Model Minority and Its Discontents

Model Minority expectations for Asian Americans have been in circulation for more than seven decades, and their grip on the Asian American psyche endures to the present day. In previous papers, the author addressed Asian American compliance with these expectations as a trauma-based, identifying-with-aggressor adaptation to the anti-Asian racism in American society: Reeling from the long history of racial discrimination that culminated in the incarceration of 120,000 individuals of Japanese origin during WWII, Asian Americans embraced compliance and model citizenship as a way of survival. In this paper, I highlight another source of the Model Minority adaptation, namely, the unresolved historical and cultural traumas (i.e., genocides, wars, poverty, authoritarian governments) carried by immigrants from Asia and intergenerationally transmitted to their Asian American children. Intergenerational transmission of large-scale historical traumas has not been explored in the psychoanalytic literature, especially for Asian immigrants. Some immigrants unconsciously attempt to resolve their historic traumas carried from Asia by a manic pursuit of the American Dream. For illustration, I use extended clinical examples and the writing of Amy Chua, a well-known Chinese American author who extolls a harsh parenting style to coax academic performance from her children.