Asian American Culture Essay

It doesn’t matter what kind of ethnicity you are, or how you were brought up. Everyone is deeply rooted in their own culture. “Culture” has a different meaning to everyone. Comparing American culture to Chinese culture we will find many different meanings to the word “culture”. For example, we Americans are always looking for something bigger and better for our future, and the Chinese are content with a small reserved lifestyle with no intentions of changing it for something bigger. A culture is a way of life of a group of people-the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and are passed along by communication and imitation from

Also I am including recent immigrants from Asia in defining the terms Asian American Japanese American, for the sake of simplicity due to resource and time constraints.

To be young and Asian in America is a special brand of torture. There is an unspoken dictum of silence that grips Asian youth, a denial of our place in popular culture. Asian youth walk in America not quite sure where we fit in-black children have a particular brotherhood, Hispanic children have a particular brotherhood, white children own everything else. We cannot lay claim to jazz or salsa or swing; we cannot say our ancestors fought for equality against an oppressive government or roamed the great hallways of power across the globe. We do not have a music, a common hero, a lexicon of slang. Asian youth experience personal diasporas every day.

Asian Americans are a diverse group of people who are among the fastest growing minority groups in the United States. Despite their minority status, they often surpass Whites in America and do so while holding on to their cultural values regarding family, education, and success.

Growing up as an Asian American, I often struggle to identify my own cultural identity. Being the first generation of both my mother and father’s side of the family, I more than often get confused between American and Asian culture when applying them to society or at home. While being raised at home, I am largely influenced by culture and traditions from Asian parents and relatives. However, when I go to school or someplace else, I am heavily judged for practicing part of my Asian culture because it is entirely different than western or American. With that being noted, I began to learn and adapt to the western culture in hopes of fitting with society as well of trying to keep my Asian culture intact. As can be seen, this situation I dealt with is the same problem the whole Asian American community faces. Mainly focusing on younger generations like me for example, the Asian American community struggles to adapt to the western culture because they were raised with an Asian influence. Wishing to fit in society and be part of the social norms, the Asian Americans community faces issues that identify their cultural identity.

Asian Americans with no other ancestry comprise 4.8% of the U.S. population while people who are Asian alone or combined with at least one other race make up 5.6%

Although Asian Americans comprise only about 5% of the U.S. population, this group is the fastest growing segment of American society. Despite such rapid expansion, Asian Americans are widely underrepresented throughout media, whether in television, cinema, or literature. Moreover, there are different stereotypes associated with Asian Americans. One of the most pervasive stereotypes details how Asian Americans are a “model minority”. In essence, this myth describes how anyone who is Asian American will become a successful individual able to achieve the “American dream”.

The exporting of American pop culture has been going on ever since America has become a big world power along with other countries. Sometimes we don’t know how westernized we are since it’s all around us. There are some positives to this export to other countries, but there is also negatives. Some negatives to the exportation of American pop culture are the misrepresentation of other societies, teachings of extreme beliefs, and the erasing of other cultures around us.

For 20 years, Asian Americans have been portrayed by the press and the media as a successful minority. Asian Americans are believed to benefit from astounding achievements in education, rising occupational statuses, increasing income, and are problem-fee in mental health and crime. The idea of Asian Americans as a model minority has become the central theme in media portrayal of Asian Americans since the middle 1960s. The term model minority is given to a minority group that exhibits middle class characteristics, and attains some measure of success on its own without special programs or welfare. Asian Americans are seen as a model minority because even though they have faced prejudice and

In the 1990s, there were more than 7 million Asian Americans in the United States of America. Bureau of the Census has published that there is a total of 3,726,400 Asians, which includes Pacific Isalnders, which is represented to about 1.6 percent of the population. Chinses Americans were the first Asian to be migrated in the United States.

When I moved to United State of America, and entered college, I found out that it is not easy being an Asian-American. As I have lived in U.S. for two years so far, I believe I qualified to say that and I am not the only one. Even though culture shock and psychological state are normal for people like me who just came to U.S for 2 years, other young Asian-Americans who born and raised in U.S also continually suffer with their bi-cultural identities.

The pain and the suffering, the oppression, and the exclusion all describe the history of Asia America. When they arrived to the United States, they become labeled as Asians. These Asians come from Japan, China, Korea, Laos, Thailand, and many other diverse countries in the Eastern hemisphere. These people wanted to escape from their impoverished lives as the West continued to infiltrate their motherland. They saw America as the promise land filled with opportunity to succeed in life. Yet due to the discrimination placed from society and continual unfair

Asians have migrated to and have lived in the Americas since the days of our founding fathers. The first to come from the Eastern Hemisphere were a small group of Filipinos in the early 18th century that settled in present day Louisiana. The first major influx of Asian Americans was Chinese Americans who came in the 1800’s to find financial opportunity during the California gold rush. They settled in the Golden State and eventually spread out all over the United States, creating the now-famous Chinatowns that millions of Americans visit every year. There is a continual migration of well educated South Asians and East Asians for job and education opportunities and their success has formed the basis for the “myth of the model minority” (MMM). This is the idea that all people who are Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) are successful both socioeconomically and educationally. This does have a logical basis rooted in statistics—AAPI students are reported to have higher grade point averages, math scores, and overall standardized tests scores on tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the American College Testing Exam (ACT). Other studies often use a racialized rhetoric comparing Asian Americans to white Americans in terms of education and socioeconomic status while contrasting them to the so-called “lazy” and “incapable” Hispanic and African Americans.

As Japanese economy soared, its media products such as manga, TV shows, movies and music spread out across Asia. Especially, the young people in Asia began to embrace Japanese culture rather than the culture from the most dominant culture exporter- the United State, and this phenomenon was analyzed by Koichi Iwabuchi in his Feel Asian Modernities. His account of this intra-regionalization in Asia is cultural proximity that Japanese culture shares intimate similarities with other Asian countries and appeal to the audience to perceive this cultural flow.[ Iwabuchi, K(2004), Introduction: Cultural globalization and Asian media connections. Feeling Asian Modernities, pp 12.] In this way, American

T Over the past decades, an increasing amount of cultural products such as television dramas, movies, animations and pop music have gained immense popularity among Asian countries, especially in Mainland China since the Chinese economic reform in the early 1980s.