What happened in the 70's to make this Chinese girl feel isolated?

Question

Im reading short essay by Maxine Hong Kingston, an asian immigrant I believe, who writes about her struggle with her native tongue and culture while speaking in school and in general living in america (ahe felt as if she stuck out). Was there anything that happened in the 1960's or 1970's (since it was published in the 70's) that concerned Americans an Asians that may have fueled her to write this?

Answer 1

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Well, I was a Chinese-American kid in America in the 1970s, and I felt isolated as well. And I had the advantage of being 4th generation, and therefore was culturally well-assimilated and was a native speaker of English.

There just weren't that many Asians around. In our entire elementary school, (in the DC Metropolitan area, which is pretty internationalized and urban) there were only two Asian families, one Chinese (ours) and one Japanese. In other words, you stuck out.

I had cousins who grew up in rural upstate New York. It wasn't until college that they went to school with another Asian that wasn't in their immediate family.

Asian Americans currently make up 5% of the US population. In the 1970's, it was 1%.

What changed that increased the number of Asians? The number of Asians only started increasing when the 1965 Immigration Act ended the system of national origin quotas that had previously restricted immigration from non-European countries (the Civil Rights movement of 1965 considered the practice racist.)