Multiple Identity in Asian-Americans

Whether a panethnic identity is invoked sometimes depends on the context. Accordingly a young Korean-American man might think of himself as Korean when with his grandparents, Korean-American while at a Korean-American church, and Asian-American when thinking about whom to casually date. Selectively porous and elastic ethnic boundaries create multiple, simultaneous identities.

Those multiple forms of ethnic identity are created in the context of other identities, such as socioeconomic status, residential region, gender, and degree of acculturation or multinational identity, which add to the complexity and change the meaning, relevance, and significance of ethnic identity. Ethnicity for Korean-Americans in Los Angeles's Koreatown has a different meaning than it does for Korean-Americans in Bismarck, North Dakota; a wealthy Chinese-American man and a poor Filipina-American picture bride experience their ethnicity differently.

The consequences of ethnicity create meanings. For example, when the mid-nineteenth-century Foreign Miner's tax (as high as 98 percent of income) was applied only to Chinese miners, the meaning of being (a miner who was) Chinese was that one would be subjected to unfair taxes. In the early twenty-first century some young Asian-Americans see their ethnicity as a way of consciously connecting with their parents; a few see it as a passport to gang membership; still others see it as a source of self-esteem.

Adding to the complexity, ethnicity, like culture, is often used as a sugarcoated code word for race. Using ethnicity in this way makes events seem to be innocent reflections of ethnic differences rather than racial bias or socioeconomic opportunities, promotes the impression that racism is irrelevant to the lives of Asian-Americans, and deflates attempts to change racial inequities.

Compounding the complexity and changing meaning of ethnic identity is the difference between the ethnic identity of Asian-Americans and European-Americans, both as an attributed concept and as a choice individuals make when identifying themselves. European-Americans' ethnic identity is regarded as largely irrelevant—to the point that many do not even know their full ethnic background.

Ethnic identifications of Asian-Americans occur more often than for European-Americans because they are perceived as more relevant to the former. Indeed experience has shown that when Asian-Americans identify themselves simply as "Americans," that identification is commonly rejected as inadequate. Despite America's purported embrace of ethnic diversity, so-called hyphenated Americans (such as Chinese-Americans or Asian-Americans) frequently find that a hyphenated identity is sometimes objectionable as well. As the historian James Loewen pointed out in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995), racists like Woodrow Wilson interpreted the hyphenation as a sign of treachery. Others claim the hyphenated term, which places ethnicity first, makes ethnicity more important than nationality. (Actually in the term Asian- American, Asian is just an adjective modifying the more important noun, American.) In the face of such criticism and misunderstanding, people struggle to create an ethnic identity.

Contrary to most assumptions, ethnicity is "not a way of looking back at the [country from which ancestors came; rather it is] a way of being American" (Greeley, p. 32). In that spirit, Japanese-Americans rarely learn the intricacies of a Japanese tea ceremony; instead, they have created ways of being American with a nod toward their background. As Fukiko Uba Odanaka recounted (in a personal communication), in the 1930s, when Japanese-Americans were not allowed on school teams, she and some friends created female basketball teams paralleling teams created for young Japanese-American males in the early twenty-first century. Since then organizational sponsors have seen thousands of Japanese-American boys and girls play in basketball leagues, which have become a central cultural activity among West Coast Japanese-Americans. The leagues create cohesion while giving youngsters who go to schools that have few Japanese-Americans the opportunity to learn Japanese-American values and interaction styles. Rather than being an unambiguous demographic indicator of ancestry, ethnic identity has many contrary, complex, changing meanings, and its created significance changes accordingly.