July 2007 Stories

A Stranger Inside Himself

“Magic Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?”

Thus begins Lin Zhao’s journey of self-discovery, his attempt to define his identity as a Chinese-American torn between his Asian heritage and the American culture he lives with daily. It’s a famous line from the story of Snow White, but Zhao ’07 says it’s an apropos way to describe many second-generation Asian-Americans’ attempts to form a sense of themselves through the response of a mirror — the mirror of their peers and of society in general.

Zhao was so conflicted about his cultural identity that he decided to research his feelings by interviewing other Asian-American youths, hoping to find a commonality among their experiences. His research proposal won him a Carson Undergraduate Research Grant, a program that offers Willamette students up to $3,000 to undertake a scholarly, creative or professional summer research project.

Zhao, who graduated in December and now works in Minneapolis for the Target Corporation, titled his project “A Stranger Inside Myself” — a phrase he felt perfectly described his identity confusion. “It’s a sense of not really being sure who you are, who you’re supposed to be and where you belong,” he says. “Should you be the obedient son who follows the values of your parents, the same values they strongly adhered to at home before they came to the U.S.? Or should you be the person your friends want you to become, who gossips and hangs out with them?”

Zhao, an economics major and history and Chinese studies minor, interviewed 17 second-generation Asian-American college students on the East Coast, some he knew from his home in New Jersey and others he found through his friends or online. He calls himself “one-and-a-half generation” because he was born in China and moved to New Jersey when he was 12. Zhao lived in a predominantly white neighborhood where he learned English quickly, and he didn’t know many others who shared his culture.

He sought out similar students to interview for his project. He knew that their process of identity discovery would be different from youths who grew up in cities with larger Asian-American populations. “Growing up in New Jersey, it was more about fitting in and trying to be like everyone else, trying to not stand out in a crowd,” Zhao says.

“When college comes around, it becomes this independence period where you’re no longer under the watch of your parents. I wanted to find out the effect that had on second-generation Asian-Americans, whether they became more American or they become more in tune with their native culture.”

Zhao quickly found a commonality among many of his interviewees — most of them felt a similar conflict between retaining their culture and becoming more American. But the ways they reacted to this conflict were varied.

Some perceived that their American friends were close to their parents and could tell them anything. They longed for a similar relationship with their parents instead of feeling pressured to live up to a high standard in school and life. They felt this pressure was their parents’ reaction to their life in Asia. “I look at my parents’ experience in China and it’s a hundred times worse than what I live like today,” Zhao says. “I think about all the sacrifices they had to make to get us where we are today. I know they’ll love me regardless of what I do, but at the same time I feel like I need to make it worthwhile for them to make all the sacrifices they made for me.”

One girl Zhao interviewed wanted to study English in college, but her parents wanted her to be a doctor. The girl said she loved her parents so much that she put their happiness ahead of her own. So she studied medicine to make them proud.

Others talked of struggles with different cultural expectations, such as not being allowed to date or even watch kissing scenes on television, while their friends talked about sex or were dating. Some had to go straight home to study after school rather than hanging out with friends. Many interviewees talked about living a double life — acting like one person at school and another at home.

Zhao found some youths reacted to the cultural differences by rebelling, especially once they reached college — something Zhao dubbed the “rubber-band effect.” One boy he interviewed said he felt his parents unfairly pressured him to succeed, so he did his own thing — went to house parties with alcohol in high school, had a steady girlfriend, aspired to enter the workforce immediately after graduation rather than going to college.

Other forms of rebellion included denying their Asian heritage. A boy Zhao interviewed changed his name to one that sounded more American, stopped participating in religious ceremonies and told his friends he wasn’t Indian — he was just tan. “As I listened to him tell me this story, there was a voice inside my head saying, ‘No, don’t do this. Just be proud of who you are,’” Zhao says. “It dawned on me that maybe it was time for me to start listening to myself. This research project helped me go a long way on a journey of accepting who I am. In the end, that acceptance is priceless to me.”

Zhao’s initial motivation was to learn more about himself by hearing others' experiences. But in the process of asking them to tell their stories, Zhao says the experience was also therapeutic for the interviewees. “A lot of them came back to me later and said it was rewarding for them because I asked them questions they hadn’t thought about. Those kind of inner reflections tend to get lost. They gained a better understanding of themselves and their own identity. And that’s something I would definitely encourage others to do.”

What If?

Democratic Congressman Sam Farr ’63 grew up in a political family, where luminaries like Ansel Adams dropped by for coffee. He didn’t know his parents’ friends were famous. All he knew was that he “grew up in a living room environment of 'what-ifs.'” His biology teachers at Willamette continued the discussion, pushing him to think about ways to lessen human impacts on the earth long before “ecology” became part of the nation’s vocabulary.

When Farr returned from the Peace Corps, where he lived in an impoverished barrio in Colombia, he became newly sensitized to California farm workers living in squalor. Sans law degree, the biology graduate entered politics, hoping to create laws that would lead to a sustainable society.

And a sustainable environment. Farr has been named one of the country’s foremost champions of the environment by the Wilderness Society, the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club and California State Parks for his landmark legislation to protect California wilderness, offshore islands and green space. In an era when scientists are predicting the coming collapse of the ocean’s ecosystems, Farr collaborated with another Willamette alumnus, Democratic Congressman Jay Inslee, JD’76 of Washington State, to draft the Oceans-21 Bill, pivotal legislation that protects the fisheries that sustain civilization.

“I still go back to my biology training at Willamette,” Farr says. “Most people look at the ocean as one-dimensional. They don’t see what’s underneath.” The congressman has made a career of seeing what’s underneath, and acting — protecting society’s most vulnerable, preserving California’s last untrammeled places, and protecting the planet’s shared waters, answering his own what-ifs.

Giving Workers a Voice

It seemed like a simple request. Workers at a north Portland Fresh Del Monte Produce plant asked for safety gloves to protect their hands as they washed and sliced fruits and vegetables.

But when eight Hispanic women were fired at the plant allegedly in retaliation for making this request — and asking for time off for New Year’s Eve — they didn’t just stay silent. They filed a class action lawsuit against Fresh Del Monte and its employment firm. The company denied wrongdoing when it settled the case for $400,000, at the time the largest class action settlement for agricultural workers ever in Oregon.

When Keith Cunningham-Parmeter first took the case as lead attorney, it seemed clear to him that his clients’ workplace rights had been violated. Most of those working at the plant are immigrants. “This was a group of eight very courageous women who spoke up when almost every other person in their situation would stay silent,” he says. “They were experiencing the sort of abuse that people from their community now accept as commonplace, as part of being an immigrant working in the United States.”

Cunningham-Parmeter, now an assistant professor at Willamette’s College of Law, has spent much of his career providing legal counsel to agricultural workers like those at the Fresh Del Monte plant. He realizes that these cases become more and more contentious as the public debate rages over illegal immigration. But he is adamant that regardless of whether a worker is in the country legally, the law still protects that person’s basic rights.

In June, the same plant was subject to an immigration raid that resulted in the arrest and detention of 167 workers suspected of being in the country illegally. But after the raid, it also was revealed that the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division had opened two separate investigations into safety practices at the plant. During the lawsuit, Cunningham-Parmeter facilitated a separate investigation that resulted in the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries finding substantial evidence to support the workers’ allegations they had been fired for making safety complaints.

“I really believe that no matter what side of the immigration debate you’re on, most people would agree that if you work for eight hours, you should be paid for eight hours. In representing farmworkers, I sought to protect basic human rights — the right to be paid your wages, the right to be free of sexual harassment, the right to have a safe workplace. Whether you’re documented or not, the law says you have those protections.”

Cunningham-Parmeter grew up around migrant agricultural workers in his Bay Area hometown of Gilroy, Calif., which calls itself the “Garlic Capital of the World.” His family lived comfortably, but he saw the struggles of many Hispanic immigrants around him. “I realize that simply by being born white and middle class in the United States, I obtained instant privilege, and it doesn’t take much to see that not everyone was born with that privilege. My work is my way of giving back.”

After getting his bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Oregon, he spent two years in the Mississippi Delta through Teach For America, teaching middle school in one of the 10 poorest counties in the country. Then it was on to Stanford University for a law degree, where one summer job had him representing female lettuce packers who had been passed over for promotions.

But his love for the Northwest eventually drew him back to Oregon. Cunningham-Parmeter earned a two-year fellowship from Skadden Arps, one of the country’s largest law firms, allowing him to provide legal services to migrant and seasonal farmworkers in Oregon. He worked with the Oregon Law Center, a nonprofit organization that provides free legal services to low-income clients.

Oregon has the sixth-largest migrant farmworker population in the country. Workers come to the state in the spring and summer to harvest various crops, including berries, hops and pears.

The Fresh Del Monte case was one of many Cunningham-Parmeter took on during his fellowship. He relied on the help of outreach workers, often former farmworkers, as he tried to gain connections within the migrant communities in Woodburn, Portland and the Columbia River Gorge.

“Building relationships with your clients doesn’t happen overnight,” he says. “It often involved frequent visits to homes and labor camps. My clients were understandably skeptical of this outsider coming in and saying he was going to right all the wrongs.”

Much of his time was spent meeting workers and informing them that they had basic protections under the law, regardless of their immigration status. He would leave his business card behind — and sometimes workers called him to report possible violations.

Besides complaints of not being properly paid, workers also were concerned about unsanitary living or working conditions on farms — including lack of bathrooms and drinking water — and about improper exposure to pesticides. The law requires employers to provide these workers with pesticide safety training, but Cunningham-Parmeter says there often was no training, or it was done in a language the workers could not understand.

“Whenever I would think I was having a tough day, I would think about my clients living in ramshackle labor camps or suffering sexual harassment,” he says. “My life seemed like a cakewalk.”

Cunningham-Parmeter joined the Willamette faculty a year ago because he wanted to continue with a profession he fell in love with while serving through Teach For America. Now he shares his extensive knowledge of labor law and employment discrimination with his students. But he won’t forget about the workers who need a voice; he hopes to continue helping them through his scholarship and outreach work.

His continued passion goes back to his deep-seated need to give to those who don’t have the same privileges he has. And it’s also a part of his spiritual side as a Catholic. “I believe in service,” he says. “I’m here to do more than just survive. If I have the means and talents to help others, then I should.”