ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIESbe improved to the advantage of both legislators
and research academicians (see Yu and Liu 1992).
Much information on Asian Americans, par-
ticularly new immigrants, still depends on small
sample backyard research by individual investiga-
tors. In the post–civil rights movement decades,
studies on ethnic identities and race and ethnic
relations continue to flourish, adding new Asian
immigrants into the sample of observations and
analyses. The newly arrived Korean businessmen
and professionals gave birth to fresh topics in the
research literature. Publications on Korean pro-
fessionals and small businesses provided opportu-
nities to support the old ‘‘middleman’’ theory that
argued Asians succeded in finding business oppor-
tunities by being middleman between white and
black supplier and customer relations; (see Light
and Bonacich 1988) and also advanced an argu-
ment that newly emerged Asian-American eth-
nic business communities can best be understood
in the context of a global business community
(Min 1987, and 1988; Yu, E.Y. 1983, Light and
Sanchaz 1987).
Newer research also includes a collection of
refugee studies that involved Vietnamese,
Cambodians, and Laotian Hmongs. Publications
on the Vietnamese community centered largely on
the initial movement of refugees after the with-
drawal of American troops from Vietnam on April
25, 1975. Liu and his associates made a survey of
the first wave of refugees who were brought in
directly from Vietnam to Camp Pendelton in Cali-
fornia (Liu, Lamanna, and Murata 1979). He di-
rected the reader’s attention to the special status
of refugees vis-à-vis immigrants, and the pathway
to becoming refugees from previously nonrefugee
status as a result of both political and military
decisions. The distinction between refugees and
immigrants was later further elaborated by Haines
(1989a, 1989b). Gold (1992) compared Vietnam-
ese with Jewish refugees’ adaptive experience, and
showed commonalities of refugee experience in
general. Freeman (1984) on the other hand, col-
lected life histories and reported refugees’ own
accounts of flight and adjustment. Taken togeth-
er, studies on Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Lao-
tians focused more on their cohort experience as
refugees, rather than their transition to an emerg-
ing new ethnic community.
The smaller number of Cambodian and Lao-
tian Hmong people, relative to the Vietnamese, is
a major reason why they remained as a part of the
underserved Asian-American population in the
Asian-American literature. Much of the writings
on the Hmong people were based on clinical
interviews by practicing health providers and aca-
demic psychiatrists (Beiser 1987, 1988; Boehnlein
1987; Mollicca et al. 1987). There is also the reflec-
tion of a time when the concern was on wartime
trauma, refugee experience, and cultural adjust-
ment (see Chan 1994). These publications tend to
leave an impression that Hmong people had the
most difficult time in America, and are psychologically
maladjusted. A popular book that portrayed the
experience between American physicians and a
Hmong child revealed how culture interfered in
clinical judgment, no matter how well intentioned
(Fadiman 1997)There remained a scarcity of systematic stud-
ies, except for Agarwal’s (1991) work on Indian
immigrants. Agarwal’s survey on immigrant Asian
Indians in America was based on a rather small
sample of professionals. Available studies on im-
migrant Americans from the Indian subcontinent,
however, remained inadequate and woefully few.The arrival of voluminous publications on
new immigrants from Asia did not slow down
studies of prior to 1965 immigrants. A cumulative
bibliography began to focus on the aftermath of
Japanese nisei resettlement (Ichioka 1989a; Miyamoto
1989; Warren 1989), and sensei scholars began to
search for the Japanese identity of their parents’
generation (Ichioka 1989b ). A well-publicized book
by Ronald Tataki (1989), Strangers from a Different
Shore: A History of Asian Americans, contained ver-
batim recorded life histories. The book was well
received by the public but was poorly reviewed in
the social science literature because it lacks a new
conceptual framework for an old topic. However,
it did arouse renewed interest in Asian Americans
and their American experience, particularly at a
time of race consciousness.While the third-generation Japanese Ameri-
cans were busy finding their identities, nisei con-
tinued to search for the meaning of ‘‘being Ameri-
can.’’ In September of 1987, on the campus at the
University of California at Berkeley, a group of
scholars who belonged to the original Japanese
American Evacuation and Resettlement Study