"I like the interaction with everyday people, with the average worker and stuff," Burgos said, adding that she also wants to contribute her experience as an Asian American and to voice the experience of other Asian Americans. The problem, she said, is that Asian Americans have been historically misrepresented by the media.

Burgos, an intern at The Dallas Morning News, is one of 16 aspiring journalists in a newspaper workshop sponsored by the Asian American Journalists Association, which is holding its convention in New York City this week.

That news coverage of Asian Americans is frequently distorted is an opinion shared by the veteran journalists of the AAJA, which has published a handbook for reporters and editors called "All American: How to Cover Asian America." Because I wanted to know how I ought to be covering Asian Americans, I got a copy.

You might think Asian Americans don't have much to complain about. From the news reports most of us have read or watched on TV, you'd think no Asian student ever scores below 750 on the SAT, that Asian immigrants are universally successful entrepreneurs and that every Asian- American family can boast of a musical or mathematical genius.

In fact, although a lot of Asian Americans are prosperous, some national groups suffer from high rates of poverty, unemployment and lack of education. A 1995 United Way study found that Cambodians living in Los Angeles had lower median incomes and college graduation rates and higher levels of poverty and unemployment than the city's African Americans.

"We suffer from reporting that says we're either the first or the worst," says Catalina Camia, Washington correspondent for The Dallas Morning News and president of the AAJA.

The news stories are either about exemplary Asian Americans like Bill Lann Lee, the first Asian American to serve as assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department, or they're about the Asian Americans who were involved in the Democrats' fund-raising scandals or alleged villains like Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos physicist who stands accused of breaching national security by downloading nuclear weapons secrets.

Anthony Ramirez, a New York Times reporter and author of "How to Cover Asian America," feels the coverage of the Wen Ho Lee story has been particularly unbalanced. Most stories, he said, have failed to point out that Taiwan, where Lee was born, is an anti-Communist country, yet he's accused of spying for Communist China. "A lot of the coverage has focused on his being [an ethnic] Chinese," says Anna- lisa Burgos. "Too much of the reporting has focused on that instead of on the facts of the case." We journalists have come to expect that political correctness will be strictly enforced in reporting about most racial groups. Yet ethnic slurs for Asian Americans still slip into stories and headlines. So do cartoons depicting buck-toothed Asians. When Rockefeller Center was sold to a Japanese firm some years ago, you'd have thought Pearl Harbor had been bombed again, so loud was the press outcry about selling an American icon to the Japanese.

And while other ethnic groups are presumed to become Americanized over time, Asian Americans are regarded as eternally foreign. When a reporter asks an Asian American where she's from, Sacramento isn't a sufficient answer, Ramirez said, even though she might be a third-generation American. The reporter usually wants to know where the person is really from, say, China, Korea or Taiwan. When Tara Lupinski defeated Michele Kwan for the Olympic gold medal in figure skating, the headline on the MSNBC Web site read, "American Beats Out Kwan," even though both young women are American.

And for that matter, how many journalists really know what we're talking about when we talk about Asia and Asians? How many of us could actually find Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore on a map? AAJA's Camia says she hopes the group's handbook will wind up on the desk of every news desk in America. It's a reminder that we know a lot less about Asian Americans than we think we do.

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