Politics Across Generations

For nine months, Jennifer Love Tang’s weekends were taken up by a special routine — she went door to door, introducing herself and asking people what local issues they cared about.

“I thought a lot about what it means to be an elected representative,” she said. “And it's exactly in the name and you have to represent people’s issues.” Tang was running for Monterey Park City Council District 2. By the time the election arrived on March 3, she and her volunteers had knocked on every registered voter’s door in her district, roughly 4,000 homes.

In recent decades, increasing numbers of Asian Americans have been running for office throughout the country. Tang is one of them. Historically, Asian Americans have been considered less civically engaged. They also have a history of being excluded from political leadership positions, and the community is still underrepresented on all levels of government nationwide. The current 116th Congress has 20 Asian American and Pacific Islander politicians, which is the highest number of AAPI politicians elected to congress in history. However, with 14 AAPI representatives in the House and three AAPI senators in the Senate, out of the 435 total representatives and the 100 total senators, the number still doesn’t represent the total Asian population in the nation.

Growing up in an immigrant family, Tang understands why it is difficult for some Asian Americans to gain access to political power and to exercise that power. By having more conversations with residents, she hoped to engage people who hadn’t historically made their voice heard.

Monterey Park became the first city with a predominantly Asian population in the mainland United States in the 1980s. Since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, there has been an influx of Asian immigrants to the U.S. In the 1970s, Monterey Park was marketed by realtors as the “Chinese Beverly Hills” and attracted a lot of immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong and later on mainland China.

In response to the increasing immigrant population, in 1986 the white-majority Monterey Park City Council adopted a resolution that urged Congress to declare English as the nation’s official language. The city council had also tried and failed to declare English as the city’s official language themselves; they also failed to pass English-only sign ordinances. Immigrants protested, as they felt animosity from some other residents in the community and underrepresented in the city government.

Nevertheless, Monterey Park became a hub for gaining political power and breaking the barriers for the AAPI community. The city elected Lily Lee Chen, the first female Chinese American mayor in the nation. Judy Chu, the first Chinese American woman elected to Congress in history, served as Monterey Park mayor for three terms.

Tang was running against three other District 2 candidates: two Asian Americans and one Hispanic American. Going door to door was an important part of Tang’s campaign. Usually she went canvassing alone. For countless days, she drove from her house to a street where she planned to walk that day. She used a cellphone app that told her the address of registered voters. Following the map, she walked to a house, rang the doorbell and waited patiently at the porch. Most of the time no one came to the door. Then she would leave her campaign flyer on the door and move on to the next house. Monterey Park is a hilly area with beautiful views. Walking in the quiet neighborhood, the twitter of birds was usually the only sound she heard.

Tang grew up in a family she described as “incredibly apolitical.” Her mother voted for the first time in 2018, almost 40 years after she came to the country. It was a memorable moment for Tang when she and her mom sat down and filled out the ballot together, along with her younger sister who just turned 18 that year. Tang’s father registered to vote in 2000, after the family moved to Monterey Park. He registered in order to vote for Judy Chu, who was Monterey Park mayor and was running for California State Assembly at the time.

Tang’s parents are both refugees from Cambodia; neither received a high school education. When she was born, her father worked multiple jobs. She seldom saw her parents when she was little. It was hard for their family to be able to save up enough money and live in Monterey Park. Tang had heard about how terrible her parents’ lives were when they were back in Cambodia. “I heard stories about starvation and violence, bomb shelters and sickness,” she said. From an early age, she thought about how politics impacts ordinary people’s lives.

“When we were young, we saw that people who got involved in politics suffered with their lives. We were kind of scared of politics,” said Tang’s mother Sandy Tang. “After coming here, all we hoped for was just peaceful lives.”

The Asian American community has the largest foreign-born population among all racial groups in the U.S. “There's a sense of anxiety and concern that if they participate, there could be some kind of backlash because of their experiences,” said James S. Lai, a professor at Santa Clara University who specializes in U.S. racial and ethnic politics. He pointed out that with a 60% foreign-born population, the very first barrier that a lot of Asian American potential voters face is language. The Asian population has the highest rates of limited English proficiency at 35%.

Many Asian immigrants came here with limited resources. And navigating a very complicated political system can be overwhelming and time consuming. “This system is kind of created around language. It’s basically trying to understand what the issues are,” Lai said.

According to the estimates by the 2019 AAPI California Workers Survey, nearly one in four (23%) Asian and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Californians are working and struggling with poverty. If people are working multiple jobs and struggling just to make a living, they often will not have time to do all the research, they might not know the deadlines for mail-in ballots, and they might not even be able to come out and vote on election day.

The problem is not only that many potential voters have barriers to participating or lack enthusiasm. When it comes to voter outreach by the parties and the candidates themselves, Asian Americans are still struggling to get visibility. The 2018 Asian American Voter Survey shows that 50% of Asian American voters surveyed reported no contact from the Democratic Party before that year’s election, and 62% of voters reported no contact from the Republican Party. Less outreach from politicians increases the sentiment of not belonging in American politics among Asian Americans. When the parties decide whether it’s worth focusing on the community, less participation might in turn result in less outreach.

Lai said stereotypes such as “the model minority” and “perpetual foreigners” are underlying the lack of outreach. The model minority stereotype masks a lot of issues within the diverse Asian American community and creates wrong assumptions that the community doesn’t need help or support. And the socioeconomic variations across Asian ethnic groups and within Asian ethnic groups are not acknowledged well. If the model minority myth is internalized, it would have Asian Americans believe that there are no real policy measures to fight for and impact their voting enthusiasm. The stereotype of perpetual foreigners perceives Asian Americans as permanent aliens, even though they’ve naturalized very quickly and have been living here most of their lives.

“As I go door to door, it gives me an opportunity to help residents understand how important their vote is and how much power they hold in that vote,” said Tang. And by talking with residents, Tang started to know more about the issues that concern people. She heard a lot about public safety, even though she hadn’t realized before that it could be a concern in Monterey Park, which is considered a safe city and has consistently ranked as one of the country’s best places to live.

She also noticed that the language barrier still exists within the local government. “I want to ensure that people who don’t typically have access to power gain access,” she said. That means immigrants, non-voters, and people who have different kinds of barriers and can’t participate. This diverse city would be strengthened as more of those diverse voices are elevated and heard.

The population of Monterey Park City Council District 2 is 11,817, with a 70% Asian population. Only 2,729 voters have voted for the City Council District 2 election this year. Tang didn’t win. She got 25% of the votes, which is lower than Yvonne Yiu, who won with 29%.

Godfrey Santos Plata is a friend of Tang who is running in 2020 for the State Assembly 53rd District. It is a predominantly immigrant district with a total population of 483,000. In the last election, only 5% of the population voted for the person currently sitting in the seat. “People are out of that conversation because no one’s coming to ask us, because the rules don't need us to get involved in the process,” Plata said. He and his volunteers had also knocked on every voter’s door in the district for the primary election on March 3.

Plata is running to be just the third Filipino assembly person ever in California. He immigrated to the country with his family at the age of 4. As soon as he got to the United States, he felt like he entered a world in which it was very clear that race was important.

His parents had lived underneath the dictatorship of the Marcos regime, and the message they conveyed to him was that “we’re a conservative family: just focus on your studies, be obedient, be safe.”

Plata first started his career as a 7th grade teacher in a school where most students qualified for free or reduced lunch. Soon he realized that teachers were working with students of color without a deep understanding of racism and classism. He shifted his work to organizing and advocating to influence policies and laws that govern education.

One of the reasons that pushed him to run for office, he said, are the younger generations in his family. He has a niece and a nephew who are the first two people in his family born in the United States. “I’m really afraid that they are going to grow up in the United States and not see models of Filipinos who take the lead and be involved in the democracy here,” he said.

Having someone who breaks through the barrier and creates role models is always very important in politics. For a long time when Asian Americans were even more underrepresented, the number one goal of Asian American politics was just to get somebody there who is Asian. Now it has reached a point that it’s not just about one’s ethnicity, but about building multiracial coalitions and alliances based on issues that people all care about.

“It’s really exciting to see how Asian American politics has evolved in the last 20 to 30 years,” Professor Lai said. It used to be so hard for them to even get elected; it then evolved to the point where they could not run against each other because that would knock both of them out. “Now you can see Asian Americans running against each other and actually still winning.”

According to Lai, the Asian American voting population will only grow larger. The foreign-born population will continue to naturalize and their U.S.-born children will grow up. A higher participation rate is highly promising in the future.