Where The Asian-Americans Are

Mayor Michael Guingona of Daly City, Calif., gets a little taste of what life was like in his parents' native country — the Philippines — by walking down the streets of his neighborhood in the San Francisco suburb.

Outside of Honolulu, Daly City is the largest city in the United States with a majority Asian population, says a Census Bureau report to be released Monday.

California, New York and Hawaii are home to over half of the nation's Asian population, though there also were pockets of growth during the past decade in Minnesota, Indiana and other states.

Even Guingona, a Filipino born in San Francisco, is a little surprised about how things have grown.

"One guy would come over from the same town (overseas), he would assess the place, and before you know it a lot of people from the same town would stay in one house here for a short time and then move on," he said.

Nearly 54 percent of Daly City residents selected Asian as their race on their census form.

Among cities with more than 100,000 residents, Honolulu had the largest share of residents who were Asian, nearly 68 percent, according to the 2000 census report that summarized previously released data. After Daly City, the rest of the top 10 were in California.

Still, data indicate that the Asian population — typically with backgrounds from smaller Southeast Asian countries — surged outside of the traditional immigrant gateways, said Karen Narasaki, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium in Washington.

Asians nearly doubled in size during the 1990s in Indiana, and more than doubled in Minnesota. Thousands of Hmong, an ethnic group from the highlands of Laos that was caught up in the Vietnam War, have settled in Minnesota in recent years.

Data from 1990 is not directly comparable, however, because of a new option on 2000 census forms that allowed people to identify themselves as being members of more than one race.

Southeast Asian groups settled outside longtime immigrant destinations in part because of government's refugee resettlement programs that assessed a quota per zip code, Narasaki said.

Chinese is the largest Asian subgroup in the country, numbering 2.7 million, followed by Filipino (2.4 million), and Asian Indian (1.9 million).

By Genaro C. Armas