By LEE
SIEGEL
Last March, an interviewer archly asked
President Barack Obama whether he was aware that he had been
"surpassed" by basketball phenomenon Jeremy Lin "as the most
famous Harvard graduate." The
question was misformulated. If there was any surpassing going on, it was that
Mr. Lin had become, briefly, more famous than Mr. Obama as the country's most
exemplary figure from a hitherto marginalized minority.
Asian-Americans are now
the country's best-educated, highest-earning and fastest-growing racial group. They share with American Jews both the distinction
and the occasional burden of immigrant success. WSJ's Stu
Woo talks to author Lee Siegel.
Mr. Lin's triumph on the basketball court is a
living metaphor for the social group he comes from. No one would dispute the
opening paragraph of the Pew Research Center's
massive study of Asian-Americans, released over the summer:
"Asian-Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing
racial group in the United
States. They
are more satisfied than the general public with their lives, finances and the
direction of the country, and they place more value than other Americans do on
marriage, parenthood, hard work and career success." Or as Mr. Lin put it
in a video of congratulation he made last spring for the overwhelmingly
Asian-American graduates of New York City's
famed Stuyvesant
High School: "Never
let anyone tell you what you can't do."
Mr. Lin might well have been
thinking of a troubling backhanded homage to Asian-American success. Once upon
a time, threatened elites at Ivy League schools like Harvard and Yale secretly
established a quota—known as the "numerus clausus"—for the number of
Jews allowed through their exclusive gates. Today,
some of these schools stand accused of discrimination against Asian-American
students who, according to recent studies, must score higher than whites on standardized
tests to win a golden ticket of admission. It seems that, despite their very
different histories in this country, Asian-Americans now share with American
Jews both the distinction and the occasional burden of phenomenal immigrant
success.
Asian-Americans have become the immigrant group
that most embodies the American promise of success driven by will and resolve.
When, six years ago, the Korean-American management consultant Yul Kwon won the
13th season of "Survivor," it must have been a social scientist's
dream come true. The show's
producers had separated that season's contestants into ethnically and racially
divided groups: white, black, Hispanic and Asian-American. Never mind the sorry
lack of taste. The crude segregation
also served as an illumination, bringing to the surface America's
eternal subterranean scrimmage between newly arrived tribes. Mr. Kwon's victory
made abstract social trends vividly concrete. Not only had Asian-Americans gone
beyond Hispanics as the most populous group of new American immigrants. They had risen to the top in the pursuit of the
American dream.
For the purposes of demographic studies,
Asian-Americans are defined as Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean
and Japanese, with the Chinese being the largest group and the Japanese the
smallest. The Pew study is rich with
statistics: The Indians and
Filipinos lead Asian-Americans in household wealth, Asian-Americans vote mostly
liberal, the Japanese and Filipinos are most likely to marry outside their
group, more Chinese-Americans than any other Asian-American group say they are
doing better materially than their parents were at a similar age.
And Asian-Americans
increased their numbers faster than any other race between 2000 and 2010,
growing by 46%. From 1980 to 2010, the Asian-American population quadrupled,
with Chinese-Americans becoming by far the largest group. Tom Buchanan, F. Scott Fitzgerald's racist bully in
"The Great Gatsby," would
have plotzed (as my Russian-Jewish relatives might have said). At one point in
the novel, Buchanan expresses his alarm over the "yellow peril":
"The idea is if we don't look
out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged."
Although the fictional character's fears might
strike us as alien and repellent today, it is not just a blessing but also
historically peculiar that more Americans don't feel the same way, especially
given Asian-Americans' breathtaking success. America has always been a place
where rapid assimilation of strangers was accompanied by brutal opposition to
same.
To be sure,
beginning with the large waves of Asian-American immigration in the latter half
of the 19th century, the mostly unskilled Asians who worked the farms and mines
and built the railroads met violent, sometimes lethal prejudice. Such hostility
was officially sanctioned by legislation banning, at different times, Chinese
women, all immigrants from China,
and then, in 1924, immigrants from any Asian country, period. The internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor is unique in American history—no other
immigrant group has ever been imprisoned on American soil en masse because of
ethnic guilt-by-association. But since 1965, when the Immigration and
Nationality Act opened the doors to immigrants from Asia,
their assimilation into American life has proceeded without the turbulence
often faced by other groups.
Contrast
the Asian-American saga with that of American Jews, the immigrant group most
like them in terms of accomplishment and stability. Central and Eastern
European Jews also began coming to America in the late 19th century,
but because they didn't incite the ferocious racial hatred that Asian-Americans
first confronted, they established themselves more quickly. At the same time,
since they were less culturally reticent and more socially ambitious than
Asian-Americans, Jewish immigrants also faced more egregious obstacles to
mobility than Asian-Americans did when America once again allowed them in.
By the 1930s, when the only Asian presence in
American movies was Charlie Chan, Jews had invented Hollywood out of whole cloth. Back in New York, Jews began
redefining stagecraft and acting with the founding of the Group Theater in 1931. Though
barred early on from elective office by the Irish, who for a long time had a
monopoly on the insurgent ethnic side of mainstream American politics, Jews had
already reached the highest political echelons as close advisers to President
Wilson. In the 1930s, they were the core of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's
so-called brain trust, his inner circle of wise men. By the end of World War
II, Jews had achieved prominence in just about every realm of American life.
Yet furtive prohibitions against Jews, as well
as entrenched anti-Semitic attitudes, thrived even after the Holocaust, though
that unprecedented atrocity had the effect of eventually ending the Ivy League
quotas on Jewish admissions. What socially ambitious Jews aspired to were the
Elysian fields of WASP bastions such as rarefied country clubs, exclusive
professional clubs, white-shoe law firms, prestigious foundations and the like,
and these were the very institutions that resisted them the most intensely. As
late as 1975, Saul Bellow could complain to an interviewer that "a few
years ago it was fashionable to describe Roth, Malamud and me as the Hart,
Schaffner and Marx of writing. The
Protestant majority thought it had lost its grip, so the ghetto walls went up
around us."
As it happened, 1975 was
one year before Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize, after winning the Pulitzer
once and the National Book Award twice. Contrary to Bellow's somewhat delighted
fantasy of persecution, the ghetto walls had come down around Jewish cultural
figures decades before. The
perception of anti-Semitism often exceeded its reality because, after the
Holocaust, any expression of hostility toward Jews got amplified from muted
social ugliness into loud moral crime. But there was another factor at work.
Having attained prominence and social power, Jews could be disproportionately
vociferous and visible in their complaints about rejection and exclusion.
Along with their outsider theological
status—something not shared by Asians, many of whom are practicing
Christians—one reason that anti-Semitism persisted even as Jews ascended in
American life was that Jews were frequently in the vanguard of American social
and political dissent, from the anarchist Emma Goldman to Yippie Abbie Hoffman
and beyond. Not only that, but many of the architects of America's
archenemy, Soviet Communism, had been Jews. As the WASP establishment lost
ground to Jewish newcomers, the words "communist" and "Jew"
often became synonymous. The
association of Hollywood with lax morality, and
of Jews with Hollywood,
heightened a kind of low-grade hum of anti-Jewish feeling, even as it proved
the general acceptance of the Jewish sentiments and sensibility that permeated
American entertainment.
Asian-Americans have
followed the opposite trajectory from Jewish-Americans. Toxic
racism and then prohibitions against immigration prevented them from rising in
American society for nearly a century. And then they did so with unique
alacrity. Jewish immigrants, whether in the 19th century, in the 1930s as
refugees from Hitler or in the 1980s as refugees from the Soviet
Union, came here for the most part without a penny to their name. Today, Asian-Americans arrive in America more
highly educated, and more prosperous, than any other immigrant group.
Yet the astounding success of Asian-Americans
raises the dark question of how long they will be able to resist attracting the
furies of fear and envy, especially during times of economic stress, or of
economic and political conflict with countries like China, where the
preponderance of Asian-Americans still come from. If China does one day become an
explicit antagonist, it seems likely that the anxiety among Chinese-Americans
will be even more intense than that of American Jews every time the allegiances
of the American-Jewish lobby are questioned.
Some of the more vehement attacks on Amy Chua's
deliberately provocative 2011 memoir of child rearing, "Battle Hymn of the
Tiger Mother," were perhaps
fueled by resentment of Asian-American ascendancy, especially in the context of
raising "perfect" children. Confession: I was one of the book's more
vocal detractors. Was I, a Jewish-American writer, driven to pique, in part, by
a member of a group that threatens Jewish-American cultural domination, just as
American Jews once threatened the WASP mandarinate? Well, maybe.
The subtle vying for success in various
realms of American life between Asian-Americans and American Jews makes one
wonder what mores and tastes will look like when Asian-Americans begin to exert
their own influence over the culture. Will the verbal brio and intellectual
bent of Jews, their edgy irony and frank super-competitiveness give way to
Asian discretion, deference to the community, and gifts for less verbal
pursuits like music, science and math? Will things become, as they once were
under WASP hegemony, quieter?
Not if the mercurial nature of culture has
anything to do with it. Think of the
wild Korean-American comedian Margaret Cho, who belongs on the same family tree
of comic art as the wild Jewish-American comedian Sarah Silverman. Jeremy Lin
himself, in his video for the class of 2012 at Stuyvesant,
included an antic rap song performed with an Asian-American friend. And the
speaker who addressed the high school's graduates in person last June was the
32-year-old Chinese-American actor Telly
Leung, a star of the hit TV series
"Glee."
Mr. Leung spoke for over
20 minutes, joking, shouting, making ironic quips, teasing and provoking. At
one point, he boasted that he had overthrown his parents' middle-class
expectations of stability and security and made them redefine their idea of the
American dream. He sounded, dare I say it, like a certain type of Jew. Which is
another way of saying that he sounded like everyone who comes to America from
somewhere else and ends up exemplifying, anew, a native irreverence and
vitality that is as old as the American hills.
—Mr. Siegel is the
author of four books and, most recently, the e-book "Harvard is Burning."
A version of this
article appeared October 27, 2012, on page C1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Rise of
the Tiger nation.
