Another Horizon
Ambition in Asian America
Last week, a colleague of mine, for whom I have the utmost respect as a rising scholar doing new and innovative work in the derided humanities, confided that he wanted to exercise the right to be average. When I asked him what he meant, he continued, explaining that the escalator of academia was wearing on him, the incessant push behind the logic of accumulation (power and prestige, if not wealth) was exacting a heavy toll on him, as if I couldn’t already tell by the defeated way he slumped his shoulders behind closed doors. Telltale signs of first-world ambition.
It made me reflect on the model minority myth that haunts Asian Americans like him and me. The model minority myth is all about ambition and drive; it is a dangerous narrative (or stereotype, although its reach far exceeds the limited work that stereotypes do) precisely for reinforcing what my students call a “bootstraps”-logic of personal responsibility for one’s welfare. Asian Americans are upheld as examples that America is a post-racial space where a bit of elbow grease, family values, and emphasis on education rather than political visibility will get you a long way.
The myth is contrasted with representations of blacks and Latinos as dependent on entitlements like welfare and whose poverty and dysfunction supposedly result from cultures that don’t value hard work and morality rather than structural and biopolitical racism. This divisive ethnic politicking ignores the histories and politics surrounding these communities that go a long way in helping to explain why, for instance, some Asian American populations have high rates of upward mobility while other Asian Americans face very similar struggles to blacks and Latinos. But that’s what myths do, simplify and fictionalize.
On closer inspection though, at least to me, the model minority myth is a narrative of being average, of mediocrity. Maybe mediocrity isn’t the right word. But the narrative of upward mobility that serves the model minority myth is not an endless escalator into the orbit of fame, fortune, and power. The model minority figure is not supposed to make it all the way to the top, where she might threaten the racialized infrastructure of American society. No, she reaches what some critics refer to as the Bamboo Ceiling, which is derived, of course, from the Glass Ceiling that prevents women from moving beyond positions equivalent to middle management. erin Khuê Ninh writes that
that’s the rub of being hailed the Ideal Racial Buffer: you are not supposed to move out of your secondary position. You are scripted to do well (diligent, proficient, amenable—good assistants), but not too well (not creative, self-assertive, or apt to challenge the status quo—bad leaders). Do well and you are the model for other minorities; do too well, and you are the yellow peril all over again.
Though that’s incisive analysis, Ninh is even more incisive when she recognizes that the model minority myth isn’t only something that has been imposed on us externally by a sociopolitical discourse bent on fracturing ethnic politics in favor of post-racialism; no, the model minority myth is often wholeheartedly embraced and imposed on us by our immigrant parents:
We were Made in America, fit for purpose. The Asian immigrant parent’s vision of the model child—obedient, faithful, professional-managerial—is none other than American society’s vision of the model minority.
This is bold writing insofar as it demands that we confront the complexity and history of immigration, race, and belonging. Yes, the model minority myth is racist, and it exacts a toll on Asian Americans and even more so on blacks and Latinos. But for immigrants like my parents, the myth has a particular context.
When they moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s, there were no guarantees it would amount to anything. We grew up in subsidized public housing and declared bankruptcy twice in a decade. For them, the model minority values they imparted to me and my brother were a call to avoid their struggles, to make their immigration meaningful in ways that they could recognize, which for better or worse meant stable living conditions, not living paycheck to paycheck, not shaming oneself by depending on others.
If it meant we weren’t allowed to play with the poor whites and Chicanos living across the street, so be it. I’m not justifying their racism; I’m putting it into context, showing how my parents inherited the discourse of the model minority, how it played out in real life. I’m not satisfied with how they framed racialized pride, but I understand their negotiations. I was there, I wanted to play with Andy and Sharon. I wanted friends.
And I was there, too, last week, when my colleague articulated his goals for being average. It was a different version of the model minority myth, one he might not want to recognize as such, given its dangerous legacies and the ways we have internalized a certain code of progressivism that, in my opinion, is willing to ignore history in its forward march.
Just as I understand my parents’ model minority dreams, so too do I understand his plight as he negotiates his career. In a fast-paced neoliberal world of accumulation, where making money and climbing ladders is the name of the game, I can empathize with Asian Americans and other people of color who want to ease up on the gas, who want the privilege of not always having to push, push, push yourself to the top.
I see how white people don’t bear these burdens, how relaxed they get to be in their averageness. There’s not as much at stake for them. Spaces are generally safe (although this certainly changes depending on issues of class, gender identity, sexuality, and ability); literally and metaphorically, doors open for them in ways I will never know.
Suburbia, which for us is a marker of making it, is for them a fallback, an escape hatch if things don’t go awesomely. If they fail, they get to be average, they get to be suburban. For people of color, suburbia is paradise, and failure is bad. (Some of you will harp on my generalizations, a critique I accept.)
And yet, I actually set out to write this essay to disparage my colleague’s claim (which is why I began with such complimentary words for him—that’s always a sign that something bad is coming). I kept coming back to his words, dissatisfied with the narrative of being average. I don’t care that it’s reminiscent of the model minority—I just provided my take on why we might actually empathize with both positions, which are really one and the same (the primary difference being, perhaps, that the narrative of mediocrity does not necessarily entail the divisive racial politics of the model minority myth).
Something about aspiring for being average, which sounds oxymoronic, bothers me. It makes me think of aspiring for suburban living, for middle-class ennui. That’s it: desiring mediocrity sounds to me like desiring to be normal, a word I’ve been trained to despise ever since I set my foot in a college classroom. Being average in this day and age cannot but bear the characteristics of all kinds of norms. One still thinks of the white-picket fence, two-car garage, husband-wife duo, the requisite dog. Which, once again, are precisely the limited ambitions of the model minority.
Before I go on to my critique, let’s pause at that. It’s striking, isn’t it, that for many people of color, success is attaining, not surpassing, a norm? Success is not achieved by reaching the top, but by escaping the bottom. Leaving poverty behind qualifies as success. What economists, historians, and sociologists might regard as “average” is a promised land for us.
But indeed, I am here to dispel everything I just wrote. I’m here, in fact, to call for a ruthless ambition. The model minority narrative, and its contemporary iteration as the quest to be “average,” reinforces neoliberal logic. Most of you will admit that the model minority myth does so; I’m here to suggest that aspiring to be average, even minus the racial divisiveness of its predecessor, also does. To aspire to be average, to be normal, is to give up the quest for bigger undertakings.
Listen, I get it, I really do: some days, I just want to blend in, not feel like a spectacle, not feel my difference through the normalizing gaze that renders my otherness.
But on an ethical plane, I think we have to steel ourselves against that temptation, opt out of the mediocre. Here’s the twist: the ambition I’m suggesting we maintain is not to desire the neoliberal rise of one’s career to power, prestige, and wealth. No, we must aspire beyond mediocrity to do the work we set out to do, the work we find meaningful for ourselves and for those to whom we are accountable.
We do not break the Bamboo Ceiling to reach the top of the corporate ladder. We bust out the sidewalls, determine new horizons determined by the things that matter to us. (If your bank account or a corner office is all that matters to you, well, then, I’m pretty sure you’ve stopped reading by now.) We disrupt the model minority myth, the narrative of the average, and the neoliberal imperative of accumulating wealth, power, and prestige, by pursuing the things that matter to us most.
Ruthless ambition in itself isn’t a bad thing, it’s only bad when it’s directed toward imperial ends. But to be ruthlessly ambitious in pursuit of alternatives determined by our convictions is, at the very least, something we ought to consider.
The problem for Jim, my colleague, isn’t that he is overburdened with the pressure to achieve, but that he is overburdened with the pressure to achieve things that aren’t in his gut, things that don’t go down to the core of who he is and why he’s here. And the solution isn’t to take a step back, toward the average, but to take a step aside, and begin pursuing what matters to him, and not his boss, nor his financial portfolio.
According to its etymology, to be average is to lose something. Somewhere along the way, its meaning transformed into reaching a middle ground, the mediocre. But I want to suggest that the trace of the etymological origin remains with us in the model minority, in the mediocre. Rather than give up, which is giving in to the protocols of the Bamboo Ceiling, the model minority, and neoliberalism, we aspire for more, hungrier than ever, but with a different palate, with alternative desires.
