FOUR
Sometimes stories that we read in our youth about other countries, cultures, and peoples change the trajectory of our lives. We may not realize it at the time, but decades later, we can trace the emergence of an inspired path. During those impressionable years, we become aware of distinct places—new worlds—that transport us into a place that we now call home.
In Krishna Chandrasekhar’s case, he started reading magazines and journals about the United States while he was a high school student in India. “I was fascinated by the United States,” he recalled.1 Soon after earning his medical degree, Chandrasekhar decided with two other doctors to immigrate to the United States. A complex interplay of individual and collective curiosity, professional limitations in India, and employment opportunities in the United States had propelled them to take a chance and work abroad.
On June 28, 1970, Chandrasekhar departed from Madras, India, for Buffalo, New York, where he completed his residency at Mercy Hospital. In the headshot that accompanies his interview for the First Days Project—a project, presented by the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), which shares stories of immigrants’ and refugees’ first experiences in the United States—we see Chandrasekhar’s face from those first days. Looking straight into the camera, he looks smart and determined. His long hair is pulled away from his face, and neatly styled into a bun on top that you might miss seeing if you looked at the photo quickly. His glasses with black rims on the top and clear frames (which in the twenty-first century have become retro chic), crisp, buttoned-up white shirt, and dark tie with a subtle diamond pattern complete the seriousness of his look.
Sometimes what brought us to the United States had less to do with our own youthful dreams, but rather was a path laid out for us by a family member. In Lakshmi Kalapatapu’s story, the family member was her husband, Venu, who had begun working in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1974, she and their two young children departed from Hyderabad, India, and joined him in the heartland of America. Kalapatapu may not have been the first of her family to arrive in the United States, but her first days were no less adventurous. In her interview for the First Days Project, she recalled, “I came with one small suitcase and two small boys—a four-year-old and an 18-month-old—and that was a very big change for me.”2
One of the biggest changes she experienced had to do with the weather. Although Kalapatapu had arrived in Minneapolis on a summer day, the subsequent snowstorms made an impression. She recalled, “That year, the snow didn’t stop until May of the following year. That was really something.”3 While Minnesotans were used to this type of climate, perhaps taking it for granted, Kalapatapu was struck by its beauty: “All day long, I would sit at the window with my two boys and watch the snow fall. . . . I enjoyed that time very much.”4 The photo that accompanies her First Days Project interview complements these sentiments. You see her in a long winter coat, standing with her two young boys, who are sporting puffy down winter jackets. They appear to the left of the frame alongside freshly shoveled mounds of snow. The faces of Kalapatapu and the two boys are a bit blurry, but she appears to have a hint of a smile.
And sometimes what brought us to the United States was not solely an individual or family adventure, but rather the country’s new law. The passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 enabled both Krishna Chandrasekhar’s and Lakshmi Kalapatapu’s immigration. Before passage of the 1965 Act, anti-Asian hostility infused US immigration policies, and immigration restriction and exclusion had cast a shadow over the Asian American experience. As Chandrasekhar noted, “When I became a doctor, in 1965, for the first time since 1924, [the US] relaxed the immigration rules for foreigners; previously only people of European descent could come to America.”
Krishna Chandrasekhar and Lakshmi Kalapatapu are two of the many faces of post-1965 Asian America.
THE IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALITY ACT OF 1965
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ushered a major transformation of the United States. It abolished the national origins system that had favored immigration from northern and western Europe since the 1920s. The new immigration system continued to restrict immigration, setting a ceiling of 290,000 annual visas, with 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere and 170,000 from the Eastern Hemisphere. However, it prioritized family reunification. Immigrants who were immediate relatives of US citizens, such as spouses and minor, unmarried children, were not subject to quotas or numerical limitations. The 1965 Act created a more equitable system to the extent that it limited annual emigration from any one country to 20,000.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act for its congressional sponsors, established a preference system that emphasized the reunification of other family members—such as the adult, unmarried children of US citizens—and the immigration of workers with needed skills. The initial preference system consisted of seven preferences. A non-preference category was also created, under which a person who invested $40,000 in a business could qualify for immigration to the United States. Although the 1965 Act has been modified—the third and sixth occupational preferences became part of a larger employment-based immigration system in 1990, for example—it continues to be the basis of US immigration law in the twenty-first century.5
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 is a legacy of the civil rights movement, linking the histories of Black freedom struggle and contemporary immigration. It prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence in the issuance of immigrant visas.6 Yet, despite its historical significance, it is not well known. On the fiftieth anniversary of its passage in 2015, multiple observers noted that the Immigration and Nationality Act is overshadowed by other major civil rights legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.7
In light of some Americans’ insistence that the United States is a nation of immigrants alongside others’ persistent hostility toward immigrants, it is time for post-1965 immigrants—their contributions and struggles—to step out of the shadows and take center stage. As a result of their immigration, the face of America has changed.8 It is more Asian as well as Latino and African.
Although some legislators expected the 1965 Act to increase immigration to the United States, the increase they expected was from Europe and not from Asia, whose emigration numbers grew exponentially. In 1960, persons of Asian ancestry in the United States numbered less than one million. By 2019, that number had increased to over twenty million.9 Post-1965 immigration catalyzed this dramatic numerical growth. As a result, a much larger percentage of Asian Americans—57 percent—were born in another country, compared with 14 percent of all Americans.10
The faces of post-1965 Asian America are also changing. South Asians and Southeast Asians account for the majority of Asian Americans, while Japanese Americans account for a much smaller share of the population than they did a century ago.11 Many of these faces are of immigrant women, whose larger numbers helped balance a gender ratio in Asian American communities that once favored men.
The Pew Research Center’s demographic profiles of national origin groups present one lens to view the dramatic growth and diversity of post-1965 Asian America. Whereas pre-1965 Asian American communities were predominantly Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Indian, and Korean, nineteen origin groups make up the vast majority of Asian Americans since then. In addition to those initial groups, they now include Vietnamese, Pakistani, Thai, Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Burmese, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Malaysian, Mongolian, and Bhutanese. According to Abby Budiman and Neil G. Ruiz’s analysis of US Census Bureau data, six origin groups—Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese—accounted for 85 percent of all Asian Americans in 2019.12
Eleven of the nineteen origin groups more than doubled in size between 2000 and 2019. These include the Pakistani population, which grew from 204,000 to 554,000. However, some of the smaller origin groups, such as Bhutanese, Nepalese, and Burmese, stand out because they experienced the fastest growth rates, growing tenfold or more during this span. The Nepalese population increased from just 9,000 to 198,000.13 By contrast, Japanese have had the slowest growth rates among Asian Americans since 2000. Thus, while the largest groups shape the demographic characteristics of the overall Asian American population, disaggregated data, unique histories, and distinct migration and settlement patterns demonstrate that each origin group deserves analysis on its own terms.
In the midst of these sheer numbers are two more faces of post-1965 Asian America. One belongs to Tariq Akmal, who departed from Lahore, Pakistan, in 1984 when he was eighteen years old and arrived in Pullman, Washington. The other belongs to a girl who departed Chitwan District, Nepal, in 2004 when she was nine years old and arrived in San Pablo, California.
Before arriving in Pullman, Akmal had landed in Chicago at O’Hare International Airport. In his interview for SAADA’s First Days Project, his memories are infused with strong sensory experiences of sight, smell, and taste. Although he was familiar with large airports, having traveled to Europe, he was struck by the incredible expanse of O’Hare against the color of the sky, which appeared to be even bluer in this new place, and the smell of the concourses that he later realized had come from the industrial strength cleansers used in those days. In Washington State, his cousin picked him up from Spokane’s airport and, on their way to Pullman, stopped at a county fair, where Akmal tried a corn dog for the first time. “I never knew what a corn dog was even,” he recalled.14
The wondrous quality of the United States that Akmal had noted during those first few days had been forged by his previous positive interactions with “well-educated Americans who were so open to new ideas, who were so progressive.”15 He also experienced the welcoming and friendly nature of Americans as he went through the customs and immigration line during that first day. “A grandfatherly looking gentleman with a nice white mustache” had opened Akmal’s passport and said, “Welcome home, son.”16 Akmal had hoped that this would be the American spirit that he would encounter everywhere he went in the United States, but soon realized that that was not the case, and his overblown hopes became tempered by disappointment.
The first days of the nine-year-old girl who immigrated to California from Nepal were also filled with wonder and disappointment. She was disappointed that the “big buildings and fun stuff” of New York City that she had seen on television were not to be found in San Pablo. Yet, she was in awe of her first BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train ride that brought her and her family from San Francisco to San Pablo in forty-five minutes. She had never been on a train before. Coming from a “developing country,” such a fast transportation system “just felt new.”17
The girl soon learned that her new community was a violent place. One day when her parents were away from home, she saw the ice cream man getting beat up and robbed for twenty dollars, and she wondered why anyone would “make someone bleed” for such a pittance. The contrasting grandeur and despair of the new country shocked her but did not dampen her curiosity. She learned the English language by watching Tom and Jerry cartoons and Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting show, and by studying the dictionary because she loved spelling bees. Within a few months of arrival, her father and mother started working in the fast-food industry, so the girl became the household cook for her parents, her younger sister, her uncle—with whom they were staying—and his three roommates. The need to cook nurtured her passion for food and inspired new ambitions. Watching Food Network stars like Rachael Ray and Emeril Lagasse made her want to become “really, really famous,” and inspired her to role-play the host of her own cooking show in front of an audience consisting of her sister. Although she requested that her name be withheld from her First Days Project interview, and no photos of her or Akmal accompany their respective interviews, their vivid storytelling present themes of the post-1965 immigrant experience both unique and universal.
The 1965 Act initiated new waves of immigration that increased the number of female immigrants. Alongside new emigration policies in Asian-sending countries and changing social attitudes about female international migration, these waves contributed to balancing the predominantly male composition of Chinese, Filipino, and Indian communities that had settled in the US before 1965. Sometimes women immigrated to join their husbands and other family members. Other times, they were the ones to pioneer the immigrant trail by utilizing the occupational preferences of the new system.
One of these women was Viji Raman, who was born in Cochin, in the southern state of Kerala in India.18 She arrived in New York City in 1969 and initially resided in Rochester, New York, where her husband completed his medical residency. Her family relocated to Houston, where Raman together with six other women founded the organization Daya—which in Sikhism signifies compassion—to provide culturally specific services for South Asian women impacted by domestic violence. Its first service activity was establishing a volunteer helpline. Since it began in 1996, the organization has grown, and its idea of who is a survivor and the many types of abuse it addresses have expanded. In 2021, as Daya commemorated its twenty-fifth anniversary, the organization paid tribute to Viji Raman in a blog post titled “Women We Admire.” In it, Raman acknowledged her immigrant background and shared her hopes for future generations:
As a first generation Indian American, I know firsthand the challenges that immigrants have faced. Struggling to balance life, living in two cultures, gave me a unique perspective about life. Moving forward, I’m focused on the legacy I want to leave for my daughter, son, grandsons, and granddaughters. I want them to feel comfortable in their own skin. I want my grandsons to respect boundaries and understand the meaning of consent. I want to teach them that sexism is neither cool nor funny. I want to have conversations about empathy and healthy relationships.19
The occupational preferences for workers with needed skills facilitated the immigration of Filipino female medical professionals, most notably nurses, to alleviate critical shortages in inner-city public hospitals as well as rural healthcare institutions.20 The high demand for nurses contributed to a healthcare–industry ethnic niche for Filipino immigrants in general and the rise of immigrant women-owned healthcare businesses specifically. The research of medical sociologist Jennifer Nazareno spotlights the growing number of Filipino immigrant women in Southern California who have become private owners of government-subsidized small businesses in the long-term care industry. These women provide care to some of the most impoverished—as well as cognitively and physically disabled—elderly populations. While Filipino immigrant women entrepreneurs have created an important safety net for the most vulnerable in the American healthcare system, they are under tremendous stress to provide quality care within limited budgets. For example, Regina, the owner of a government-subsidized six-bed residential care facility, could not afford to hire any staff members initially. She recalled:
When I first opened my board and care in 2006, I remember sleeping on the floor by the door for two weeks straight because one of my first residents would wake up in the middle of the night and keep saying “Help me, help me . . .” But she was confused, physically unstable, so I was afraid she might fall. . . . I told her daughter that it was so difficult for me to care for her, but her daughter did not have anywhere else to take care of her because of her SSI [Supplemental Security Income]. So I took care of her for almost a year. So I was the employer, caregiver, licensee, maid . . . you name it! Sometimes you know the kids are fighting too and you’re in the middle. They only pay $1500 but want best care. Some of them, some of the kids tell you, do your job, that that’s what we’re paying you for . . . and they don’t even know how hard it is to take care of mom.21
In the first few decades after the passage of the 1965 Act, the occupational preferences and non-preference category facilitated the immigration of highly educated Asian medical professionals and engineers as well as business investors. Their backgrounds created a simplistic perception that Asians were innately good at particular occupations and skills, especially in STEM fields. If the Asian American faces you encounter are predominantly those of STEM college students or employees, you might get that impression. Unfortunately, such notions reinforce the model minority stereotype and the cultural expectation of Asian American socioeconomic success. They also obscure the dual nature of post-1965 Asian immigration, which includes less educated persons who are not part of the highly specialized STEM workforce.
The dual nature of post-1965 Asian immigration is partly a product of the 1965 Act’s prioritization of family immigrants who did not necessarily have highly educated backgrounds, investment capital, and specialized skills. In the twenty-first century, income inequality among Asian Americans has become more pronounced. Researchers Rakesh Kochhar and Anthony Cilluffo note that, from 1970 to 2016, the gap in the standard of living between Asians near the top and the bottom of the income ladder nearly doubled. Asians have displaced Blacks as the most economically divided racial or ethnic group.22
The growing number of undocumented Asian immigrants and their vulnerability to exploitation further contribute to the presence of Asian Americans in low-paid, precarious work. Undocumented Asian immigrants are often rendered invisible by the perception that undocumented migration is a Latino issue and a unique problem related to the US-Mexico border. However, according to scholars Karthick Ramakrishnan and Sono Shah, one out of every seven Asian immigrants is undocumented. In the United States, there are approximately 1.7 million undocumented Asian immigrants, accounting for about 16 percent of undocumented immigrants in the country.23 The number of undocumented Asian immigrants has tripled since 2000.
The numerical caps of the post-1965 immigration system and increasing visa backlogs for both family-based and occupational preferences gave rise to this phenomenon. For example, by 1970, the waiting period for a “third preference” occupational visa—for skilled workers and professionals—was already thirteen months. In 1970, an immigration amendment allowed foreign workers to fill permanent positions in the United States through a temporary H-1 visa that migrants could receive in significantly less time. These two factors—the extraordinary wait times that can be decades long for immigrant visas, and the expiration of various temporary visas for work, study, or tourism—have contributed to the increase in undocumented Asian immigration.
Another face of post-1965 Asian America is Anthony Ng, who came to the United States from the Philippines as a twelve-year-old. Ng is a DACA recipient. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, protects undocumented immigrants who were minors upon arrival from deportation and allows them to work and study in the United States. After graduating from the University of California, Irvine, Ng worked at the nonprofit civil rights organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Los Angeles, advocating for the protection and expansion of immigrant rights. Ng spoke to the Washington Post in 2017, a few days after President Trump announced that the program would end. When asked whether he felt ignored because Latinos are the face of the immigration debate and if that even mattered, Ng responded:
It really does matter. When you feel invisible, you don’t feel connected, you feel isolated. Acknowledging that there are diverse immigrant communities—there are black immigrants, Asian immigrants, LGBT immigrants—means a lot of those folks hold those identities. The first time I met other undocumented Asians, I felt I was understood; I didn’t have to explain myself.24
The Supreme Court blocked President Trump from ending DACA, but the program’s status remains uncertain.
The struggles of Asian immigrants in low-wage and precarious work are often hidden behind the model minority stereotype and the emphasis on post-1965 professional immigration. Restaurants and other food services, and nail salons and other personal care services are two of the major industries that employ them. In the 1970s and 1980s, the labor and entrepreneurship of Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Nepali, Tibetan, and Latino immigrants and refugees transformed nail salons from an elite, luxury service to a more accessible, affordable one.25 In 1996, state licensing exams were translated into Vietnamese in some metropolitan areas, reflecting the predominance of this group. Korean women were pioneers in New York’s nail salon industry, with over two thousand Korean-owned nail salons in the metropolitan area.26 By the late twentieth century, manicurists had become stereotyped as “quiet Asian women working in sweatshops,” reflecting a racial, gendered, and classed hierarchy separating the cheap salons from the high-end ones.27 The seemingly glamorous side of this multibillion-dollar industry belies its exploitive work conditions.
The story of Minh, the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of a Vietnamese nail salon worker, bears witness to the intergenerational toll of low-paid work. According to Minh, her mother had been an accountant, but started working in the nail salon industry after Minh’s father’s auto parts business had folded. Her mom thought that the industry would offer more job security, but she barely earned enough money from paychecks and tips to support herself, even though she was working over forty hours per week, five days a week. Despite the hazards of working amid chemicals and fumes from nail polishes and removers, her mom did not have healthcare. As a result, Minh worked multiple jobs to pay for her own college tuition so as not to burden her mother. Minh lamented, “I am angry seeing older Vietnamese women exploited in this industry on a larger level. As a society, we must ask why it is okay for Vietnamese and other immigrant women to fill the nail salon industry across the United States.”28
Higher education, specialized skills, and financial capital are among the privileges of immigrant professionals and investors. They fuel images of successful Asian Americans who do not need any help. These perceptions often exclude Asian Americans from discussions about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. However, according to Buck Gee and Denise Peck of the nonprofit Ascend Foundation, Asian success is an illusion. In their analysis of the leadership pipeline in the Bay Area technology sector from 2007 to 2015, they found that Asians were the largest cohort of professionals yet the least likely among all races to become managers and executives.29
Furthermore, Asian women were the least likely among all other racial groups to become executives. They face a “double glass ceiling.” “It turns out that the racial gap accounts for more of the disparity than the gender gap alone,” Peck says. “What that means is if you are an Asian woman, then not only do you suffer from the gender pay gap, but you are also heavily penalized for being Asian.”30 With increased awareness of these leadership ceilings and gaps, companies and organizations can collectively as well as individually address these disparities. Including Asian Americans in these discussions is a basic but integral step forward.
Finally, the post-1965 period is marked by many cases of anti-Asian hate and violence that predate the surge beginning in 2020. These include a spate of violence targeting South Asians in New Jersey in 1987. In September of that year, Navroze Mody was taunted and brutally beaten to death by a group of youths in Hoboken. Mody had just been promoted to a managerial role at Citicorp. A few days later, another Indian was beaten into a coma on a busy street corner in Jersey City Heights.
That same year, a note threatening to drive out the Indian community in Jersey City, penned by a hate group known as the Dotbusters, was published in a local paper. The group’s name refers to the bindi, or dot, that Indian women wear on their foreheads. The bindi has familial, social, and spiritual meanings. It can signify marriage, self-realization, and piety. Yet, in the midst of this violence, its meaning had tragically changed for Lalitha Masson, a gynecologist who had emigrated from India in 1966. Masson stopped wearing her bindi and opted for Westernstyle dress instead of her Indian saris. She hoped this would make her less of a target.31
EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
Just as there is no singular face that represents the United States, post-1965 Asian America is composed of many faces. They labor in various sectors and in diverse jobs within industries. Their faces include those of physicians in hospitals and caregivers in nursing homes, of massage therapists at spas and nail technicians in salons, of chefs and dishwashers in high-end and mom-and-pop restaurants, of high-tech engineers and computer factory assembly workers in Silicon Valley.
Writer Janice Lobo Sapigao’s debut book of poetry, microchips for millions, weaves binary code, English, and her family’s Philippine language, Ilocano, to make visible the thousands of immigrant women who help produce our ubiquitous tech devices, yet who we rarely acknowledge.32 It is dedicated to her mom who, in the poem “the assembly line,” works in the shadow of Silicon Valley.33 In the poem “the tech museum of innovation of 2012,” Sapigao refers to an exhibit called “reface,” which combines visitors’ eyes, noses, and mouths to create various expressions. The poem ends with the question: “even though we are small do you see us?”34
As of 2019, Asian Americans reside in every region, with the majority living in the West (45 percent), yet they also have a sizable presence in the South (24 percent), Northeast (19 percent), and the Midwest (12 percent). Nearly a third (30 percent), or roughly 6.7 million, live in the state of California. The states with the next largest Asian American populations are New York, Texas, New Jersey, and Washington. A closer look at growth rates, however, would shift our attention to North Dakota and South Dakota, which between 2000 and 2019 saw the fastest increases in Asian American populations. Indiana, Nevada, and North Carolina also saw significant growth.35
From this data, we might conclude that Asian Americans are everywhere. And, yet, we are nowhere. Nowhere to be found in American history textbooks, minus a few sentences about Chinese laborers building the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 or Japanese American internment during World War II. Nowhere on Hollywood movie and American television screens—again, with few exceptions. Consider the number of Hollywood films with an Asian-majority cast. One of them, Crazy Rich Asians, was released in 2018, twenty-five years after the previous one, The Joy Luck Club, in 1993. Before Joy Luck Club was Flower Drum Song in 1961.
In a 2021 study, The Prevalence and Portrayal of Asian and Pacific Islanders Across 1,300 Popular Films, scholars Nancy Wang Yuen and Stacy L. Smith and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that nearly 40 percent of the films reviewed had no Asian and Pacific Islander (API) representation at all. And of those API characters who did make it on screen, 25.3 percent died, often violently, by the end of the film. In the study, the juxtaposition of these findings with data on anti-Asian hate incidents during 2020 and 2021 is haunting.36 And it begs the question: Can one acknowledge a people’s humanity if one does not see them as multidimensional human beings in popular culture?
Many Asian Americans grapple with the complex messages that they should just work hard, be quiet, and not make waves in a nation that values speaking up and standing out. These messages partly stem from American societal expectations of the model minority. Sometimes, these messages come from our own family or community members, many of them immigrants, a result of their cultural values of modesty and respect of authority, but also their experiences of American nativism and racism.
Yet, there is also a history of Asian Americans’ resisting immigrant invisibility. Sharing their stories for SAADA’s First Days Project is but one example. SAADA launched the First Days Project in 2013 because it realized that stories of immigrants’ and refugees’ first experiences in the United States were not systematically being collected, preserved, and shared with others.
Immigrant health practitioners have documented their contributions to healthcare delivery on online media platforms, such as Zócalo Public Square. Before the emergence of COVID-19, post-1965 immigrant professionals worked on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic. After studying dentistry in India, Jayanth Kumar pursued a dental residency training program in the New York State Department of Public Health. He started his public health career during the onset of the AIDS epidemic. At that time, no one knew that AIDS was caused by the HIV virus. Dentists started observing people who had unusual ulcers and tumors called Kaposi’s sarcoma in the mouth but did not know how to manage or treat this condition. Kumar was part of the New York state health department’s team studying this problem and addressing the transmission of the disease. The department recommended that all dentists should wear gloves, masks, and eyewear for treating patients. Prior to the study, dentists were not wearing gloves while treating patients. Later, this guideline to wear gloves, masks, and eyewear—which we may take for granted in a dentist’s office today—became a requirement through regulation.
In the essay he contributed to Zócalo Public Square’s inquiry on how immigrants are making healthcare delivery more holistic and human, Kumar reflects:
I was able to see the impact of this policy, which within a short period of time made all dental offices improve their infection control practice—not only for HIV and AIDS, but also for other diseases like hepatitis B. The policy really transformed the way infection control is practiced in dentistry and dramatically reduced the transmission of infection in dental settings. That experience exposed me to the power of making big, system-wide changes in dental care.37
Kumar led one of these big changes, developing guidelines for oral health care during pregnancy that are now adopted in many states. Previously, pregnant women had difficulty obtaining dental care during their pregnancies.
Asian influences, from meditation to herbal medicine, have shaped the booming, trillion-dollar wellness industry. However, for Ka-Kit Hui, the integration of Eastern and Western medicine is not about profit, but rather the goal of making people all over the world healthier. In 1968, Hui departed Hong Kong and arrived in Los Angeles to study chemistry at UCLA. He initially aimed to introduce the Western world to a new drug derived from the Chinese herbal pharmacopoeia, following in the path of the 2015 Nobel laureate Tu Youyou, who discovered artemisinin, the anti-malarial drug derived from a Chinese herb used for fever and chills. Instead, Hui pursued an integrative vision of medicine, with an emphasis on health promotion, disease prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation. He founded the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine, one of the first integrative medicine centers in the United States, in 1993. In his Zócalo Public Square essay, Hui explains:
My method of integrative medicine . . . is not like an international buffet, where a provider picks randomly from a disjointed assortment of therapies, such as adding acupuncture or massage to a drug therapy. Instead, it is like a carefully curated dinner menu, with the most appropriate therapies working together to address the specific needs of each patient. We combine Western biomedicine’s strengths in disease detection, acute condition management, and vital system stabilization with Traditional Chinese Medicine’s concept of balance and emphasis on the body’s innate ability to heal.38
During the early decades of his career, Hui encountered the perception of Chinese medicine as quackery. The possibility of integrating traditional Chinese medicine with Western biomedicine was also met with skepticism. Since then, hundreds of Western-trained doctors have referred their patients to the Center for East-West Medicine, thousands of students have joined its educational programs, and Hui has worked with many institutions, including the US Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Hui reminds us of the benefits of immigrants’ innovative spirit: “Immigration, after all, is a risk, and we need to see more risk-taking to make health care safer, more effective, more affordable, and more accessible.”39
Platforms that publicize immigrants’ innovations and contributions are of the utmost importance because even though immigrants have transformed virtually every aspect of American life for the better, xenophobia continues to be an American tradition.40 Anti-immigrant sentiment dehumanizes immigrants by stereotyping them as diseased, lazy, or criminal. Do you know any of the faces of post-1965 Asian America? Might they belong to you, your family, or members of your community?
I do. I am the daughter of Filipino immigrants who settled in New York City during this time. I grew up among many Filipino immigrant nurses who lived in my neighborhood and worked in the surrounding hospitals, a phenomenon that inspired my first book on the history of Filipino nurse migration.41 For me, writing about post-1965 immigration is deeply personal as well as professional. I have many childhood memories of seeing the Statue of Liberty while walking in Battery Park or riding the Staten Island Ferry. The “golden door” that she represents had instilled hope in me.
During a family visit in the summer of 2018, seeing the Statue of Liberty stirred very different emotions. In the midst of yet another intense moment of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States—earlier that year, US Citizenship and Immigration Services changed its mission statement to eliminate a passage describing the US as “a nation of immigrants”—the sight of Lady Liberty compelled me to reflect on how and why such contradictory narratives of the United States continue to exist.42 Thus, I wonder if the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act has not become common knowledge because of this dispiriting American choreography that we perform, embracing immigrants as foundational to US history when we need their labor, skills, or other resources, and pushing them back when we need a ready-made enemy.
Asian Americans are in sight, but unseen. And this must change. Placing a human face on the Asian immigrant experience is one way to contest this vicious cycle of nativism. If you are part of this post-1965 history, I hope you share your story.