Last week was important for Asian-Americans in the US. The community was at the center of a slew of eye-catching and brow-raising events.

The US Congress passed a resolution expressing regret for the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law that was active from 1882 until 1943 and prohibited Chinese immigrants from becoming US citizens or from coming to this country.

Asian-Americans around the country also gathered together to highlight the 30th anniversary of the death of Vincent Chin, a young Chinese man beaten to death with baseball bats by two white auto workers in Detroit, in a horrific reflection of the then pervasive hostility against the rising Japanese auto industry. They mistakenly thought Chin was Japanese.

What's more, the Pew Research Center released a report painting Asians as the best-educated, highest-income, fastest-growing racial group in the country.

Taken together, this may look like a rosy picture for the Asian community, with the old injustices recognized and corrected, the present achievements highlighted. It seems a splendid time for the community is dawning. But the reality is much more complicated.

First of all, despite the achievements of Asians in all fields, including the battle for equal rights, racial bias and discrimination is still very alive in modern US society.

Recent research conducted by the Fiscal Policy Institute found Asians suffered the highest long-term unemployment rate among all racial groups in 2011, and Asians with college degrees had a higher unemployment rate than whites. The research indicated the disparity might be caused by many Asians' foreign-born background.

A study from the Asia Society also found that because of the glass ceiling, less than half of the Asian employees in US firms feel they are part of the future of their companies.

In schools, Asian students, many of whom are quiet and physically delicate, often become targets of bullying. In the military, hazing claimed the young lives of 19-year-old Danny Chen, and 21-year-old Harry Lew, who was also the nephew of Judy Chu, the only Asian woman in Congress who drafted the regret resolution. Both Chen and Lew committed suicide.

While things like these can easily trigger an outcry, it is generally not an easy task to unite all Asians in the US behind the same issues. In fact, for a long time, Asians tended to only identify with their own sub-groups such as Japanese or Chinese.

It was the ridiculous and tragic cause of Chin's death that made many realize that above their differences, they have many common sufferings and interests. This is largely considered to have marked the birth of the concept of the Asian community in the US.

In the past 30 years, the Asian community has tripled in size to 14.7 million people, or 4.8 percent of the entire US population. This certainly brings more leverage and stronger voices, but it also means the community, with multiple layers of generations, origins and economic and education stature, is more diverse than ever, and often more divergent on policy issues.

For example, affirmative action, a policy that allows US universities to take applicants' racial backgrounds into consideration when making admission decisions, is enthusiastically supported by underrepresented Vietnamese or Hmongs, but largely opposed by Chinese, Koreans and Indians who are often affected negatively because they already have strong representation in Ivy League schools.

Or take the gap between previous Chinese immigrants and the super-rich newcomers from various parts of the Chinese mainland in recent years. The luxury spending and upper middle class lifestyles of these people have started to create the false impression that all Chinese are rich.

This is why the Pew research backfired right after it was released. Many advocacy groups in the Asian community blamed the research for having reinforced the model minority myth and overlooking the Asians struggling on the edges of society.

They are right. But how to make a general appeal to people whose interests can not be generalized may be the hardest challenge the community faces.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com