About two months ago I participated in a half-hour telephone survey about my smoking history and habits. The survey was specifically targeted for Indian Americans living in California, and I believe it was run by one of the UC campuses. The questions ranged from whether I had ever chewed paan, to how accepting I would be of my eventual offspring dating someone of another race. I do not know for sure if this new study reported by OnlyPunjab.com is associated with that same survey or not, but the results are worth examining:

California’s Asian Americans smoke at a lower rate than the state’s population as a whole, but the better an Asian California woman’s English, the more likely she is to smoke.

“Because one of every three Asian Americans in the United States lives in California, these findings have significance well beyond the borders of our state,” said Moon S. Chen, Jr., professor of public health sciences at UC Davis School of Medicine and Medical Center and principal investigator for AANCART, an $8.5 million project funded by the National Cancer Institute.

Why is it that the more assimilated (I correlate this only with English fluency) an Asian woman, the more likely she is to be a smoker? This is particularly curious when considering the following:

Researchers also found an intriguing relationship between English fluency and smoking rates. “Among Asian American males, high English fluency speakers had significantly lower smoking prevalence when compared to low English fluency speakers — 17 percent versus 25 percent. But the pattern was completely the opposite for Asian women,” Tang said. “Those with the highest English fluency were significantly more likely to smoke than Asian women with lower English fluency — 11 percent versus 4 percent.” English fluency has often been used as an indicator for acculturation in ethnic research.

The original press release can be found here.