Written by Dr. Julia So, staff writer

On June 19, 1968, two days before his wedding day, Vincent Chin, an engineer of Chinese descent in Detroit, was bludgeoned with a baseball bat by two unemployed white autoworkers. The assailants, harboring their anger against the Japanese and Japanese automakers due to their recent lay-offs, assumed Chin was Japanese.

Chin went into a coma and died five days later. The two defendants were found guilty of manslaughter and were fined $3,000 each.

Over the years, the Chin incident was cited numerous times to galvanize a pan-ethnic movement among Asian-Americans across the nation. The case also demonstrates a common mistake of confusing one Asian group with another

Fast forward to December 1999. Wen Ho Lee, an American of Taiwanese descent that worked as a nuclear scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was indicted on 59 counts of mishandling classified government information and thus was exposed to the charge of alleged espionage on behalf of the Peoples’ Republic of China.

Lee was held in solitary confinement for 278 days despite a lack of substantial evidence from federal prosecutors. In addition, he was shackled and threatened with execution. Lee was eventually released in September 2000. At the hearing, US District Judge James Parker issued an official apology in open court for Lee’s maltreatment by the executive branch of the government. Parker added that “the Departments of Energy has embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it."

Some argued that Lee was used by the Republicans to further shame the Clinton administration in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Others contended that Lee was singled out for suspicion of atomic espionage by the Energy Department because he was an immigrant. Either way, one may also wonder whether the charge originated from the general notion about Asian-Americans being “perpetual foreigners” because they look different and thus they are “not one of us.”

These two incidents, among many others, are typical examples in which one Asian group is mistaken for another. So, who are the Asians? Who are the Asian-Americans? To understand this, we have to trace back to the Naturalization Act of 1790 that granted limited citizenship to free White males who had resided in the country for a minimum of two years. Immigrants from Asia (and other nonwhites) were excluded from becoming citizens. Although other classifications such as nativity, labor force participation or socioeconomic status were added later, the classification of citizenship and publication of government statistics until recently been defined along the racial line of black and white. For example, the data on people of Asian descent were collected under their country of origin such as China, Japan or the Philippines, but published under the category of “non-Black minorities”. It was not until the issuance of the Office of Management and Budget Statistical Directive No. 15 in 1978 that Asians were counted as a separate subgroup in the 1980 Census.

Today, while the US Census continues to define “Asian” as anyone who self-identifies herself/himself as people of Asian descent, the Federal Office of Management and Budget further classifies 17 racial/ethnic groups as Asians. They are:

• Asian Indian
• Bangladeshi
• Cambodian
• Chinese, except Taiwanese
• Filipino
• Hmong
• Indonesian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Laotian
• Malaysian
• Pakistani
• Sri Lankan
• Taiwanese
• Thai
• Vietnamese
• Other Asians include people from Bhutan, Brunei, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, etc.

Notwithstanding how the US Census defines “Asians”, the general public, especially those of Asian descent, distinguishes Asians as people who live in Asia from Asian-Americans as people of Asian descent that live in the U.S. So you see, the term “Asian” is not just diverse. It is also complex. With this in mind, I plan to write a series of articles in this space about the immigration history of Asian Americans in this country and the many challenges that they overcame historically, and the social barriers they face today. By sharing about the rich cultures of various groups of Asian Americans, I also hope to clarify some common misperceptions about the 14 million Asian-Americans in the nation.

Julia So can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it