Are You Aware? The Model Minority Myth
This is part II in our Awareness Wednesday series on the Asian American experience. Read the other posts in the series here.
I tried to step lightly across the hot sand in a graceful manner but failed as grains of sand made room for the weight of each step as I balanced three pairs of sandals and an extra pair of goggles that my daughters and husband didn’t need. We were vacationing in Kauai for the first time, and, as is normal, they all ran pell-mell into the surf leaving all their belongings behind. As I gathered their accouterments to the chair where I had staked out our spot on the beach, I heard a man yelling.
At first I wasn’t sure what he was yelling. As I got closer to him — a white man with a belly that looked stretched over a dangerously overinflated Bosu ball, splayed out on a beach chair near mine — I realized he was yelling at me. I was the only Asian at this beach, and I happened to be standing in his direct line of sight.
With my heart racing, and the heated crawl of embarrassment rising up my neck, my initial indecision of how to respond resulted in my determination to refuse any acknowledgement of his yelling. “HEY! Are you Japanese?! HEY! Chinese?! Fillipino?! Vietnamese?! HEY! Answer me! What are you?!”
By the time I reached my chair, I heard his annoyed huff as I denied him any answer, or response.
Once I sat down, I was furious. I was furious at him for making me feel like I was just an object to be yelled at, and categorized. I was furious that he thought he had the privilege to behave in that manner. I was furious that no one around me gave a damn. I was furious that I didn’t yell back at him with, “HEY! Are you French?! German?! English?! HEY! Answer me! How white are you?!”
When you live in a country where the default is the white majority experience, Asian Americans end up living as perpetual foreigners in their mother country.
My friends have heard me share one of my most vivid memories of my first-grade life growing up in Bountiful, Utah. I was one of three Asian kids at Valley View Elementary — one was my brother, the other was a Japanese boy my age. Of course, we were the only Asian family in our ward.
One day at recess some older girls came down to the little kids’ playground and were swinging on the swing set. It was still winter, but the snow had somewhat melted, and what was left in the sandbox under the swingset was hard, dirty, refrozen snow mixed with sand from the traffic of kids.
The girls saw me and immediately started taunting me, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these.” Then they threw hard sand-laced snowballs at my face. One of the older boys, a neighbor friend, saw this happen and ran over to me. He helped walk me into the school so I could wash off the gritty sand, now mixed with hot tears, that had gotten into my eyes, my hair, and my ears, and gargle ice-cold water to remove the grains of sand that filled the crevices in my teeth.
I used to speak in Mandarin at recess when people teased and bullied me. It made me feel a bit powerful because they’d scatter, afraid I was cursing them with witch magic. I spent a lot of time in the bathroom stall, furthest from the outside door to the playground, just sitting, praying that the Lord would do something to make me blend in so the bullying would stop.
My father and mother immigrated to the United States in the ‘70s. They both joined the Church in Taiwan as some of the early members when President Hinckley, an apostle at the time, opened the mission in Taiwan. My father began studying at BYU, and my mother, who had already graduated from Taiwan’s prestigious National Taiwan University, taught Mandarin to returned missionaries at BYU.
My father learned early on that members of the Church could be cruel and racist. He found a job working in BYU facilities. He struggled with English (on top of challenging university studies), and those who worked with him would often assign him the dirtiest jobs in the bathrooms — while taunting him. Classmates demonstrated this same base behavior. An assignment that might take an English speaker one hour to complete would take my father three to four hours. He learned it is through immigrant persistence and determination to rise above the ugliness and messiness that, generation upon generation, we get the job done.
Thankfully, my parents met some lovely older couples, two in particular, who “adopted” my parents. In fact, growing up, we visited them often. My parents treated them as our American grandparents. We called them Grandpa and Grandma, and they included us with holiday gifts and thoughtfulness. My parents honored them and loved them as if they were their own parents.
America, this hopeful beacon in the world, founded on ideals of equality, liberty, and freedom, has yet to live up to these true values.
As Americans, we should seek to lift those less fortunate and bear one another’s burdens that they may be light. We shouldn’t throw more hoops, inflict more strife, or create added weight for those who seek refuge within our borders.
We’ve already learned about the history of Asian Americans in this country from MWEG member Angela Stevenson — how Asian Americans were portrayed as yellow peril, and how Asians were pitted against Black Americans by the model minority construct. We’ve all experienced this model minority myth in one form or another. I grew up with it as an expectation, fed by white society. Expectations can be a double-edged sword. Asian Americans are expected to be more intelligent, hard-working, obedient, submissive, and accepted in civil society culturally. However, when we don’t meet those unrealistic expectations it can take a toll on mental health and access to public services; it can deepen divisions that need healing. Choosing to place certain characteristics on a culture is a dangerous practice. We were and continue to be used as a wedge to justify the maltreatment of our Black sisters and brothers.
When we look at Asians across the U.S., we see that the sweeping brush of model minority characteristics is a false brush. There are many Asian Americans who live below the poverty line — many who are unable to access adequate education, many who are excluded from healthcare and simple services simply because they don’t know how the system works.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the disparity Asian Americans are experiencing on all fronts. Asian American employment numbers have shifted from the group with the lowest unemployment rates to one of the highest. A great deal of the Asian American working population works in restaurants, consulting, retail, nail salons, and other personal services. These industries are currently frustrated by the pandemic. Compared to one year ago, where the jobless rate was 2.8% for Asian Americans, in May it rose to 15%. While disparities in jobs for the Black and Latino communities receive attention in the media, Asian American joblessness receives muted notice. Part of this reason is that the model minority attitude thinks of Asian Americans as always “just fine” — no need to ever bother with or even include them in basic polling numbers.
While Asian Americans deal with the economic travails under the pandemic, they’re also dealing with increased discrimination and violence due to the attitude and perpetual race-baiting by the current president and his administration as they continue to create chaos and call COVID-19 the “China Flu,” the “Kung Flu,” the “Chinese Virus,” and more derogatory terms — all meant to shift blame away from the administration’s abject failure to contain and lead our country out of this mess.
These attitudes filter to the general public, who then adjust behavior by avoiding areas traditionally populated by Asian Americans. Some news stations have covered stories about how the public was afraid to even eat Chinese food for fear of COVID-19. Things escalated during the height of this fear, as Asian Americans across the country were subject to violent, physical, and verbal racist attacks.
The purpose of the model minority myth is two-fold: It allows dominant white society to ignore real, systemic racism codified in our system of government, by pointing to Asian Americans, using them as props to foil reality. It also allows dominant white society to dehumanize and take advantage of Asian American “foreignness” to easily manipulate as a patsy when it is convenient for their narrative in preserving power and wriggling out of accountability.
So what can be done? How do we make the changes necessary to fix the world we live in? How do we walk forward with hope?
It begins with us. Until we face our broken reality, we can’t build a better world. I’ve had to decide that I won’t be anyone’s model minority. I’ve had to come to terms that my relative nearness to acceptability to white culture wasn’t on my terms. I had to realize that hiding under the umbrella as a model minority didn’t bring me safety but allowed me conditional, makeshift security, depending on the whims of any careless, flippant attitude. I realized that true equality means I have to stand up, speak out, and support the actions of those who fight for the rights of all minorities.
Just as John F. Kennedy said, “the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.” In our case, the rights of every human are magnified when the rights of one are secured. May we rise up together in support of true equality; in doing so, we will magnify our own humanity.
Stephanie Huang Porter lives in Northern California with her husband and two brilliant teenage daughters. She is a first-generation Chinese American. Her parents immigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. in the 1970s, and her grandparents on both sides escaped China to Taiwan during the Japanese occupation and communist takeover. Her maternal grandparents were some of the first members of the Church in Taiwan. Stephanie graduated from BYU in broadcast journalism and has spent her career working in public relations for Bay Area tech companies. She was one of the original lifestyle/motherhood bloggers in 2005 before monetization sucked the joy out of it. Today she stays active in her community serving on the Storymakers Conference committee, as a VP on the board of her local National Charity League chapter, as president of the high school theatre board, and as a writer behind the scenes for MWEG. Stephanie adores the power of language, dancing, spicy sauce on all the food, traveling abroad, losing herself in a good book, binging movies/television/podcasts, engaging in philosophical conversations, and empowering action to do good.
