Working toward a truly multicultural America

Working toward a truly multicultural America

Evi Mariani
The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

Having grown up as an Asian-American in the United States,
Professor Evelyn Hu-deHart is now a seasoned American citizen in
the area of discrimination.

During her early years as a Chinese immigrant in the U.S. in
the 1950s, her parents once were denied the right to rent an
apartment because some of the other owners did not want yellow-
skinned people around.

Initially, her family were refugees who fled from China
because her parents were neither Kuo Min Tang members nor
communists.

That political situation did not work in their favor, so in
1949, when Evelyn was only two, they took refugee in Hong Kong
until, in 1959, the government told them to get out of the
country.

The parents chose the perceived land of opportunity, the
United States of America.

They landed on Palo Alto, where Evelyn's father, who could
read English, got a job in a library at Stanford University and
her mother, who could not speak or read English, worked as a
cleaning lady.

"It was kind of sad, because my mother was a teacher in China
but in California she had to clean other people's houses," said
Evelyn, who is now in Japan, on an exchange program with Keio
University.

Educated at Palo Alto public schools, Evelyn grew up aware
that she was not fully accepted as part of the American
community.

"We were made aware of our differences: We dressed
differently, looked and spoke differently," she told The Jakarta
Post during a one-week visit to Indonesia.

"Sometimes difference is considered good, but often it can be
negative," she added.

She said that many young Asian-Americans said that they
remembered growing up conscious that their eyes were not large
enough and their noses too flat, so they wanted to change their
appearance to be more like Caucasian-Americans.

However, her experiences have not made her bitter. Instead,
she is now actively promoting an Asian-American movement to build
a truly multicultural nation in the U.S.

Because she did well at school, Evelyn received a scholarship
from Stanford University to major in political science, where she
became acquainted with the Asian-American movement.

"The movement gave us a framework and the strategy to change
the situation," she said. "Your strategy is not to fight back as
one person or one family, but to organize and fight back as a
collective against a systematic form of discrimination."

"Not just, 'I fight because you discriminate against me, so
I'm going to take you to court.' We fight back by saying, 'The
law itself must be changed'," she added.

Evelyn, who married a Dutch-American with whom she has three
children, said that the Asian-American movement modeled itself on
the black-American movement, which was, she said, "very
powerful".

Judging from her modest experience, people could easily
perceive her as a feeble woman.

She is, of course, anything but feeble. Her curriculum vitae
boasts a huge amount of research she has done, grants she was
awarded and academic positions she has taken.

Since 1973, she has been an assistant and associate professor,
and then full professor, at Washington University, University of
Arizona, Lehman College, New York University, University of
Colorado and now Brown University, Rhode Island.

These are just a few of her achievements, on top of books she
has written and a range of academic activities.

One of her fields of expertise is on the Chinese diaspora in
Latin America.

"But I also did much other research, not only on the Chinese
diaspora," she said.

"In America, I speak about many issues. I'm often invited to
speak about black-Americans or Mexican-Americans," she said.

"In some way, I'm creating a different model. I may be an
Asian-American, I know something about my own community. But I
also speak about other communities because they're of concern to
me, too," she said.

That's why, besides Chinese and English, she also speaks
Spanish, Portuguese, German and French.

Her extensive academic experience allows her to see herself,
as the part of the Chinese diaspora, somehow in an analytical and
sharp way.

She does not believe the internal stereotype Chinese people
like to use about themselves: that Chinese immigrants are
successful because they work hard.

"At school in Palo Alto I did well because I worked hard. But
not because I'm Chinese. I worked hard because my parents said we
had sacrificed a lot to live here," she said.

Chinese immigrants worked hard, as well as Javanese
immigrants, for example, she said.

"I do not like the kind of stereotype I think some Asians
propagate about ourselves. Some Asians have internalized this and
we say we work very hard. You know what? Everybody works hard,"
she said.

She always like to emphasize that the movement should be
carried out by building coalitions with other minority groups in
America and even with the majority, Caucasian-Americans, who
agree that multiculturalism is the best for the U.S.

"We have to convince Caucasian-Americans that multiculturalism
is in their own interest. We don't simply say, 'Do it because it
is a morally correct thing to do.' We say, 'Do it because it is
in your own interest, too'," Evelyn said.

"We call it interest conversion," she said.

"Building a multicultural nation does not mean minority
Americans versus Caucasian-Americans. We have to form an alliance
with Caucasian-Americans who say the future of America must be
different from the past," she said.

"We (the movement) are not where we want to be yet, but there
has been progress," she said.

"Our goal is that, at some time in the future, we are truly a
multicultural society, where people can be different in how they
express themselves and, at the same time, we have absolutely
equal rights and opportunities," Evelyn added.

"And we have to keep working at it; we cannot sit back and
relax," she said.