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For kids—who by nature desperately want to belong—the feeling of alienation can be so painful that they will do almost anything to make it go away, to fit in. For years, Mark Hong, 31, shunned the only other Asian kid he knew in Davenport, Iowa, and hung out with the popular—and other than him, entirely white—crowd at school: the jocks. "I repelled anything that was Asian because it represented everything that was not cool at the time. Asians did kung fu and worked at Asian restaurants," he explains. That his Korean-born dad was actually an engineer at Caterpillar had no effect on Hong's teenage mind, which was focused on one goal: "I wanted to be cool."
Racial alienation and ethnic mockery are commonplace in the immigrant-kid experience, and the stories these Asian Americans tell of their childhood are "the same kind of talk about social exclusion that you might have found among Italians and Jews in the 1930s," says Harvard sociologist Mary Waters. But previous generations of immigrants' kids, including those Italians and Jews, lived in neighborhoods with built-in social support structures—people who looked like them, ate like them, prayed like them. They had what Marissa Dagdagan, 28, a daughter of Filipino-born doctors, who grew up in Burr Ridge, Ill, says she did not—"people like me that I could corroborate with."
Many children of the Asian immigrants who came over in the 1960s and 1970s say they didn't find that kind of self-affirmation until, like Fareha Ahmed, they got to college. Raymond Yang was one of only three Asians in a class of 420 at his high school in East Northport, N.Y. "I always felt like I was between worlds, especially in high school," says Yang, 28, whose parents are Chinese. That interim place felt like his and his alone—until he got to Brown University. When Yang was a freshman in 1995, there were 854 other Asian Americans enrolled—a full 15% of the undergraduate student body. "It was sort of culture shock. I had never met kids like me," he says. "We all grew up feeling the tension between trying to be Asian and trying to be American. We really bonded over the idiosyncrasies of being between two cultures." During his senior year, he roomed with five other Chinese Americans, and his close friends included children of Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Indian and Korean immigrants.