I cannot deny. That is a fact that I

cannot escape from. And people would never see me as an American because

the conventional wisdom is that if you are American, you should speak with

no accent. [Lee 1991: viii]

Cao O, Chinese from Vietnam, in his mid-thirties

There are people Lodi They persist and

who admire Minneapolis ask again.

the aesthetics Chicago

of our traditions Gilroy Compliment

South Bend our command of the

And ask politely, Tule Lake English language.

Where are you from? San Francisco

New York Los Angeles

(excerpt from “American Geisha,” Mirikitani 1987)

Janice Mirikitani, a Japanese American poet

Vignettes such as these illustrate the diversity of people covered by the term

“Asian American” – recent immigrants and descendants of immigrants – multiple

generations representing a range of languages and cultures. These stories focus

on experiences with language that are familiar to many immigrants to America:

the struggle to learn a new language, the role of language in negotiating mul￾tiple identities across cultures and generations, and the emotion-laden burden

of coping with racism and language discrimination. To what extent are these

experiences unique to the emerging community of Asian Americans? To what

extent are they comparable across the spectrum of immigrant communities to

which Asian Americans trace their roots? How do those communities differ

with respect to their language experiences? Surprisingly, scholars have paid

scant attention to the rich and diverse language situations in the Asian American

community.

This chapter focuses on the language of those voices: to report the findings

of existing studies and to suggest topics that we still know too little about. It

starts with a brief history of Asians in America and continues with a discussion of

some contemporary language issues in the Asian American community. Although

the focus is on the language situations of East Asians, Southeast Asians, South

Asians, and Filipinos, readers should bear in mind that similar inquiries need to

Asian American voices: language in the Asian American community 247

be made for the growing Pacific Islander communities in the USA, as well as for

mixed-race members of the Asian American community.

Asian American voices: history of immigration

While the identification of “Asian Americans” as a politically and socially signif￾icant group is a product of community activism in the 1960s and 1970s (Espiritu

1992, Wei 1993), Asians in America have a long and rich history, probably predat￾ing Columbus. The discovery of ancient Chinese artifacts along the Pacific coast

supports Chinese records reporting their arrival on the North American continent

in the fifth century CE. By the period of the Manila Galleon Trade (1593–1815),

Filipino and Chinese craftsmen and sailors were employed in Mexico, California,

and the Pacific Northwest. On the East coast, the US Immigration Commission

first recorded the arrival of Chinese in 1820. In the South, Filipino seamen settled

in Louisiana in the 1830s and 1840s. Chinese were reported to be working in

1835 on the island of Kaua‘i in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.

Early Asian presence in North America was modest, though. Large-scale immi￾gration occurred later, in two waves. The first wave began in the mid-nineteenth

century in Hawai‘i, an independent kingdom until its annexation to the USA in

1898, and in California, annexed to the USA in 1848 after the war with Mexico.

It ebbed with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 and concluded with the

Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934. The second wave of Asian immigration began

in 1965 after legislative reform expanded quotas for immigrants from Asia. The

impact of this wave continues to be felt today.

Both waves of immigration are jointly characterized by the pull of perceived

opportunity for higher wages and standards of living in the USA and by the

push of unstable political, economic, or social conditions in the emigrants’ home

countries. Both also resulted from an aggressive US international stance, the first a

direct result of American expansionism and colonialization, the second the result

of American military, economic, and cultural penetration in Asia. There are also

important differences between these waves of immigration – particularly among

the various immigrant groups.

The first wave: entry, exploitation, and exclusion

We would beg to remind you that when your nation was a wilderness, and

the nation from which you sprung Barbarous, we exercised most of the arts

and virtues of civilized life; that we are possessed of a language and a liter￾ature, and that men skilled in science and the arts are numerous among us;

that the productions of our manufactories, our sail, and workshops, form no

small commerce of the world . . . We are not the degraded race you would

make us. [Takaki 1989: 112]

Norman Asing, a Chinese immigrant, in an open letter to Governor

John Bigler, published in the Daily Alta California in 1852

248 thom huebner and linda uyechi

Still unaccustomed I’m writing letters

To the language of this land, To my children in English

I often guess wrong. It is something like

(Hosui, in Ito 1973: 619) Scratching at an itchy place

Through your shoes.

(Yukari Tomita, in Ito 1973: 626)

Japanese American Issei (first generation) poetry

Then at supper Tosh brought it up again. He spoke in pidgin Japanese (we

spoke four languages: good English in school, pidgin English among our￾selves, good or pidgin Japanese to our parents and the other old folks),

“Mama, you better tell Kyo not to go outside the breakers. By-’n’-by he

drown. By-’n’-by the shark eat um up.” [Murayama, 1959]

Milton Murayama, capturing the linguistic diversity in many Japanese

American families in Hawai‘i during the 1930s and 1940s through Kyo, a

young plantation boy

The first wave of immigrants from Asia came largely as unskilled laborers.

Many from impoverished rural backgrounds came as sojourners and returned

to their homelands. Some elected to settle in their new homes; others found

themselves forced to stay for economic or political reasons. In both Hawai‘i and

California, immigration was initially promoted as a source of cheap labor. In

Hawai‘i in 1850, an association of mainly American sugar cane planters called

the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society began to import laborers to supplement

the native Hawaiian labor force. Meanwhile, on the North American continent,

with US annexation of California in 1848, the rush to clear and settle the new

territory, establish an economic presence on the West coast, and open markets

in Asia led American capitalists and congressmen to support the importation of

Asian laborers. In both cases the first source of labor was China. Spurred by

political and economic unrest at home, lured by contracts promising work and

wages, enchanted by the discovery of gold in California, and financed by loans

from family and labor agents, the number of Chinese living in the USA grew

to 63,000 by 1870. Of this number, 77 percent resided in California, but there

were also concentrations in the Southwest, New England, and the South. Chinese

constituted 29 percent of the population in Idaho, 10 percent in Montana, and

9 percent in California. In Hawai‘i, by the turn of the century, some 46,000

Chinese were laboring in the sugar fields.

In both locations, subsequent immigration from other parts of Asia – Japan,

Korea, the Philippines, and, on the mainland, South Asia – resulted from racist

attempts to check the growth of the Chinese population and confound any attempts

at labor organization. In Hawai‘i, sugar planters in the 1880s, fearful that Chinese

workers would organize, began looking elsewhere for labor. In the USA, the

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 essentially barred immigration from China,

forcing employers to recruit cheap labor from other parts of Asia.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed in 1892 and extended indefinitely in

1902. It became the cornerstone of increasingly restrictive legislation aimed at

Asian American voices: language in the Asian American community 249

Asians in both Hawai‘i and the continental USA. From 1790 until 1952 Asian

immigrants could not become naturalized citizens, a privilege reserved for whites

only (and, by a decision of the US Supreme Court, the ban applied to Asian

Indians as well). In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive

order prohibiting the remigration of Japanese and Korean laborers from Hawai‘i

to the continental USA. That same year, workers began arriving on the West

coast from India; a total of 6,400 arrived before Congress prohibited immigration

from India ten years later. And the next year, the 1908 Gentleman’s Agreement

restricted immigration from Japan. Finally, the Immigration Act of 1924, aimed

specifically at Asians, banned immigration by anyone who was not eligible for

naturalization. Discriminatory laws were passed at the state level as well. In

California, for example, a 1913 alien land law forbade the ownership of land

by anyone not eligible for US citizenship; it was aimed particularly at Japanese

immigrants.

In spite of these restrictions, the number of Asians in the USA continued to

rise. By the 1920s, some 200,000 Japanese went to Hawai‘i and 120,000 to the

USA mainland. Motivated in part by the colonialization of Korea by Japan, 8,000

Koreans immigrated to Hawai‘i between 1903 and 1920. In 1924 the Immigration

Act curtailed Asian immigration, but as citizens of a US territory, Filipinos were

technically “American nationals” and were heavily recruited to backfill the need

for laborers. By 1930, 110,000 Filipinos had gone to Hawai‘i and more than

40,000 to the continental USA. But even Filipino immigration came to a virtual

halt, as the Tydings–McDuffie Act (1934) signaled the start of proceedings to

sever territorial claims to the Philippines and restrict subsequent immigration

from those islands.

From the beginning, both in Hawai’i and on the continent, Asian American

immigrant groups were split along national lines as they brought ethnic antago￾nisms and cultural stereotypes with them from their homelands. In the new land,

competition for employment and anti-Asian public policies further encouraged

Asian immigrants to dissociate themselves from one another. Japanese and Korean

immigrants, for example, did not want to be associated with Chinese.

In contrast, ties within individual Asian ethnic communities were strong.

Whether created voluntarily or as a result of segregationist policies and racist

pressures, ethnic enclaves contributed to the maintenance of culture and language

through temples and churches, community associations and schools, shops, banks,

theaters, and newspapers. There were differences, though, between Asian com￾munities in Hawai‘i and those on the continent, and those differences impacted

language in important ways.

In Hawai‘i, plantations were initially dominated by unmarried men who com￾posed a cheap labor force. Pressured by missionaries and noting better output by

married men, planters in Hawai‘i began to favor and encourage laborers to estab￾lish families (Takaki 1983: 119–26). As a result, many Chinese laborers married

Hawaiian women and, in addition to their native Chinese, may have spoken a

Pidgin Hawaiian (Bickerton and Wilson 1987). Later immigrants, especially from

250 thom huebner and linda uyechi

Japan and Korea, brought families with them or sent for picture brides. Although

ethnically segregated camps provided some support for maintaining immigrant

languages, the dominance of English in public domains (cf. Huebner 1985), the

use of a Pidgin English as the lingua franca of the fields (Reinecke 1969), and the

presence of a generation of Hawai‘i-born Asians intermingling across ethnic lines

in school and playgrounds led to rapid development of a predominantly Asian

American form of every day speech–avernacular called Hawai‘i Creole English

(HCE). Further reinforced through a system of language-segregated public edu￾cation, HCE contributed to the development of a “local” identity that continues

today (Sato 1985, 1989).

On the continent, the first wave was more diverse and dispersed. Although most

settled in California, many also made their ways to other parts of the West, to

the South, and the Northeast, including New York. Groups also differed in their

gender balance. Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Asian Indian immigrants were

predominantly male, forming “bachelor societies” in America. Although dis￾couraged by anti-miscegenation laws, Filipinos and Asian Indians often married

Mexican, Native American, and African American women. In contrast, Japanese

immigrants included significantly more women, and the greater gender balance

contributed to a more ethnically homogeneous community.

Work and settlement patterns were also more varied. Asian immigrants mined

for gold in the Sierras, copper in Utah, and coal in Colorado and Wyoming;

they built the intercontinental railroad; they labored in the fisheries and canneries

of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska; they cultivated fruit and vegetable farms;

they worked as hotel keepers and domestic servants; and they provided migrant

agricultural labor throughout the West. By the turn of the century they even

provided services to other Asians in the growing Asian enclaves in San Francisco,

Seattle, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and other cities.

These diverse patterns among Asian immigrants were naturally reflected in

their language situations. Those Chinese living in urban enclaves could meet

most everyday needs in Chinese. Japanese, too, formed ethnic enclaves. Like

other immigrant groups, both the Chinese and Japanese established language

schools to transmit the heritage language to the second generation. Koreans,

while more geographically dispersed, formed communities around church and

nationalist organizations. They maintained the highest literacy rate among the

first wave of Asian immigrants and also established Korean language schools

for the second generation. In contrast, Asian Indians and Filipinos had no self￾sufficient communities. Overwhelmingly male and relatively small in number,

Asian Indians often worked in labor gangs and dealt with the larger society

through an interpreter. Filipinos could often speak English, and as a consequence

were perhaps not driven to ethnic enterprise to the same extent as other Asian

groups (Takaki 1989: 336). Those Asian Indians and Filipinos who had married

Mexicans often spoke English and Spanish at home and, presumably, retained

their native language with friends (Takaki 1989: 311–14). Our understanding