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This chapter shows that the two congregational models of the relationship between religion and civic life found in ethnic-specific and multiethnic churches provide Korean Americans with resources to create identities as American citizens. Korean Americans use the different interpretations of Christianity to create civic identities with overlapping religious, class, racial, and ethnic components. Such perspectives structure how Korean Americans view their relationship with other ethnic groups, particularly those with black Americans, and provide Korean Americans with diverse ways to view the image of Asian Americans as model minorities.

This chapter adds complexity to descriptions of disability by introducing distinctions between “impairment,” “disability,” and “handicap.” It also describes the diversity of experiences located within the category “disabled” and observes the ways in which other identity characteristics intersect with disability, as in the case of sexism. A brief overview of disability activism and the academic discipline of disability studies is included. Particular attention is given to description of three models of disability: the medical or functional-limitation model, where attention is focused around what one can or cannot physically or functionally do; the social or minority group model, in which shared experiences of discrimination and oppression are emphasized; and the limits model, which encourages engagement in critical reflection on embodied experience, and offers a way to think about the limits of each person and situation and of what such limits may enable or make difficult.

This chapter argues that contemporary Asian American intellectuals, who prefer to see themselves and the objects of their inquiry as bad subjects, are haunted by the specter of the model minority. While model minority discourse allows for the inclusion of Asian Americans in American society at the cost of concessions to the legitimacy of American pluralism, the discourse of the bad subject allows for opposition to the hegemony of pluralism and capitalism, but at the cost of an inability to recognize meaningfully ideologically contradictory Asian Americans. The result of such a refusal is the failure of Asian American intellectuals to confront the transformation of Asian American identity into a commodity. The discourse of the bad subject also prevents Asian American intellectuals from seeing how they also practice interpellation, not only hailing those they identify as Asian Americans — who may think of themselves otherwise — but also hailing them to behave in particular ways as Asian Americans.

This introduction argues that the state, popular journalism, and university responded to economic and racial crises through pairing Asian and Black masculinity as oppositional humans, a structural design I call racial magnetism. In response to Black revolutionary critique and falling-profit rates for capitalism, the architects of racial magnetism rearticulated discourses of race and masculinity through a rigid and immutable framework of racial cannibalism. The bodies of Asian and Black men were profiled for markers of difference, at the phase when a new social contract in the post-civil rights era needed to be recalibrated because of a perfect storm of anti-systemic challenges. Theorizing Afro-Asian comparative racialization as a tool of crises management for market democracy—this chapter explores the ways in which Asian American incorporation into model minority citizenship, as obedient subjects over and against subversive Black subjects, mediated the crossfire between white capitalist reproduction and Black-led revolutionary critique. As such, this introduction intersects the projects of neoliberalism with the tenets of antiblackness.

This concluding chapter discusses how, by the twilight of the civil rights era, the success stories of Japanese and Chinese America had themselves become success stories. The cross pressures of exigencies and desires both within and beyond the ethnic communities had effectively midwifed the rebirth of the Asiatic as the model minority. Since then, the model minority has remained a fixture of the nation's racial landscape, ever present yet constantly evolving to speak to a host of new imperatives in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. Recent iterations depart from the original in notable ways, but retain many of the themes that first coalesced in the postwar period: self-reliance, valorization of family, reverence for education, and political moderation.

This introductory chapter describes the racial order in twentieth-century America—its evolution, consequences, and significance. Japanese and Chinese Americans, the largest ethnic Asian populations, and the two that figured most prominently in the public eye between the 1940s and 1960s, are central to this investigation. Their trajectories unfold separately in order to illuminate their distinct histories. Yet Japanese and Chinese Americans also appear in tandem to emphasize the many parallels that account for their concurrent emergence as model minorities. As a mix of cultural, social, and political history, the chapter highlights how the discursive and the material mattered for Japanese American, Chinese American, and ultimately Asian American identity formation from World War II through the “Cold War civil rights” years.

This chapter examines how, in seeking to produce new envisagements about Japanese Americans, Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) spoke to mid-twentieth-century liberals' confidence in the ability of educational campaigns and social science to transform existing ideas about race and alter the country's racial order. Constituents of the era's race relations complex identified Nikkei citizenship as an American dilemma to be repaired in order to prove the nation's capacity for righting its wrongs, thereby protecting the United States' global position. The celebration of Japanese Americans as model minorities seemed to vindicate the assimilationist approach to rehabilitating Nikkei citizenship as espoused by JACL and its allies. Yet at the same moment, the emergence of this image undermined the league's dominant position within the Nikkei community.

The process of adapting Buddhist religious practices to the American milieu is different from that employed by white Buddhists and sympathizers. Burmese immigrant Buddhists cannot simply racially rearticulate their religious practices to the American context; i.e., modifying the host culture by infusing meanings that comes from the culture of their homeland. Rather, they must adapt their religious beliefs and practices to the American culture by negotiating within the racial and religious landscape of the United States. This chapter contextualizes this process by situating the experiences of Burmese Americans within the larger historical framework of Asian Americans in order to highlight the ways in which Burmese Americans have inherited overt and covert racism experienced by Asian ethnics (those who have been in this country for two or more generations), and the ways in which the existence of a hegemonic culture uses model minority myth to continuously reproduce itself to maintain the status quo.

Minority stress refers to a conceptual model that describes stressors embedded in the social position of sexual minority individuals as causes of health-related conditions, such as mental disorders, psychological distress, physical disorders, health behaviors (e.g., smoking, condom use), and, more generally, a sense of well-being. The minority stress model suggests that because of stigma, prejudice, and discrimination, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people experience more stress than do heterosexuals and that this stress can lead to mental and physical disorders. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the minority stress model. It then discusses the domains of health and well-being that are affected by minority stressors, including mental health, physical health, health behaviors, and well-being.

This chapter uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that hardworking Asian Americans held for white sociologists and the appeal that gambling held for Asian Americans. In other words, the chapter emphasizes again the formal symmetry between the way both parties were using gambling to try to rationalize larger paradoxes in cultural theories of race and economic mobility by reframing immigration and social mobility as a risk-taking opportunity. Gambling served an ideational narrative function that is made clear through its representations in both literary and journalistic fictions of the model minority. The model minority myth was, from that perspective, essentially a racialized version of the gambling narrative, wherein Asian Americans modeled a new way of representing and explaining the relationship between past and future, merit and heredity.

This concluding chapter considers early twenty-first-century immigration controls as furthering national economic advantage. The immigrant I.M. Pei, with his imported talent and skills, illustrates the diminishing of racial inequality through his exceptional accomplishments and success even as he reflects the hollowness of such civil rights victories. The quantified overattainment by the Asian American model minority emanates in large measure from immigration preferences that privilege those most likely to succeed educationally, economically, and now entrepreneurially. Model minority successes have served as rebukes to less well performing minority populations by implying that their failure to attain equal standing does not result from past and ongoing discrimination but is somehow attributable to a lack of the kind of cultural values that would produce upward mobility in the land of equal opportunity.

In 1924, Robert Park, a sociologist from the University of Chicago, directed a study that asked: Were Asians more like blacks or whites? To find the answer, Anglo American researchers interviewed Chinese from British Columbia to California, starting with Vancouver, Canada. West Coast Chinese felt that Park’s answer could not be left to chance, so they mobilized the Chinese community to steer the researchers in a specific direction. Brokers hoped to win white scholars’ sympathy as well as to turn the power of social science against anti-Chinese policies. Chinese regarded the study as a battle of wits, a battle that the researchers did not know they were fighting. This meeting would help shape a pivotal set of ideas about immigration and race that would become known as the Chicago School of Sociology.

In 1958, seventeen contestants from California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, and Connecticut came to San Francisco to compete for the first national “Miss Chinatown U.S.A.” beauty pageant, held at the Great China Theatre in Chinatown. Ethnic beauty pageants such as Miss Chinatown U.S.A. were the highlight of the contemporary Chinese New Year Festival. Contestants had to participate in various festival events: in addition to competition night, they had to attend a coronation party, a fashion show, and ride on a parade float. Another requirement was to appear in the events sponsored by their family associations. These activities turned contestants into ethnic celebrities. By redefining womanhood, ethnic leaders rearticulated their ideal Chinese American: women and men who were equipped with certain cultural traits such as middle-class gender ideals, higher education, and work ethics that promoted economic success. Moreover, they observed Confucian ideas such as filial piety and gender hierarchy. Through this model minority identity, ethnic leaders attempted to transform Chinese Americans into ethnic minorities and integrate them into mainstream America.

This chapter explores the contradictory desires incited by the model minority stereotype by reading Justin Lin's 2002 film Better Luck Tomorrow alongside Lauren Yee's 2008 play Ching Chong Chinaman. Both Better Luck Tomorrow and Ching Chong Chinaman feature characters who attempt to expand their lives by doubling as their others or taking them on as surrogates. This chapter explains how the characters' efforts to play different types of Asian Americans are constrained by their own obligatory physical execution and unpredictable social impact. It suggests that Lin and Yee use the model minority stereotype as an occasion for dramatizing fissuress within Asian America that are provisionally crossed with the racial mundane as accomplice, but never completely bridged.

China is home to over one million ethnic Koreans who have long thought of themselves as part of the Chinese nation, making significant contributions to the nation’s development. Due to their high educational outcomes, Koreans are often viewed as a “model minority” in China, a cultural stereotype that can carry a weighty burden. Arguing in her chapter that multicultural education requires protective and discursive spaces for minority languages, Gao Fang demonstrates that for ethnic Korean teachers, at least, the pressure to succeed and live up to the model minority tag has led to a gradual hollowing out of Korean-Chinese identity. In place of the Korean language, which is increasingly devalued, commodified cultural practices like kimchi and karaoke have come to define the boundaries of Korean identity in China. Gao’s chapter also highlights the nested yet fluid hierarchy of minzu categories and identities in the PRC, with several of her Korean informants viewing themselves as innately superior to Tibetan and Uyghurs students but still inferior to the Han majority.

This chapter analyzes how discussions of class and its more tacit effects in NetSAP book club meetings reveal the ambivalent effects of economic privilege among members as they construct a sense of South Asian American identity in the group. On one hand, NetSAP participants challenge the representative dominance of economically affluent South Asians in the United States. On the other hand, the members' shared privilege makes them both nostalgic and uncomfortable when they broach issues of economic inequality that reveal the persistent effects of class privilege in the book club. In conversations about the book club and within the meetings themselves, readers reflect on the terms of their own privilege particularly through an engagement with ethnically authenticating discourses—such as the model minority paradigm and caste consciousness.

Jeshua Enriquez, in “Crossing the Threshold of B-Mor: Instrumental Commodification and the Model Minority in Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea,” examines how Lee’s 2014 novel presents an acutely globalized and market-driven dystopian vision. In the aftermath of a national collapse, American civilization rearranges itself into stratified sub-societies—Charters, Facilities, and Open Counties—with B-Mor (formerly Baltimore) the ultimate example. Consequently, Enriquez provides a nuanced reading of Asian American commodification as the model minority and the importance of communal story-telling in defeating an oppression generated by racial framing as social control through the novel’s key figure-Fan.

With the rise of the Pacific Rim economy, the restructuring of global economies, the image of wealthy immigrants, and the prevailing model minority narrative, Chinese Americans became “dream customers” for multinational corporations. They were also perceived as cultural brokers to expedite trade across the Pacific. Major corporations began to sponsor the festival in 1987, while television stations started annual broadcasts of the parade in 1988. This chapter explores how commercialism and the mass media entered the terrain of ethnic-identity formation. By evoking exoticism and the model minority image in the English-language parade broadcasts, parade organizers successfully attracted corporate sponsorship and incorporated the Chinese New Year Festival into contemporary multicultural America. However, the counter-memory presented in the Chinese-language television broadcasts of the parade rebuffed the idea of a unified Chinese American ethnicity, instead revealing a heterogeneous community divided by geographic and linguistic barriers.