Feb 12, 2012 | 04:21
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Jan 05, 2010
Former TV journalist unveils story of Chinese immigrants' quest to belong
As a popular Los Angeles television reporter in the early 1980s, Tritia Toyota started to notice a population trend that would eventually motivate her to write a book about the topic.
Currently an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology and Asian American studies at UCLA as well as an alumna, Toyota interviewed Lily Chen, the new mayor of a rapidly changing Monterey Park and the first Chinese American woman to attain that post in the continental United States.
Chen was very different from the Asian Americans that Toyota had known and reported on until then — Chen was a foreign-born, naturalized immigrant from Taiwan who had moved to Monterey Park and then became involved in the city’s politics. Only a few years after moving to the San Gabriel Valley city, which by the 1980s had become a Chinese American enclave, Chen had won a city council seat. She was later appointed mayor.Chen’s story resonated with Toyota, who would eventually research and write “Envisioning America: new Chinese Americans and the Politics of Belonging” (Stanford University Press, November 2009). The book details the story of how naturalized Chinese Americans in Southern California became highly involved civic and political leaders and the challenges they faced to get there.
“These activists largely refute the notion that it takes several generations for an immigrant group to be involved in the political process,” Toyota said. “They truly believe in the tenets of American democracy and want to be involved politically.”
Toyota started researching the book after she retired from a groundbreaking career in broadcast journalism in 1999.
The daughter of Japanese American internment camp survivors, Toyota was the first Asian American female anchor-reporter at a major television station in Southern California. For KNBC News, she wrote and produced "Asian America," the first hourlong documentary on this topic that won an Emmy award.
When she started working as a radio reporter in the early 1970s, she never imagined her career in television journalism would last 25 years.
“I didn’t think at the time — given the demographics of most news staffs — that I would even have an opportunity for a lasting job,” Toyota said. “But someone at KNBC decided to give me a chance.”
While she was still reporting, Toyota, who earned a master’s degree in journalism from UCLA in 1970, was accepted to UCLA’s doctorate program in anthropology.
“Most of the graduate seminars were held in the afternoon, and I had to anchor the 5 p.m. news,” Toyota said. “For obvious reasons, it just didn’t work out.”
In 1999, Toyota retired from broadcast journalism and returned to her academic roots.
Although much has been written about the rise of Asian American politicians, Toyota felt the personal stories of immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China were missing from academic research.Chen, for instance, was voted out of office in 1985, the result of a backlash against the burgeoning number of Chinese immigrants who had established new lives and businesses in Monterey Park.
“Race was at the root of the ‘degradation’ of the community, posited directly through an economic issue – commercial and residential development that ‘old timers’ thought included too many strange new businesses, garishly designed condominiums and unreadable signs,” Toyota wrote. “Nobody was fooled into thinking this had nothing to do with race.
“New development had a Chinese face,” she added.
But Chen and others persevered in their own right.
Although Chen never regained political office, she is still active in community groups and attends political events and fundraisers.
“New Chinese American activists believe that in the doing, they can make a difference in bringing about positive social change,” Toyota wrote. “Inherent in this explicit political agenda is faith in collective struggle with other Americans of Asian ancestry and the power of social movements to rearticulate entitlement and belonging.”
