(FORTUNE Magazine) – PACKING A BAG and hitting the road is part of the journalistic life. So it was routine for associate editor Anthony Ramirez to crisscross the country, stopping at Pittsburgh, Washington, Memphis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco as he prepared this issue's report on the remarkable advance of Asian Americans, specifically their progress in U.S. business (see page 148). Tony Ramirez immigrated to the U.S. from Manila as a 1-year-old. At that age, assimilation is not much of an issue, he says. Reporter Barbara Loos, who also conducted many interviews for the story and wrote the accompanying article on Asian American women, got early expatriate experience as the daughter of an IBMer. The ''I've been moved'' syndrome took her to Tokyo at age 4. Loos did a second tour of duty there, spending the fourth and fifth grades in the Nishimachi International School, where most of her classmates were Japanese. Loos's memories of being an outsider echo the sentiments of some of her story subjects. ''You can't escape the fact of looking, and being, different,'' she says. The achievements of Asian Americans constitute a distinctly upbeat chapter among the sometimes troubling tales of immigration today, but the FORTUNE team's interviews with more than 80 managers and professionals revealed that some lingering racial stereotypes hurt Asian Americans' advancement. As Ramirez observes: ''It's said that Asians are the model minority. They're supposed to be smart and hardworking, but passive. It may be better to be considered a computer nerd than to be completely anonymous. But even a generally positive stereotype like that can kill your chances of becoming C.E.O.'' Talk about hardworking. As their eight weeks of reporting and writing drew to a close, Ramirez and Loos found themselves tied up well after midnight on long-distance calls to the West Coast, conducting follow-up interviews. Perseverance, too, is a Ramirez trait. As a 1976 graduate of the University of California, Tony swallowed rejections from 46 newspapers until he got into | journalism with a job writing for a magazine for auto dealers. ''I just papered my wall with those letters and kept trying,'' he recalls. Quickly tiring of in-depth analyses of carwashes, he moved into general business as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and an editor at the Los Angeles Times before joining FORTUNE in 1984. The one Asian American stereotype Ramirez firmly rejects is reticence in the workplace. But then, he's a journalist.