New Poll Finds California Asians Unite to Give Millions in Tsunami Relief Aid
Pacific News Service, News Report, Daffodil Altan, Posted: Mar 03, 2005
Editor's Note: The first multilingual poll conducted on Asian Americans' response to the tsunami reveals a broadening unification between U.S. Asian communities, as well as a high percentage of Asian Californians donating millions to relief efforts.
SAN FRANCISCO--When Naresh Patel heard about the tsunami, he was in his car, on his way to his salesman job in Los Angeles.
"I thought, 'I should help. Everyone should get together and help.'"
Within a day, Patel, who came to the United States from India in 1968, had donated money to tsunami relief efforts. He says it didn't matter that he personally didn't know anyone affected by the catastrophe.
"It's God's work to help," he says.
Patel isn't the only one who gave what he could after the ruinous natural catastrophe that struck Southeast Asia Dec. 26. According to the first multilingual poll on Asian Californians and their response to the tsunami, released March 1 by New California Media, 70 percent of Asian Californians have contributed to tsunami relief efforts, compared to 33 percent of all adult Americans across the country. New California Media is a project of Pacific News Service.
Asian Californians account for about 1 percent of the U.S. population, yet were responsible for more than 15 percent of overall donations. According to the poll, an estimated $200 million has come from the California Asian population out of the $1.2 billion in nationwide donations.
Most, like Patel, didn't know anyone affected by the disaster. According to the poll, only 8 percent of Asian Californians reported knowing someone directly impacted by the tsunami. Despite this, two out of three still donated to the relief effort.
"We have some evidence here that we may be seeing Asian groups coming together," says Sergio Bendixen, president of Bendixen and Associates, the firm that conducted the poll.
The poll surveyed 606 Asian Americans in California, both immigrant and U.S.-born, and 100 Indonesian Americans. It was conducted in six languages, between Feb. 8 and Feb. 18. Eighty-five percent of the people interviewed chose to speak in their native languages.
"Within a week of the tsunami catastrophe it was clear to us from conversations with our Asian media partners that Asian media was taking a leadership role in mobilizing relief," says Sandy Close, executive director of New California Media.
The nonprofit organization has created an exchange between hundreds of ethnic media outlets producing news in numerous languages across the country. Close partnered with interTrend Communications and various California foundations to conduct the poll after noticing the overwhelming call to action in many Asian papers following the tsunami.
Chinese-language, Vietnamese-language and Korean-language news outlets, among others, were urging readers to give to relief effort organizations, as well as donating funds themselves.
"This struck us as something, as a story that needed to be explored and told," Close says.
When asked what motivated them to donate to relief efforts, respondents to the poll said the Chinese-American, Korean-American and Vietnamese-American press were all primary influences.
"What's fascinating is that this is happening within their respective languages," says David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee. Lee conducted interviews for the NCM poll and has conducted several other polls on the Asian American community.
The poll also probed how religion may have affected Asian Californian's reaction to the tsunami and whether people thought fate played a role. Nearly half of the Indonesian population surveyed felt that the tsunami was a call to people in the region to increase their devotion to their faith.
Although the majority of people interviewed felt that an early warning system would have prevented much of the tsunami's destruction, one-quarter of them felt that the events were predestined by fate.
Asian Americans in the United States have historically split along cultural, linguistic and historical lines and identified solely with their countries of origin. But according to the poll, Asian immigrants -- who make up the bulk of the U.S. Asian population -- are becoming more comfortable with the all-inclusive Asian American label. In the past, American-born Asians have more readily accepted the label, Lee says.
Twenty years ago the belief was that a broadening of the Asian-American umbrella would happen only after several generations, with English as the shared, common language, Lee says.
"What we're seeing here is that that's not true," Lee says. The poll, he says, demonstrates that a shared language does not have to be a precursor for the birth of an Asian American identity.
In the future this could mean the wielding of more political clout for the comparatively small Asian American population. "Their only chance of gaining political power is to unite," says Sergio Bendixen.
Bendixen's firm has also conducted numerous polls on U.S. Latinos. He says the broad Asian American response to the tsunami is similar to the way Latin Americans united when Hurricane Mitch struck Central America in 1998.
"For the first time we see the Asian American reaction mirroring what has been now for almost a generation a very united Latin American population," Bendixen says. "And the rise in political power in the U.S. has a lot to do with Latinos seeing themselves as Latin American."
Daffodil Altan is an editor and reporter for Pacific News Service and New California Media, an association of over 700 ethnic media organizations representing the development of a more inclusive journalism.
Other New California Media polls:
National Poll of Asian Pacific Islanders on the 2004 Election
Multilingual Poll of Arab, Iranian and Pakistani Americans on President Bush's Iraq Policy and Post-9/11 Discrimination
Page
1 of 1
|
