A colleague of Japanese ancestry once told me that she often has been asked, “You speak such good English. Where are you from?”
She answers truthfully, “St. Louis,” and watches as the inquisitors are momentarily startled.
Is it so hard, she wonders, “to imagine that my family has been here for three generations?”
Some people unfortunately still need to take an extra leap of the imagination to think of Asian-Americans as “looking” American.
From at least the mid-1800s, when waves of Chinese worked the railroads and the Japanese farmed in California, prejudices toward Asian-Americans have run hot and cold, from “model minority” to “yellow peril” and back again.
It is the residue of that long history that has spurred two scholarly organizations to call for Asian-American scientists to boycott jobs at federal laboratories in the wake of the arrest of Wen Ho Lee.
The Association for Asian-American Studies issued its call in late May to protest what it suspects is unfair treatment of Lee, a former government scientist accused of mishandling nuclear secrets at Los Alamos. In March, Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education, a California-based group, issued a similar boycott call.
The closer you look at the case, the more you begin to wonder. Why, for example, is Wen Ho Lee jailed while former CIA head John Deutch is walking around free?
Both allegedly violated security laws by taking classified computer files home and keeping them in unsecured locations. Neither man was charged with espionage, although news accounts alleged Lee was a “Chinese spy” when he was fired in March of 1999. After months of investigations, Lee was charged, not with spying, but with mishandling classified information.
Some of the material Lee took home has remained missing. He claimed he destroyed it. Whether he did or not, the computer files at the heart of the case against him were not given the crucial “secret” or “confidential” security classifications, as the indictment against him alleges, until after he was fired.
Lee has been held without bail in a New Mexico jail since Dec. 10, where his family says he is isolated from human contact for most of the day and night–pretty rough treatment for a guy who has no criminal record or charges of spying against him.
You have to wonder why was Lee locked up, while Deutch was not? Is Lee so much more dangerous? If so, why was he not charged with spying? Or was Lee racially profiled because his ancestral nationality is the same as our new national adversary? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time that has happened in history. “I think there has always been this perception of Asian-Americans as non-American, even after our families have been here for generations,” University of California at Berkeley ethnic studies professor Ron Takaki, said in a telephone interview. “… Wen Ho Lee is an American but nevertheless he wears what has been called `the racial uniform,’ like Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor.”
Takaki’s latest book, “Double Victory,” is a “multicultural history” of America during World War II.
After Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that led to the uprooting and “interning” of more than 120,000 Japanese-descended Americans. Significantly, no such order was issued to “intern” Americans of German or Italian descent.
Four decades later, President Ronald Reagan signed a national apology and the government paid up to $20,000 to each Japanese-American who was interned as a token of reparations.
Even so, I was astonished at the time to receive several letters from elderly readers who still were insisting Japanese-Americans posed enough of a threat to national security to justify incarceration of them and their families.
“Today the racial perceptions are blending,” said Frank Wu, associate professor at Howard University Law School. “We are the model minority as a yellow peril. Suddenly, in a new high-tech global economy, the fear is that Asian-Americans will be the group that is on the rise.”
Is Wu too paranoid? Maybe. But, then, as the old saying goes, even paranoids have enemies.
At a time when government struggles to compete with the private sector to lure the brightest in the sciences and technologies, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson has not been indifferent to Asian-American concerns. He has even appointed a new ombudsman, Jeremy Wu, whose ancestry is Chinese.
I don’t envy the new ombudsman. Washington’s slickest spin doctors would have a tough time warming up the chilly message sent by the government’s treatment of Wen Ho Lee.
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E-mail: cptime@aol.com
