Asian Pacific Americans Struggle for Identity
Asian Pacific Americans have fought for their unalienable rights since the first Asian Pacific American step foot onto American soil. Though the fight was not as great as it is now, the fight was a step into the direction that has shaped and expanded the civil rights Asian Pacific Americans have fought for. There have been many diverse and active struggles that Asian Pacific Americans have had to endure; yet the main struggle is the struggle for other cultures of the United States to see that each Asian Pacific American have an identity of their own. ... However for an identity and individualism that should be expressed openly and freely as any other, we are still struggling in a fight for just that. In Helen Zia’s book, Asian American Dreams, Zia spoke of how Asian Pacific Americans constantly had to fight for people to recognize them separately as a person and not by their ethnicity. ... For example, in chapter ten of Zia’s book, it is written about a Twin Cities radio disc jockey by the name of Tom Barnard who worked at the radio station KQRS who verbally on air insulted the Asian community. ... Zia notes that “throughout the broadcast Barnard used a recurring fake Asian American character by the name of ‘Tak.’ Tak made comments throughout the show in a ‘mock-Asian’, pidgin English accent and joked that it would ‘take a lot of egg rolls’ to pay the criminal fines for concealing a corpse.