8 Asians

The Asian American Studies Department at the University of Maryland has published a report called A Portrait of Chinese Americans. This pdf contains information about residential patterns, employment, and demographic and social profiles. To make the data friendlier to the public, it’s full of dorky photos and graphics and little personal blurbs from individual Chinese Americans. Personally, I think this report could have been a LOT more fun — I think I need the kids’ version — But it’s better than reading anything at a .gov website.

For any who don’t want to go through 64 pages (though it’s mostly pictures and white space), there’s a short version called the Snapshot of the Portrait of Chinese Americans.

And if you just want to look at graphics, there are some maps of the areas most highly populated with Chinese Americans.

And for those who don’t want to read beyond this post, here are a few interesting facts from the report:

On Industry and Sector of Employment:

• The vast majority (80.4%) of Chinese Americans work in the private sector rather than in the government sector (13.2%).
• Few Chinese Americans are self-employed proprietors (6.1%). Chinese Americans in the “second generation and beyond” are even less likely to be self-employed (4.2%).

On Language:

• Chinese Americans are overwhelmingly bilingual. 83.4 percent speak more than one language at home. By contrast, 80.3 percent of the general population speaks only English while 19.7 percent are bilingual.

The top eight metropolitan communities of Chinese Americans:

• New York/ New Jersey
• Los Angeles
• San Francisco
• San Jose
• Boston
• Chicago
• DC/ Baltimore
• Seattle

New York is the most popular metropolitan area, but California is the most highly populated state for Chinese Americans.