Interestingly enough Bush Sr., Reagan, and even Bob Dole in 1996 won the Asian vote.
I think a lot of that has to do with the inner-city riots that took place in the 1980s and early 1990s. Particularly after the Rodney King incident, there were a lot of Asian-owned stores and restaurants that got damaged and ransacked by the black rioters. Add to that the fact that Asians generally view black people as not entirely civilized (this is true both among Asian-Americans and among Asians in Asia), and they likely wanted to vote for the party they associated with "law and order" and against the party that blacks tended to support.
