Date: Thu, 14 Dec 1995 12:20:15 -0800
From: Keith Aoki 
Subject: NY Times, 12-13-95


For your use and information, here's an item from today's New
York Times that I had scanned in (cite as New York Times,
12-13-95, at A16)

__________________________________________________________________

ATTACKS AGAINST ASIAN-AMERICANS ARE RISING

By Kenneth B. Noble

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 12 -- He chose his course of action
matter-of-factly, as if he were deciding which color shirt to
wear. "I'm going to kill me a Chinaman" is how Robert Page put
it in his written confession to the police.

A few hours later, as Eddy Wu carried a bag of groceries from a
supermarket in Novato, Calif., to his car, Mr. Page attacked,
leaving Mr. Wu, 23, with stab wounds to his back and shoulder,
and a punctured lung.

"He was looking for a victim based on his white supremacist
beliefs," Jim Laveroni, a police sergeant in the affluent suburb
about 30 miles north of San Francisco, said at Mr. Page's court
hearing last month.

The assault  on Mr. Wu is the latest in a series of recent
race-based incidents directed against Asian Americans,
particularly in Northern California.

A study released in July by the National Asian Pacific-American
Legal Consortium, an organization representing 40 groups,
calculated that there was a 35 percent increase in anti-Asian
hate crimes nationwide to 452 incidents last year, up from 335
incidents in his audit for 1993.  In Northern California, the
increase more than doubled to 83 last year, from 39 the year
before.

The State Attorney-General's first hate-crimes report, which was
released today, counts 57 hate crimes against Asian Americans in
the last six months of 1994, involving 72 victims.

The crimes, as reported to various Asian-American organizations
and to the police, range in violence from racist-graffiti on the
offices of the Japanese-American Citizens League in Sacramento,
to an attack on a Chinese-American family in a Vallejo, Calif.,
amusement park, where they were taunted and told to return to
China, to the fire-bombing of the home of a Chinese city
councilman in Sacramento.  In a significant number of incidents,
attackers say, "Go home," or "Get out of my country," the report
said.

The attacks have largely baffled the police in places like
Novato, whose middle- and upper-middle class community is widely
regarded as liberal and tolerant. ANd, compared with the rest of
California, it has a small Asian-American population -- not
large enough, residents suggest, to pose a threat to anyone.

The incidents have heightened fears among many Asian-Americans
that increasingly blatant race-based harassment is on the rise
and that those who commit these crimes seem to hate Asians
without drawing distinctions between newly arrived immigrants
and native-born Americans, or between Chinese, Japanese,
Cambodians and other Asian nationalities and ethnic groups.

"Like most minority groups, we're accustomed to to dealing with
subtle forms of racism," Thanh Ngo, a lawyer with the Asian Law
Caucus in San Francisco said about the attack on Mr. Wu.  "But
it's striking to see such a blatant act. A lot of people are
very frightened."

Like many of the more recent crimes, the attack on Mr. Wu
involved a young white man.

Still at issue is whether Mr. Page is competent to stand trial.
A psychologist hired by the public defender's office told a
judge last week that Mr. Page was seriously disturbed, and a
hearing has been set in January to determine his competency. 
Meanwhile, Mr. Page, who is being held in the Marin County Jail,
has been charged with attempted murder with bail set at $1
million.

In another incident in May, across the bay in Los Altos, John
Lee, 28, an American of South Korean ancestry, stopped at a gas
station. There he was approached by a white man, Justin Adams,
who began taunting him by putting his hands together and bowing
"Buddha-like", squinting his eyes and mimicking an Asian accent.
 According topolice and court records, Mr. Lee confronted Mr.
Adams and two other whites, saying his antics were not amusing. 
Mr. Adams then punched him several times, kicking Mr. Lee to the
ground. One of Mr. Adams' companions kicked Mr. Lee in the head,
and the third punched Mr. Lee as he lay on the pavement.

The three men were later arrested. Two pleaded guilty to
battery. Mr. Adams pleaded innocent to charges of committing a
hate crime. The case, which went to trial in October, resulted
in a hung jury. The local District Attorney's Office has
announced plans to try Mr. Adams again.

National Asian-Pacific American Legal Consortium said in its
report: "Many incidents begin as simple name-calling and
escalate into further violence resulting in serious or fatal
injuries. Further, racist hate messages alone cause real
psychological and emotional damage on their victims."

Elaine H. Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies  at the
University of California, Berkeley, and Chairwoman of the
comparative ethnic studies department, said Asian-Americans have
faced a distinctive type of racism in the last 100 years, a
feeling on the part of the white population that "you can't be
here."

"My mother came to Hawaii in 1903 as an infant, and she could
not become a citizen until 1952," Professor Kim said.  "I think
it's always tied to resentment. If you don't make it, you get
kicked down. And if you make it, you get kicked down. It's
really a Catch-22."

What is particularly unnerving for many Asian-Americans,
community groups say, is that success has not bred tolerance;
they have assimilated into many communities but are still the
objects of hate.  Rather, their financial and educational
achievements may have engendered a new generation of hate crimes
directed at them from disenfranchised whites who are jealous.

One factor that may be fueling the upsurge in hate crimes,
especially in California, has been the unparalled influx of
Asian-American immigrants in recent years.  In San Francisco
County, for example, Asian-Americans are now the largest
minority group, exceeding in numbers the black populations and
people of Hispanic descent combined. Data from the 1990 census
show that the 337,118 white residents of the county constitute
46.6 percent of the population; Asians, whose numbers total 205,
686, constituted 28.4 percent; Hispanics totaled 100, 717 or
13.9 percent; blacks were 76, 343, or 10.5 percent, and the rest
were American Indians, Eskimos and Pacific Islanders.

But even as Asian-Americans are integrated into their
communities, changing the character of those communities, they
are still considered to be interlopers by some, and thus
legitimate candidates for harassment. The consortium complained
in its report, for instance, that "in best-selling novels and
blockbuster movies, Asian-Pacific Americans continue to be cast
as untrustworthy foreigners, devious economic competitors or
martial arts experts."

Perhaps an even bigger factor inciting anti-Asian sentiment,
experts say, is what many see as growing nativism and racial
intolerance exemplified by Proposition 187, the
immigration-control proposal that has become one of California's
biggest political disputes.

Diane Chin, a lawyer and co-chairman of the Intergroup
Clearinghouse in San Francisco, a nonprofit group that assists
victims of hate crimes, said that with Governor Pete Wilson's
promotion of Proposition 187, "There has been a climate created
by the established political leadership that devalues peoples of
color, and gays, lesbians and bisexuals; they've established a
climate that allows hate violence to exist."

Michael Wong, the co-chairman of Break the Silence, a San
Francisco based group that documents hate crimes against Asians
and provides assistance to victims, suggested that the increase
in anti-Asian hate crimes is linked to the Congressional debate
over welfare cuts.  "At a time when public benefits are being
curtailed, there's a lot of talk of not having enough space and
resources to protect our communities," Mr. Wong said.  "There's
a lot of scapegoating and pitting populations against one
another."

PHOTO: Robert Page of Novato, Calif., at his arraignment last
month in a stabbling attack on an Asian man.