I’m tired of how Asians in this country are treated — pushed around literally and figuratively. This is why I’ve decided I’m done being your model minority.
Throughout school and my early career, I used to play along with the expectations of Asians. I was grateful for every opportunity, and my parents worked too hard — bagging groceries seven days a week because office jobs were not available to them — for me to mess up. At one job in publishing, I was assigned to the math and science books that no one else wanted; I took all of them on without protest.
Even when I stopped conforming to these expectations, I found that others still wanted me to adhere to the model minority stereotype. I started to realize why my parents had advised me to not make trouble. If I voiced any dissent, I was met with contempt, and aggressively put in my place. Nobody likes it when you play against type.
As the Pulitzer-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen puts it, “Asian Americans still do not wield enough political power, or have enough cultural presence, to make many of our fellow Americans hesitate in deploying a racist idea.”
A paradoxical feature of the model minority is our simultaneous invisibility — when we’re quietly working in the background, head down — and our hypervisibility, when we become easy targets.
I’m tired of feeling terrified. This weekend, at my niece’s first birthday party in Queens — a celebration in Korean culture as big and joyous as a wedding — the table-talk with family and friends was about how scared we are for our elderly parents. We’re frustrated at how quickly non-Asian folks discount the role of race when they have not lived in our skin. We’re tired of being perceived as weak, easy targets, ripe for the pushing. We, especially as Asian women, feel threatened and helpless and silenced.
We’re starting to push back. Asian American female business owners are confronting racist and misogynistic threats from trolls online. In New York City, advocacy groups are calling for citywide action and legislative change to combat bias against Asians and others. Head down and mouth shut is no longer an option, for many of us. We need voices, both Asian and non-Asian, to speak out. We are starting to realize that the bystander effect — seeing something but saying nothing, when we witness incivilities or worse — is as dangerous as the attacks themselves.
