ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES(JERS) at the Berkeley campus convened, and
reminisced about lost valuable information of that
period (see JERS 1989). Among those who attend-
ed include Ichioka, Miyamoto, L.R and J.H.
Hirabayashi, Suzuki, Spencer, Kikuchi, Takagi, and
Sakoda. Later researchers learned from discussion
notes that there was a diary kept by Charles Kikuchi,
known as the Kikuchi Diary, but it was destroyed. A
manuscript entitled American Betrayed by Profes-
sor Morton Grodzin was suppressed from being
published. Furthermore, another manuscript re-
portedly written by Violet de Christoforo described
internees’ refusal to leave camps as camps were
closed. The book also exposed the harshness of
expulsion. The existence of this manuscript, if
true, shed additional light on similar experiences
reported in Camp Pendelton as the Vietnamese
camps were closed, when refugees were labeled as
suffering from campetitis by the federal administra-
tor in charge of closing all camps that housed
refugees from Indochina (see Liu et al. 1979).
Clearly Asian-American research could not be
separated from the general field of race and ethnic
studies. In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers con-
tinued to be fascinated by Asians who had mutual
ill feelings in their home countries because of
neighboring dominations and the World War II
experience, but appeared to be united behind a
cause of advancing the status of Asian-Americans
as a group. Whether there is a single identity of all
Asian-Americans, or multiple subidentities of sepa-
rate entities depends, of course, on issues. But the
persistence of a multiple subidentities seem to be
present not only among the first-generation immi-
grants, which is understandable, it also appears to
be real among second- or third-generation ethnics.
Fugita and O’Brien’s (1991) volume on Japanese
Americans is a good illustration; they seemed to
have suggested that a single identity of Asian
Americans is but an abstract rather than a reality.
Among the Asian-American professionals, perhaps
this issue is more complex and deep than is com-
monly expected (see Espirita 1992).
There also had begun some long-awaited new
social science contributions to the literature on
Filipino immigrants in the 1980s that were absent
in the earlier generation. These studies includ-
ed Filipino-American income levels (Cabezas,
Shinagawa, and Kawaguchi 1986–1987), Filipino
assimilation (Pido 1986), and Filipino health prac-
tices (Montepio 1989).
As more practicing professionals took part in
studying Asian immigrants, there appeared in the
1970s and 1980s a bifurcation of writings on Asian
Americans: those that catered to an academic
audience and those that served as ‘‘voices’’ of the
grassroots community (see Radhakrishnan 1996).
It is understandable that, when more and more
publications contained a whole spectrum of top-
ics, the quality of writings would also vary widely.
At the conceptual level, there remained in these
writings a contrast between neo-Marxian and neo-
classical economic approaches to status attain-
ment, income, and employment opportunities for
Asian Americans.For example, the censuses of 1980 and 1990
confirmed the fact that U.S.-born Japanese and
Chinese men came closest to parity with white
men with respect to individual income. Japanese
and Chinese women have significantly lower in-
come than white women. The rest of those Asian
men and women continued to have lower incomes
than those of whites, Japanese, and Chinese. One
explanation seemed to have suggested that Asians
as a group valued education and scholastic achieve-
ment or individual effort, known as the human
capital theory (Becker 1975). But within various
Asian subgroups, the disturbing question is why
some Asian immigrants attained higher income
than others in the same ethnic group. Here both
Becker’s human capital and the labor market segmen-
tation explanations are applicable. The Lahei sug-
gests a two tier wage system prevail (see Cabezas,
Shinagawa, and Kawaguchi 1986–1987; Bonacich
1975, 1988, 1992).Perhaps a third explanation of the differential
pace of status attainment came from some writ-
ings about the Filipino immigrant-labor market
structure that related to the manner in which
newcomers came to join their kin-relatives. The so-
called ‘‘network recruitment’’ tended to form clus-
ters in the same occupation area, resembling the
earlier immigration patterns of Chinese in Califor-
nia (who came from four or five villages in Guangdong
Province) and Japanese farm workers (who were
recruited from southern prefectures of Japan).Unlike blacks and Native Americans, Asian
Americans varied significantly in terms of lan-
guage proficiency, which had an enormous impact
on income and the kinds of occupations in which
they tended to cluster together. Barry Chiswick