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declaun's review against another edition
5.0
Solid 5/5 stars.
Likes:
+ Comprehensive history of the early Asian-American experience in the United States
+ Chronologically organized and easy to follow
+ Thesis on how the modern model minority myth comes into being
+ Gives a nod to the vital role that inter-minority community collaboration and coordination is to advancing civil rights
Difficulties:
- Very dense, logical but laborious
- Focuses too heavily on just Chinese and Japanese American experiences (To be fair, the study and analysis would be unwieldy if the scope wasn’t narrowed so I understand)
Likes:
+ Comprehensive history of the early Asian-American experience in the United States
+ Chronologically organized and easy to follow
+ Thesis on how the modern model minority myth comes into being
+ Gives a nod to the vital role that inter-minority community collaboration and coordination is to advancing civil rights
Difficulties:
- Very dense, logical but laborious
- Focuses too heavily on just Chinese and Japanese American experiences (To be fair, the study and analysis would be unwieldy if the scope wasn’t narrowed so I understand)
cekaya's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
danielleliss's review against another edition
3.0
I agree with a review below. Content was 4 stars. The readability (and narration, since I did audio) was not great.
ikuo1000's review against another edition
3.0
I'm an Asian American. When I was in college (a couple decades ago), I didn't even know that Asian American Studies was a thing. If I had taken any classes in it, I imagine this is the kind of book I would have read for class (though this particular book, published in 2013, wasn't available back then).
While absolutely informative, I also found this book to be academic and dense. I'd give 4-plus stars for the content, but maybe 3-minus stars for readability. That averages out to be something like 3.5 stars, and having to choose, I rounded down.
This book focuses on the Chinese and Japanese experiences, as those have been the most visible Asian ethnicities in U.S. history, and they are the populations around which the model minority emerged. Going into this book, I had a working knowledge of major pieces of Chinese and Japanese American history as separate and distinct events, but this book - for the first time I have encountered - studies Japanese internment alongside the Chinese Exclusion Act. During World War II, when the U.S. allied with China to fight Japan, Japanese Americans suffered from their assumed allegiance to their ethnic country of origin, while Chinese Americans benefited from the same assumption.
After WWII, integration became even more complicated as U.S.-Japan relations were strained and Communism took hold in China and threatened to spread throughout East Asia. Both Japanese and Chinese Americans loudly declared their support for American ideals, but at the same time, there was value on the international stage in promoting cultural plurality in America, to show that America truly was a place of equal opportunity, regardless of race.
Both groups were cast as "assimilating Others," capable of being culturally American despite clearly being racially distinct. Asian Americans were definitely not white, but also definitely not black, and the model minority was consciously created as a "simultaneously inclusive and exclusive reckoning" (p. 9) of Asian Americans as part of the national identity. Asian Americans themselves engaged in self-stereotyping, eager to "dislodge deeply embedded 'yellow peril' caricatures." (p. 6) It was a conscious effort to align themselves with white middle class Americans, and to separate themselves from African and Mexican and Filipino Americans (despite sharing common experiences of oppression), thereby upholding white supremacy in the process. Inevitably, the model minority became a wedge that divided Asian Americans from other minority groups seeking equal rights, particularly African Americans.
Personally, I would have liked to learn more about the model minority in the post-1960s era - the time in which I've lived and have first-hand experience - but this time period is only discussed briefly in the Epilogue, which touches upon the "repudiation of the model minority and its assimilationists origins...[as well as how activists] deliberately inverted the trope of non-blackness and instead embraced affinities with" other racial minorities. (p. 247)
While absolutely informative, I also found this book to be academic and dense. I'd give 4-plus stars for the content, but maybe 3-minus stars for readability. That averages out to be something like 3.5 stars, and having to choose, I rounded down.
This book focuses on the Chinese and Japanese experiences, as those have been the most visible Asian ethnicities in U.S. history, and they are the populations around which the model minority emerged. Going into this book, I had a working knowledge of major pieces of Chinese and Japanese American history as separate and distinct events, but this book - for the first time I have encountered - studies Japanese internment alongside the Chinese Exclusion Act. During World War II, when the U.S. allied with China to fight Japan, Japanese Americans suffered from their assumed allegiance to their ethnic country of origin, while Chinese Americans benefited from the same assumption.
After WWII, integration became even more complicated as U.S.-Japan relations were strained and Communism took hold in China and threatened to spread throughout East Asia. Both Japanese and Chinese Americans loudly declared their support for American ideals, but at the same time, there was value on the international stage in promoting cultural plurality in America, to show that America truly was a place of equal opportunity, regardless of race.
Both groups were cast as "assimilating Others," capable of being culturally American despite clearly being racially distinct. Asian Americans were definitely not white, but also definitely not black, and the model minority was consciously created as a "simultaneously inclusive and exclusive reckoning" (p. 9) of Asian Americans as part of the national identity. Asian Americans themselves engaged in self-stereotyping, eager to "dislodge deeply embedded 'yellow peril' caricatures." (p. 6) It was a conscious effort to align themselves with white middle class Americans, and to separate themselves from African and Mexican and Filipino Americans (despite sharing common experiences of oppression), thereby upholding white supremacy in the process. Inevitably, the model minority became a wedge that divided Asian Americans from other minority groups seeking equal rights, particularly African Americans.
Personally, I would have liked to learn more about the model minority in the post-1960s era - the time in which I've lived and have first-hand experience - but this time period is only discussed briefly in the Epilogue, which touches upon the "repudiation of the model minority and its assimilationists origins...[as well as how activists] deliberately inverted the trope of non-blackness and instead embraced affinities with" other racial minorities. (p. 247)
candelibri's review
informative
slow-paced
3.5
While there is no doubt about how important this work is, in an academic sense, the readability level comes in at around a 2. Incredibly dense and at times difficult to digest, the information is still well-researched and offers many other resources to explore.
Focusing specifically on the Chinese and Japanese American experiences, it was illuminating to see both groups juxtaposed against the Chinese Exclusion Act as well as the Japanese internment during WWII.
Ultimately, the “model minority” stigma did exactly what it was designed to do - ostracize East Asian Americans from other minority groups and “othered” them just enough so they were in a class all their own: not quite aligned with Black and Brown people (despite having similar experiences as the hands of white supremacy) and not aligned close enough with white people.
juliusmoose's review
4.0
This book was in a rather more academic register and I had to draw back on my college experiences to remember how to read books like it, but once I did it was okay. The book discusses the origins of the model minority myth about Asian Americans, tracing the shift from the '30s and before, when they were seen as these inscrutable others, to the '70s and beyond, where they’ve become the "model minority": highly educated, middle class, etc. This book discusses how that shift in popular perception came about. It touches on at the end, but doesn’t go into a lot of detail about, how the model minority myth is problematic itself. This book seems well-researched and accurate but I know almost nothing about this history so it could be all wrong I guess but I expect it isn’t.
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