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Amerasian Identity

The term Amerasian has two uses. It is often used to refer to people born in Asia with one Asian and one American parent, especially the children of U.S. soldiers and Asian mothers. Large numbers of Amerasians, defined in this way, have been born in the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. Sometimes the term is used more broadly to include all children of mixed Asian and non-Asian American ancestry. U.S. Census estimates indicate that there were close to two million individuals of mixed Asian and non-Asian heritage in the United States by 2008. The majority were young people, attending educational institutions in the United States. The immigrant children of U.S. servicemen have often faced difficult questions of personal identity that have posed special challenges for their daily lives in U.S. schools.

Historical Background

The novelist Pearl S. Buck described the children of American fathers and Asian mothers in Asia as Amerasians, and her writings helped to establish the term. Amerasians were often children of American military personnel. At the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898, the Philippines became a territory of the United States. Although the Philippines became independent in 1946, it was the site of U.S. military bases until 1992, and many children were born to U.S. servicemen and Filipino women. Similarly, many Amerasian children were born after the U.S. occupation of Japan after World War II and also after the establishment of American military bases in South Korea following the Korean War. American military involvement in Vietnam from the early 1960s until the mid-1970s produced thousands of Vietnamese Amerasian children and led to the passage of the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1988 (also known as the American Homecoming Act), which brought over 20,000 Amerasians to the United States.

From 1980 onward, the Asian population of the United States grew rapidly and many Asian groups, including Filipino, Thai, and Japanese Americans, had very high rates of intermarriage with Americans of other backgrounds. Students of mixed Asian and non-Asian ancestry became common in schools in many parts of the United States by the end of the 20th century.

Issues of Identity

All mixed-race individuals face questions of identity in a society in which race plays an important part in self-definition and in the definition of oneself by others. Simply deciding which racial category to choose on a questionnaire or survey can be perplexing. The immigrant children of former U.S. soldiers can face some of the most serious problems. Many Vietnamese Amerasians, for example, spent their early years in Vietnam, knowing only Vietnamese culture, while at the same time being identified by those around them as American. In the United States, the same young people often found that native-born Americans saw them as foreigners. Afro-Amerasians—children of Asian and African American parents—face some of the greatest challenges. Scholars and school officials frequently describe Afro-Amerasians as dealing with multiple marginalized social statuses, as minorities within minorities who cannot easily describe themselves as fitting into any category. As mixed-race individuals increase as a proportion of the U.S. population and American racial identities become less sharply defined, mixed Asian American identity will probably pose less of a difficulty for young people.

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