A project of
United for a Fair Economy

Ninjas, Dragons & Other Asian Myths

by Windy Sengsatheuane

May 5, 2005

It’s astonishing to me that some men are still captivated by the gaze of ‘Orientalism’. On occasions when I venture to have a cocktail, I am still asked, “What are you?” (I usually assume they mean my ethnic background as opposed to some kind of freak.) My usual reply is “I’m an Inuk,” borrowed from the singular of Inuit which means ‘the people’ or ‘real people’. As their brow begins to furrow, they insist on the truth, “No really, what are you?”

“I am a person, a human being, but my family is from Laos.” And as some people have no idea where Laos is, a drink turns into a geography lesson where I proceed to draw a rough map of Southeast Asia on a bar napkin, usually noting China as a reference point.

Mike Judge, creator of the animated Fox TV show King of the Hill has a Laotian family living next to Hank Hill, the main character on the show. In the series premiere, Hank asks Khan, his neighbor, where he is from. Khan replies that he is from Laos, whereby Hank then proceeds to ask, “So are you Chinese or Japanese?”

Debunking the Model Minority Myth

When my family emigrated to the U.S. after the plight of the Vietnam War (1979), no one in my family had had any formal educations. My mom cleaned the homes of white women, about 6 or 7 a day, for $30 a day--total. To make extra cash, she would buy live chickens from a farm in the country for $1 each, and make my brother, sister and I pluck, clean, and package the chickens to sell them to other people in the community for $5 each. She would buy them by the hundreds and every weekend while my friends were riding their bikes, scoping out each other’s new quarter pipes, I was plucking chickens. I got so good at it I could pluck a chicken in 2 minutes flat.

Asians do even better than whites, right? The basic American tenet of equality of opportunity is the bedrock of society. But upon closer scrutiny, for Asians as well as other people of color, the bedrock turns out to be sand.

Overall statistics of the 2000 Census indicates that Asian Americans are doing better than the national average in their median household income and the value of their homes. But statistics can go awry, and sometimes numbers mask the truth.

The model minority myth has traditionally been employed by pundits and politicians to show people of color that Asian Americans, such as our Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, are the embodiment of the American dream, a bright, shining example of hard work and prosperity. Those in power utilize—in this case, exploit—the story of a successful minority, usually a compliant and conscientious Asian, in attempts to deflate claims of injustice from other people of color as justification for growing economic inequality.

Historically, Asian Americans have been stereotyped as a monolithic group, even though we have more diversity within us than any other racialized group. So many disparities exist among Asian Americans that when you take factors such as immigration status, geographical region, and educational levels of attainment into account, we find that Asian Americans are more diverse than the various slopes of their eyes.

Stooping below the glass ceiling: Income

Our socioeconomic status provides misleading statistical ammunition for those who celebrate Asian success. Asian success has been exaggerated to sell the policies of social opportunity, while disguising how many Asian Americans face insidious discrimination in the workplace. Dr. Clifford Cheng (1997) studied the Fortune 500, and found that only 0.3% of senior level executives were of Asian descent. The glass ceiling applies to Asian Americans, just as it does for all women, and other people of color.

There’s a glass ceiling at the top -- but a sub-floor below the basement.

Disaggregated data for per capita income shows how many Asian subgroups are falling behind. Most staggeringly, the Hmong ($6,600), followed by Cambodian, Laotian, and Tongans are well under the poverty threshold. Though the stereotype that all Asians are good at math, their recent immigration status and language barriers may still translate into lack of education. More than half of Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotians (52.7%) have less than a high school degree—a rate higher than Latinos (48.5%) and Blacks (29.1%). Melany de la Cruz, from the Asian Pacific American Community Development Data Center speculates that “Southeast Asian groups tend to be a very young population, which might account for their low educational attainment rates, home ownership rates, etc.”

Although the median household income for Asians and Pacific Islander ($54,827) was larger than whites ($48,500), our per capita incomes ($21,823) still fall short of whites ($26,744).

Per Capita Income in 1999 by Ethnic Background
Total Population	$21,587	Total Asian	$21,823	Total NHPI	$15,054	Other Asian	$20,699

*NHPI is abbreviated for those who identified themselves as Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander

Asian Indian	$27,514	Hmong	$6,600	Pakistani	$18,096
Bangladeshi	$13,971	Indonesian	$18,932	Samoan	$12,160
Cambodian	$10,366	Japanese	$30,075	Sri Lankan	$27,428
Chamorro	$17,583	Korean	$18,805	Taiwanese	$25,890
Chinese	$23,756	Laotian	$11,830	Thai	$19,066
Filipino	$25,890	Malaysian	$19,895	Tongan	$10,680
Fijian	$14,745	Native Hawaiian	$17,697	Vietnamese	$15,655

Table 1. Per Capita Income by Ethnicity in 1999 Source: U.S. Census Bureau Summary File 4, SF4-PCT 130

Home Sweet Home

But secondly and more importantly, even if Suzy Wu is making more money than Shelly White, Ms. Wu is still likely to be asset poor. If Suzy Wu were to lose her job, she wouldn’t be able to pay the bills and feed the children for three months without help. Unfortunately, many Americans don't own any assets at all. One-third of all Americans and two-thirds of African-Americans have no assets.

Given that household income is calculated by the income generated by a household, size does matter in estimating wealth depending on how many wage earners are contributing to the overall household income. Asian households were, on average, more crowded than whites. Instead of mom, pop, 2.5 kids and a dog, Asian families tend to house parents, grandparents, and random relatives on top of the usual nuclear family--literally.

According to the 2000 Census, Asian households are much more overcrowded than the total population. The rate of overcrowded homes, with 1.01 occupants per room, for Asians as a group (14%) is four times the rate of all owner-occupied housing units (3%). On average, 49.3% of Asian families have roughly 3 people per room, whereas in the total population each has their own room. When I was growing up, my family lived in a three-bedroom home; I double bunked with my 2 brothers and my sister. My older sister, her husband and two children lived in the other room, and my parents had the other. Imagine the bathroom line before school—I had to learn how to brush my teeth and pee at the same time!

Eric Belsky, Executive Director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, estimates that 30-40% of all people of color are spending more than half of their income on housing. Government aid programs that facilitate asset building, such as Fannie Mae and its sibling Freddie Mac, hardly target Asian Americans at all, focusing more attention on Blacks and Latinos. Homeownership rates for every race have been steadily increasing whereas Asian rates have become stagnant. Nonetheless, homeownership rates of all people of color are still trailing whites by at least 20% in most areas (except HI, CA, MA).

The average value of Asian American homes is estimated at $199,000 compared to the total population’s average household value at $123,000. Why? With more family members contributing to the cost of homes, Asian American families are able to afford suitable sized homes to better accommodate their larger family size. Seeing as higher concentrated Asian American populations are in states with higher cost of living (i.e. HI, CA, NY, MA, etc.) and property values at astronomical amounts (For example, Hawaii’s average housing price is $272,700.) it is less problematic to see why Asian home values are so much higher.

Table 2. Value of homes (in dollars) by race according to the U.S. Census Bureau 2000

Policies Create Economic Differences

It has been the role of government to encourage asset development through employer-sponsored and personally held investment accounts. But what have they ever done for the average Joe? There are many tax incentives to buy a home, such as mortgage interest deductions. However, these policies do little to benefit the poor, in part because they operate primarily through tax credits to federal income tax. Low-income families have considerably smaller income tax liability, often zero, so a non-refundable tax credit doesn’t provide much of an incentive. But as the cost of rent continues to increase, there are still no federal rental deductions to help the poor who cannot afford homes. Furthermore, eligibility requirements for federal anti-poverty programs typically include an asset ceiling. Anyone who has over $2,000 in savings typically cannot receive TANF or Food Stamps. Essentially, these limits discourage poor families from saving and creating wealth, thereby compromising the effectiveness of many federal anti-poverty programs.

Tax policies do not necessarily benefit extended families as the Code is now set up. Though every household member contributes to the cost of the house, only one gets to take advantage of the home mortgage interest deduction or property (real estate) tax deductions each year. For example, two siblings who can’t afford to establish their own household get a home together and have everyone else chip in on the mortgage payment. Even though they have their own benefits, there still has to be a rotating schedule each year for who gets to claim the house. Every year, my brother and sister play cowboy, ninja, dragon, (a variant of the traditional rock, paper, scissors where cowboy shoots dragon, dragon slays ninja, and ninja stealthily trumps cowboy) for who gets to claim the house and/or mom on April 15th.

With larger households, siblings (usually the eldest) fulfill obligations of filial piety such as taking care of their parents once they are older as opposed to placing them in nursing homes. Another benefit is that many use mom or grandma as a live in day care to rear their children in the same manner that they were raised. Furthermore, there may be some relatives who do not apply as dependents even though they are living off the household’s income. As a result, factors such as geography and family structure contribute to the high average value of Asian American homes, yet numerically, less Asian Americans benefit from the tax incentives available for homeowners.

Now, what?

Many people of color, including Asians are still pressured under these stereotypes and feel like failures if they cannot overcome the lot they have been given. For people of color, it is empowering to understand that building economic stability within the widening gap of racial economic inequality is due to structural barriers and social injustices throughout history. I once saw a bumper sticker next to a “Keep Austin Weird” label that read, “Sure you could trust the government, just ask an Indian!” Is it entirely paranoid to suspect that all those folks in Congress traditionally known to extol the ‘American Dream’ of equal opportunity will even listen to our shrill cries for change? Asians must get involved with policy development and must not allow themselves to be used to set barriers that widen racial inequality while building a case for equal opportunity. By reforming policy from the bottom up and educating those that tax policies affect the most, we could devise strategies to close the racial economic divide for everyone—from a Sudanese tribe to a Samoan clan—plans that don’t fold on sight to the race card being pulled.