Editor’s note: Our publication continues this series of articles that will explore, address, and attempt to convey with empathy and direct perspective issues of race and culture within our communities. These issues are not limited to racial inequalities or suffering. We intend to also share stories of success and hope. The second article in this series is written by journalist Soo Youn, an experienced professional who has written for The Guardian, CNN, CNN Business, ABC News, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Health Publishing, ABC NewsOne, Aol, and Yahoo News UK to name a few publishers. Youn conveys her personal story, and those of several other families, of having grown up in the Chesapeake Bay region within the context of the greater Asian American experience of immigration and assimilation.
How the arrival of eastern cultures, their struggles, and assimilation into the American story have inspired generations of success and achievement
“I could see, across the river, the track field and buildings of the famous U.S. Naval Academy, and further down the river, the Bay Bridge is also visible. It was a clear sunshine [sic] day in the early spring, the breeze, not salty, but cool and fresh, made me feel once again the call of the mighty and stormy sea as well as the charm of a little seaside town, which I had missed so much and so long while in State College.”
In mid-April 1977, Yen-Yi Wu first laid eyes on Annapolis while visiting for a job interview. The software engineer with a Ph.D in mathematics from Penn State University already had several job offers, but the commanding views of the white-walled academy accompanied only one. Wu grew up in Keelung, a major port city on the northeastern edge of Taiwan near Tapei with its own harbor, and the Annapolis vistas evoked a longing for home, as he noted in an essay he wrote for his family in 2005.
Families Bond
Wu left Taiwan in 1964, arriving first at Berkeley, then to Pennsylvania for his doctorate. Then, like few Asians before him, he moved to the Annapolis area to work for IITRI, a company contracted to the Department of Defense to maintain its radio frequency resources for U.S. military units around the globe. In the summer of 1977, he moved his family—his wife Sabrina and his children, Craig and Chrissy, into a house in Arnold, just seven miles from where he would work until he retired in 2001.
When young Craig started at Belvedere Elementary School that year, there were two classmates who were ethnically Chinese. A few days later, a woman identifying herself as Mrs. Hon called. She was the mother of one of Craig’s Chinese classmates at Belvedere.
“We were both surprised and delighted to finally meet a family from Taiwan that had a similar background as ours,” Wu wrote. Mrs. Hon introduced them to the Chis—whose daughter was also in Craig’s class. The Hons had been in Arnold for a while, but the Chis were also recent transplants who had moved so Professor Chi could teach computer science at the Naval Academy. A fourth family, the Leungs (who moved when their father took a job teaching math, also at the Academy) rounded out the group.
“All of a sudden, we had four families, each with school children of similar ages, living in the same area, and it was no surprise that [the] four families became very close since then,” Wu said.
And that’s exactly four more Taiwanese—or any Asian—families I [the author] would have expected to find in the area then. Soon enough, my own family would connect with the others. I had gone through most of elementary school in the 1980s without encountering another Asian student. Then, in middle school, I met Chrissy through All-County orchestra. Later, we both attended Severna Park High School. My memory is inexact, but I believe there were also a couple other students who were south Asian refugees, having arrived in fifth or sixth grade. Occasionally, people confused all of us, saying we looked alike. We did not.
On October 3, 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Immigration Act as Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Lady Bird Johnson, Muriel Humphrey, Sen. Edward (Ted) Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and others look on at Liberty Island, New York.
The Immigration Wave Explained
That trickle of Asians to the area tracks the greater immigration trends for Maryland and the U.S. at large. In the midst of the Civil Rights Era, Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart–Celler Act, or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 into law, abolishing the National Origins Formula or per-country immigration quotas, that finally allowed Asians to immigrate to the U.S.
From the 1920s, U.S. immigration policy had restricted immigration to people from northwestern Europe, serving to discriminate against Asians, and southern and Eastern Europeans (Jewish and Italian Americans fell into this category). The 1924 Immigration Act succeeded in barring immigration for Asians who were not previously excluded from immigration laws, notably the Japanese.
In his 1925 manifesto, Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler expressed admiration of America’s immigration laws as an aspiring example for Germany, writing: “The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races.”
In fact, Asian Americans can trace their history to Maryland at least as far as 1870.
That was the first year the racial category “Chinese” was added to the census, according to Mike Friedrich, a public affairs specialist at the U.S. Census Bureau. “Two people in the whole state of Maryland!” he wrote in an email. In 1880, the government added “Japanese” as a category.
But after 1965, everything changed.
“It’s the law that ended Asian exclusion,” says Occidental College history professor Jane Hong.
“The way that it was originally written was it was supposed to be half skilled and then half family relationships that get you in. But at the last minute, some lawmakers who really wanted to restrict nonwhite immigration changed the formula,” Hong, author of Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion, explains.
“There’s no numerical limit on family visas. They did that on purpose because they thought fewer nonwhite people would come, because mostly European people came historically. But the unintended consequences were that the people who ended up using the family visas were Asians and Latinos. That’s how the rest of my family came,” she says.
Before 1965 about 100 to 185 Asians came to the U.S. per country every year, Hong says. In the 1940s and ’50s, the vast majority of Asians came to the U.S. outside the quotas as students, military brides or refugees, or other special categories.
“But ’65 opens the gates for everyone. Before then, there were basically racial restrictions by way of nationality restrictions,” Hong says. For the first time you had tens of thousands, then many more Asians emigrating.
Personal Journeys to America
In fact, Hong’s own family also moved to the Chesapeake Bay area in the late 1980s. They had initially immigrated to New York City, where Hong was born. But after her father died, her mother moved the family to Salisbury, where she worked at a nursing home. It was a huge adjustment from New York, where her parents had opened a deli in Brooklyn Heights, a much more familiar Korean American narrative. By then, there were enough Koreans locally that Hong’s family attended an already-established Korean church.
Her mother was a nurse, as was her now mother-in-law, who immigrated to Los Angeles, both on skilled worker visas. Her mother immigrated from Korea in 1975, the same year as my parents.
“That’s very common. It’s equally common among Filipino Americans. There’s a long history of U.S. colonialism: setting up an educational system, hospitals, industries in the Philippines and South Korea. So, there’s a whole historical legacy there,” Hong says. She argues that the push for Asian immigration to the U.S. came from protecting U.S. military troops and economic interests in Asia after World War II.
My [the author’s] father traces our American story to the Vietnam War, when the U.S. suffered a shortage of doctors, which dovetails into the Immigration Act of 1965.
The U.S. recruited Foreign Medical Graduates (FMGs) mostly from postcolonial Asian nations, like my father, who received permanent residency or citizenship for their medical service, often in marginalized communities. Originally conceived as a temporary solution, it has become a fixture in American immigration to this date.
This provision prompted waves of Asian doctors in the 1960s and 1970s to come to the States, particularly from Korea, China, and the Philippines, then later India and Pakistan.
Like Hong’s mother, my family came in 1975 to Richmond, Virginia, where my uncle and aunt—an anesthesiologist and nurse, respectively—had moved in 1967. We then spent a year in rural North Carolina, where my father worked in a mental hospital with a friend from medical school in Korea who was like him, trained as a pediatrician—such was the need for foreign doctors. Afterwards, we ended up in Maryland. When I was six years old, we moved to Severna Park, where I grew up.
Adolescence & Race
There was racism, of course. I remember being beaten up—punched a few times as I walked home from school by a blonde-haired brother and sister who were older than me. I remember thinking their hair looked like Malibu Barbie. We were friendly in high school and never talked about it—the girl was sheepish around me.
When I reconnected with Chrissy, now Christine Wu Nordahl, she said she remembers growing up without a lot of racism because there were so few Asians to even generalize about, which I somewhat agree with. My high school guidance counselor always called me Kim, which was curious.
I reconnected with Sonya McFarland, who I knew as Sonya Lee, the other Asian girl I remembered from Severna Park. Her dad had been in the Korean military and befriended an American soldier who worked at General Motors—they fixed machinery or trucks together.
The American offered to help Sonya’s dad find a job should he come to the States. Sonya’s father took him up on it and ended up with a job at a GM plant in Maryland, without experience. He learned on the job and spent his breaks in the bathroom reading manuals and cramming.
I asked Sonya if she agreed with Chrissy’s take, that the scarcity of Asians translated into a lack of racism. She and Chrissy were often mistaken for each other, so much so much so that their nicknames for each other were Chrissy Lee and Sonya Wu.
We talked about how people were in general well-meaning, and earnest. Despite remembering very little of that time, she does recall being called “banana” and “Twinkie” and also “chink” by friends she had known since kindergarten.
The other thing she distinctly remembers is a fact-box in her older brother’s yearbook from 1990. It broke down Severna Park by race: 97 percent white, 2 percent Black, 1 percent other. “We were other,” she said.
Yet, as the Asian American population increased in the U.S. we assumed it would get easier. I remember always wanting to be younger, because it would be that number of years less racist, and less hard to not be white in America. For a while, for me, and others, it did seem like it was getting better.
Maryland’s First Lady Yumi Hogan has long been a champion of Asian American awareness, recognition, and relationships. In November of last year, Hogan received the Order of Civil Merit of the Republic of Korea—the nation’s highest and most prestigious civilian honor. The Camellia (Dongbaek) Medal was awarded in recognition of the First Lady’s commitment to serving the Korean American community and strengthening ties between the United States and the Republic of Korea. Photo by Steve Kwak/Office of Governor Larry Hogan.
Who We Are and Aren’t, Today
By 2018, the estimated number of U.S. residents identifying as some degree of Asian was 22.6 million, according to the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, which partners with the U.S. Census Information Center.
That breaks down into 5.2 million Chinese (excepting the Taiwanese), Asian Indian (4.5 million), Filipino (4.1 million), Vietnamese (2.2 million), Korean (1.9 million), and Japanese (1.5 million).
The current U.S. population is 331 million.
In 2019, Maryland’s population was 6.05 million—58.5 percent White, 31.1 percent Black, 10.6 percent Latino or Hispanic, and 6.7 percent Asian, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Marylanders who identified as having two or more races numbered 2.9 percent.
Last year started off with a culturally groundbreaking moment for Asian Americans. For many, it signaled a sort of arrival. A Korean film, Parasite, won four Academy Awards, and made history by becoming the first non-English film to win the Best Picture Oscar.
That seemed to build off of the momentum of Crazy Rich Asians, which enjoyed unexpected box office success, and two Golden Globe nominations in 2018. Lulu Wang’s The Farewell broke records in 2019 for theater average on opening weekend, topping even Avengers: Endgame. It seemed that Asian representation was pushing new frontiers and being not just embraced, but wildly celebrated.
Then COVID19 struck the U.S. full force. As the virus raged, so did anti-Asian sentiment, stoked by the then-President’s constant race-baiting moniker “China virus.”
As COVID19 initially made its way through America, I was living in Brooklyn, one stop from Manhattan’s Chinatown. On January 25th, to mark the Lunar New Year, I hosted a party. On the way, a friend noticed that an older Asian man had coughed on the subway, and other riders had glared and moved away. “It’s starting,” she said. We knew what was going to happen next.
As the weeks and months unfolded, so did reports of attacks on Asians and Asian-owned businesses both in the news media and in our own whisper networks across the U.S. My friends and I worried about our parents—and they, in turn, worried about us being in the city, because of both COVID and racism. One day I opened Facebook to find a friend from Severna Park (going back to first grade!) saying she was “proud of” her nephew writing “China virus” across his school calendar. I rarely comment on such things but this time I did, and she maintained it was not racist. While heartbreaking, I cannot say I was surprised.
Maryland’s own First Lady, Yumi Hogan, witnessed hateful actions as well.
“I am saddened that our community has faced that sentiment and went through unacceptable incidents. First generation Asian Americans are actually immune to it—think about how their life has been,” she wrote in an email, a stoic cadence I find so familiar from that generation of immigrants.
“They were obviously nervous, for example, when hearing ‘go back to China’ at a market. Some Asians regardless of their origin heard that. Young generations were also worried about it and tried to find a way to protect our community,” she said, referencing letters she received.
Hogan herself immigrated to the U.S. 42 years ago and has lived in the state for the past three decades. Like Wu, she had embraced Maryland for terrain evocative of home.
“Its landscapes—with mountains and the ocean and four seasons—much look like those of South Korea, my homeland,” she said.
I asked Hogan about the highly anticipated film Minari, about a Korean American family’s struggle to farm in Arkansas, written by the Korean American screenwriter Isaac Lee Chung, which features an ethnically Korean cast starring Steven Yeun. Heading into the Hollywood awards season, the film’s classification is “foreign film” by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) who administer the Golden Globes, and not a contender for either best picture awards, but rather considered a foreign language film.
“It is based on not a story in Korea, but a story of Korean American immigrants living in America. It is absolutely an American story, our story,” Hogan wrote. “Defining it as a foreign film is going backward. This is another type of discrimination.”
Journalist and writer of this article Soo Youn grew up in the 1980s and ’90s in the Severna Park area, just outside Annapolis.
The celebration of art in 2020 did not reflect the anti-Asian sentiment so flagrantly on display in everyday life. The National Book Awards showcased Asians or Asian-Americans as three of the five winners: the novel Interior Chinatown by Charle Yu, the poetry collection DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi, and the translated novel Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri.
For Hogan, the most arguably high profile Asian American in Annapolis, or Maryland, there is much to celebrate in the arts, a course of action she advocates.
“I am proud of wonderful artists who make great artworks that represent and raise the voice of immigrants and remind all of us of what American history is about. Different cultures, foods, and languages are part of the diversity America is proud of and learning or knowing them is your strength,” she said. “Enjoy, support, and share them and talk about them more.”
