Southeast Asians seek recognition among school’s Asian population

Courtesy of Annalyn Bui

Bui and her extended family celebrating Christmas.

Of the school’s Asian population, which makes up 62% of the student body, most students’ families are from India, Pakistan, China and Korea. The population of Southeast Asians, such as Vietnamese and Thai students, makes up a much smaller percentage of the Asian population. 

As a result, these students often find themselves in the bind of having to conform to American culture while also being subsumed in the larger Asian culture, sometimes forcing them to feel as if they must discard their own cultural heritage.

According to the Center of Southeast Asian Studies, Southeast Asia is made up of 11 countries, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, each possessing distinctive cultures that highly differentiate from more populous countries like China and India. 

Some immigrants from Vietnam and the Philippines have come to the U.S.  in the past few decades to flee humanitarian crises such as the Vietnam War and World War II, while others immigrated for economic or educational reasons. 

For junior Annalyn Bui’s family, this story is familiar. After her grandpa passed away, Bui began learning about her family history from her grandma in order to feel closer to her family. Her paternal extended family was heavily affected by the Vietnam War, which involved multiple countries and raged from 1955 to 1977 and caused the country to fall to communist rule. 

Fear of getting placed in a communist camp led Bui’s paternal grandparents to flee Vietnam in 1975. They traveled to America on a refugee ship with little money. Upon their arrival, they were sent to a navy camp, Camp Pendleton, which offered thousands of immigrants food and shelter. 

They remained there until they found a home under a sponsor while they worked multiple jobs, settled into society and, eventually, became financially independent. 

On her mother’s side of the family, Bui has roots in the Philippines. Her grandparents lived there on a rice and buffalo farm and were impoverished. They decided to move to the U.S. in 1975 to provide a better life for Bui’s mother. Having a relative in the U.S. Navy eased the process of citizenship for them, and they started their new life in Milpitas. 

Bui’s parents met at Milpitas High, and they went their separate ways for college before reuniting and getting married. Bui was born in San Jose and moved to Saratoga when she was age 5. 

After Bui had the opportunity to learn more about her family’s history, she felt as though her culture and experiences were often reduced. 

“Many people think I’m Chinese because they assume that’s the only country in East Asia where students are from,” Bui said. She has even been called Chinese racial slurs. 

In addition to the assumptions about her ethnicity, some of her peers  have questioned her choice of  classes, which is less STEM and AP and Honors heavy than that of many Asian students. She attributed this misperception to the stereotype that all Asians are a “model minority” and insanely smart and driven to succeed in narrowly accepted paths. 

Bui has also faced comments from those who know she is Vietnamese, such as telling her to “go back to the trees,” referring to her family’s history in the Vietnam War. Comments like these made her uncomfortable and unsure of how to react, and she has felt that her family’s history was invalidated. 

Lack of cultural opportunities 

Juniors Emily and Josh Ta’s families have a similar story. They are also refugees from the Vietnam War who ultimately ended up moving to California in order to escape death and imprisonment. 

As a South Vietnamese military officer, the Ta’s maternal grandfather was on the list of wanted Naval officers on the North Vietnamese army list. After this discovery, their grandpa and the rest of their family fled to Wisconsin in 1976. Their paternal family had left a year earlier in 1975. The Tas’ parents met at UC Santa Barbara and moved to the Bay Area for their jobs, choosing to raise their kids here. 

Though the Vietnamese population at the school is small — 2.5% —  the Vietnamese population in California exceeds 640,000. In addition, Vietnamese Americans make up more than 10% of San Jose’s population. Many of these immigrants hoped to escape the fallout of the war just like the Bui and Ta families. 

San Jose is a vibrant cultural hub for Vietnamese immigrants that gives them many opportunities to connect to their culture. Little Saigon, San Jose, is home to a lively community of Vietnamese immigrants as well as stores: Vietnam Town, a Vietnamese mall and even a museum. However, this is not the case for Saratoga. 

The school, with a large South Asian population, celebrates many Indian holidays, like Holi but not ones popular in Vietnam. Bui also pointed out that while there are several weekend Chinese language schools nearby for children, there isn’t a Vietnamese school, leaving no opportunities for her to learn the language. 

Difficulty in finding connections 

Junior Isara Chankhuntood, whose family comes from Thailand, has also felt overshadowed by more widely represented cultures in Saratoga. 

His parents met as undergraduate students in Thailand. His father got a scholarship to USC and immigrated to the U.S. for a master’s degree, and his mother followed soon after. 

During the move, Chankhuntood’s family faced challenges with the extremely arduous citizenship process as well as the language barrier since they spoke little English. To stay connected to their old home, his family visited Thailand every year where many of their relatives still live before COVID-19 hit in 2020 and closed the borders. For his part, Chankhuntood can speak enough Thai to get around Thailand. However, it is difficult for him to find other doors into Thai culture in Saratoga. 

“Thai culture is hard to connect to because there’s not a lot of Thai people I know here,” Chankhuntood said. “But I strongly relate to Asian American culture.” He said that he is often mistaken as Indian but has gotten used to that assumption, so it doesn’t affect him. 

Chankhuntood’s family has found Thai connections in the Kachicathorn family, who own Bai Tong, the widely loved Thai bistro in downtown Saratoga. 

“Thai people are generally just really welcoming,” Chankhuntood said. “They’re funny. They’re forgiving. That’s what I’ve learned.” 

Isolation and tokenization 

Disconnection from her culture has also affected senior Alexandria Pak, who is half Filipino and half South Korean. Coming from a bi-ethnic household and having lived her whole life in the U.S, Pak describes her connection with her roots as “complicated.”

“The cultural environment in Saratoga is a bit like a bubble,” Pak said. “There really isn’t much new stuff coming in or out, and there are very isolated communities that don’t often interact with each other.”

Being a minority group, Filipinos are often stereotyped in society in ways that invalidate their individuality. They are also a minority at the school, seeing as the Filipino population is only 0.8%. According to Pak, who hopes to go into the medical field, a prominent stereotype is that Filipinos are always nurses, an assumption that undermines their attempts at more highly educated positions such as doctors and physician’s assistants.

Pak has experienced tokenization, or “the practice of doing something (such as hiring a person who belongs to a minority group) only to prevent criticism and give the appearance that people are being treated fairly” defined by Merriam Webster. 

Pak thinks she has been tokenized in school when she speaks up about Asian American Pacific Islander or other social issues because of the minority of Southeast Asians in the community. She pointed out that while Saratoga comes off as diverse on paper, it is actually divided. She said tokenization has more of an impact than simply an insincere attempt to be inclusive.  

“For some people, tokenization becomes so extreme to the point that they’ll try to relate to Southeast Asians, which I believe waters down our struggles and our history,” Pak said. 

It would help to see more awareness around the school regarding Southeast Asian struggles and culture, she said. 

Cultural clubs, such as the Middle Eastern and North African club and the Indian Cultural Awareness Club, bring awareness to the large group of South Asian students at the school and have shown to be an inclusive way to bring groups of students from different ethnic groups together, but similar clubs do not exist for Southeast Asian students. 

“It would be cool to see clubs like this directed for Southeast Asian students; that would also serve to bring members of the community together,” Bui said.