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Ninjas, Dragons & Other Asian Myths
by Windy Sengsatheuane
posted 5/3/05
It’s astonishing to me that some men are still captivated by the gaze of ‘Orientalism’. On occasions when I venture to have a cocktail, I am still asked, “What are you?” (I usually assume they mean my ethnic background as opposed to some kind of freak.) My usual reply is “I’m an Inuk,” borrowed from the singular of Inuit which means ‘the people’ or ‘real people’. As their brow begins to furrow, they insist on the truth, “No really, what are you?”
“I am a person, a human being, but my family is from Laos.” And as some people have no idea where Laos is, a drink turns into a geography lesson where I proceed to draw a rough map of Southeast Asia on a bar napkin, usually noting China as a reference point.
Mike Judge, creator of the animated Fox TV show King of the Hill has a Laotian family living next to Hank Hill, the main character on the show. In the series premiere, Hank asks Khan, his neighbor, where he is from. Khan replies that he is from Laos, whereby Hank then proceeds to ask, “So are you Chinese or Japanese?”
Debunking the Model Minority Myth
When my family emigrated
to the U.S. after the plight of the Vietnam War (1979), no one in my
family had had any formal educations. My
mom cleaned the homes of white women, about 6 or 7 a day, for $30 a
day--total. To make extra cash, she would buy live chickens from
a farm in the country for $1 each, and make my brother, sister
and I pluck, clean, and package the chickens to sell them to other
people in the community for $5 each. She would buy them by the
hundreds and every weekend while my friends were riding their bikes,
scoping out each other’s new quarter pipes, I was plucking
chickens. I got so good at it I could pluck a chicken in 2 minutes
flat.
Asians do even better than whites, right? The basic American tenet of equality of opportunity is the bedrock of society. But upon closer scrutiny, for Asians as well as other people of color, the bedrock turns out to be sand.
Overall statistics of the 2000 Census indicates that Asian Americans are doing better than the national average in their median household income and the value of their homes. But statistics can go awry, and sometimes numbers mask the truth.
The model minority myth has traditionally been employed by pundits and politicians to show people of color that Asian Americans, such as our Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, are the embodiment of the American dream, a bright, shining example of hard work and prosperity. Those in power utilize—in this case, exploit—the story of a successful minority, usually a compliant and conscientious Asian, in attempts to deflate claims of injustice from other people of color as justification for growing economic inequality.
Historically, Asian Americans have been stereotyped as a monolithic group, even though we have more diversity within us than any other racialized group. So many disparities exist among Asian Americans that when you take factors such as immigration status, geographical region, and educational levels of attainment into account, we find that Asian Americans are more diverse than the various slopes of their eyes.
