الفهرس 
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Abstract
America is the home of a variety of ethnic groups who came from different parts of the world to work and live there. All the migrants have distinctive background or ethnicity that concerns a particular culture. In Theory of American Ethnicity, Werner Sollors confirms that ”American culture is full of examples of the fusion of ethnicity and otherness”(22). America is a multiethnic and multicultural society since it helped to pull different people from different cultures to create some national cultures. Thus, different cultures such as Irish, Spanish, Italian, Black and Asian co-existed together in the American society. These different cultures interacted with each other or with the mainstream culture. This interaction took forms of assimilation, acculturation and in some other times, it took a deculturation form; some migrants separate themselves from the mainstream society and struggle to keep their own cultural heritage suffering a cultural conflict. On the other hand, other migrants try assimilation by acquiring the traits of the new culture. In ”Being Asian American: Identity, Cultural Constructs, and Stereotypes Perception”, both Oyserman and Sakamoto state that ”assimilation was assumed to be the goal attained by all who were willing to abandon allegiance to their culture of origin and take on the American characteristics of hard work and individuality based on striving achievements”(436). Those who chose the path of assimilation should view themselves as being part of the mainstream society. Others exert much effort to share both cultures adopting what is known as acculturation. Acculturation depends on two dimensions, namely the migrants’ willingness to be mainstreamed or accepted by the host culture and the complex process of retaining all or some of the characteristics of their cultural heritage. Ethnic group members can be either accepted or marginalized by the mainstream culture. In ”Cultural Identity and its assessment”, Susham Gupta and Dinesh Bhugra comment that ”inclusion and acceptance by the new culture depends on a range of socio-economic factors but, in most societies, those farthest from the color/ or culture of the majority group are often the most marginalized”(333).
Historically, although the presence of Asians in America dates back to the sixteenth century, Josephine Lee in Performing Asian American assures that ”the second half of the nineteenth century saw the first major wave of Asian immigration to the
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United States”(1). She also adds that Asian immigrants are ”attracted by the economic opportunities provided by the California gold rush and westward development and spurred by civil unrest and famine in China”(2). Asian immigrants came to work first in gold mines during the gold rush, sugarcane plantation in Hawaii and later on the transcontinental railroad construction. They excelled white workers because of their skills as well as being the cheapest kind of laborers. Some supported the continuous flow of Asian immigrants to America because of the economic value they have while others felt threatened by their increasing numbers. In A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama, David Krasner states that ”after the exhaustion of gold rush and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 the excess laborers in the west led to anti-Chinese xenophobia, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882”(303).In order to control their increasing numbers, strict procedures were taken such as preventing the wives of Chinese laborers from entering America. In addition, numerous laws which aim at minimizing the number of Asian immigrants were passed. Lee states that Asian immigrants’ new lives ”were complicated by the acts of violence and institutionalized discrimination”(2). In her book Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe confirms that the conditions of Asian immigrants in America have become worse because of passing ”immigration exclusion acts and laws against naturalization in 1882, 1924, and 1934”(5).
A series of laws were passed to bar entry of Asian immigrants to America. The first of these acts was the Page Law of 1875 which barred entry to different ethnicities of Asian immigrants; Chinese, Japanese and Mongolians. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act suspended immigration of laborers for ten years and in 1892, this law was renewed for another ten years demanding all Chinese immigrants to register. In 1902, the law was not only renewed for another ten years but also the police raided Chinatowns in major American cities arresting those who have not registered yet. In 1924, the Immigration Act prohibited not only Asians but also other immigrants from entering America. In search for security and safety and in order to provide themselves with mutual help to resist oppression, early Asian immigrants established organizations and associations that played the role of community centers. The first of these associations was formed in San Francisco in 1851 and in the following year, the first formal association which was called Zhonghua Hurguan was formed to unite smaller Chinese groups. This association
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later on acquired the nickname ”Chinese Six Companies”. Other Asian ethnic groups formed similar organizations such as the Japanese Association of America in 1908, the Korean National Association” KNA” in 1909, the Sikh temple that served as the Indian community in 1912, and the Fraternal Organization of the Filipinos in 1921. These associations provided different kinds of social activities and services such as giving money loans, sending money and letters to China as well as other Asian countries, building altars and temples for worship, and paying much care for the sick and the needy. For mutual benefit, these smaller ethnic groups united together to form coalitions. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Asian immigrants formed their own towns in regions of major American cities such as Chinatown in San Francisco and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles.
Asian immigrants rejected and resisted these exclusion laws by all possible means. They fought these laws in numerous courts and the Chinese Six Companies hired a group of lawyers to defend the rights of its members. They held continuous demonstrations and strikes until they received treatment equal to other immigrants in 1965. This equal treatment made them build their own schools, churches and temples where they taught their children not only their cultural heritage but also Western ways of living. The Chinese Six Companies opened the first Chinese language school in San Francisco in 1884.During the first half of the twentieth century and with the increase of the number of American-born Asians who are known as the second generation Asians, their fathers insisted on teaching them the traditional values they brought from Asia as well as seeing them accepted and assimilated into American culture. The second generation Asians now had the right to attend public schools and enjoyed other privileges yet they were denied full participation because of racial discrimination.
In America, Asian culture developed to the extent that Asians have maintained their separate identity and have retained their sense of worth in the midst of a multiethnic and hostile society. If a group of people belongs to a specific ethnic group, it becomes a necessity for the members of this group to learn about their background, culture and perception as a part of that particular ethnicity. In their study entitled ”Being Asian American”, Oyserman and Sakamoto confirm that Asian American ethnic identity is constructed upon the interdependence and group connectedness that are assumed to be the cultural hallmarks of Asian Americans’ cultural heritage. They say, ”Asian American
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ethnic identity focused on four content domains: family relatedness, pride in heritage-connectedness to traditions, awareness of discrimination-barriers, and achievement as integral to group membership”(438). In Beyond Ethnicity, Werner Sollors confirms that ethnicity as a term is interrelated with other literary terms such as race, imperialism, class, intermarriage, etc. He states, ”terms like ethnicity, melting pot, intermarriage, regionalism, and generation are all used in a dazzling variety of elusive ways”(5). Although ethnicity as a term is often mixed with race in critical discussions, it is not the same as race and it has its own history of meaning and assumptions. In Race and Ethnicity in America, John Iceland states that although race and ethnicity are often used interchangeably in public conversations because of some factors such as increasing intermarriage and importance of group differences, ”ethnicity refers to a group of people who are differentiated by culture rather than by perceived physical or genetic differences central to notions of race”(14). Ethnicity as a discourse is considered as an inherited status based on the society in which one lives. In his search for its first usage, Sollors in Beyond Ethnicity states that he found ” the apparently first occurrences of ethnicity in W. Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City Series, the well-known, five volume community study of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which began to appear in 1941”( 23).