S5E17: Dialogues of the Model Minority

Hạ: Derek, I feel like you need to give us an inspirational quote. That's the only thing that we can do right now.

Derek: For some reason, I just keep saying this, "Power through," whether that is studying or staying up late at night. I don't know, but it's always been "power through." I don't know why.

Hạ: Okay. Power through.

Derek: That's it.

Hạ: So, hello, "Bundle of Hers" listeners. This is Ha in the virtual studio today. And with me, I have a very exciting guest, Derek, who is one of my classmates and an inspirational quote aficionado. How do you pronounce that word, Derek?

Derek: Aficionado.

Hạ: Aficionado. Something sounds off about it.

Derek: I don't know. We'll roll with it.

Hạ: Yeah. But he's so good at inspirational quotes. It was one of the first qualities that I noticed about him. First, he's actually one of my first friends at the medical school. We met in orientation week and he also studied biomedical engineering too. And like me, he was raised in the Salt Lake valley, also went to West High School. Woohoo.

Derek: Oh, yeah. Go Panthers.

Hạ: Oh, yeah. Go Panthers. I totally forgot about that. Don't you think it's annoying that in "High School Musical" they misrepresent us as West High Knights instead of West High Panthers?

Derek: Yeah. It's not cool.

Hạ: Yeah. We should have sued them. We should have sued them for defamation.

Derek: We really should have.

Hạ: And we first bonded over our shared love of corgis and coffee, but now we bond over a lot of other things, pretty deep conversations. Derek, are you ready for it?

Derek: Oh, geez. Sure. Let's do it.

Hạ: Okay. So tell us a bit about your identities and your relationship with your Asian identity and the Asian community.

Derek: The origin story is that my mom and my dad emigrated from Taiwan and they came here for foreign exchange student at the University of Utah. So I was born here in Salt Lake City and identify as an Asian-American male.

I lived closer to the mountains of Salt Lake City, and where I kind of grew up is mostly in a white neighborhood with the predominant religion of what they call Latter-day Saints. And I grew up basically not really seeing myself, other than my brother, in my community. So all I had to go off of was me and my family.

And then there was also a small Taiwanese/Chinese community where I went to Chinese school. So I had some connection there through family friends growing up with other families of that sort. But for the most part, I kind of grew up with mostly the white community around me.

Hạ: What was that like growing up with that?

Derek: How did it affect me?

Hạ: Yeah.

Derek: I don't know. Maybe I was just a very go-lucky kind of person, go with the flow. That's just how I am. So I didn't really think much of it, honestly. In elementary school, I just kind of did my own thing.

And maybe it could be other kids in the elementary school kind of noticed that I was the only Asian kid in school, comments of like, "Oh, you must be really good at math and science and chess." And I didn't play soccer or football, like what the cool kids did, as they said. But I didn't really think much of it, honestly. I was just like, "Oh, yeah, whatever. Sure. Yeah."

I was actually not that great at school, to be quite honest. I'd get Cs and I'd just goof around. I was kind of a troublemaker too. But mostly, growing up, I honestly just kind of rolled with it. I didn't think much of it, to be quite honest.

Hạ: It's really interesting hearing about your experiences because as I've talked about extensively in a lot of other episodes, I grew up more in the west side of the Salt Lake Valley. Derek, in his boujee mountain area is called the east side.

Derek: The east side.

Hạ: The boujee east side. And so, for me, it was pretty natural to be around a lot of people of color. But it was interesting because I went to temple a lot growing up, but my family didn't . . . They taught me to be really proud about being Vietnamese, but I think they never really taught me how to integrate that with what it means about growing up American and in the U.S. and all of those constraints with it.

So it took a while until me going into college for me to really start navigating my identities deeply, and all of this leads to our topic for today. I think that the delay that it's taken for me to really get to my identity and to really understand what it means to be Vietnamese-American has really impacted the way that I've responded to what we're going to be talking about. And the topic of the day is going to be anti-Asian hate.

In 2021, March 16, a man came in and killed eight people in a series of deadly shootings at three spas in the Atlanta Metro region. Six of them were Asian women.

In that same year in San Francisco, two grandmothers were stabbed and a third punched in the face in brought daylight, some attacks of many that were waged against elderly Asian residents.

Earlier this year in January, Michelle Go was fatally shoved in front of a subway car in the Times Square station. A month later, Christina Lee was brutally murdered in her bathroom by a man who had stalked her into her Manhattan home.

These stories represent a really tiny portion of the Asian hate crimes that have surged over the last few years. And according to some data, anti-Asian hate crimes have increased more than 73% across the U.S. in 2020, and there was also a 567% increase in San Fran in 2021.

When I say all of this, how are you feeling, Derek?

Derek: It kind of shakes me. Fortunately, in my life, I haven't received this kind of hatred towards my identity, who I am as a person. Maybe I'm fortunate. I'm not sure how to feel about that. But then when I hear these communities, these people getting fatally murdered, it really makes me concerned. It's just something I didn't think was prevalent for me.

And then hearing those elderly people and then I think about my dad who lives here, it makes me concerned that if he's decides to go to a bigger city or any other community across this country, I would be concerned about his wellbeing and safety.

He's even mentioned that to me, that he doesn't feel safe to go to those big cities like San Francisco or New York City because of these kinds of attacks. Hearing that, it just made me realize that maybe my life isn't an ignorant bliss that I have always lived, that everyone is kind to each other. And that was just my purview until I'm hearing these kinds of attacks. So it's actually very, very concerning for me.

Hạ: For me, it is definitely a continual reminder about something that I've always sensed deep inside my soul and something that my family has always alluded to, but they've also not alluded to, is that regardless of me being a U.S. citizen, people will look at me and still see me as something different. They will still see me as someone that doesn't belong in this country.

And for my family, the response to that was that I had to just play this sort of game. I had to be a sort of person. I had to be quiet. I had to not raise any trouble and just nod my head, and then hopefully things would be okay and things would be safe for me and maybe I would be accepted enough to have that stability.

But when I hear about these crimes and how they're happening to people who are just trying to live their lives, I start to realize that all these strategies that I've been taught to be safe and might not really work and that there's really no strategy to keep us stable, to prevent hatred from being launched onto our community.

Derek: It's kind of interesting you say that underlying how you build up these defense mechanisms and hearing it from your family, because with my family, I don't know if it was just the idea that we should live "the American dream" and try to assimilate and try to fit in as much as possible. So, like you said, put your head down, don't make trouble, just try to fit in, and work hard, and if you do those things, you shall succeed. It's interesting to see.

My parents and my family kind of still live this way, because in my household, we had some traditions, but mostly, we just kind of lived more the American life than anything. I would say more than really honing in on my Asian identity.

So, in some aspects, I felt . . . I used this word a lot when I was a kid, but I don't use it today. Whitewashed. I felt like I needed to blend in so I would feel like I am just another American. Again, ignorant bliss that maybe I don't identify as much Asian as I should or want to as a defense mechanism.

Hạ: When did you start identifying as being super Asian or identifying with that side of you more?

Derek: I would say a little more starting when we were repping West High Panthers. Moving from the east side to the west side where you see more people of color and then making more friends that are similar to me. I understand them. We grew up maybe in different areas of Salt Lake Valley, but we understand each other at a fundamental level without really discussing it. Just talking about our experiences, similar jokes, even food and activities, those kinds of things became more to the frontal portion of my thought process of my identity.

And then, obviously, when I went to college, I actually did go to college briefly in California, and it's interesting to say that it was actually a culture shock to see so many Asians. I grew up in white America, I would say, in Salt Lake City and then going into California, I was like, "Wow. There are a lot of people that are like me that I haven't really interacted with." And it was so cool to see how many similarities there were. So I would say this is a very slow continual process of seeing others that are like me.

Hạ: Makes a lot of sense. And I feel like the same way for me. Melding the Vietnamese and the American aspects of me came from going to college and finding the Vietnamese Association, and seeing how they growing up in a very Asian-heavy community were able to meld and blend their identities together.

And then the other thing that they really taught me was to think a lot about the historical context, the things that they don't teach in our history books.

So, for our listeners, I want to talk about these two events in history that make me think quite a bit about how throughout decades, Asian-Americans, even though we are given this myth of the model minority and that we're able to make it with the American dream, we've actually never really been accepted in this society.

The first story comes in early 1900s with the San Francisco plague. So there was a bubonic plague that came in and it was the first plague epidemic in the continent of the U.S., and it was centered all in San Francisco's Chinatown. And the governor at that time really denied the plague's existence for more than two years because he wanted to protect the reputation of San Fran and California. So,it really led to the plague spreading even more.

There were 121 cases identified, including 119 deaths. And a lot of what contributed to it was that there was a widespread social acceptance of racism towards Chinese immigrants at that time. Because of that, there would be racist images of Chinese-Americans as the carriers of disease.

San Fran quarantine measures would allow European-Americans to leave the affected area, but would bar Chinese- and Japanese-Americans from doing that unless they had a health certificate. That was one quite major instance.

And then flashing back just a few decades later, in 1982, we then moved to Detroit and there's Vincent Chin, who is a Chinese-American draftsman, and he's beaten to death by two white men. And at that time, Detroit was facing an economic downturn due to competition from Japanese automakers. So one of the words uttered by Chin's murderers was, "It's because of you little mother that we're out of work."

And despite a lot of legal proceedings at the time, the two assailants were only sentenced to three years' probation and a $3,000 fine with the judge later writing, "These weren't the kind of men you send to jail."

I think a lot about these two stories, along with countless others, in the history of anti-Asian hate in the United States. And a lot of the threads that I see from these two stories are threats that I see today with the dynamics that we face as Asian-Americans.

And one of the threats that I first notice is the fact that . . . Well, I'll say the major threat that I really notice is the fact that Asian-Americans were never really desired and welcomed until they could be used for an agenda, right? And the agenda was the agenda of the model minority. "Oh, look at all these Asians being able to be successful. But the other people of color can't make it like they are. So, clearly, there's a problem with the other people of color."

But when Asian-Americans get in the way of the white supremacist model, and the goals, and the livelihoods of white people, we end up getting thrown out either way.

And it kind of correlates with how we're always used in affirmative action cases. And we're always used in all of these arguments when we talk about race relations with the black, Latinx, indigenous communities. But then when COVID hit, suddenly, there was the China virus, suddenly Asian hate crimes were spiking again.

Derek: All these historical contexts you bring up, the plague, Vincent Chin, COVID, just really exacerbates and really exposes, I would say, the lies of the minority myth. Just from my perspective, Asians are hardworking, smart, and they can move up the ladder, and then they are able to maybe get wealth, power, status, and they can use that as a way to show that, "Oh, we are accepting of everybody. Look at the Asians." But when you delve deeper into the microscope, you see that many Asian people do not have those kinds of advancements up the ladder.

I guess we could take an example of one of my favorite Asian-American actress, Sandra Oh. She's obviously an incredible actress and she works incredibly hard, but just to even get into the American Hollywood of sorts, of movies, and film, and TV shows, a lot of them didn't want her. She had to grind and prove herself.

Oh, Lucy Liu in "Charlie's Angels" too. It's like, "Oh, we have one amazing American woman actress, Asian-American actress." And they use that as, "Oh, we are actually very equal to each other." And that's not true.

You see most people in the film industry that Asian-American characters are actually quite denigrated. I don't know if that's the word, or just look like they appear as the role of someone who is nerdy, not attractive, doesn't get the job. They're just the comic relief. So I just see all of this minority myth thing just completely false.

Hạ: Definitely. And that's why movies like "Crazy Rich Asians" are so big and they raise such a huge traction and attention to it, because it's taken this long for us to really see more movies like it.

And I think "Crazy Rich Asians" is particularly interesting even though rom-com isn't my big vibe. It's interesting because for us, all of the movies that you see that are popular with Asian actors in the Western industry are Kung Fu movies and very specific tropes for Asians, right? So it was cool to see "Crazy Rich Asians" as a rom-com.

Derek: It's interesting you bring up . . . No offense to any of the actors who play in it, but "The Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the "Rush Hour" is always the Kung Fu kind of . . . I heard from people when they watch these films, "Oh, that is so exotic." What does that even mean? Why are you even saying that? Just kind of interesting to think about how film has progressed and culture for the Asian-American population until now.

Hạ: Yeah. And talking about exotic, that just totally gets me thinking about how a lot of Asian women are always described as exotic. There's this huge, huge history that sexualizes Asian women. We're seen as submissive. We're seen as quiet individuals. And it's really enmeshed in that historical context of imperialism and war when you're thinking about the comfort woman in Korea. You're thinking about the musical "Miss Saigon" and the Saigon sex workers.

And that kind of just makes us think about a lot of these hate crimes that we're talking about, which are occurring against Asian women to be even more nuanced. Anti-Asian hate goes beyond the play on the model minority myth, goes beyond all of this history. It's also very gendered too.

Derek: Yeah. I'm a man and I'm not a female, I'm not an Asian-American female, and I can't speak to their experiences. I just don't know what that feels like, but I can only imagine that it's not good for our Asian-American population.

Hạ: It's so weird because when I was in France . . . I've had microaggressions waged all my life, but blatant verbal harassment occurred to me when I was in France because all these men . . . And this was when I was 19, college student doing my summer abroad in Paris, trying to live the Parisian dream.

I would walk down these streets and these men who looked way, way, way older than me would always go and smile at me and go, "Konnichiwa. Ni-hao." They felt that they had the right to do that. They felt they had the right because I was an Asian woman navigating this landscape.

And so, whenever I think about these things, it just makes me really sad because I'm like, "There's so much that's intersecting and making the situation more complicated." But then what gets me even more sad is that I feel that a majority of the world and the people around me don't care. How many of the people around you reached out to you when the hate crimes were happening? Did anyone really reach out unless you made it obvious?

Derek: Unfortunately, I would say 98% of my friends did not reach out. I even saw on Instagram the Stories of, "I feel for you. I'm putting all these resources and reposts," and all that stuff, but then you didn't reach out to me.

Hạ: Yeah.

Derek: That was disappointing. I'm not going to make a big deal of it. Maybe I should, but it's just kind of interesting to see that a lot of people look out for themselves. And if it's not affecting them, they're not going to realize it. They're not going to recognize it. They only see through their lens, not others', for the most part, which is quite disappointing actually.

Hạ: I similarly felt that until I really made it obvious that I was going through this. A lot of people didn't even think that it was something that was hard for me to process.

And as I've been reflecting on it quite a bit, I've been realizing that part of it is because I think a lot of . . . And I'm just speaking for myself, I guess, here. But for me as an Asian-American, I've been always taught to minimize my experiences. When I get a microaggression happen to me, I've been taught to go, "It's okay because you're the model minority and other POC have it worse. Other people who weren't able to make it in America from Vietnam have it worse. And you've just got to grind through it. It's fine. Just keep going."

And I don't think I've ever really had a moment to really even process all these hate crimes. I just see them happen and I go, "Well, this is just a truth that I know. The world is going to keep going on. Maybe one or two people are going to share it onto their Stories, but no one is going to really engage in a conversation about it with me. And that's because they just expect me to be the happy model minority and just keep moving on."

Derek: I strongly echo that statement that you've made. It's interesting to think that . . . I don't know. As you were saying this, I maybe sometimes think that subconsciously I think that I need to act a certain way. Who knows? It might be ingrained in my personality that I just go with the flow. Maybe I go with the flow too much to be like, "Oh, I don't want to cause any trouble. I don't want to make it sound like a big voice. I want everything to be happy and optimistic."

But when comes down to it, these kinds of issues are very, very important. Having people be of that and actually do a deep reflection about not just themselves, but the people around them, is very important.

And I think a lot of us, my generation, your generation of Asian-American, young professionals, college students, up-and-coming people, unfortunately, we do need to put in the effort to change that narrative.

So, from this discussion, I guess we need to be a little more loud. Maybe not be quiet, go with the flow. Let's make some noise. Let's be loud.

Hạ: That's the inspirational quote. Let's be loud.

Derek: Yeah. Let's be loud.

Hạ: Wow. Derek, do you have any other concluding remarks that you want to give to the listeners?

Derek: I think that we've all experienced the pandemic together. We've experienced not necessarily to ourselves, but we've seen people struggle through racial hate crimes, Asian-American, black people, people of color. I would say our voices do matter, the collective us, because if we're going to try to live in a more, I would hope, peaceful, and happy, and equitable place, we need to educate people, or frankly, be loud about what is going on with our experiences. And hopefully, someday, maybe some people will listen.

It does suck that we have to do this. I wish it wasn't so. I wish people who are of the majority do the work. People say, "Yeah, I'll do the work," but they're not us. They're the majority. They can sleep in their home and just read a book and then fall asleep and then wake up the next morning and not really experience what we feel.

So I just hope that all of us continue at least think about it. Constantly think about, "There are people around me that aren't me, so I need to really just reflect and make sure that the people around me, the closest community around me, they're doing okay." Surround yourself by people who have different viewpoints, different cultures, stuff like that, and just continually improve and educate yourself.

Hạ: Thank you so much, Derek.

And so, before we close this off, I really want to give us a moment of remembrance, a heavy pause to grieve the lives tainted by the tides of imperialism, colonization, and war, the Chinese railroad workers, the Japanese families forced into interment camps, the Korean comfort women, and Saigon sex workers, the Southeast Asian refugees, the Uyghurs facing genocide, the massacre of Cambodians in the killing fields, those destroyed in the Rohingya genocide, and countless other lives lost but continually forgotten by Western history and media.

Let us remember the victims of anti-Asian hate in the U.S.: Vincent Chin, the eight victims of the Atlanta spa shootings. Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzales, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Michelle Go, Christina Lee, and countless others whose names will never be heard, whose stories will never be known.

And let us reflect on our ancestors who have suffered from the trauma of their lived histories, our parents who valiantly carry the scars of the past while pushing forward for a more stable future, and our community built from the suffering and healing of those that came before us.

The world may try to belittle their experiences, their truths, their griefs, but they will live on through our voices. We remember them. We grieve them. We forever tell their narratives.

Thank you so much, Derek, for joining me on this episode. I hope that you found it healing and not stressful.

Derek. No, not at all. It was a good conversation. Thanks for having me, Ha. It's been a pleasure and you're doing great work. "Bundle of Hers," so good. So good. Keep up the good work, and I look forward to hearing more awesome stories.

Hạ: Thank you. And thank you to our listeners for continually engaging with us on our work of collective reflection and healing. We always love hearing from you. Love you. Derek, do you want to say the final farewells?

Derek: Sure. Take it easy, guys, and power through.