Beneath the North Star explores the multifaceted Southeast Asian population in Minnesota, the heartland of America. While the experiences of Asian immigrants are well documented on the coasts, the tales of those in the Midwest, especially those of the refugees, have been largely overlooked. A major goal of this project is to collect and present their experiences. How well did they settle in Minnesota? How did they face the challenges of assimilation, stereotype, and discrimination while keeping their own cultures, languages, traditions, family values, and identities? What does it mean to be an “American” and live an “American” life in Minnesota?

During the summer of 2016, the research team interviewed 16 Southeast Asian Americans, both first and second generation, who come from diverse ethnic backgrounds, including Cambodian, Filipino, Karen, Vietnamese along with college professors and educational experts who have extensive knowledge and worked closely with Southeast Asian students. The stories that are presented here also encompass those participants with heritages from Indian-Thai, Malaysian, and Laotian in earlier research. For the most part, the semi-structured interviews took place on the St. Olaf campus as well as the homes of the informants. The interviews usually last between one and one and a half hour.

Their stories bear some similarities. Many struggled between learning English and holding onto their heritage language. Others experienced some form of racism. All of them stressed education, family, and community as most important to them. However, there were also differences, chiefly regarding individual identity, ethnic labeling, and the idea of the “American Dream.”

Kaziah Josiah: I… just because I’m Karen, so I guess I have a lot of advice for the Karen community, especially for the youth, new . . . newly arrival refugees, Karen refugees. I want to give them advice to take school seriously. To focus on school and try to do their best in school because… their parents have migrated here for… I guess for the same reason as my parents. Their parents want their kids to go to school and have better life in the future. But sometimes I see some Karen youth who are able to quickly adapt to the immigrant lifestyle but in a negative way if that makes sense… so like they would skip school, they would not take education seriously, just… and they would just prefer to make money, which is understandable because they might be struggling in school. But I think that one important reason is also because they… because there, I feel like there is not enough support from our community to push these students to go to… not high school but college.

Tenzin Choerap: So being that we have these small communities in these larger American communities. There’s a lot of tensions I feel like, and these tensions can very much affect the students. And how do they can affected? Well, say that a certain student in one family is pursuing to be a doctor or a lawyer, something prestigious as a profession. What we tend to do in these communities is to pressure our kids into pursuing that. I think that plays in part that our parents were never brought up in the American system. They hear that doctors and lawyers are great professions. But there are hundreds of other professions that others can pursue. So then the child kind of takes on that expectation from their parents and have to give up their passion of becoming a musician or a teacher. So they have to then struggle with that pressure from the society that, this person in this family is pursuing something that is prestigious so my parents want me to also. In a community that is so small, you have to sort of compete in a sense. So I think there is that challenge as well in the Asian American communities here in Minnesota.