With one newspaper article and little evidence of espionage, The New York Times turned Lee into a "perpetual foreigner" and ruined the reputation of an innocent man. Taking the paper's lead, Americans across the country wrongly branded the Taiwanese scientist as a spy.
It didn't matter that he was a naturalized citizen, that he spoke English or was educated in the United States. What mattered was that he spoke Mandarin at home, was not born in America, spoke English with an accent and looked "different." That earned him the title of "foreigner."
Lumping Asians together as a whole dangerously generalizes a community of varied cultures and people. On Saturday, Professor Andrew Leong noted how his friend from Boston had flown to Los Alamos a year ago for personal reasons. She has no relation to Lee, though they share a last name. Despite the fact that she did not know Lee, FBI agents followed her during her stay there. In China the surname Lee is as common as the surname Smith in the U.S. To follow a woman simply because she has the same last name as a man they are investigating is absurd.
Sometimes distinctions are not even made between Asians from different countries. In her book, "Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People," Helen Zia writes about the death of Vincent Chin. Two men beat Chin to death in Detroit after a confrontation earlier that night in the bar because they were upset over auto worker layoffs as a result of the importation of Japanese cars to the United States. Vincent Chin was a Chinese man, not Japanese.
One of the most ridiculous facts about this case is that because Lee is Taiwanese, he does not have a personal tie to mainland China. He is not even from the People's Republic of China, the very country that the United States government accused him of leaking secrets to. Taiwanese spying for China would be akin to a South Korean spying for North Korea.
The most telling evidence that the government just had no case for espionage against Lee is that, of the 59 counts he was charged with, not one had to do with being a spy. The one count that he admitted to-and never denied-was improper downloading of documents to an insecure computer. Ironically this is an action that former CIA Director John Deutch himself is guilty of, yet he remains unprosecuted.
Lee's case is just one in a long line of examples of Asians continuously treated like they do not belong here. When approaching someone of Asian heritage, people constantly ask, "Where are you from?" If we respond, "Boston or New York or Seattle," the question is asked again: "No, where are you really from?" We are expected to respond with "China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea or Vietnam." We might be born in America; we might have never even stepped foot in Asia; but still people are not satisfied until we tell them which country our ancestors came from. On the other hand, people of European descent are rarely asked from which country their ancestors emigrated immeiately after they are met.
While these questions may reflect curiosity and not prejudice, they expose inclinations to define members of a group solely by race. Asians treasure our cultural history, but the automatic assumption that we are not from this country is a symptom of viewing Asians as perpetual foreigners-always Asian but never fully American.
This "perpetual foreigner" stereotype is equally dangerous to the "model minority" stereotype of Asians. While such a generalization may be a positive reflection on the Asian community, assumptions about a large group-whether good or bad-do not stand as universally true. The actions of some individuals within a group cannot come to represent the identity of the whole. Asians do not have an inborn advantage, just as they are not all born in foreign countries.
The implications and the outcomes of Lee's case have far-reaching consequences that go beyond the Asian-American community. The use of ethnicity as a basis for connecting a person with a crime concerns not only Asian groups. Rather, this case should be a warning to all Americans.
Lee should not have had to spend nine months in jail for a crime the government had no evidence of him committing. I would have to agree with Federal Judge James Parker's apology when he condemned the government for having "embarrassed this entire nation" with their treatment of Lee.
Bethany Li '03 is Copy Editor for The Student.