Overseas Chinese communities

[bhchao]

Here is a very informative page that talks about the Chinese communities overseas and the demographic makeup of a community's population, Cantonese, Taishanese, Taiwanese, or Mainland Chinese.

Historically the Chinatowns in the US have been allied to the KMT, but recently the PRC has tried to gain support among these communities. Just recently, a faction allied to the PRC clashed with a KMT-aligned group in San Francisco.

Most Chinese-Americans in Southern California live in the San Gabriel Valley, where there are strip malls operated by Chinese everywhere. Taiwanese Americans make up the largest percentage of Asian-Americans in the San Gabriel Valley. Cantonese people are predominant in Monterey Park, the affluent enclave of San Marino, and parts of South Pasadena; while Taiwanese are mainly centered in Arcadia (where there are Taiwanese-owned restaurants and boba-drink establishments everywhere, and where the Taiwan-based Din Tai Fung is located) and Rowland Heights. In Rowland Heights, many of the Taiwanese-owned businesses are adjacent to strip mall businesses operated by Koreans.

Mandarin-speaking people used to make up the majority of the Chinese population in Monterey Park. The waishengren from Taiwan first came to the city during the 1970's. Gradually Mandarin-speaking people in Monterey Park became a minority when people from other dialects poured into the city. In the early 1990's, people with Mandarin as their mother tongue began an exodus out of the city and settled into communities like Diamond Bar, Hacienda Heights, Chino Hills, or Irvine. They were later joined by Taiwanese immigrants.

At the University of California at Irvine, Asian-Americans make up 50% of the students on campus, possibly more.

http://www.answers.com/topic/chinatowns-in-north-america

[TSkillet]

University of California at Irvine

Except for UC Berkeley - all the UC's are known by their intials (UCLA, UCSB, UCSD, UCD, UCSC, etc.)

One joke which has been around for a long time is that UCI is the "University of Chinese Immigrants"

[bhchao]

I think Asians make up close to 50% of freshman at UCLA and UC Berkeley, with Chinese constituting the majority of Asian students.

On a side note, one of my favorite places in New York is Flushing in Queens. It has a large diverse ethnic population, from Cantonese and Taiwanese establishments to Indian and Pakistani. I think Chinatown in Manhattan is starting to become more and more Fuzhounese.

[TSkillet]

UC Berkeley (or Cal as it's students call it) - 32% Chinese, 41% Asian overall - or at least it was when I attended from 92-96. I don't think those numbers have swung too much in the 8 years since.

[gato]

http://www.ucop.edu/news/factsheets/flowfrc9503.pdf

The ban on affirmative action beginning in 1998 has had signficant effects on the student demographics at Berkeley. In general, you'll see more Asians, about the same percentage of whites, and much fewer blacks and Latinos. The changing demographics in California is another major factor. There're more Asian-Americans who were born or raised in the U.S. graduating from high school today than in 1995. They would presumably have much better SAT verbal scores than recent immigrants. The recent immigrants have an edge on the math portion, but only a little.

The numbers below, following the UC administration's chart above, don't include East Indians/Pakistani and Philipinos in the Asian-American category:

Among freshman enrolled at Berkeley in 1995, 33% self-identified as Asian-American, 30% as white, 13% as Chicano (Mexican-American), and 6.7% as African-American. 5.1% refused to state their ethnicity (most of these are probably either Asian-American or white).

In 2003, 38% self-identified as Asian-American, 28% as white, 8.8% as Chicano, and 4.3% as African-American. The "refuse to state" percentage was 8.4%.

The "refuse to state" figure was the highest in the first year of the affirmative action ban, shooting up to 15% in 1998. This number has fluctuate greatly since the ban as applicants tried to adjust to the changing admissions criteria.

[bhchao]

Based on your link, Asian-Americans make up the majority of freshman at each of the UC campuses except Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and Davis. The reason is probably because admitted Asian-Americans (those living in California) are more likely than admitted whites to choose UC campuses over non-UC universities.

Cal used to have a chancellor called Chang-Lin Tien? (I think that was his name) I heard he was really popular among students at Berkeley.

TSkillet, was he chancellor when you were there?

[Zhende ma?]

bhchao, I can understand what you mean about the clash betwen the PRC and KMT allied Chinese communities. I remember I was in San Francisco last October. On October 1, Grant St., the main throughfare in Chinatown, was awash with the PRC 五星红旗 and banners that declared ＂促统反独＂. A little over a week later on double ten day on 10/10 the street was covered with ROC flags and pro-Nationalist slogans. Of course, both had celebrations with officials from China or Taiwan. I wondered how many tensions could be simmering in the background.

[gato]

Cal used to have a chancellor called Chang-Lin Tien? (I think that was his name) I heard he was really popular among students at Berkeley.

Tien was the chancellor when I was an undergrad at Berkeley, too. He passed away in 2002 at the age of 67. Immediately prior to Tien's becoming chancellor, there's was a controversy involving Asian-American admissions, allegations of quota limiting Asian-American admissions, and threatened lawsuits. The admissions critieria were changed to give test scores and grades a greater emphasis. Maybe Tien was chosen to counter those charges of discrimination.

In retrospect, I see Tien as being a great populist chancellor, very accessible to students. You'd see him walking around the campus all the time. I think he attended almost all the football and basketball games, too. He was very vocal in his opposition to the ban on affirmative action. Some people say that he resigned as chancellor in part as a protest to the ban. It was during his chancellorship, the state budget crisis of the early 1990s, that Berkeley started to move away from reliance on California state funding and began to raise much more money from the private sector. That's probably the main reason more and more buildings on campus are named after private donors rather than old professors and chancellors (the former practice). I think Tien was critical in increasing donations from Asian and Asian-American donors.

He had a very thick Chinese accent, and at the time I thought that might be an obstacle to his acceptance. But it seems that people of all background loved him regardless, probably because it really looked like he loved the school and the students and was working so hard.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2002/10/tien.html

Tien was born on July 24, 1935, in Wuhan, China, and educated in Shanghai and Taiwan. With his family, he fled China's Communist regime for Taiwan in 1949. After completing his undergraduate education at National Taiwan University, Tien arrived penniless in the United States in 1956 to study at the University of Louisville. Supported by scholarships, he earned his master's degree there in 1957 and then a second master's degree and his PhD in mechanical engineering at Princeton University in 1959.

He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1959 as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. In 1962, when he was 26 years old, Tien became the youngest professor to receive UC Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award, an award for which he was enduringly proud.

[bhchao]

Being a student at Berkeley during Tien's tenure must have been quite interesting. Remember that infamous Naked Guy at Berkeley? I think that incident also coincided with his chancellorship at Berkeley, prompting Tien to ban nudity on campus.

I was about to graduate from high school then, and people at my school were talking about it.

[bhchao]

Here was a very poignant interview conducted with Chancellor Tien. It looks like he had a big heart that made him so well liked by students. It takes a lot of courage to go against the UC Board of Regents over affirmative action, which I remembered many Californians wanted to do away with, especially in the aftermath of the proposition that wanted to deny health services to illegal aliens in California. But that also shows he was a champion of the underdog.

Chancellor Tien was to Berkeley as Charles Young was to UCLA.

http://www.asianweek.com/070497/interview.html

"I have a broken dream. I didn't make it as an NBA basketball player. I worked really hard but my height never changed in the upward direction, so I feel that is my broken dream. "

[TSkillet]

I was there during Chancellor Tien. He's possibly the greatest man I've ever met. Self-made immigrant makes really good. Great administrator - kept Cal's professor's from leaving, despite a dwindling budget, used to go around campus picking up trash - one time I was studying for finals in Moffitt and he came in with a huge box of cookies and walked around giving them out and exhorting us: "Students! Study hard!".

I miss him. He was a role model.

Also, he was the biggest Cal football and basketball fan - he once changed his flight coming back from a University presidents and chancellor's meeting to swing through kansas to watch the bears take on the jayhawks. He would lead the band after every Big Game win (okay, there were only a few during his time).

He did preside over a very turbulant time at Cal - from the Oakland Hills fires, to the hostage crisis at Henry's, to Rosebud and the People Park's Riots - the dismissal of Affirmative Action and . .. Jason Kidd.

[gato]

Remember that infamous Naked Guy at Berkeley? I think that incident also coincided with his chancellorship at Berkeley, prompting Tien to ban nudity on campus.

I met the Naked Guy, aka Andrew Martinez, at a co-op party in my freshman year. The band Rancid was playing. Martinez had just been kicked out of school. He told me that he was going to Europe and do a speaking tour of some sort. Then he took off his clothes and started moshing. The mosh pit quickly emptied out at that point.

[TSkillet]

Andrew and I were in school at the same time - but I never met him. Saw him plenty of times - I do remember a bunch of my friends and I were sitting around watching him on some daytime tv show (Maury? Montell?) and we were saying how cool it would be if he was really well-spoken and had a great reason for going to class naked.

And he gets on national TV and says "basically the idea came to me when I was smoking a lot of pot". Way to perpetuate stereotypes of Berkeley students.

[bhchao]

Here is an article published last week about San Marino's Asian majority. http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/Stories/0,1413,206%257E22097%257E2858314,00.html

"Third in an occasional series Lindsay Jenkins wanted to run for social chair of her sophomore class, but she wasn't sure if she had a chance to win.

She is involved in drama, choir and cheerleading. Peppy and outgoing, she fits the stereotype of the can-do student leader.

But at San Marino High School, the conventional wisdom is that it is difficult for a white candidate to muster enough votes from a student body that is more than 70 percent Asian.

Jenkins' mother convinced her to run anyway. One of only a handful of white students to seek office last spring, she lost against two Asian opponents....

The school's comfortable Asian majority has even given rise to a unique brand of slang. In some circles, the term "white' denotes someone who is laughably mainstream and ill-informed about other cultures. "Fobbing' a derivative of "fresh off the boat' means blaring Chinese pop tunes on the stereo or picking up red bean popsicles and frozen shumai at the Chinese supermarket.

In the space of a few decades, immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong have transformed San Marino from a bastion of lily-whiteness into a place where multimillion dollar homes sport Buddhist shrines and many of the old people who putter around Lacy Park in the early mornings speak only a few words of English.

With 70.7 percent of its 1,200 students claiming Asian ancestry, San Marino High School has the second-highest concentration of Asian students of any high school in the state. Only Gretchen Whitney High School in Cerritos, at 75 percent, has a more heavily Asian student body.

The cultural shift at San Marino High School offers a glimpse of the future for area school districts such as Arcadia and Diamond Bar, where the Asian population tops 50 percent, and for other places nationwide where children are applying Asian immigrant work ethics in the classroom.

While majority African-American schools, despite desegregation efforts, have long been a fact of American life, and majority Latino schools have also become common in the inner cities, the majority-minority school in a wealthy suburb is a recent phenomenon. Unlike other racial minorities, Asians as a group outperform whites on standardized tests and other measures of academic achievement. San Marino is one of the highest-scoring public school districts in the state....

In 1970, the Chinese population of San Marino was a mere 15 individuals. By 1980, it had grown to 486, by 1990 to 3,304, and by 2000 to 5,260 an eleven-fold increase over just two decades.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, San Marino's population is about 50 percent Asian, with the vast majority of Chinese or Taiwanese origin. Latinos are four percent and African Americans less than one percent.

The trend in San Marino mirrors that in the San Gabriel Valley at large. Beginning in the 1980s, immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong fled crowded islands where the specter of a Chinese takeover loomed and where only the very best students could go to college. Those who could afford it settled in San Marino, attracted by its leafy tranquility and top-notch public schools....

"Our concept of education in Taiwan is that we push the kids to study and we don't emphasize sports or community service,' said Nancy Chu, an immigrant from Taiwan with two older children who graduated from San Marino High School and a son who is a sophomore there. "My (oldest child) you could say she had a harder time. I pushed her to study a lot. But as I was here longer, I gradually felt that an education like this is pretty good.' "

[TSkillet]

ha! I have friends who attended both San Marino High and Whitney High.

Both are Taiwanese.

[马杰]

I see the growth of pro-mainland students as a locally destabilizing threat to communities in the US, especially where there are large immigrant Chinese communities.

Not only do they pose a threat to the peaceful, pro-freedom Taiwanese communities but they bring the possbility of CCP influence on local and state politics.

Having CCP officials at these pro-mainland events serves to act as a more ominous sign.

Who is watching them? The FBI, NSA or Secret Service? If they can pull themselves away from pushing around anti-Bush protestors and recreational pot-smokers they would find CCP officials pushing pro-Beijing agendas in the US a very real problem.

[Outofin]

I see the growth of pro-mainland students as a locally destabilizing threat to communities in the US' date=' especially where there are large immigrant Chinese communities.

Not only do they pose a threat to the peaceful, pro-freedom Taiwanese communities but they bring the possbility of CCP influence on local and state politics.

Having CCP officials at these pro-mainland events serves to act as a more ominous sign.

Who is watching them? The FBI, NSA or Secret Service? If they can pull themselves away from pushing around anti-Bush protestors and recreational pot-smokers they would find CCP officials pushing pro-Beijing agendas in the US a very real problem.[/quote']

This post raised my attention. You see the growth of pro-Mainland as a threat. If I were you, I would pay much more attention to the American journalists, entrepreneurs and politicians (maybe including your president) who pro the Mainland, because the foreign students are nobody compared to these people in term of their influence. That would make your logic more solid.

[gato]

I see the growth of pro-mainland students as a locally destabilizing threat to communities in the US, especially where there are large immigrant Chinese communities.

Go talk to some of them, and you'll find they're not who you think they are.

[TSkillet]

I don't think they're destabilizing local US overseas Chinese communities. I will admit the presence of CNP members might be a little worrying, but I've never seen the tension in the three US cities where I've lived (SF, LA, Houston) between Mainland and Taiwanese immigrants - that say a Vietnamese community might have between former foes.

[Outofin]

TSkillet,

马杰 is not only worrying about "a locally destabilizing threat to communities" on the micro level. The thing that bothers him the most is that on the macro level "the possbility of CCP influence on local and state politics". The scarest part is that whether they're going to unleash some men in black to "watch" you. I do hope I misread that post.