Casinos Aggressively Market to Asian Americans, But Few Services Help Addicts
Sampan, News Feature, Adam Smith, Posted: Oct 01, 2006
It's Friday and David Liu is taking a 9:30 a.m. bus from Boston's Chinatown to the Mohegan Sun casino complex in Connecticut. Liu, an immigrant from Hong Kong who's been in the U.S. for about four years, says he first learned about the casino in an ad in a Chinese-language newspaper. Now that he's retired, he says, leaning into his seat, he enjoys gambling once or twice a week for fun.
"The service in the casinos is good," he says, speaking in Mandarin, as the bus's stereo speakers blare pop songs from Hong Kong. "They treat the Chinese well."
On this rainy weekday morning, as most people are just beginning their workday, Liu is joined by about 30 other Chinese immigrants also heading to the casino. The group is among the thousands of Asians who everyday flood the floors of Mohegan Sun and its nearby competitor, Foxwoods, one of the largest casinos in the world. Many of them travel to the casinos on buses that serve primarily Chinese immigrants and entertain them with Cantonese music, movies, and multilingual hostesses.
The majority of these Asian customers are like Liu: They gamble, but safely, and for fun.
But as the two giant gaming complexes have sharpened their skills of attracting the local Asian market over the past decade, most New England communities have lacked any established and coordinated services to help the small percentage of Asian Americans who develop addictions to gaming.
"There just aren't that many resources" for the Asian community, said Kathleen Scanlon, executive director of the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling.
"As far as we know, there are no Gamblers Anonymous meetings in any language other than English," she said. This often prohibits non-English speaking Asians from tapping into services helping those with gambling addictions, she said. Translation also isn’t enough, she contended. "It's very hard to do counseling with a third person [translating] in the room," said Scanlon. To address what it fears is a hidden problem in the state's Asian population, the council plans to earmark a new $100,000 grant from the state lottery specifically for Asian American gambling addicts. The council intends that the initiative, which is still in planning, will include hiring a Chinese-speaking coordinator and training social workers who can treat Asians with gambling problems.
But even armed with that money, the council will likely face a tough challenge. Mohegan Sun's 25-person Asian American marketing department alone is more that four times the size of the entire staff at the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling.
Advertising to Asians
To attract Asian consumers, casinos in New England -- and across the country -- use many traditional advertising and promotional techniques as well as some innovative strategies uncommon in other entertainment markets. Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun regularly buy ads in Chinese newspapers and Chinese-language phone books, and distribute glossy flyers in Asian languages.
The two casinos have also hired large numbers of Asian employees to assist Asian customers: Nearly one in seven employees at Mohegan Sun is Asian American, and at Foxwoods the number is one in six.
But the centerpiece of their promotional strategies is their Chinatown bus service promotions. Private bus services such as Sunshine Travel in Boston or Golden Global Travel in Flushing, New York, collaborate with the casinos to offer patrons like David Liu round-trip tickets from Chinatown, in Boston or in New York City, to the casinos for only $10. The ticket price also offers free lunch and betting vouchers worth upwards of $35, depending on the casino and the carrier. The only catch (or bonus -- depending on how one views it): the return ride typically departs about six hours after drop-off at the casino. So, if a bettor doesn't play his cards right, and loses his money soon after arriving, he has limited options: sit in the food court or withdrawal more money to shop at the casino complex or continue to gamble. For Foxwoods alone, the promotional bus trips bring in 750,000 Asian patrons each year, according to the casino's spokeswoman, Sandra Rios.
These marketing tactics to draw in a share of the nation's 12.5 million Asians are not unique to Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods. Casinos all over the nation have similar promotions.
"We have buses on a daily basis coming in to pick up people," said Janet Soohoo, deputy director of Asian Counseling and Referral Service in Seattle, Washington. "The buses park right outside our senior homes...and in Chinatown," she said. Soohoo said that the casinos in Washington have Cambodian nights, Vietnamese nights, and a Lunar New Year night.
Kent Woo, executive director of NICOS Chinese Health Coalition in San Francisco, California, said that many casinos on the West Coast have similar bus promotions and advertising strategies.
But social workers around the country who counsel Asian gambling addicts say that help is very limited for Asian immigrants who become problem gamblers.
"It's a big deal. A lot of Asians struggle with gambling addictions but there is nowhere for them to turn for help. They just don't know how to manage their addiction, or identify it," said Timothy Fong, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California in Los Angeles, who is studying gambling's effect on Asians in L.A.
Fong said that when a population has access to gambling but no resources to treat addiction, the problem becomes “a vicious cycle.”
Fong contends that many people assume that because Asians tend not to seek counseling, they don't need it. Policy makers and funders hold the view that “‘[Asians] don't have problems and therefore we're not going to fund Asian-specific treatments.' But if you don't fund Asian-specific clinics, of course no one will seek Asian-specific treatment because they won't perceive [their addictions] as treatable."
Social workers maintain that if the addiction goes untreated in entire communities, other troubles, such as domestic violence, identity theft, and bankruptcy, can follow.
Risky Business?
In the U.S., less than 6% of the total population of bettors has some form of gambling problem. But social workers helping various Asian communities around the country have said that the percentage of problem gamblers among Asian Americans -- especially those who arrived to the U.S. as refugees from war-devastated countries such as Vietnam -- is much higher.
A survey of Chinese Americans in San Francisco conducted by students at the University of California at Berkeley found that more than one in three respondents had some form of gambling trouble. Another survey that was conducted by the University of Connecticut Health Center found that nearly 60% of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian Americans who sought assistance from Connecticut community service providers had a gambling problem. A report by the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans also identified a gambling problem among Southeast Asians in Minnesota.
Fong said that his work with the Chinese American population in Los Angeles has found addiction rates to be between 5% and 10%, a smaller number than in other surveys but still higher than the general population. Too little research has been conducted in Massachusetts to determine if rates of gambling addiction among Asian Americans are higher than the total population, said Scanlon at the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling. A 1995 report sponsored by the council did confirm that the Asian population -- especially those with limited English proficiency -- struggle with gambling problems to some degree.
It would also appear that because of the sheer number of Asian patrons at the two Connecticut casinos, the number of Asian gamblers locally is disproportionate to the total population. Asian Americans make up about 20% of the business at Mohegan Sun. Foxwoods did not tell the Sampan the exact percentage of its Asian American customers, but a recent Associated Press article states that it's about 33%. Compare: Massachusetts has an Asian population of only 4.7%; Connecticut, only 3.2%; and New York, only 6.75%.
Some see the marketing tactics used by casinos as contributing to possible high rates of addiction to betting. "The more access that you have to gambling, the more likely there is to be problem gambling," said Kent Woo. But others feel the reasons are more complex and related to cultural and social views of gaming, prior traumatic experiences of refugees, and isolation of immigrants.
"Gambling [addiction] isn't likely to come out just because of aggressive marketing practices. It's going to come out for a whole variety of reasons, biological, psychological, and social -- easy access is only one part," said Fong.
Several social workers who help Asian problem gamblers see a cultural acceptance of betting as contributing to the frequency of gambling among Asian Americans.
Janet Soohoo of the Asian Counseling and Referral Service in Seattle notes that many Asian societies enjoy gambling socially at parties or family celebrations. Social gambling for Asians, she said, often has a clear beginning and ending: it starts with the gathering and ends when everyone goes home. "But in the Western [gambling] model… there is no end time. Casinos are open all the time," she said.
For their part, both Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, which are not legally bound by Connecticut laws regarding gambling because they are owned by Native American tribes, offer some assistance to groups who work with compulsive gamblers. Mohegan Sun, for example, gives to the Connecticut Council on Compulsive Gambling and offers gambling addiction brochures in Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean, according to a spokesperson for the casino. But the casino only works with groups inside Connecticut. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, which owns Foxwoods, did not return a phone call seeking information about how it supports groups working with gambling addiction.
Of a half dozen people interviewed during the bus ride with David Liu last week from Boston's Chinatown to Mohegan Sun, and at the casino, most said they gamble simply because they don't have many other alternatives for entertainment. "Chinatown is so small; it's not fun," said one rider, a retired 66 year-old immigrant from China. "Because Chinese people have a cultural and language barrier, there's not much entertainment for them," said another patron, a 38-year-old immigrant from Taiwan living in New York.
These statements ring true for Zan Ng, who founded Admerasia Inc., an advertising agency that has worked with Foxwoods. "Asians love casinos," he said, noting that most Asian immigrants have few other sources of entertainment in U.S. cities in the Northeast. "If they go to the movies, they can't understand it. There are no Chinese movie theaters anymore. [Gambling] is the only thing they can do on the weekend."
But for problem gamblers who are isolated because of a lack of English skills, this entertainment, when taken to an extreme, can become destructive, not only to individuals, but to entire communities, say social workers. And with little help for troubled gamblers, the problems can persist.
The new Asian initiative by the Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling might just begin to offer a remedy locally, but in many cities across the country, problems will likely remain.
"There needs to be more services and more culturally relevant services. Just for pathological gamblers in general there are very few services," said Fong at UCLA. "But then whose responsibility is it? I don't think it's the responsibility of the state or the casinos to take care of every person with a gambling addiction. But at the same time, if you're a pathological gambler who has no health insurance, you're in debt, you want to get treatment and everyone is saying no to you... that's not right either."
* Anita Chang contributed to this story
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