links for 2007-04-13

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Comments

  1. ren. wrote:

    re: man pleads guilty in attack on prof.

    This won’t make me very popular with the Asian Americans and probably means I won’t get invited to the stereotype theme-party but I have to voice some concerns about the model minority mythos. First off I don’t see it applying to this guy in the article, nothing in this article hints at the high pressures and expectations set upon Asians. If he was being pushed to achieve academic greatness, he sure as hell wasn’t involved. What was the super-expectation for this guy? A minimum 2.0GPA at Umass-Lowell? That’s understandably rough. Perhaps I’d agree if this guy had a 3.9 and the teacher didn’t give him a 4.0 and so he stabbed her in the neck with a knife. Then I would assume he had a zero tolerance for failure as you call it. But a 2.0 is not breaking anyone’s ass. The point is, he didn’t look to be engaging in hard-work period. You’re worried about this guy striving for the peak, but I don’t think he even bothered to show up at the base of the mountain. I’m not sure this guy is the proof positive for showing the negative effects of the model minority status.

    Why an affliction? Why is he automatically branded a victim? Is it inappropriate to consider the possibility that higher education was not this dude’s forte? Perhaps his family is well educated, but that doesn’t indicate he’s intelligent… and it clearly doesn’t show if you figure stabbing your teacher in the neck with a weapon is a reasonable response to being unable to compete intellectually with the fam.

    Secondly, he was Asian and not Asian American. Does he really suffer from this model minority affliction? Considering he was here on visa, does he really comprehend the model minority ideology (an American Invention) such that he might embody it, or do Asian Americans just attribute this to him anyways? I live with Chinese grad students and they don’t really comprehend the typecast. I attempted to explain the unfair pressure to be academically successful and they looked at me with a puzzled look: one part “stop whining” and one part “we’ve had this pressure since elementary school”. They don’t attribute this “fair/unfair” qualification to pressure, it’s just a part of their lives if you’re striving to be an academic. Considering the Asian Internationals that I know, who could academically wipe the floor with the best Asian Americans, I’m under the impression that they face incredible pressure and don’t see it as the stigma that we do.

    This isn’t to say that I don’t have problems with some issues surrounding the model minority mythos. But being Asian American, I’ve had this term beaten into my head (by other Asians go figure) to the point where I have this Pavlovian response to foam at the mouth at first mention. Apart from people telling me to hate this term, they don’t really go into explaining what constitutes “fair” pressure . If the model minority term creates false expectations, then what praise could you give to Asians who do succeed that in no way establishes any expectations that are unachievable or prove damning to their self-image?

  2. Jay wrote:

    I’m under the impression that they face incredible pressure and don’t see it as the stigma that we do.,

    I don’t think it’s the same type of pressure. The main difference between International students and domestic ones is probably that international students can afford to place all their time into their work (and thus there’s probably quite a few who are terrible at teaching – something that professors are supposed to do, supposedly.) The majority I know already have family when they arrive.

    On top of that, these communities tend to be tight-knit and impossible to fit into unless you know the language of the country of origin for the community.

    So an average Asian-American experience or what have you would be very foreign to them.

    But then again, “good at math” isn’t the whole of the model minority myth anyway. “good at math but crappy at speaking and leading and not very edgy” is the model minority myth.

    Which is probably why you have trouble articulating the problem.

  3. ren. wrote:

    Jay

    I’m sorry, what’s the difference in the pressure that international Asians face compared to Asian Americans? I didn’t understand that whole “terrible at student teaching – professors hijacked by research biased institutes of higher learning” thing?

    Somehow I figured the problem was with me. That’s so refreshing to know. I was afraid it was just some ambiguous and often empty slogan propagated by some kind of overzealous groupthink, but knowing I’m the culprit, you’ve put me at ease. Before I accept the blame and admit my inability to communicate those core issues of model minority, let me just quell any unfair generalization of my international roommates.

    It’s not like I’m engaging in charades and she has to decipher what I’m trying to say. Chances are we wouldn’t have chosen to live together and confide with each other daily if communication was that much of a hindrance and my attempts at conversing consistently went awry. While I make no defense of my intelligibility, I will defend my roomie’s capacity to comprehend. And considering her expertise is in writing the questions that go into standardized tests (GRE, LSAT), her comprehension of English is a tad better than you might figure and probably better than most Americans. So don’t try and chalk up her incredulous attitude toward the model minority “affliction” as merely something lost in translation, she just might not find it viable. That’s not to say model minority doesn’t mean anything for Asian Americans, just that it might not be attributable to Asians unlike what the article suggests.

    But thanks for pointing out the whole “crappy at speaking and leading and not very edgy” core points of the model minority myth. As an Asian American it’s news to me and by the time I’m 30 I hope to comprehend these core principles. But I believe the author of the article was approaching the story purely in the context of pressure to succeed. While I agree that passivity is definitely a troubling issue among Asian Americans, it really isn’t made an issue in regards to this article, thus my not mentioning it. So… should the model minority affliction apply to international Asians in America on visa as the article suggests or should it not?