Asian Americans Are Still Caught in the Trap of the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype. And It Creates Inequality for All
Asian Americans Are Still Caught
in the Trap of the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype.
And It Creates Inequality for All.
Nguyễn Thanh Việt
The face of Tou Thao haunts me. The Hmong-American police officer stood
with his back turned to Derek Chauvin, his partner, as Chauvin knelt on
George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds and murdered him.
In the video that I saw, Tou Thao is in the foreground and Chauvin is
partly visible in the background, George Floyd’s head pressed to the
ground. Bystanders beg Tou Thao to do something, because George Floyd
was not moving, and as he himself said, he could not breathe.
The face of Tou Thao is like mine and not like mine, although the face
of George Floyd is like mine and not like mine too. Racism makes us
focus on the differences in our faces rather than our similarities, and
in the alchemical experiment of the U.S., racial difference mixes with
labor exploitation to produce an explosive mix of profit and atrocity.
In response to endemic American racism, those of us who have been
racially stigmatized cohere around our racial difference. We take what
white people hate about us, and we convert stigmata into pride,
community and power. So it is that Tou Thao and I are “Asian
Americans,” because we are both “Asian,” which is better than being an
“Oriental” or a “gook.” If being an Oriental gets us mocked and being a
gook can get us killed, being an Asian American might save us. Our
strength in numbers, in solidarity across our many differences of
language, ethnicity, culture, religion, national ancestry and more, is
the basis of being Asian American.
But in another reality, Tou Thao is Hmong and I am Vietnamese. He was a
police officer and I am a professor. Does our being Asian bring us
together across these ethnic and class divides? Does our being
Southeast Asian, both our communities brought here by an American war
in our countries, mean we see the world in the same way? Did Tou Thao
experience the anti-Asian racism that makes us all Asian, whether we
want to be or not?
Let me go back in time to a time being repeated today. Even if I no
longer remember how old I was when I saw these words, I have never
forgotten them: Another American driven out of business by the
Vietnamese. Perhaps I was 12 or 13. It was the early 1980s, and someone
had written them on a sign in a store window not far from my parents’
store. The sign confused me, for while I had been born in Vietnam, I
had grown up in Pennsylvania and California, and had absorbed all kinds
of Americana: the Mayflower and the Pilgrims; cowboys and Indians;
Audie Murphy and John Wayne; George Washington and Betsy Ross; the
Pledge of Allegiance; the Declaration of Independence; the guarantee of
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; all the fantasy and
folklore of the American Dream.
Part of that dream was being against communism and for capitalism,
which suited my parents perfectly. They had been born poor to rural
families, and without much formal schooling and using only their
ingenuity and hard work, had become successful merchants. They fled
communist Vietnam in 1975, after losing all of their property and most
of their fortune. What they carried with them–including some gold and
money sewn into the hems of their clothes–they used to buy a house next
to the freeway in San Jose and to open the second Vietnamese grocery
store there, in 1978. In a burst of optimism and nostalgia, they named
their store the New Saigon.
I am now older than my parents were when they had to begin their lives
anew in this country, with only a little English. What they did looms
in my memory as a nearly unimaginable feat. In the age of coronavirus,
I am uncertain how to sew a mask and worry about shopping for
groceries. Survivors of war, my parents fought to live again as aliens
in a strange land, learning to read mortgage documents in another
language, enrolling my brother and me in school, taking
driver’s-license examinations. But there was no manual telling them how
to buy a store that was not advertised as for sale. They called
strangers and navigated bureaucracy in order to find the owners and
persuade them to sell, all while suffering from the trauma of having
lost their country and leaving almost all their relatives behind. By
the time my parents bought the store, my mother’s mother had died in
Vietnam. The news nearly broke her.
Somehow the person who wrote this sign saw people like my mother and my
father as less than human, as an enemy. This is why I am not surprised
by the rising tide of anti-Asian racism in this country. Sickened, yes,
to hear of a woman splashed with acid on her doorstep; a man and his
son slashed by a knife-wielding assailant at a Sam’s Club; numerous
people being called the “Chinese virus” or the “chink virus” or told to
go to China, even if they are not of Chinese descent; people being spat
on for being Asian; people afraid to leave their homes, not only
because of the pandemic but also out of fear of being verbally or
physically assaulted, or just looked at askance. Cataloging these
incidents, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong wrote, “We don’t have
coronavirus. We are coronavirus.”
Looking back, I can remember the low-level racism of my youth, the
stupid jokes told by my Catholic-school classmates, like “Is your last
name Nam?” and “Did you carry an AK-47 in the war?” as well as more
obscene ones. I wonder: Did Tou Thao hear these kinds of jokes in
Minnesota? What did he think of Fong Lee, Hmong American, 19 years old,
shot eight times, four in the back, by Minneapolis police officer Jason
Anderson in 2006? Anderson was acquitted by an all-white jury.
The basis of anti-Asian racism is that Asians belong in Asia, no matter
how many generations we have actually lived in non-Asian countries, or
what we might have done to prove our belonging to non-Asian countries
if we were not born there. Pointing the finger at Asians in Asia, or
Asians in non-Asian countries, has been a tried and true method of
racism for a long time; in the U.S., it dates from the 19th century.
It was then that the U.S. imported thousands of Chinese workers to
build the transcontinental railroad. When their usefulness was over,
American politicians, journalists and business leaders demonized them
racially to appease white workers who felt threatened by Chinese
competition. The result was white mobs lynching Chinese migrants,
driving them en masse out of towns and burning down Chinatowns. The
climax of anti-Chinese feeling was the passage of the 1882 Chinese
Exclusion Act, the first racially discriminatory immigration law in
American history, which would turn Chinese entering the U.S. into the
nation’s first illegal immigrant population. The Immigration and
Naturalization Service was created, policing Chinese immigration and
identifying Chinese who had come into the U.S. as “paper sons,” who
claimed a fictive relation to the Chinese who had already managed to
come into the country. As the political scientist Janelle Wong tells
me, while “European immigrants were confronted with widespread
hostility, they never faced the kind of legal racial restrictions on
immigration and naturalization that Asian Americans experienced.”
American history has been marked by the cycle of big businesses relying
on cheap Asian labor, which threatened the white working class, whose
fears were stoked by race-baiting politicians and media, leading to
catastrophic events like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment
of Japanese Americans in 1942. The person who wrote that sign I
remember seeing as a child, blaming the Vietnamese for destroying
American businesses, was simply telling a story about the yellow peril
that was always available for fearful Americans.
The reality was that downtown San Jose in the 1970s and 1980s was
shabby, a run-down place where almost no one wanted to open new
businesses, except for Vietnamese refugees. Today, Americans rely on
China and other Asian countries for cheap commodities that help
Americans live the American Dream, then turn around and blame the
Chinese for the loss of American jobs or the rise of American
vulnerability to economic competition.
It is easier to blame a foreign country or a minority, or even
politicians who negotiate trade agreements, than to identify the real
power: corporations and economic elites who shift jobs, maximize profit
at the expense of workers and care nothing for working Americans. To
acknowledge this reality is far too disturbing for many Americans, who
resort to blaming Asians as a simpler answer. Asian Americans have not
forgotten this anti-Asian history, and yet many have hoped that it was
behind them. The slur of the “Chinese virus” has revealed how fragile
our acceptance and inclusion was.
In the face of renewed attacks on our American belonging, the former
presidential candidate Andrew Yang offered this solution: “We Asian
Americans need to embrace and show our Americanness in ways we never
have before … We should show without a shadow of a doubt that we are
Americans who will do our part for our country in this time of need.”
Many Asian Americans took offense at his call, which seemed to
apologize for our Asian-American existence. Yang’s critics pointed out
that Asian Americans have literally wrapped themselves in the American
flag in times of anti-Asian crisis; have donated to white neighbors and
fellow citizens in emergencies; and died for this country fighting in
its wars. And is there anything more American than joining the police?
Did Tou Thao think he was proving his belonging by becoming a cop?
None of these efforts have prevented the stubborn persistence of
anti-Asian racism. Calling for more sacrifices simply reiterates the
sense that Asian Americans are not American and must constantly prove
an Americanness that should not need to be proven. Japanese Americans
had to prove their Americanness during World War II by fighting against
Germans and Japanese while their families were incarcerated, but German
and Italian Americans never had to prove their Americanness to the same
extent. German and Italian Americans were selectively imprisoned for
suspected or actual disloyalty, while Japanese Americans were
incarcerated en masse, their race marking them as un-American.
Asian Americans are caught between the perception that we are
inevitably foreign and the temptation that we can be allied with white
people in a country built on white supremacy. As a result, anti-Black
(and anti-brown and anti-Native) racism runs deep in Asian-American
communities. Immigrants and refugees, including Asian ones, know that
we usually have to start low on the ladder of American success. But no
matter how low down we are, we know that America allows us to stand on
the shoulders of Black, brown and Native people. Throughout
Asian-American history, Asian immigrants and their descendants have
been offered the opportunity by both Black people and white people to
choose sides in the Black-white racial divide, and we have far too
often chosen the white side. Asian Americans, while actively critical
of anti-Asian racism, have not always stood up against anti-Black
racism. Frequently, we have gone along with the status quo and
affiliated with white people.
And yet there have been vocal Asian Americans who have called for
solidarity with Black people and other people of color, from the
activist Yuri Kochiyama, who cradled a dying Malcolm X, to the activist
Grace Lee Boggs, who settled in Detroit and engaged in serious, radical
organizing and theorizing with her Black husband James Boggs. Kochiyama
and Lee Boggs were far from the only Asian Americans who argued that
Asian Americans should not stand alone or stand only for themselves.
The very term Asian American, coined in the 1960s by Yuji Ichioka and
Emma Gee and adopted by college student activists, was brought to
national consciousness by a movement that was about more than just
defending Asian Americans against racism and promoting an
Asian-American identity.
Asian-American activists saw their movement as also being antiwar,
anti-imperialism and anticapitalism. Taking inspiration from the 1955
Bandung Conference, a gathering of nonaligned African and Asian
nations, and from Mao, they located themselves in an international
struggle against colonialism with other colonized peoples. Mao also
inspired radical African Americans, and the late 1960s in the U.S. was
a moment when radical activists of all backgrounds saw themselves as
part of a Third World movement that linked the uprisings of racial
minorities with a global rebellion against capitalism, racism,
colonialism and war.
The legacy of the Third World and Asian-American movements continues
today among Asian-American activists and scholars, who have long argued
that Asian Americans, because of their history of experiencing racism
and labor exploitation, offer a radical potential for contesting the
worst aspects of American society. But the more than 22 million Asian
Americans, over 6% of the American population, have many different
national and ethnic origins and ancestries and times of immigration or
settlement. As a result, we often have divergent political viewpoints.
Today’s Asian Americans are being offered two paths: the radical future
imagined by the Asian-American movement, and the consumer model
symbolized by drinking boba tea and listening to K-pop. While Asian
Americans increasingly trend Democratic, we are far from all being
radical.
What usually unifies Asian Americans and enrages us is anti-Asian
racism and murder, beginning with the anti-Chinese violence and
virulence of the 19th century and continuing through incidents like a
white gunman killing five Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee children in
a Stockton, Calif., school in 1989, and another white gunman killing
six members of a Sikh gurdwara in Wisconsin in 2012. The murder of
Vincent Chin, killed in 1982 by white Detroit autoworkers who mistook
him for Japanese, remains a rallying cry. As do the Los Angeles riots,
or uprisings, of 1992, when much of Koreatown was burned down by mostly
Black and brown looters while the LAPD watched. Korean-American
merchants suffered about half of the economic damage. Two Asian
Americans were killed in the violence.
All of this is cause for mourning, remembrance and outrage, but so is
something else: the 61 other people who died were not Asian, and the
majority of them were Black or brown. Most of the more than 12,000
people who were arrested were also Black or brown. In short, Korean
Americans suffered economic losses, as well as emotional and psychic
damage, that would continue for years afterward. But they had property
to lose, and they did not pay the price of their tenuous Americanness
through the same loss of life or liberty as experienced by their Black
and brown customers and neighbors.
Many Korean Americans were angry because they felt the city’s
law-enforcement and political leadership had sacrificed them by
preventing the unrest from reaching the whiter parts of the city,
making Korean Americans bear the brunt of the long-simmering rage of
Black and brown Angelenos over poverty, segregation and abusive police
treatment. In the aftermath, Koreatown was rebuilt, although not all of
the shopkeepers recovered their livelihoods. Some of the money that
rebuilt Koreatown came, ironically, from South Korea, which had enjoyed
a decades-long transformation into an economic powerhouse. South Korean
capital, and eventually South Korean pop culture, especially cinema and
K-pop, became cooler and more fashionable than the Korean immigrants
who had left South Korea for the American Dream. Even if economic
struggle still defined a good deal of Korean immigrant life, it was
overshadowed by the overall American perception of Asian-American
success, and by the new factor of Asian capital and competition.
This is what it means to be a model minority: to be invisible in most
circumstances because we are doing what we are supposed to be doing,
like my parents, until we become hypervisible because we are doing what
we do too well, like the Korean shopkeepers. Then the model minority
becomes the Asian invasion, and the Asian-American model minority,
which had served to prove the success of capitalism, bears the blame
when capitalism fails.
Not to say that we bear the brunt of capitalism. Situated in the middle of America’s fraught racial relations, we receive, on the whole, more benefits from American capitalism than Black, brown or Indigenous peoples, even if many of us also experience poverty and marginalization. While some of us do die from police abuse, it does not happen on the same scale as that directed against Black, brown or Indigenous peoples. While we do experience segregation and racism and hostility, we are also more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods than Black or Indigenous people. To the extent that we experience advantage because of our race, we are also complicit in holding up a system that disadvantages Black, brown and Indigenous people because of their race.
Given our tenuous place in American society, no wonder so many Asian
Americans might want to prove their Americanness, or to dream of
acceptance by a white-dominated society, or condemn Tou Thao as not one
of “us.” But when Asian Americans speak of their vast collective, with
origins from East to West Asia and South to Southeast Asia, who is the
“we” that we use? The elite multiculturalism of colored faces in high
places is a genteel politics of representation that focuses on
assimilation. So long excluded from American life, marked as
inassimilable aliens and perpetual foreigners, asked where we come from
and complimented on our English, Asian immigrants and their descendants
have sought passionately to make this country our own. But from the
perspective of many Black, brown and Indigenous people, this country
was built on their enslavement, their dispossession, their erasure,
their forced migration, their imprisonment, their segregation, their
abuse, their exploited labor and their colonization.
For many if not all Black, brown and Indigenous people, the American
Dream is a farce as much as a tragedy. Multiculturalism may make us
feel good, but it will not save the American Dream; reparations,
economic redistribution, and defunding or abolishing the police might.
If Hmong experiences fit more closely with the failure of the American
Dream, what does it mean for some Asian Americans to still want their
piece of it? If we claim America, then we must claim all of America,
its hope and its hypocrisy, its profit and its pain, its liberty and
its losses, its imperfect union and its ongoing segregation.
To be Asian American is therefore paradoxical, for being Asian American
is both necessary and insufficient. Being Asian American is necessary,
the name and identity giving us something to organize around, allowing
us to have more than “minor feelings.” I vividly remember becoming an
Asian American in my sophomore year, when I transferred to UC Berkeley,
stepped foot on the campus and was immediately struck by intellectual
and political lightning. Through my Asian-American studies courses and
my fellow student activists of the Asian American Political Alliance, I
was no longer a faceless part of an “Asian invasion.” I was an Asian
American. I had a face, a voice, a name, a movement, a history, a
consciousness, a rage. That rage is a major feeling, compelling me to
refuse a submissive politics of apology, which an uncritical acceptance
of the American Dream demands.
But the rage that is at the heart of the Asian-American movement–a
righteous rage, a wrath for justice, acknowledgment, redemption–has not
been able to overcome the transformation of the movement into a diluted
if empowering identity. In its most diluted form, Asian-American
identity is also open to anti-Black racism, the acceptance of
colonization, and the fueling of America’s perpetual-motion war
machine, which Americans from across the Democratic and Republican
parties accept as a part of the U.S.
My presence here in this country, and that of my parents, and a majority of Vietnamese and Hmong, is due to the so-called Vietnam War in Southeast Asia that the U.S. helped to wage. The war in Laos was called “the Secret War” because the CIA conducted it and kept it secret from the American people. In Laos, the Hmong were a stateless minority without a country to call their own, and CIA advisers promised the Hmong that if they fought along with them, the U.S. would take care of the Hmong in both victory and defeat, perhaps even helping them gain their own homeland. About 58,000 Hmong who fought with the Americans lost their lives, fighting communists and rescuing downed American pilots flying secret bombing missions over Laos. When the war ended, the CIA abandoned most of its Hmong allies, taking only a small number out of the country to Thailand. The ones who remained behind suffered persecution at the hands of their communist enemies.
This is why Tou Thao’s face haunts me. Not just because we may look
alike in some superficial way as Asian Americans, but because he and I
are here because of this American history of war. The war was a tragedy
for us, as it was for the Black Americans who were sent to “guarantee
liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest
Georgia and East Harlem,” as Martin Luther King Jr. argued passionately
in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam.” In this radical speech, he
condemns not just racism but capitalism, militarism, American
imperialism and the American war machine, “the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today.” In another speech, he demands that we
question our “whole society,” which means “ultimately coming to see
that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation and
the problem of war are all tied together.”
Little has changed. The U.S. is still a country built on war and for
war. This is why “Vietnam,” meaning the Vietnam War, continues to haunt
this country, stuck in a forever war. And this is why Tou Thao’s face
haunts me. It is the face of someone who shares some of my history and
has done the thing I fear to do when faced with injustice–nothing.
Addressing Tou Thao, the poet Mai Der Vang, also Hmong, wrote in her
poem “In the Year of Permutations”: “Go live with yourself after what
you didn’t do.” Thao was “complicit in adding to the/ perpetration of
power on a neck … Never truly to be accepted/ always a pawn.” While the
life of a Hmong-American police officer descended from refugees is
different from that of a stereotypical model-minority Chinese-American
engineer or a Vietnamese-American writer like me, the moral choices
remain the same. Solidarity or complicity. Rise against abusive power
or stand with our back turned to the abuse of power. If we as Asian
Americans choose the latter, we are indeed the model minority, and we
deserve both its privileges and its perils.
Our challenge is to be both Asian American and to imagine a world
beyond it, one in which being Asian American isn’t necessary. This is
not a problem of assimilation or multiculturalism. This is a
contradiction, inherited from the fundamental contradiction that ties
the American body politic together, its aspiration toward equality for
all, bound with its need to exploit the land and racially marked
people, beginning from the very origins of American society and its
conquest of Indigenous nations and importation of African slaves. The
U.S. is an example of a successful project of colonization, only we do
not call colonization by that name here. Instead, we call successful
colonization “the American Dream.” This is why, as Mai Der Vang says,
“the American Dream will not save us.”
“Asian Americans” should not exist in a land where everyone is equal,
but because of racism’s persistence, and capitalism’s need for cheap,
racialized labor, “Asian Americans” do indeed exist. The end of Asian
Americans only happens with the end of racism and capitalism. Faced
with this problem, Asian Americans can be a model of apology, trying to
prove an Americanness that cannot be proved. Or we can be a model of
justice and demand greater economic and social equality for us and for
all Americans.
If we are dissatisfied with our country’s failures and limitations,
revealed to us in stark clarity during the time of coronavirus, then
now is our time to change our country for the better. If you think
America is in trouble, blame shareholders, not immigrants; look at
CEOs, not foreigners; resent corporations, not minorities; yell at
politicians of both parties, not the weak, who have little in the way
of power or wealth to share. Many Americans of all backgrounds
understand this better now than they did in 1992. Then, angry
protesters burned down Koreatown. Now, they peacefully surround the
White House.
Demanding that the powerful and the wealthy share their power and their
wealth is what will make America great. Until then, race will continue
to divide us. To locate Tou Thao in the middle of a Black-Hmong divide,
or a Black-Asian divide, as if race were the only problem and the only
answer, obscures a fatal statistic: the national poverty rate was 15.1%
in 2015, while the rate for African Americans was about 24.1% and for
Hmong Americans 28.3%.
The problem is race, and class, and war–a country almost always at war overseas that then pits its poor of all races and its exploited minorities against each other in a domestic war over scarce resources. So long as this crossbred system of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation remains in place, there will always be someone who will write that sign: Another American Driven Out of Business by [fill in the blank], because racism always offers the temptation to blame the weak rather than the powerful. The people who write these signs are engaging in the most dangerous kind of identity politics, the nationalist American kind, which, from the origins of this country, has been white and propertied. The police were created to defend the white, the propertied and their allies, and continue to do so. Black people know this all too well, many descended from people who were property.
My parents, as newcomers to America, learned this lesson most
intimately. When they opened the New Saigon, they told me not to call
the police if there was trouble. In Vietnam, the police were not to be
trusted. The police were corrupt. But a few years later, when an armed
(white) gunman burst into our house and pointed a gun in all our faces,
and after my mother dashed by him and into the street and saved our
lives, I called the police. The police officers who came were white and
Latino. They were gentle and respectful with us. We owned property. We
were the victims. And yet our status as people with property, as
refugees fulfilling the American Dream, as good neighbors for white
people, is always fragile, so long as that sign can always be hung.
But the people who would hang that sign misunderstand a basic fact of
American life: America is built on the business of driving other
businesses out of business. This is the life cycle of capitalism, one
in which an (Asian) American Dream that is multicultural, transpacific
and corporate fits perfectly well. My parents, natural capitalists,
succeeded at this life cycle until they, in turn, were driven out of
business. The city of San Jose, which had neglected downtown when my
parents arrived, changed its approach with the rise of Silicon Valley.
Realizing that downtown should reflect the image of a modern tech
metropolis, the city used eminent domain to force my parents to sell
their store. Across from where the New Saigon once stood now looms the
brand-new city hall, which was supposed to face a brand-new symphony
hall.
I love the idea that a symphony could have sprung from the refugee
roots of the New Saigon, where my parents shed not only sweat but
blood, having once been shot there on Christmas Eve. But for many
years, all that stood on my parents’ property was a dismal parking lot.
Eventually the city sold the property for many millions of dollars, and
now a tower of expensive condominiums is being built on the site of my
parents’ struggle for the American Dream. The symphony was never heard.
This, too, is America.
So is this: the mother of Fong Lee, Youa Vang Lee, marching with Hmong
4 Black Lives on the Minnesota state capitol in the wake of George
Floyd’s killing. “I have to be there,” she said. She spoke in Hmong,
but her feelings could be understood without translation.
“The same happened to my son.”
Nguyễn Thanh Việt
Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and a University Professor
at the University of Southern California
This appears in the July 06,
2020 issue of TIME.
Bản dịch tiếng Việt của Ian BÙI :
* Phần 1
* Phần 2
* Phần
5 (hết)
Các thao tác trên Tài liệu