ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES(1974) has demonstrated that English proficiency
is a major factor in income parity. P.G. Min (1986)
showed that Filipino and Korean immigrants, an
even match for income, engage in quite different
occupations. Koreans engage in business but Fili-
pinos do not. Min pointed out that the language
barrier forces Koreans to be self-employed, no
matter how hazardous their business turns out to
be. Furthermore, it was Korean immigrants’ link-
age to industrial development in Korea that led to
the development of some of the Korean communi-
ties in the United States. Filipino communities, on
the other hand, did not develop similar enter-
prises to form a visible ethnic enclave in America.
Instead, they depended more on ethnic profes-
sional societies and trade associations as basis of
ethnic cohesion.
The same rationale was also applied in the
case of ‘‘new’’ Chinatown studies. The earlier de-
scriptive studies of Chinatown either over-roman-
ticized the exotic quality of an ethnic enclave, or
highlighted the worst side of humanity. To see
Chinatown as a unique economic system is per-
haps a new approach that is not without controver-
sy. Zhou (1992), herself a new immigrant scholar
from China, took the conceptual framework of her
major advisor A. Portes, and wrote and published
her dissertation on New York’s Chinatown. She
ably showed how a separate economic system had
developed and embedded in urban America. Zhou’s
book on Chinatown is refreshingly different from
several other volumes on the same topic published
between the latter part of the 1970s to the early
part of the 1990s that continued to portray pat-
terns of conflict and cleavage (Wong 1977; Kuo
1977; Kwon 1987; Kinkead 1992).
The rise of Asian-American Studies programs,
either as a part of multicultural or ethnic studies,
or as an independent program, certainly has been
instrumental in the increasing research and num-
ber of publications that deal with Asian-American
communities. Given the interdisciplinary nature
of the field, the multitudes of topics to be covered,
and the unusual personal experiences of writers,
the uneven quality of these publications is expect-
ed and sometimes unavoidable. Among studies on
new communities, on income and status attain-
ment, and on racial and ethnic relations, there
appeared to be a genuine effort to formulate
theoretically applicable concepts, and to use exist-
ing theories and models, which compared to fairly
good and important descriptive studies of an earli-
er era, both before and after World War II. A good
example is the analysis of the Korean rotating
credit associations in Los Angeles (Light, Kwuon,
and Zhong 1990), in which the authors examined
the functions of financing and savings groups
based on informal trust in Korean business
communities.The most noticeable achievement of the Asian-
American Studies programs in the 1970s through
the 1990s is the abundant effort to compile impor-
tant bibliographies, by searching for research ma-
terials that are normally scattered through scientif-
ic journals, unpublished files, doctoral and masters’
dissertations, working papers, diaries, and confer-
ence proceedings. The federal government is credit-
ed with making bibliographies on Indochinese
refugees, either through the U.S. Government
Printing Office, or at the University of Minnesota
Southeast Asian Refugee Studies Project (see ref-
erences at the end of this section). Finally, the rise
of Asian-American Studies programs increased
efforts to establish libraries and documentation
centers in a number of universities throughout the
country.REFERENCES
Agarwal, Priya 1991 Passage from India: Post 1965 Indian
Immigrants and Their Children. Palos Verdes, Calif.:
Yavati Publishers.
Becker, G. S. 1975 Human Capital. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Beiser, Morton 1987, ‘‘Changing Time Perspective and
Mental Health among Southeast Asian Refugees.’’
Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 11(4):437–464.
——— 1988 ‘‘Influence of Time, Ethnicity, and Attach-
ment on Depression in Southeast Asian Refugees.’’
American Journal of Psychiatry 145(1):46–51.
Boehnlein, J. K. 1987 ‘‘Clinical Relevance of Grief and
Mourning Among Cambodian Refugees.’’ Social Sci-
ence and Medicine 25:765–772.
Cabezas, A. L., H. Shinagawa, and G. Kawaguchi 1986–
1987 ‘‘New Inquiries into the Socioeconomic Status
of Filipino Americans in California. Amerasia 12(1):21.
Caces, Fe Immigrant Recruitment into the Labor Force:
Social Networks Among Filipinos in Hawaii, AA
12:23–38.
Chan, Sucheng (ed.) 1994 Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos
and America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.