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Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake, a novel about Indian immigrants and their U.S.-born son, has observed the struggles of Asian Americans like Chang up close. "Asian kids are not just choosing a different way of doing things," she says. "They're choosing an entirely different [cultural] vocabulary. They're dealing with oil and water." Nowhere is that incompatibility more deeply felt than in romance. Most Asian-immigrant parents encourage their children to find partners of the same ethnicity, and many of the kids see the advantages of doing so. As June Kim, a Korean-American copywriter in Philadelphia who is engaged to another Korean American, Shane Kim, sees it, "there are certain things you don't have to explain—cultural nuances, how our families work, our roles within our families." Yet 40% of Asian Americans ages 25 to 34 marry people of other ethnicities, compared with 12% of African Americans in the same age group. Both Grace Chang Lucarelli and her sister married white men. Although their Taiwanese parents weren't pleased at first, Lucarelli says they understood the odds. "They took us to Texas," she says, of her upbringing in the small town of Terrell. "What did they expect?"
Nidhi Khurana, 25, has dated Indian Americans, but for the past three years, she has been seeing an African-American man. "It definitely caused a rift with my parents," she says. "They were very confused." Her father Sunil, a gastroenterologist who came to the U.S. in 1977, admits that accepting the interracial romance "was hard. We are very active in the Indian community, [and] everybody watches you. Also, you grow up in a certain culture, and you expect that to continue."
Of course, such tension is common to generations of immigrants. But Jack Tchen, director of Asian/Pacific/American Studies at N.Y.U., says these second-generation immigrants are beginning to find a middle ground and to "define a new modern form of Asian modernity, not necessarily the same as American modernity." That is what sociologists call identity building, and for the second generation, it is based not on a common ethnicity, faith or language (except English) but on shared experience.
Which is what the six around the New York City table are discovering. For nearly three hours, they tell stories about their families, their work, their heartaches, their joys. They discuss their Asian identities and American habits. And they confess how hard it has been to walk an often lonely path. Says Mohip Joarder, 27, an Indian-American computer programmer from Spring Valley, N.Y., "I've never felt like there were people I could talk freely to about this stuff."
The talk about themselves provides some insights about their parents too. Rob Ragasa, 31, a Filipino-American high school teacher raised in New Jersey, reflects on how his parents—conservative as they always seemed to him—had to be pretty daring to immigrate. "They had to come here and struggle. They had to be the first," he says, then pauses for a moment. "Maybe we are like our parents," he adds finally. "We are going to be pioneers too." And maybe they already are.