Con cố gắng đi học nhé
— any Vietnamese parent, auntie, uncle, and elder to younger family members still in school or any youth they meet. “Try to go to school” is the direct translation. What is lost in translation are the nuances of an entire community that allow it to breathe and thrive miles away from where its culture is rooted. Those six words carry generational trauma resulting from the pursuit of refuge, the toil of building stability on foreign land, and the effort to retain heritage when surrounded by constant attempts of its erasure. A more realistic translation would be: “put forth your best effort in your studies; your education will create an abundance of opportunities we did not have and a safety net so that you will never have to experience what we endured. The foundation we created for you is merely a skeleton for which your freedom here will allow you to build upon. Remember to return to the community and plant the seeds of your knowledge to nurture the next generation as we tried to do with you. We support you.”
As the daughter of refugees from the Vietnam War and on the cusp of completing my first year of medical school, my pursuit towards becoming a physician is fueled by a desire to promote Southeast Asian representation in medicine and to bring into light the journeys of my community that institutional racism obscures with its desire to compartmentalize identities. The aggregation of data for Asian-Americans reduces our accomplishments to a collective intrinsic trait and ignores the individual effort that created those successes.
The disaggregation of data (1) for Asian-Americans will aid in the deconstruction of the “model minority” stereotype, describing us as “a perseverant, intelligent, academically and socioeconomically successful people who have built a comfortable and desirable lifestyle in the United States despite their minority status” (2). As Robert Lee stated, the stereotype of model minority was more about how in the 1960s, Asian-Americans were perceived as a racial minority who were “politically silent and ethnically assimilable” (3). It was less about their successes and more about the government wanting to fragment the black community as they fought and demanded equity after the dismantling of Jim Crow. In a speech that Ronald Reagan gave in the 1980s, he took the stereotype further by praising Asian-Americans for overcoming hardships and fulfilling the American dream, misleading the public into believing that that fulfillment reveals a post-racial society. It invalidated the efforts of Black-Americans in their pursuit to rebuild their community in the face of racism and blamed them for any inequities they faced with the notion “if they can do it, why can’t you?” In short, it is a label that ascribes our successes and perceived societal acceptance to our cultural values and work ethic, resulting in a misinterpretation of our virtues and pits minority communities against one another.
In data collected by Pew Research Center, compared to the Asian-American average of 19.6% without a high school diploma, 38.1% of Vietnamese adults, 49.6% of Lao adults, 53.3% of Khmer adults, and 59.6% of Hmong adults do not (4). In a 2014 report with the Center for American Progress, data show that when compared to other races, 49% of Asian-Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher (5). However, that percentage masks the underlying disparities for the following subgroups: 26% of Vietnamese-Americans, 14% of Khmer-Americans, 14% of Hmong-Americans, and 13% of Lao-Americans. Even further, when data for medical school applicants who identified as Asian was disaggregated, it revealed that Southeast Asian students represented only 5% of all applicants (6).
Doesn’t that data argue against what society perceives as “success” in America, such as the attainment of higher education? The pressures of “model minority” heavily fall on students of Southeast Asian descent. We often find ourselves balancing filial piety with translating dual identities and biculturalism and remaining conscious of stereotype threat and internalization of “model minority”. We write our visions of success with heritage and our parents’ adages as reminders of how far our roots can nurture our growth and fuel our breath.
We are the children of immigrants and refugees — a unique history and narrative that aggregated data does not account for.
References:
- Chen, A., Ginsberg, J., Konsky, J., Moore, E., Sheridan, G., Skahill, E., . . . BPR Media Team. (2018, April 13). Why Data Disaggregation Matters for Asian-Americans.
2. Leong, F.T.L., & Grand, J.A. (2008). Career and work implications of the Model Minority Myth and other stereotypes for Asian Americans. In G. Li & L. Wang (Eds.), Model Minority Myths revisited: An interdisciplinary approach to demystifying Asian American education experiences. (pp. 91–115) Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
3. Lee, R. G. (1999). Orientals: Asian Americans in popular culture. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.
4. “Vietnamese | Data on Asian Americans.” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project, Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project, 8 Sept. 2017, www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-vietnamese-in-the-u-s-fact-sheet/.
5. Ramakrishnan, K., Ahmad, F. (2014, September). State of Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Series: A Multifaceted Portrait of a Growing Population.
6. “Data-Driven Diversity and Inclusion Change.” AAMC FACTS FIGURES 2016, www.aamcdiversityfactsandfigures2016.org/report-section/section-2/.
