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The children of some of these immigrants, college-age Asian Americans, led many of the protests against Abercrombie & Fitch's shirts last month. Many of their contemporaries, however, found nothing offensive about "Wong's laundry service" even though many of their parents and grandparents shared the struggles of real-life Wongs and other early immigrants to this country.

My dad worked as a dish washer in a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant for a time before scraping together the gumption and money to start a Chinese vegetable farm that's still around today, run by my brother. When I was a kid, I didn't want my friends to see that side of my life. I didn't want them to know my parents were immigrants who didn't speak English and toiled on the land for a living. Back then, I would have laughed at the Abercrombie shirts, too. By rejecting an image like that, there was less chance it could be projected onto me. I wanted to fit in and be an all-American kid.

Part of the assimilation process for immigrants and their children often includes forgetting the past and pushing forward as "Americans." To be American is to not speak with an accent or have any FOB-ish tendencies because that is what marks people as different. Outsiders are easy objects for ridicule and lead to images such as those in Abercrombie's shirts.

It's easy just to laugh off something like the Abercrombie shirts as something silly and not important. A&F's shirts are just one example of these types of images in TV, movies and popular culture. They are the same types of stereotypes that were used more than 100 years ago to dehumanize Chinese miners and they're still around. As long as somebody sees me as just a pair of slanted eyes, caricatures like those on the shirts are nothing that I can laugh at.

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