In “With
772 you get eggroll,” we re-ran excerpts from a 1981 column that examined
the immigration issue as it appeared in the Springfield of that day. I promised
to post the
original, much longer essay, so here it is, as it appeared in our paper of
Sept. 3, 1981.
Which come first? The sweet and sour
chicken or the egg roll? Springfield now boasts no fewer than nine Chinese
restaurants. Those restaurants, like Darwin’s Galapagos finches, prompt certain
speculations about the evolution of local populations. Did Springfieldians not
eat Chinese ten years ago because there were no Chinese restaurants? Or were
there no Chinese restaurants because Springfieldians did not eat Chinese? Or
(most likely of all) was it because there were no Chinese?
According to the U.S. Census, there were 772 Asians of
various nationalities living in Springfield in 1980. The city’s Indians,
Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese thus compose only 0.6
percent of its population, which makes them collectively an even smaller
minority than aggregate-demand Republicans. But the Asian presence in the city
is out of proportion to their numbers, in part because of their color, in part
because of their costume, and in part because it sometimes seems that every
single one of them cooks.
It is true that restaurants have long served as high-water
marks by which one can chart the ebb and flow of ethnic subcultures in U.S.
cities. I assume there were scone shops in colonial New England; the Chinese
aren’t the first new arrivals who learned that the most mundane native skills
acquire a profitably exotic appeal in this country. For those whose ambition is
thwarted by handicaps of language or education, the skillet is as good as a
college degree. Thus the fact that Stevie’s Latin Village in Springfield now
houses the China Inn is a socioeconomic datum of considerable significance. So
is the opening of the House of Hunan in a defunct Burger Chef, and the conversion
of Taft’s (a hamburger joint on the east side where I took my first-ever date
after a dance) into Chishing and Pam Ming King’s Hong Kong Garden.
How, then, does one explain the fact that although roughly
half the Asians living in Springfield are Indian, there is not a single Indian
restaurant in the capital? One must remember that restaurant-keeping among
Asians is not, like black hair, a genetic predisposition. It is circumstance,
not chromosomes, that put so many Chinese in the kitchen in Springfield, and it
is circumstance that has kept Indians out of it. The Indians are the WASPs of
the local Asian community. Because it remains one of India’s two official
languages, immigrant Indians usually speak English. They are schooled in
democracy, and, like early Americans, were molded in part by the British
colonial experience. They are well-educated and ambitious, and arrive here not
as refugees but as physicians, engineers and teachers. It took the Italians of
Springfield three generations to make it from the ethnic enclaves on the north
side to the affluent subdivisions of the west side; it took the Indians only as
long as the drive from the airport.
The Indians, in short, came admirably equipped to excel,
compared to their hemispheric kin. Because it is both a bureaucratic and a
medical center, Springfield is home to what is probably a higher percentage of
Indian professionals than might be found in other U.S. cities. (It’s been
estimated that half the Indians in Springfield are engineers.) Of the nation’s
362,000 Indians there are more than a few restaurateurs, to be sure; New York’s
Mayor Ed Koch praised Indians at an India Day parade by saying, “They give
us their culture and their taxes—and their wonderful restaurants.” If any
of Springfield’s Indians were to open a restaurant, one suspects, it would be
as a tax write-off.
If Indians are the WASPs of the current Asian immigration,
the Chinese and Vietnamese (and to a lesser extent the Koreans and Taiwanese)
are its Poles and Italians. Americans are generally ignorant of the East; when
our Debbie Courtright interviewed a Gujerati engineer named Ashok Bhatt in
1978, he told her of being shown a bathtub by his American hostess, as if he’d
never seen one back home. The diversity of language, culture, history, and
religion among the Asian newcomers is at least as broad as that of white
America’s European ancestors. In the course of my own limited rambles around
town I have encountered an exiled South Vietnamese army officer, the son of a
South Korean political dissident, a Calcutta physician, and a Chinese
economist; a sign across the street from my apartment announces the reassuring
presence of one Chan-soo Kim, M.D. Peasant, fisherman, Ph.D.—all are
“Asian” although many of them did not even feel “Indian” or
“Chinese” until they left the homeland, where their allegiance was to
caste, state, or province. Some came as political refugees, some as economic
refugees. Some are Buddhist, others Catholic; a Taiwanese in 1980 was reported
making a living in Modesto as a Methodist minister. Most arrived relatively
unschooled in English, and although few were unskilled, language barriers kept
many from practicing the trades they followed at home.
They share much in
common nonetheless, principally a capacity for hard work which Americans have
long since chosen to honor rather than imitate. C. tells me that when her color
TV went on the fritz she chose not to surrender it to the clumsy ministrations
of the store which had sold it but took it instead to a Mr. Kim, a Korean repairman.
He proceeded to violate every tenet of modern American business practice by 1)
fixing the set; 2) fixing it promptly, and; 3) charging a fair price for the
work. I foresee Asian banks, built on the profits of countless bowls of won
ton. Who knows? Perhaps someday some enterprising Vietnamese, having made a
killing in catering, will go into land development and open a subdivision
called “Mekong Meadows.”
The fact of the Asians’ rise does not interest me as much as
the manner of it. Consider politics. It will be fascinating someday to listen
to local pundits gather on the tube to argue the Buddhist question the way they
argued the Catholic question in the ’60s, more fascinating still to see what
innovations await the traditional political weiner roast. The Indians have
already reached one political milestone in Illinois; an Indian businessman has
been indicted in Chicago on charges that he illegally funneled campaign money
to Dan Walker’s 1976 gubernatorial race through a front called the American Asian
Alliance. If true, the allegations will establish again that public officials
in this country are bribable by anyone, regardless of race, creed, color, or
national origin.
As noted, the
Indians have already risen, economically speaking. But their social progress
may be stickier. Springfield is a small Midwestern town, after all, even if it
does have nine Chinese restaurants. If it took the Illini Country Club
seventy-five years to admit a Jew, for example, how long will it be before it
admits a Hindu? There is always the chance that Indians may choose to organize
their own counter-country club, much as local Jews did in 1956 when they
founded the Lake Shore Club. (V.S. Naipal has written of the men of Rajasthan,
who were “a model village, and-so they considered themselves. There was
little more that they needed…. It took time to understand that they were only
peasants, and limited.” Country Club material if ever there was any.) Of
course, middle class Indians are more likely to play cricket or tennis than
golf. But they have shown a flair for snobbishness, especially toward other
Asians, and so I predict they will be aces at the country club. We might even
see a club from which white Americans are banned, which would be nice.
Clearly, accommodation will require some adjustments. I
confess I look forward to that night when the first Asian-American is crowned
queen of the Beaux Arts Ball. She will doubtless bear a name like Traci Ting,
and she will march from the podium to the rhythm of old-line members beating
their gray heads against the walls out in the lobby. There may even come a day
when the girls of the Junior League get together to swap curry recipes. Brave
new world, indeed.
The new Asians will make it in Springfield. It will cost
them much, of course. Already many have made the traditional adjustments of the
displaced. On Monday they change their names to conceal their ethnic origins,
then on Tuesday form an association to celebrate the ethnic identity they
abandoned on Monday. On Wednesday they reserve a booth at the Ethnic Festival,
and on Thursday they run for the school board.
Usually, the greater the sense of loss of ethnic identity,
the more self-consciously ethnic one becomes; the process of becoming
Asian-American, like that of becoming Italian-American or German-American,
means becoming neither Asian nor American. Last winter I often saw an Asian
family — Vietnamese I believe — emerge in the mornings from their upper-floor
apartment downtown. One of them was an old man who wore a stocking cap against
the unfamiliar cold and whose eyes looked blank, as if they’d so wearied of
trying to understand all the new things they saw that they gave up trying to
see. Every time I saw him I thought of my own great-great-great-grandfather
who, having shepherded his brood to this country from Germany, died just two
months later, very far from home, of what I have always assumed was a broken
heart. Immigration is for the young; the old have too much baggage to make such
trips.
This article appears in Feb 11-16, 2016.
