	While the general historical narrative of Asian immigration from the late 19th to mid 20th century is one of poor immigrants, the narrative of Asian immigration in the late 20th through the 21st century is quite different. Due to the combination of a quota and preference system in the 1964 Immigration Act, more affluent immigrants are now favored. Clutter’s family’s story is a common one in the restricted sphere of Asian immigration after 1964. In contrast, the story Yung tells of a well-off student, Jane Kwong Lee, who travels by ship from China to San Francisco, succeeds in getting an education, and becomes fairly successful afterwards is relatively rare for Asian immigration of that time. It is important to note that aspects of Clutter’s story may be as rare for Asian immigration today as Lee’s story is for Asian immigration in the past. This is the danger of creating an analysis from one person’s story. It would also be simplistic to equate Clutter’s story entirely with Lee’s; economic affluence is clearly a huge advantage in any situation, but many other factors are involved. Racial paradigms, for example, changed greatly over the 20th century, and this is especially true in the case of Chinese immigration. Yung ends her story with the 1940s so we cannot follow Lee’s experience of the Red Scare in the 1950s, but Ngai writes that Chinese immigrants suddenly came under suspicion due to fear of communism, and their legality was questioned. Even affluent immigrants were at risk of deportation if they were proven to be “paper sons” and had ties to communists or labor organizations. Since Clutter’s family immigrated in 2005, quite a bit later than the end of the Cold War, and after American society had changed so that it was socially unacceptable to assert that people were untrustworthy entirely due to their race, their experience as affluent Asian immigrants is distinct from affluent Asian immigrants of the past. To be sure, racism still exists, but it manifests itself in much different ways.
	In fact, Mike Clutter does not believe racism has played a significant role in his life as an American immigrant. His family chose to move to Potomac, MD, because it was near his father’s new job in Northern Virginia and because his mother had a cousin who had already moved to Potomac. Potomac has a large Asian population, with a significant percentage of that being Taiwanese, and Clutter says that this “helped with home-sickness”. As Clutter finished up high school, he started out spending most of his time with Asian immigrants and Asian Americans. 
 Although Clutter first became friends with other Asians - shorthand for East Asians in Potomac - he soon made friends from other ethnic groups common in Potomac, including South Asians, Iranians, Jews, and even some white Christians. He considered Potomac to be ethnically integrated, but pointed out that his family would sometimes get together with other Taiwanese families to stay connected. He says he felt “comfortable” and “welcomed” in Potomac and continued to feel the same way after he left to go to college at the University of Pennsylvania. Of course, it is possible that Clutter experienced racism and chose not to talk about it. It is also possible that he is lying about feeling comfortable and getting along well with his white friends, and the danger of an oral history is that he could conceivably be lying about everything the interviewer does not have personal knowledge of. However, that is unlikely. A more plausible explanation in which Clutter did in fact experience racism would be that the racism was too subtle for him to be sure of its motives, too rare for him to deem worth mentioning, or too uncomfortable a subject for him to be willing to talk about. It is only possible to interpret whether one of these is the case by considering the information Clutter does give. He was successful in his education and social life, he felt that he was able to keep in touch with Taiwanese culture adequately (more on that later), and he described the environment of Potomac as a comfortable one. From this evidence, I can only assume that any racism Clutter experienced was something he considered insignificant and did not have a substantial detrimental effect on his life.
