Model Minorities: Asian Americans as The Great American Pawn
Captivated, I watched silently as my father and his parents exchanged broken conversation each time we visited my grandparent’s house. Tongues split between English and Vietnamese, they managed to communicate somewhat awkwardly through both. At home, Vietnamese was not a common dialect because my father was more comfortable in English. I do recall nights at the dinner table, all 5 of my siblings surrounding, where my father would grant us fifteen minutes of his native language. In these fifteen minutes, Dad would speak only Vietnamese to us, leaving my siblings and I to laugh and try to understand what he was saying. My father would often joke around, pretending to sternly lecture one of us in Vietnamese, usually throwing his victim into a fit of giggles. I listened as familiar, yet so unfamiliar, phrases and tones migrated across the room, dangling bluntly from the ceiling.
These moments were filled with wonder, joy, and bubbling laughter; ending abruptly after fifteen minutes. My father would burst into laughter, throwing his hands in the air and exclaiming, “That’s all I got, guys!” As a child, I was always slightly confused by this. How could fifteen minutes be all he could remember? How could he let go of something like this? I recall this same confusion when my dad told us he would avoid squatting in public as a kid to prevent being called F.O.B. (Fresh Off the Boat). I remember being unable to fathom how my dad could live without squatting, or what exactly the implications of being called F.O.B. were. As I got older, I quickly learned that growing up in 1980’s America as a Vietnamese Immigrant was not easy. Ridicule and mocking often followed my father’s family- it is no wonder he abandoned his native tongue as a child. Just as his family fled their home to seek refuge in the Land of Opportunity, my father forsook pieces of his identity for social opportunity. Such is the story of many Asian Americans seeking success in America; letting go of culture is often a means of survival, “fitting in,” or often, to accept the privilege America offers them as Asian citizens. Many rise to the occasion and accept this pedestal, without truly realizing Asian American privilege is often fleeting and may be stripped away at any moment.
On August 1, 2018, a video surfaced of an unresponsive South Asian man being dragged off a train at Long Beach Station by a white man in a suit. The unresponsive man allegedly had a seizure and is seen with stitches on his head and a medical bracelet, suggesting he could’ve been recently released from a hospital. Witnesses confronted the man in the suit and accused him of “not wanting to miss his ride.” The white man flippantly responded that there were a lot of people on the train wanting to go home and insinuated the unresponsive man could be drunk. Metro investigators have yet to conclude if the incident is racially charged or not. In any case, the video exhibits a striking image of Asian people being cast aside in moments of inconvenience. Striking, however, not unfamiliar. Historically, America has used Asian Americans as valuable pawns in racial manipulation, economical profit, or creating a white-savior narrative- only to later abandon or betray them when they can no longer be exploited. Asian American privilege is fleeting and often misunderstood as progress, rather than white manipulation. White manipulation being, American officials using Asian people as pawns, beginning with the creation of the “Model Minority” myth.
It’s difficult to say exactly when the term “Model Minority” surfaced, but its suspected to have begun in World War II. Previously, Chinese and Japanese immigrants had been deemed overly foreign and unassimilable to America because of their strong cultural ties. “Beginning in World War II, however, the United States’ geopolitical ambitions triggered seismic changes in popular notions of nationhood and belonging, which in turn challenged the stronghold of white supremacy,” writes Ellen Wu in The Color of Success. Faced with this new confrontation as well as the recent conflicts between Japan and the U.S, federal officials rushed to dismantle social exclusion in fear of an uprising of Japanese Americans. This led to the institution of Internment camps, which American militia justified by the notion that Japanese Americans were potential enemies based on shared blood with that of America’s rival. The WRA, War Relocation Authority, presented the unconstitutional program to the public under the guise of a “promise for refashioning ethnic Japanese into model Americans.” The camps emphasized English education and instilling of American values, as well as urged resettled internees to identify and assimilate with the White middle class.
Upon creating these “Model Americans” and settling them into White neighborhoods, officials then used their seemingly successful assimilation as a weapon against other minorities. Wielding the testimonies of Asian Americans to glorify their “not-blackness” (or brownness), while simultaneously praising White Americans for their openness to diversity.
“At times the comparison was implied,” Ellen Wu writes, “as when a Chicago Tribune reader mused, ‘There is another race that has been subjected to even greater prejudice and discrimination- the Asians.’ Yet through ‘quiet dignity,’ ‘hard work,’ and an ‘order of good citizenship higher than the average white,’ Asian children stayed in school, were not born out of wedlock, and did not grow up to become criminals or ‘create slums.’ More often, the contrast was explicit … In Beyond the Melting Pot, one of the era’s seminal studies of ethnicity in the United States, sociologist Nathan Glazer accentuated the sluggishness of Puerto Ricans’ socioeconomic motility by juxtaposing them with Japanese and Chinese. Puertorrqueños’ lack of the ‘more tightly knit and better integrated systems’ as seen in Asian immigrant communities had hobbled their group advancement.”
By creating this false pedestal for Asian Americans, federal officials hoped that stripping away color and identity would divert rebellion, while pressuring other minorities to follow suit. We often see similar attempts at assimilation and instating of “color-blindness” in today’s America- however, history proves the consequences of this tactic are far from equality.
When Japanese Americans resettled into white middle class areas, the community was less than thrilled. Rejecting the new additions to the neighborhood by mocking them, ignoring them, or barring them from parties or activities. “In 1956, Northwestern University’s Psi Upsilon fraternity ousted pledge Sherman Wu. ‘They told me that I degrade their house because I am Chinese,’ he testified,” writes Ellen Wu. Asian Americans were meant to rise as a juxtaposition of other minorities, but never to rise above or in equivalence with White Americans. An Asian American rising above the systemically built pedestal wouldn’t promote assimilation, but rather jeopardize white supremacy. Rather than being accepted by the White middle class as internment and color-blinding promised, Asian Americans are often faced with hatred when they seemingly take the place of a white person.
“In 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was murdered by two white men, a father-and-son team of laid-off auto workers in Detroit, Michigan. Ronald Ebens, the father, provoked a barroom scuffle by yelling at Chin, ‘It’s because of you little mother fuckers, that we’re out of work.’ Afterward, Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz, chased down Vincent Chin at a nearby McDonald’s and bludgeoned him comatose with a baseball bat. A few days later, Chin was disconnected from life support,” reads a Harvard Law Review article from 1993, “…Even if one presumes that their unemployment was caused by unjust trade practices of the Japanese government, when Ebens and Nitz brained Vincent Chin, they transferred blame not only from the Japanese government to the Japanese people, not only from the Japanese people to United States citizens of Japanese descent, but finally from Japanese Americans to anyone unlucky enough to bear Asian features.”
An LA Times survey reported that only 51% of Asian American employees indicated they had led a meeting at work, compared with 68% of white employees. The survey also showed that Asian American women are less likely to be promoted to leadership positions than their white coworkers.
This pedestal for Asian Americans grants far less privilege than presumed- Asian Americans were assimilated to fall just below White citizens, never to take the place of one. Furthermore, the frustration of white Americans at an Asian (or other minority) taking “their” jobs or scholarships, only give disheartening evidence of an assumption of deserved belonging over others. Despite what the privilege of a model minority claims and attempts at assimilating into White America, Asian Americans are far from accepted in society.
In Jersey City, a public letter from the “Dotbusters” stated: “We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out… If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will just hit him or her. We plan some of our more extreme attacks… We use the phone book and look up the name Patel.”
A 1992 LA Times article describes the altering of a banner at Pomona College from “Asian American Studies Now!” to “Asian Americans die Now!”
On June 13th 2015, Tommy Le, a twenty-year-old Vietnamese American student was shot three times by police who had received reports of an Asian man walking Seattle streets threatening people with a knife. Reports later revealed Tommy never had a knife, but was holding a pen at the time of the shooting. Tommy’s father, Hoai Le told LA Times race was the only motive that made sense in the incident: “Why did the detective come to my house and say my son had a knife? Why was he so sure? Then he changed his mind later? What else could it be?”
This piece is meant to shed light on how America has used Asian Americans to promote a false image of equality and manipulate other minority groups. The success story of Asian Americans goes along with a dark history- Japanese internment used as a success story for assimilation, Vietnamese refugees welcomed to create a white savior narrative, and Asian Americans used to profit American economy with workers having “good work ethic,” as well as provide perfect juxtaposition of other minorities. The pedestal on which the Model Minority is placed upon not only invited the assumption that Asian Americans don’t face racial violence, but denigrates other minorities for falling beneath the model- creating racial conflict within the oppressed groups.
Asians are in many ways, the great American pawn. Asian Americans, like any other minority group, do not always submit, and when deviating from their narrative they are cast aside and rejected. Like the South Asian man at Long Beach station, stripped of favor at a moment of inconvenience. Just as my father soon learned- admission into America did not ensure acceptance. Being in a country did not imply belonging. To America, a pawn is not a person- a pawn is simply a piece to be played and discarded.
Cited:
“RACIAL VIOLENCE AGAINST ASIAN AMERICANS.” (1993). Harvard Law Review, 106(8), 1926.
“Despite what you might have heard, Asian American CEOs are the exception, not the norm.” (2017). Karthick Ramakrishnan and Jennifer Leela. LA Times, web.
“The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority.” (2013). Ellen Wu. Princeton University Press.
“He was 20 and unarmed. A police shooting brings Seattle’s Vietnamese Americans into the world of activism.” (2015). Jaweed Kaleem. LA Times, web.
“Metro Investigating ‘Very Disturbing’ Video of Unconscious Man Being Dragged Off Train at Long Beach Station.” (2018). Cindy Von Quednow. KTLA, web.
