Teri Hu
MA Education in Language and Literacy
UC Berkeley, May 1999
Molding Minorities:
Asian American Youth Respond to Images in Popular Culture and Literature
It’s 1979. I’m in the 3rd grade, in the cafeteria at John Marshall Elementary School. I get into an argument with a friend. It’s nothing important, but being nine-year old girls, we both stubbornly cling to our positions, each convinced of our authority. A nearby boy overhears us and intervenes. “Teri must be right,” he tells my lunchmate. “She’s Chinese, so she must be smarter than you.” As much as I appreciate his support, I know that there is a stigma attached. In third grade, smart and cool are mutually exclusive states.
Later that year, my parents are informed that I will be placed in the MGM (Mentally Gifted Minor) Program for the fourth grade. They’re thrilled, of course, thinking only of my educational opportunities, the prestige of the “gifted” designation. I, on the other hand, refuse to go to the “smart” class. “It’s bad enough that I have to be Chinese,” I cry in the midst of my tantrum, “now everybody will think I’m even smarter.” Ultimately, I have no choice. I’m going to be gifted whether I like it or not.
From then on, it’s a downward spiral of falling grades, rising alienation and increasing delinquency until tenth grade…where I simply flunked out. If you had asked me at fifteen why I didn’t put any effort into school, I would’ve told you that I didn’t see the point of a formal education, that I’d learn more from experiencing life than reading about it, or some other tough, street-smart philosophical posturing. But with over a decade of hindsight, I now know that somehow, I thought that by failing in school I could prove that I wasn’t really smart. And if I wasn’t smart, then I couldn’t be Chinese.
Introduction
In the realm of American mass entertainment, Asians have been assigned the attribute of intelligence since the days of Charlie Chan. The stereotypical image of the wise Chinese detective (or Zen martial arts master, or labcoat-clad scientist, or bespectacled computer nerd) has been a constant presence in the popular culture of this country. Often, it is the only representation of an Asian or Asian American male that young people will encounter on the silver screen or the boob tube.
Asian women have had a slightly wider range of roles in the arts, mainly because they have been allowed to sip the magic elixir of romance, a key ingredient in a successful piece of entertainment, but even so, they have been seriously limited in terms of their characters. Beginning with the prototypical doormat, Madama Butterfly of Puccini’s masterpiece (usually sung by non-Asian divas), through the self-sacrificing, asexual O-Lan of The Good Earth (again, played by a very white Louise Rainer in yellowface), to Nancy Kwan’s flirtatious, adoring prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold a la Suzie Wong, Asian women have been painted as infantile, submissive and easily manipulated by men (usually white) who show them the slightest affection.
Therefore, it is not surprising that many Americans—especially those who have had minimal interactions with Asians—take these stereotypes to be “true.” If they have never had first-hand experience dealing with people of diverse Asian descent, how else would they form their opinions of Asian Americans? What’s more interesting, and also somewhat disturbing, is the extent to which Asian Americans form their own identities around pop culture stereotypes (from this point, I will use the term “American” to refer to the white mainstream, and “Asian” to mean Asian Americans, for the sake of semantic simplicity).
The willing acceptance of this deceptively “positive” stereotype on the part of Asians is understandable given the racist hierarchy that pervades American culture. Our precarious perch on the social scale as second bananas is based on our value as mid-level managers and social buffers between the dominant white culture and more disenfranchised minorities such as blacks and Latinos. While Asians may not necessarily enjoy this middleman role, it is clearly preferable to being equally disenfranchised and further shut out of the realms of white power. Given the “yellow horde” stereotype that Asians had to battle in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the model minority may seem like a blessing in comparison. The model minority stereotype also has the weight of authority behind it; after all, the empirical evidence has been documented in numerous popular magazine and newspaper articles, and the academic achievements of Asians in this country and abroad cannot be denied. Asians must be a model minority, all the statistics say so.
There is no question that the model minority does not exist in any real form, as any serious sociological study shows. However, the effect it has on the Asian American collective psyche is tremendous. As an Asian American woman, the model minority myth has been a pervasive influence on my own sense of identity. I have generally seen it as the antithesis of everything I want to be, choosing to define myself in opposition to the expectations set forth by the stereotype. While the model minority myth says Asians should be quiet, respectful and compliant, throughout my adolescence and adult life, I’ve made a point of being vocal, irreverent and antagonistic whenever possible. And I realize, because the model minority myth is the reference point to which I have shaped my identity, direct opposition is merely a reaction to the stereotype others have imposed upon my culture. However, even with my determined, conscious efforts to deny the myth, I cannot deny that certain aspects have pervaded my own psyche; after all, I am currently a graduate student at a prestigious University and I am a public high school teacher in the educational system of this country, a figure of authority who implicitly supports the system in which she works.
This has been a difficult schism for me to negotiate throughout my years of higher education. As a teen who had never aspired to go to college, who rejected the conventional, upwardly mobile goals of my peers, choosing instead to rebel against the very structures in which I am now entrenched, I have found it nearly impossible to find a place in the University (and especially in the Graduate School of Education) that acknowledges the very real issues with which I struggled during my years as a disenfranchised youth. For the most part, these institutions seem to belong to those who have never experienced any serious adversity in acquiring their education, who have passed blithely through the system unscathed. While they do set out, in theory, to tackle the problems in American education, the problems are often seen as someone else’s, not theirs, with no real impact on their personal lives. This is unpalatable to me, as an educator, a student and a parent, and I have found it difficult to connect many of the theoretical discussions from my University classes to the realities of my learning and teaching experiences.
It is with these experiences in mind that I have taken on this study, examining the ways Asian American youth respond to media images of Asians, focusing on the gender differences in identity formation in reaction to stereotypes. I believe that Asian American males react differently than females to the expectations and limitations of the stereotype, as the stereotype itself is feminized. That is, mainstream America has genderized Asian cultures as feminine; therefore, males from those cultures are seen as somehow not fully masculine. For Asian American boys, this perception can have drastic effects on their own sense of their maleness.
Conversely, the exotic femininity attributed to Asian cultures causes Asian American females to be perceived as ultra-feminine. This is damaging in its own way, pressuring Asian American girls to adopt sexist stereotypes as cultural traits, but sadly, there are social benefits as well. Because Asian females are perceived by the dominant culture as attractive examples of femininity, they are able access a wider social group and thereby attain higher social status. Such exposure is indubitably valuable, but often comes at a price, in that these females must limit themselves to certain sanctioned roles within the groups they join.
In this study, I propose to examine an aspect of Asian American identity formation that has often been overlooked, representations of Asians in American popular culture. It is not my goal to disprove the model minority thesis, as I feel that has already been done by abler minds than my own, but to see how acceptance of the stereotype affects adolescent Asians in this country. I will present case studies of and interviews with my students, and examine the images of Asians in literature and popular culture to which they are exposed.
While I will tap a wide variety of academic sources in my analysis of the data, I am more interested in the popular images of Asian American culture. That is, instead of studying Asian cultural traits as social scientists have determined, I will look at those traits as presented to the public by writers, filmmakers and other cultural emissaries. This, I feel, would be a more accurate reflection of the influences Asian American youth encounter in their lives, and better serve to illuminate their cultural identifications.
Finally, I would like to clearly state my reasons for undertaking this study, so that there will be no misunderstanding of my motives. I do not wish to perpetuate sexist stereotypes, bash Asian cultural traits, or denounce American ideals. However, all of these factors contribute to a continuing sense of imbalance within the Asian American community, a sense that it’s easier for females to succeed, that males are holding the community back from social advancement, that the tables have finally turned on traditionally misogynistic Asian cultures and there are clear beneficiaries and losers. As with any cultural shift, the results are not so clearly determined. There are many difficult issues for both males and females within the Asian American community, some shared, others gender specific. Those are the ones that interest me.
In my own family, I have observed the different challenges males and females have encountered as we negotiated childhood, adolescence and headed out into the “real” world. These differences have sometimes led to tensions between family members, as one sees another “benefiting” from certain cultural stereotypes and others feel left out of certain social advantages. By tackling these issues directly, and examining the underlying causes as well as the current effects, I hope to bring such tensions to a head and present a clearer picture of the way society shapes us so that we can begin to shape ourselves.
The Birth of the Model Minority
The loosening of immigration restrictions in 1965 opened the door to America for a flood of new Asian immigrants. During the 1970s, the Asian American population in the United States increased from 1.6 to 3.5 million. These immigrants encountered a variety of hardships in their efforts to carve a niche for themselves in this society, facing discrimination in housing, employment and education from the mainstream society. However, towards the end of the decade, this seemed to change. Through the popularity of a few well-received articles in publications such as Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, Asians became known as a “model minority” and were believed to have “made it” as full-fledged members of American society in record time (Takaki, 1989; Sue, 1990).
The literature on the model minority stereotype is extensive but redundant. Essentially, the theory behind these studies is that the American media assembled an image of Asians as academic wunderkinds and successful entrepreneurs/professionals during the 1970s in response to racial unrest over Civil Rights in the 1960s. Asians were invoked as a buffer group, meant to diffuse the real tensions between the comfortable white middle class and poor people of color. They were held up to disenfranchised minorities as living examples of the American Dream, “proving” that failure to achieve success under the current social system was due to personal or cultural defects rather than due to the implicit biases in the system itself. This, of course, also allowed the white mainstream society to ignore the existing inequities in the system, as Asian immigrant success proved that these barriers were not insurmountable.
While the perpetuation of the model minority myth was not an organized campaign as such, the seductive argument won many adherents on both sides of the racial divide. For whites, the perceived success of Asians relieved them of the responsibility to change the system to accommodate other minority groups. Since Asians, who had once experienced such hostility and discrimination in this country were now “acceptable,” this meant that it was only a matter of time and willingness to assimilate before other ethnic groups followed the Asian example. For non-Asian minorities, the model minority became an easy target for their own dissatisfaction. Asians were seen as traitors to the fight for Civil Rights, running off with the prize and leaving their colored brethren in the dust. Resentment against the dominant group was then redirected towards a more accessible target, and racial divisiveness within the minority community caused the Civil Rights Movement to stall and stagnate. Most importantly, the “positive” image of the successful Asian was extremely attractive to Asians themselves. Given a choice between the “model minority” or the “yellow horde” stereotype that prevailed before it, it is understandable that many Asians chose to embrace the former, holding it before them as a dubious shield against the very real problems they still faced as an “other” in American society (Omi & Winant, 1989; Lee, 1996).
As the literature repeatedly states, the data does not support the model minority thesis. For example, the often quoted statistical “fact” that Asians have a higher per household income than whites does not reflect the fact that there are generally a higher number of wage earners in Asian households, which often consist of members of the extended family. Another misused statistic is the educational attainment levels of Asian Americans, which show that they generally acquire more years of education than whites. It turns out, however, that in terms of actual salaries earned by comparably educated workers, Asians earned considerably less than their white counterparts. If more years of education do not translate into higher wages, then it could be argued that workplace discrimination prevents Asians from achieving the level of success warranted by their level of education. This would indicate that Asians are being denied full access to American opportunity despite their apparent success (Commission on Civil Rights, 1980; Chun, 1980; Li, 1988; Hu, 1989).
Another misconception is that Asian “success” is the result of their cultural characteristics. Asian cultures do generally place a stronger value on characteristics such as silence, diligence and respect for authority, but these values are contrary to the American values of candor, spontaneity and rebelliousness. While there may be admiration for Asian success, there is often a lack of respect for the perceived characteristics which made such success possible. These attributes are seen as passive, staid, and unimaginative. Often, it is extrapolated to mean that Asians are undemanding, that they do not push for change because they cannot envision the world differently and are therefore content with their position in society. Such misconceptions have contributed to the phenomenon of the glass ceiling, which has hampered the advancement of many Asian Americans in the corporate world. Because employers consider their Asian American workers to be passive and unambitious, they are not promoted to executive positions, languishing instead in the limbo of middle management for the duration of their careers (Takaki, 1989; Palumbo-Liu, 1995; Lee, 1996).
These stereotypes have other negative implications in the socialization of Asian American children. Because Asians—as voluntary immigrants often do—place a high priority on education, they are willing to sacrifice pleasure for the sake of study. However, this studiousness is then overgeneralized to mean that Asian students never do anything “fun.” As a result, in many schools they are often excluded from the high status extracurricular activities such as athletics and community service organizations, relegated instead to the lower status activities such as the chess team or academic clubs (Goto, 1995, 1996; Lee, 1996; Simons, 1996).
I became interested in the subject of gender differences in Asian youths’ identity formation during my Spring 1997 student teaching placement at International Studies Academy, formerly a charter high school in the San Francisco Unified School District. In my two English/ESL classes, totaling 49 students, there were 33 students of Asian descent; 14 of these were males. While I expected our shared ethnicity to help me establish a personal connection to my Asian students, I was surprised to find that the males were more likely to seek my attention than the females. Before class, after class, in the hallways and at lunch, I was constantly being accosted by my Asian male students, asking for advice, for help on assignments, or just to say hi. However, I also noticed that for the most part, these same students were completely unwilling to speak up in class or participate in discussions despite many opportunities to do so.
As I got to know them on a personal basis, I was shocked to realize how little I actually knew about the socializing forces they faced in this country, and how many of my own assumptions about Asian males were based on the images set forth by the media. My own family is predominantly female, and I had never made many close friends who were males of Asian descent. Although I had known that due to the common misconception of Asians as quiet, studious and respectful, the reception of Asian females is vastly different than that of Asian males, the degree to which this affects the self-image of Asian males had never occurred to me. Since the qualities attributed to Asians are considered to be desirable characteristics for women, but negative for men, the Asian male is generally seen as feminized, especially when compared to the rugged individualist ideal of the “American Man.”
Looking for answers to the questions raised by my interactions with these students, I turned to my colleagues at the University. There is an abysmal lack of Asian men in the Graduate School of Education. Out of the 394 students enrolled during the 1996-97 school year,1 I was able to contact two Ph.D candidates and one credential candidate in Developmental Teacher Education who were self-identified as Asian men. There tend to be fewer men in the field of education as it is, so useful male feedback from colleagues was hard to come by in any case, but when it came to Asians, it was as if they simply didn’t exist.
I did manage to find a useful resource in the writings of a recent Ph.D graduate, Stanford T. Goto. His article “Nerds, Normal People, and Homeboys: Asian American Students and the Language of School Success” (1995) provided a fascinating look into the social structures governing the behaviors and associations of Asian American students in a suburban Bay Area high school. While his data do seem to support the stereotype of Asian students as academically focused and successful in school, he deconstructs the reasons behind their success as a result of group cooperation rather than of racial or cultural prerogative. That is, he found that the study habits and homework sharing that were common among the Asian students contributed greatly to their strong academic performance. These habits were less frequently seen in other groups of students at the school, partly due to the American attributes of individuality and possessiveness that are advocated among the more assimilated cultural groups. This, combined with the focus on education that is characteristic of voluntary immigrant groups leads to an overall high academic performance level in middle class Asian American students (Goto, 1995; Simons, 1996).
Another piece that examines the supposed academic success of Asian high school students is Stacey Lee’s 1996 monograph, Unraveling the Model Minority Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth. Lee observed the social dynamics of Asian students at an urban public high school in a large East Coast city to uncover the intragroup relations between different “types” of Asians. She found that the students could be generally divided into four categories: Asians, recent immigrants who adhered to more traditional values; Asian Americans, generally American-born teens or those who immigrated at an early age who had adopted mainstream American values; Koreans, an ethnic subgroup that avoided interacting with other Asians altogether; and New Wave Asians, the alternative crowd which embraced subversive values. A determining factor of membership in these categories was the scholastic performance of the student. That is, certain groups were designated as the “smart” groups within the larger umbrella group of students of Asian descent. The new wavers, for example were generally seen as bad examples of Asians, whom the other groups avoided because of their lack of regard for academic success:
"Unlike the other Asian American students at Academic High and unlike the “typical” immigrant described by cultural ecologists, the new wavers did not see education as the key to success in the United States. In fact, new wavers made it their business to get around school rules and schoolwork. New wave students could be found hanging around on the school’s southeast lawn smoking, talking, and listening to music throughout the school day. While students who identified as Korean or Asian spoke about family obligation, new wavers were more concerned with what their peers thought. New wave students complained that their parents were old-fashioned and did not understand them. For these peer-oriented students, the most important thing was social acceptance from their new wave peers. These students were the antithesis of the Asian model minority." (Lee, 1996)
Even within the other groups, where high performance was desirable, not all of the students exhibited evidence of such achievement. They were, however, more likely to hide poor performance from others in an effort to maintain the model student façade, resulting in exacerbated academic difficulties, as this Asian student’s experience indicates:
"…Ming’s reluctance to seek academic support was based in part on his desire to live within the boundaries of the model minority stereotype. Since academic failure clearly contradicts the model minority stereotype, Ming felt that admitting his academic failure would cause his family to lose face (be ashamed)…A desire to adhere to traditional Asian values also silenced Ming. In the end, Ming’s refusal to seek help for his academic difficulties perpetuated his academic problems and left him feeling isolated and depressed." (Lee, 1996)
Although their own personal experience denies the myth, students with poor academic records are often still eager to embrace the model minority stereotype as a defining characteristic of their identity.
Images of Asians in Literature and Popular Culture
This need to claim a “positive” image may be an understandable response to the pervasive negativity associated with Asian males. The acceptable range of identities available to the young Asian male is extremely limited due to the lack of role models in the mainstream media. The most common image of the Asian male in this country is the asexual, unattractive, social incompetent, typified in the character of Long Duck Dong in the 1984 John Hughes film, Sixteen Candles. Oftentimes, this stereotype is given a “positive” spin by incorporating an element of superior intelligence to balance the negativity, so the character can elicit some sympathy from a mainstream audience. This phenomenon was also evident in the images of Jewish men in the early half of the twentieth century, as Sander L. Gilman argues in his book, Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Superior Jewish Intelligence. Gilman claims that perceptions of the Jewish man’s intellect affected the perception of the Jewish male body:
"…Jewish intelligence compensates for Jewish physical inferiority…The compensatory function of high intelligence in American mass and popular culture is clear when the theme is love and sex." (Gilman, 1996)
The (de)sexualization of intelligence is also applicable to the perception of Asian males in the United States. However, rather than the neutered sexuality that Gilman applied in his analysis of Jewish men, Asian men are feminized, seen as possessing female traits and relegated to an appropriately subordinate position in our misogynistic culture.
Asian women writers have been one of the strongest emasculating forces in the American perception of Asian males by creating a body of highly unsympathetic and misogynistic Asian male characters in their works. Popular books by authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Gish Jen have all featured beleaguered but heroic Chinese women attempting to relate to their abusive or incompetent male counterparts. The canonical Woman Warrior by Kingston is essentially a two-hundred page rant against the indignities the author experienced as a girl-child in a male dominated culture (Kingston, 1975). The novels of Amy Tan inevitably set up a dichotomy between a monstrously abusive and misogynistic Chinese husband acquired by the female protagonist through an arranged marriage and an absent or passive “good” husband (either white or Chinese) to whom she turns for salvation (Tan, 1989, 1991, 1995). Even Ralph Chang, the bumbling but lovable protagonist of Jen’s novel, Typical American, is cuckolded (albeit by another Chinese man), thus leaving his masculinity in doubt (Jen, 1992). This bifurcated male cultural identity leaves little room for the negotiation of a viable, balanced self-identity for Asian male youth.
While the subjugation of women in Asian cultures is very real, and these works are “truthful” enough as portrayals of life within those cultures, it is disturbing that these stories are so warmly embraced by the American mainstream readership while novels by Asian male writers such as Shawn Wong, John Okada, Wayson Choy or Frank Chin are virtually ignored. No doubt the indictment of sexist Asian cultures by Asian women is considerably more palatable to the average white reader than the indictment of racist American culture by Asian men. Such imbalances point out a bias in this country’s perception of Asians. The willing acceptance and attention given to the Asian woman in literature stands in sharp contrast to the rejection and neglect of the Asian man, and his subsequent demasculinization is the inevitable result of these inequities.
Besides these literary trends, a historical factor in Asian male emasculation was the proliferation of “bachelor societies” among Chinese and Filipino immigrant men during the 1800s and early 1900s. Because strict immigration laws prevented the women of those countries from coming to the United States, many of these men were forced to live lonely, celibate lives far from their families, without the presence of women and children to maintain cultural traditions and communities (Takaki, 1989). Such policies contributed greatly to the desexualization of Asian males in America as well as retarded the establishment of viable communities which would have hastened the cultural diversification of America. It is interesting to note that in the Japanese immigrant community, where women were allowed to join their husbands in America, the rate of assimilation into mainstream society was considerably faster, as indicated by sociological measures such as level of education, income, occupational category, and rates of outmarriage (Commission on Civil Rights, 1980; Takaki, 1989).
Louis Chu’s novel Eat a Bowl of Tea examines the emasculating effects of the Chinese Exclusion Acts on a Chinese American family during the post-World War II era. Because of the pressure placed on the young protagonist, Ben Loy, to sire the first child of the next generation with his new bride—Mei Oy, the first woman to enter the community since the lifting of the immigration restrictions on Chinese women—he loses his sexual potency and is cuckolded by a sleazy gambler. So we see that once again, the Chinese man is portrayed as either an ineffectual husband or a shiftless philanderer, this time by a Chinese male author (Chu, 1961).
Another, more widely read, literary text by an Asian American male author is David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. This Tony Award-winning play critiques the feminization of the Asian man by Americans through an inverted comparison with Puccini’s famous misogynistic opera. The gist of the play is summed up in these lines, spoken by our hero in drag, Song Liling, as he tries to explain his successful twenty year deception of his lover, Rene Gallimard:
"…As soon as a Western man comes into contact with the East—he’s already confused. The West has sort of an international rape mentality towards the East…Basically, “Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes.”
The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor…but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique.
…I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man." (Hwang, 1989)
posted on March 1, 2003.