Town in transition

The library’s small but growing Chinese collection, and the addition of a few books in Bengali, reflects a town’s population in flux. In 1990, 6 percent of the town’s residents were Asian. Now, town officials estimate that 20 percent of those who live in Lexington are Asian. In the public schools, the numbers are even higher: One-fourth of all students are Asian, and officials have expanded programs that teach English.

Earlier this year, the town created a task force to pull together statistics on the town’s changing demographics and recommend ways to adapt. The group’s final report concluded that Lexington’s Asian population is significantly higher than in neighboring communities, and will continue to expand. Town officials plan to talk to communities on the West Coast with high Asian populations for suggestions on ways to better incorporate Asians into town government and boards.

“I don’t believe that we realized, in terms of the Asian community, how quickly it was growing,’’ said Carl Valente, Lexington town manager and a member of the task force.

The Lexington Police Department has hired a Mandarin speaker. The Lexington Chinese School, which started in 1972, has grown to one of the largest such schools in New England, with about 400 students.

The task force created to look at the town’s changing demographics recommended that the town further investigate the growth and makeup of the Asian community, and track emergency situations involving residents who don’t speak English well. That information would help town officials know which languages most Asian residents speak. Although the largest percentage of Asians in Lexington are Chinese, according to statistics, there are also residents from India, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and other Asian countries.

However, Paul Watanabe, director of the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, cautions against using recent statistical data on race in a town the size of Lexington. Although the US Census Bureau conducts annual surveys, the sampling size is too small to be very reliable, he said.

“The problem is that while you may be able to get data on Asian Americans in Massachusetts, you cannot get reliable data on Asian Americans in Lexington,’’ he said.

Later this year, he said, more reliable statistics will become available as the census bureau releases statistics combined from the last five years.

Still, Watanabe said, Asians have doubled in the nation and the state in recent years. “Asian Americans in Lexington, as well as within the state and the nation, may still be the fastest-growing racial group,’’ he said.

In Lexington the need for multilingual services is apparent. For example, the town trains restaurant workers on how to handle food safely, but at some Asian restaurants, that training has been difficult. “We find that some of our training is not able to reach some of the employees because we do the training in English, and they may not be able to understand, particularly technical terms,’’ said Valente.

The Chinese section of the Carey Memorial Library was started in 1987 but has grown to more than 2,700 books and DVDs and other items, bought with both gift funds and money in the library’s budget. Patrons of the collection, developed over the years by library workers who are Chinese, include Lexington residents as well as those from other towns who travel to the library for its substantial collection, said Cynthia Johnson, the library’s head of reference services.

The library also sees Chinese patrons who are only in the United States for a short period of time and are particularly interested in reading books that are banned in China, said library staff member Shiouh-lin Chang. Last month, Chang put out a new book not available in China — “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang’’ — and within a few hours, it was checked out, she said. Also popular, she said: “Mao: The Unknown Story’’ and books by Yihe Zhang, an author whose histories of China are often banned.

Anh Thu Pham was at the library one day this week with her young daughter. Pham, who is Vietnamese, and her family moved to Lexington three years ago for the town’s strong sense of community and its public schools.

“They have a lot of activities for children,’’ she said. “The school system is good.’’

The Lexington task force has recommended creating a separate task force to increase the participation of Asian American residents in local government. Asian Americans have served as Town Meeting members and on the School Committee, and one ran unsuccessfully for selectman this year. Still, the number of Asians involved in local government doesn’t reflect the percentage of Asians in town.

Peter Lee, spokesman for the Chinese American Association of Lexington and a member of the task force, would like to see more Asians become involved in local government or volunteer work. The town should encourage broader participation, but Lee also believes that as Asians become more socially integrated in town, they may become more inclined to get involved.

“The Chinese specifically have been reluctant to get involved in committees and run for town office or Town Meeting,’’ Lee said. “I think it could be a cultural thing. Government [in China] was not something that you were actively involved in unless you were a politician. There was not a lot of citizen involvement in government or volunteer opportunities.’’

Lee, who grew up in Winchester and moved to Lexington in 1992, is a second-generation Chinese American. His parents came to the United States for their education.

“After the Cultural Revolution, it just didn’t make sense for them to go back,’’ he said. “They met and they settled and the rest is history.’’

Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com.