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.”
When the federal government defines Asian American as a certain way or that all Asian Americans are the same, and they check the same box, and for the government that means they are all the same, and that can be frustrating from our standpoint by I think from students perspectives too as Asian Americans, I mean we’ve had students from all backgrounds culturally, that it is hard to compare and say that two students are the same, somebody that comes from Tibet, one comes from Japan, you know or you know American students, but culturally you know they are ingrained in the Hmong culture, .. it’s very different to compare umm those and kind of lump them and I think with resources or data umm that the state or the country utilizes umm I think that would be hard from an Asian American perspective, .. to be lumped with a group that are so different culturally. And for example if if the government said, I’m going to through at some numbers cause I don’t know what those numbers are, but let’s say the data says that 75% of Asian Americans are pursuing a college education, .. if you broke that down and actually could see well of that 75% only 2% of the Hmong population is pursuing a higher education, then as a state or as a nation we would know that maybe there is an issue there, maybe there are resources that need to go to a certain community or or what’s the disconnect you know of those students pursuing a higher education whereas if you just look at the number of well 75% of Asian Americans are going to college, that’s great move on we’ll look at some other data, .. I think that happens in other programs, health care and you know. I so that’s from our perspective working from with a federally funded program that’s a little frustrating.
Cambodians were one of the very first if not the first wave of refugees into Rochester, Minnesota…. and there was a lot of people that didn’t know how to react to us and plus we didn’t know how to react to them either and… all of a sudden we heard a lot of negative Asian stereotypes about Asians, Asians being soft, Asians being quiet, Asians being weak, Asians being gay, and that really hurt us. We felt like we survived the killing fields… that we were warriors and that we were strong and to have such a challenge we were very surprised and didn’t know how to respond. I think the first generation my mother and my… her younger siblings, the first generation of teenagers that went to school they just took it. But for us it was a different story. You know, we had more of the English growing up, coming to school young and all that stuff and so we fought back in a very strong way… we formed a very large youth gang in Rochester called the royal Cambodian bloods and till this day you can find newspaper articles about how violent we were. To us we didn’t feel like bad kids, if anything we felt like we were fighting for Cambodian pride. And it was a lot of fight in school everyday, we went to school just to fight. When we got to high school it didn’t get much better, for me I was lucky that for some reason I connected with my social studies teacher. I talked to my social studies teacher and she showed me a different way to fight and I was able to pull myself a little bit away from my peers. I still keep in touch up with and till this day I think they’re great people….great people with a lot of talent that was wasted, because of having to respond to discrimination, prejudge and such as in such a terrible way. So yeah that was some of the challenges growing up in Minnesota.
I think the biggest challenge for the Asian American community just across the board is the model minority stereotype just because statistically in comparison to African-Americans and Latinos. The Asian population does have a higher statistics in terms of high school and college and even graduate school graduation, but I think it is very skewed, because if you break down that statistic it is primarily Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. I think are the three Asian communities that really have that statistic up there. When you look at other groups that are Southeast Asians… the numbers are really as high or Pacific Islander, but I think as a whole, the media obvious perpetuates stereotypes across a lot of ethnic communities and the Asian community suffers from like “you can’t fail, because you’re supposed to be good at math” or “you have to pursue a career in health care”… that sort of thing.
I guess the person that gave me your professor’s name… her daughter and my daughter are the same age and the only reason our families ever got to know each other is because her daughter and my daughter… the teachers and faculty would get each other mixed up, they’re both half Asian and half Caucasian. They really don’t look anything alike, but that’s you know, so few Asian kids and… most of them are adopted actually.
Growing up in a small city, I was the only Asian girl so people thought I was like Chinese or Japanese. It was really annoying trying to get people to understand I was Vietnamese. I had to adapt to the American culture, and like people think that the culture I was raised in and I tried to like when I first went to public school, people thought it was a bit weird and… I didn’t really talk much, since I didn’t know English well and… I had a very thick accent at the time, and people couldn’t comprehend. And people would always tell me to slow down, when that was the way I talked to my parents, at a quicker pace.