Asian Americans

To the Editors of The Crimson:

As a Harvard student of Chinese ancestry, I would like to comment on your recent article on Asian Americans at Harvard ("The Asian Quandary," October 27, 1986). First, I commend the article's author, David M. Lazarus, on the journalistic spirit in which he carried out his research. The issues of Asians Americans at Harvard are very broad and potentially controversial, yet any reader of his work can tell he made a sincere effort to objectively summarize the major idea of his topic.

However, the article did not show a balanced cross-section of the experiences of Asian Americans at Harvard. Lazarus dealt with the doubts and worries that some Harvard students feel, yet in writing with that goal in mind, he neglected to show that for every Harvard student of Asian descent who has such preoccupations, there is another Asian American here at Harvard who does not ponder his "Asian-ness versus American-ness."

The headlines of Lazarus' article clearly show this skewed coverage: "The Asian Quandary" and "Asian-Americans at Harvard--Finding an Identity Between the Assimilationist and Separatist Extremes."

To correct the author of these generalities, most Asian Americans are not in a quandary. The Asian Americans who face the "tensions between two cultures" spend as much time worrying about it as the average Harvard student worries about his or her acne problem. What "Of Orgo and Medical School?" The decision of whether or not to go pre-med is one faced by hundreds of Harvard freshmen and sophomores, and believe it or not, the majority of them are not from Chinese, Japanese, or Korean families.

Lazarus was quite right in pointing to the media's "Model Minority" theme as a source of misconception about Asian Americans. Yet he too fell victim to those newsworthy, yet oversimplified assessments of American Asians. Lazarus too readily accepts the fallacious idea that Asian Americans are caught between two conflicting cultures. There should be no conflict with being an American and being of Asian ancestry, for having grandparents who were born in Canton, Toyko or Seoul is just as American as having forefathers from Milan, Budapest or Edinburgh.

Those of us who were born and raised in San Francisco's Chinatown are just as American as those of us raised in New York's Little Italy or South Dakota's Black Hills. Asian Americans cannot "assimilate" into the American way of life because already are American--that's why we love pizza, hate the Unions' pu-pu platter, cheer the Red Sox and boo the Mets (or vice versa). We cannot "separate" from the "mainstream" because we already have visited Disney World, attended St. Paul's Academy or the Harvard School, and cannot help but dream of B-School then Wall Street success. Lewison Lem Lim '88