Feeling Isolated, Asian Entrepreneurs Want to Go Mainstream : Networking: Though often successful in their own communities, immigrants from around the Pacific are striving to reach the broader society.

By TERESA WATANABE and SOON NEO LIM

Aug. 6, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Paul Himawan came to Pomona to study industrial engineering and now imports truck tires and frozen shrimp from his native Indonesia.

William Lu fled Vietnam for France in 1954 to escape persecution and has risen to become president and chief executive of the United Pacific Bank on North Hill Street.

Yongki Yi left Korea for Los Angeles as a tourist in 1971 and stayed to provide what the Department of Labor certified was a badly needed service: air conditioning mechanics in the Mojave Desert. Today he runs his own heating and air conditioning contracting firm in Los Angeles.

Successful as they are, the three businessmen also share a common immigrant lament. They feel isolated in their individual communities and are looking for ways to expand their business and social contacts into the broader society.

For that reason, they and about 300 others turned out last week at the Bonaventure Hotel for a landmark Asian Business Assn. dinner. The gathering brought together Korean grocers and Chinese bankers, Cambodian doughnut shop owners and Filipino architects, third-generation Japanese Americans and newly arrived Vietnamese. Association President Tony K. Wong billed it as the first time so many different Asian business groups have come together to discuss common economic concerns and entrepreneurial opportunities.

“The Pacific Rim has been talk, talk, talk,” said Wong, who escaped from the encroaching Chinese Communists in 1949 and now runs his own civil engineering consulting firm in Los Angeles. “But actually we Asians tend to work within our own little niches. It’s about time to get together and network and create more business opportunities for everyone.”

Wong said it was also critical for the “old guard” immigrant groups from China, Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines to give a helping hand to newly established Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Malaysians.

A Monterey Park planning commissioner, Wong added that the Asian Business Assn. hopes to give greater focus to increased professional unity. The group represents about 250 Asian entrepreneurs, 150 employees of non-Asian businesses and another 50 or so government agencies, utilities and major corporations. Until now, the association’s major thrust has been winning government and corporate contracts for Asian-owned business enterprises.

The dinner featured Joel Kotkin, co-author of the bestseller, “The Third Century: America’s Resurgence in the Asian Era.” Kotkin warned the group about growing hostility from other Americans who feel threatened by Asian business success and often regard them as one undifferentiated, incomprehensible mass.

“You all have been fighting each other for a long time,” he joked, “so you know there are differences.”

Turning serious, Kotkin added: “But they don’t know you are different. When people talk about the ‘Asian invasion,’ they’re talking about most of the people in this room.”

Kotkin urged the group to “participate in the life of the community” and demonstrate more openness to mainstream society.

That’s precisely what brought Vora H. Kanthoul of the Cambodian Business Assn. to the dinner. Kanthoul operates a small printing company in Long Beach, home to 40,000 of Los Angeles County’s 60,000 Cambodians--the largest concentration of them outside Southeast Asia. He is compiling the first Yellow Pages for the area’s 1,500 Cambodian businesses but finding precious little diversity.

“Doughnuts,” he said. “Eighty percent of our business people are doughnut shop owners. It takes very little capital, only $30,000 or $50,000, and people who start a doughnut shop can provide employment for the whole family.”

But Kanthoul believes that doughnuts are ultimately a dead-end and that the community must expand its range of services and clientele.

“The business community is more or less centered around the Southeast Asian community. That’s not very healthy in economic terms. So one of the things we want to do is mainstream our business activities,” said Kanthoul, a former Cambodian foreign service officer who came to Long Beach as a war refugee in 1975.

On the professional end of the scale, Isidoro Alimento is the vice president and general manager of PAE International, a Los Angeles architectural and engineering firm. Both he and Lu of the United Pacific Bank said such gatherings should be held more often to help Asian professionals find new clients among the sprawling communities.

Yi, president of the 500-member Korean Chamber of Commerce, agreed. About 70% of his air conditioning customers are Korean or Japanese, he said, and tapping into the other Asian communities could vastly expand his business.

But Yi thinks that significantly greater business interaction among different Asian groups may take another decade. That’s because first-generation immigrants who lack English-language skills find it difficult enough to communicate with native Americans, much less with immigrants from other countries.

“Right now, if I have to talk English with a new Chinese immigrant, that’s difficult,” Yi said. “It will take the next generation of Koreans and the next generation of Chinese to make it easier.”