Asian Americans: Let Your Anger Burn Down the Model Minority Myth
#burnthemyth
When I was 12 years old, I walked the streets of Paris for the first time, giddy with excitement. Gazing up at the beautiful, historic buildings, so different from my Queens, NY neighborhood, I didn’t notice that a middle-aged white woman had deliberately walked up to me on the sidewalk. I turned to her just as she took her large, boxy handbag in both hands and whacked me hard on my right side. While I stood there, arm throbbing and in shock, she walked away as swiftly as she came, muttering angrily. My French was rudimentary, but I did recognize one word: Chinois.
Years later, as a junior in college, I was walking down a pristine, palm tree-lined street in Newport Beach, CA on the way to meet a friend for lunch. As I approached a family helping their elderly grandfather with a cane get out of their car, I instinctively moved aside to give them room. Just as I passed them, the elderly white man deliberately stuck his metal cane in front of my legs and tripped me. I caught myself and turned to look at him in disbelief. He eyed me coldly and wordlessly.
These are incidents I haven’t thought about in almost two decades. For the most part I’ve led a privileged life. As a light skinned Chinese American, up until recently I did not fear for my life in the same way that darker skinned people of color might. My husband however, who is from a largely white Midwestern town, was far more routinely targeted for being Asian American growing up, and was involved in numerous physical fights on account of being called Asian racial slurs. Apart from the two physical confrontations I experienced, the racism perpetrated against me has been more subtle and insidious. Such as: going to meetings with my white assistant and having people assume she was my boss; getting labeled as too “quiet” at work even though my verbal contributions were wise and significant; getting harassed and even followed on the street by an endless string of “ni hao ma,” and standing by the door in a restaurant and being mistaken for the waitress. As always, I politely shrugged things off and moved on.
Then, after a year of escalating hate crimes against Asian Americans, 6 Asian American women were gunned down by a white man. I reacted in the same desensitized way I usually did. What else could we expect but this brutal culmination to the ugliness that this pandemic year has unleashed?
But the very next day, as I watched a video of an elderly Chinese woman in San Francisco screaming “you bum, why did you hit me?” in Taishanese to the young white man who maliciously attacked her, something in me cracked. My mind flashed back to my own “attacks” decades ago when my innocent, teenage self wondered the same thing. “Why did you hit me?”
It’s not about this virus. The virus only magnified what was already there. Why do people feel like they can brutalize and bully Asian American people and get away with it? So many factors are at play, including most obviously white supremacy, but one of the answers to the question has to be the Model Minority Myth. Asian American people are put down, targeted, mocked, and ignored, in part because people think we will let them. They think we will suffer silently, swallow our own pain, and smile politely, because we are the good, submissive minority. We don’t want to cause trouble. We do our best within the system, thinking that if we don’t rock the boat, we can continue to enjoy a proximity to whiteness that will somehow enable us to thrive.
On the whole, however, we’re not thriving. In NYC, 1 in 4 Asian Americans live in poverty. In business, Asian Americans are the least likely group to be promoted to management roles. Asian American New Yorkers experienced the highest surge of unemployment during the pandemic. Even those of us who have found some success are bruised by fistfights, handbag whackings, cane trippings, and thousands of microaggressions along the way. Last, and fundamentally, how can we thrive if we do not support black and brown communities in their justice journeys as well?
I’ve heard from so many of my Asian American friends recently, saying that they’re “numb.” I get it. I’ve been numb too, for too long. With thousands of reported hate crimes this past year, how can we not be? Yet now, more than ever, Asian Americans have a duty to act angry. Let the bullets that pierced the Asian American women in Atlanta pierce through your numbness. Let the punch to the Chinese grandmother’s face crack open your heart.
Let’s use our voices and our positions, wherever we are, to openly talk about the injustices big and small we’ve all suffered but have kept silent on, and advocate unabashedly for changes that need to take place. Let’s use our rage to burn down the model minority myth once and for all, to build a world where we can all find liberation. If there ever was a time to speak up, it’s now. America is finally listening.
#burnthemyth
