Recently, there was an article in The New Yorker called, "The Two Asian Americans." It was about the history of Asians immigrating to America, the kind of racism they faced while in America and the two types of Asian Americans that emerged: "one formed by five centuries of systemic racism, and another, more genteel version, constituted in the aftermath of the 1965 law" according to 1965 law: Immigration and Nationality Act. In another article in The New York Times, "The Asian Advantage", it discusses the idea of why Asian Americans are so successful compared to their white or African American colleagues. The author said that immigrant East Asians try to get into "good school districts" and make "sacrifices for children's education." Furthermore, the author said that "Asian-American kids are allowed no excuse for getting B’s, or even an A-. The joke is that an A- is an "Asian F."
As an Asian American myself, I was surprised by this. There was history in that article that I failed to ever learn in my own history classes and the mention of racism against Asian Americans struck me as an unfamiliar, yet familiar concept. Allow me to elaborate.
I, along with many of my Asian American friends, have probably never felt that kind of racism shown in the article, mostly because we have laws that protect us and we are not a threat to the American social ladder. However, if looking closely at the kinds of stereotypes that we are boxed in today, racism does effect us. Because no, we do not all have single eyelids, slanted and small eyes and we do not all love and excel at mathematics and/or science. Some of us have large eyes, double eyelids and prefer creative writing and/or art.
As a Chinese American, I have been asked if I am Filipino, Indonesian and even Indian when I was a young child and all because I have larger eyes than "normal." Racism, as I have recently realized, is not as clear-cut for us Asian Americans as it is for African Americans, or any other race. What we have instead is heavy stereotyping they put on us, trying to box us into a certain way, which shows off in The New York Times article. Because Asian American mothers have been named "Tiger Mothers," people expect certain things to happen like, as mentioned above, being in a good school district, sacrificing for their children and accepting no less than an A grade. And perhaps it's because that there are so few people that it happen to that it has become pinned on everyone else.
A good example of this is back in high school between my Asian American friends and I. While I was expected by my parents to obtain high grades, my other Asian American friends' parents had no such expectation (or, if they did, it was that B's are OK). I had constantly found this odd and I realize now that I, myself, have been a part of this Asian American racism, expecting the same thing of all Asian Americans. Our parents do expect great things for us because they want us to have what they couldn't have when they were our age. But that does not exercise the right of other races (or even ourselves, because we are so used to it) to pin that expectation as a stereotype on top of our heads.
I have had friends who have come up to ask me to help on their math questions because I'm Chinese. They say to me, "You must be good at math because you're Asian! Asians love math!" I look at them and say, "I hate math." They look back at me like I am the runt of the family and I can see their minds whirring, thinking of what to say next to me. By that time, I have already walked away.
Stereotypes are hard to take down, especially if they have been around for decades. But for Asian Americans, stereotypes, something that could've been encouraging and good, has turned into racism against us, using what a minority of us are good at and putting it on top of the heads of the majority.
"If Asians sometimes remain silent in the face of racism, and if some seem to work unusually hard in the face of this difficult history, it is not because they want to be part of a “model minority” but because they have often had no other choice." -- Karan Mahajan ("The Two Asian Americans")
