Earlier this week a SM tipster (thanks Ami) sent us word of this article in Time Magazine that does a pretty good job of examining the second generation Asian American experience:

The American story is, of course, made up of successive influxes of immigrants who arrive in the U.S., struggle to find a place in its society and eventually assimilate. But the group of post-1965 Asians was different from the Jews, Irish and Italians who had landed earlier. The Asian immigrants’ distinctive physiognomy may have made it more difficult for them to blend in, but at the same time, their high education and skill levels allowed them quicker entrée into the middle class. Instead of clustering tightly in urban ethnic enclaves, they spread out into suburbia, where they were often isolated. And it was there that their kids, now 20 to 40 years old, grew up, straddling two worlds—the traditional domain their recently arrived parents sought to maintain at home and the fast-changing Western culture of the society outside the front door. The six people at the New York City dinner are members of that second generation and—full disclosure—so are we, the authors of this article.

In the paragraph above you see a very concise reason for why the experience of South Asian immigrants living in the U.S. is different from those living in European countries, and totally different from those living elsewhere abroad. The fact that immigrants here spread to isolated suburbs helped them assimilate more quickly, while at the same time encouraging them to embrace inclusiveness by identifying with other immigrant populations.

If you were to draw a diagram of acculturation, with the mores of immigrant parents on one side and society’s on the other, the classic model might show a steady drift over time, depicting a slow-burn Americanization, taking as long as two or three generations. The more recent Asian-American curve, however, looks almost like the path of a boomerang: early isolation, rapid immersion and assimilation and then a re-appreciation of ethnic roots.

I enjoyed this article because I felt that they were describing my own experience quite accurately.

As a child growing up in Pennington, N.J., Fareha Ahmed watched Bollywood videos and enthusiastically attended the annual Pakistan Independence Day Parade in New York City. By middle school, though, her parents’ Pakistani culture had become uncool. “I wanted to fit in so bad,” Ahmed says. For her, that meant trying to be white. She dyed her hair blond, got hazel contact lenses and complained, “I’m going to smell,” when her mom served fragrant dishes like lamb biryani for dinner. But at Villanova University in Philadelphia, Ahmed found friends from all different backgrounds who welcomed diversity and helped her, she says, become “a good balance of East meets West.” Now 23, she and her non-Asian roommates threw a party to mark the Islamic holiday ‘Id al-Fitr in November, then threw another for Christmas—which her family never celebrated. “I chose to embrace both holidays instead of segregating myself to one,” she says.

Asian Americans say part of the reason it is so hard to reach an equilibrium is that they are seen as what sociologists call “forever foreigners.” Their looks lead to a lifetime of questions like “No, where are you really from?”

Similar to the people interviewed here, for me the University experience was where the Boomerang began its return trajectory. I remember that my freshman year another Indian kid asked me “so what are you?” I thought to myself, “is he kidding? Doesn’t he know I am Indian by my name?” He was really asking me what state in India my parents were from. By the time I was 18 I was intellectually aware of the fact that India has many states with many different cultures and languages. At a gut-level though I just assumed that all Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis were the same. They all spoke Gujarati at home and their parents acted just like my parents.

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.

And finally, here is the the most salient point. The clearest explanation yet for those people that visit our website that don’t understand why so many of us embrace the label South Asian:

…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.