Features

LOS ANGELES – If the 2000 census reflected the decade of the Hispanic population explosion, look for the nation’s 2010 head count to reflect the decade of the Asian population boom. 

While much has been made of the fact that Hispanics increased their numbers to 35 million, putting them almost dead even with non-Hispanic blacks as the nation’s largest minority group, it was actually Asians who had the country’s fastest growth rate in the 1990s. 

That increase of nearly 75 percent — compared with almost 58 percent for Hispanics — may have caught some pundits by surprise. But it’s actually part of a trend that’s been building for decades, says Don Nakanishi, who heads the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

“In some ways, it’s not surprising at all,” says Nakanishi, who notes the U.S. Asian population has doubled every 10 years since immigration restrictions were eased in 1965. 

“Whereas in 1970 there were 1.5 million Asian Americans in the entire United States, you now have three major metropolitan areas that each have a million and a half,” he said, citing Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. 

With those kinds of numbers bringing the overall Asian population to 11.5 million in 2000, demographers expect America to have a much different look 10 years from now. 

Indeed, while large numbers of Hispanics were migrating in the 1990s from the country’s traditional strongholds of the Southwest to other regions of the country, Asians were quietly doing the same, albeit in smaller overall numbers. 

Many in particular moved from traditional Chinatowns, Little Tokyos and Little Saigons, which were either in or on the fringes of big cities, to what had in many instances been nearly all-white suburbs or even rural areas. 

As a result, places like the New York City suburb of Fort Lee, N.J., is now 30 percent Asian and located in a state that saw its Asian population increase as much as 94 percent over the past decade. Other states with similarly sharp increases include Louisiana, Arkansas, Pennsylvania and South Dakota. 

Typical of such migrating immigrants is Dong Hwan Park, 39, who was a chemical engineer when he moved from Seoul to Los Angeles’ Koreatown 10 years ago, coming here largely so his wife, a diabetic, could receive better medical care. 

Within a year he’d put his expertise with chemicals into creating his own pool-cleaning business. Soon after that, he bought a house in Diamond Bar, once a sleepy rural area 30 miles east of Los Angeles but now a booming suburb of 56,000 with a rapidly growing Asian population that slightly outnumbers whites 43 to 41 percent. 

“Everyday I read the Korean newspaper, I can listen to the Korean radio station, there are two Korean cable TV channels. So I am very comfortable,” he says of life there. 

The only downside, he admits sheepishly, is that there is so much Korean culture in Diamond Bar that his English language skills have probably diminished in the 10 years he’s been in the United States. 

In Northern California and suburban New York, meanwhile, many Asians have flocked to the computer and dot-com businesses, though not necessarily always in white-collar jobs. 

“Asian Americans do everything in that region,” Nakanishi said. “Everything from owning some of the most successful high-tech and dot-com and hardware-software companies, all the way to people who assemble computers and others who are simply security guards. 

“There’s been a remarkable growth and remarkable diversification of the Asian population,” he continues, adding, “That carries with it enormous ramifications for those regions and for the (new) Asian-American communities there.” 

Indeed, unless the people involved on both ends of the new migration are willing to learn lessons from the past, they can expect those ramifications to include serious tensions between the newly arriving group and the one already there, says Leland T. Saito, who has studied Asian migration patterns around the country. 

His 1998 book, “Race and Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb,” relates how a huge influx of Asians of various backgrounds into the more than two dozen cities that make up the sprawling San Gabriel Valley in the eastern half of Los Angeles County did much more than dramatically change the area’s look over the last 30 years. 

It also tested the attitudes of the large number of white residents who were already there, Saito says. 

In Monterey Park, the first U.S. city to record an Asian majority population, early Japanese residents sometimes literally had to sneak into town. 

“There were still restricted covenants attached to homes in the 1950s and ’60s,” Saito said in a recent interview. “Asian Americans sometimes had to buy homes using a white person to do the paperwork for them.” 

Although that ended in the ’60s, he noted that as recently as the mid-80s, when Chinese immigrants began flocking to the city five miles east of Los Angeles. Officials adopted a nonbinding English-only resolution and made efforts to bar Asian-language street and business signs. 

Today all that’s changed, as a car trip along one of the San Gabriel Valley’s major thoroughfares, Valley Boulevard, quickly shows. 

As one passes through such places as Alhambra, Arcadia, Temple City, San Marino, San Gabriel and Rosemead, all cities well on their way to having Asian majorities by the next census, signs in languages like Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai and Korean are seen frequently, sometimes all on one block. 

“There aren’t many of the old businesses left,” says Norbert Lighthouse who has operated Petrillo’s Pizza in San Gabriel, now 49 percent Asian, since 1954. 

Still, he isn’t complaining. 

He welcomes the newcomers and says he’s managed to pull a fair number of them into his restaurant with a special pizza that features seven, mainly vegetable, toppings. 

“A lot of the Asian customers really go for that,” he said, laughing. “I think maybe it reminds them of some of their own dishes.” 

Overall, he says, he’s happy to see the newcomers, adding they have re-energized the city that takes its name from the San Gabriel Mission. 

“They did put money into the area,” he said. “They’re building new buildings, new centers and everything. It’s caused a lot more traffic. But hey, that’s good for our business.”