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.