One time when she was young, she wasn't in school when she was supposed to be. She spent the days at her grandmother's house, who babysat other children too. When parents came to pick up their kids, Chrysty had to hide so that other families wouldn’t see that she was there—since her family would lose face if other parents knew she wasn’t at school.“I knew how important it is to act a certain way just so that people wouldn’t comment on my upbringing," Chrysty said.In China, face is divided into two types: lian and mianzi. Mianzi is one’s social reputation or status, as given and perceived by others. Lian has more to do with morality, and the social respect that comes from others for always doing the right thing.While a Westerner's self-esteem or reputation can be influenced by what they think about themselves, face comes only from how others evaluate you. It is strongly tied to what society has told you to be, and from others seeing you function adequately in your social role.In recent psychology studies, researchers have set up experiments to determine how East Asian people view themselves, compared to Westerners. In 2010, Dov Cohen at the University of Illinois asked students from Hong Kong and the United States to take a fake creativity test, where the results were rigged so that some people got really good scores, and others got mediocre ones.“This myth is creating a whole generation of kids with depression and suicidal tendencies because they’re being told they should be doing things that are impossible to achieve.”
Thomas Talhelm, an associate professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, found that the feeling of interdependence amongst the Chinese was more pronounced in rice-growing regions than wheat-growing regions, because the former had a historical need for more coordination with others: managing the water supply, harvesting, and more. “It required effort to maintain the harmony among different people, compared to wheat, where rain falls from the sky and families harvest on their own," Heine said. This might have helped create a cultural schema of needing to rely on others, the importance of fulfilling your specific role in the system.“Losing face does not have an individual impact, it is a construct that affects an entire family unit.”
Many Asians were not Christian, and seen to be culturally different in ways that were threatening. They ate strange food, spoke a strange language, and became the victims of discriminatory laws. “Americans believed that Chinese culture was disgusting and vile, viewing U.S. Chinatowns as depraved colonies of prostitutes, gamblers and opium addicts bereft of decency,” Wu wrote in the LA Times.
That’s to say, the model minority myth isn't just something imposed upon Asian Americans by white people, but a message they had an active part in creating. Still, it’s hard to say whether these ideas would have been pushed as hard if these communities hadn’t faced such ardent and persistent discrimination and racism before.Wu said she considers the intentional rebranding to be, in large part, a reactive effort, and a response to a worry about a crackdown on illegal immigration. "There was a kind of urgency to the publicity campaigns,” Wu said. “It was taking advantage of the general tide turning to more liberal attitudes about race and inclusion.”Once the model minority ideas got picked up by society as a whole, it had unintentional consequences. For one, policymakers, academics, and journalists started to compare Asian Americans to African Americans. “The people were saying that African Americans are making all this trouble, but Asian Americans seem to be quiet and they get ahead on their own without help from the government and they're not making any trouble,” Wu said. “That became a key dimension of the model minority myth. It's not just that they're good citizens and they're loyal, patriotic and hardworking, but that they're also not like Black people.”The model minority myth often galvanizes minorities in America to compete against each other, and fuels racism between marginalized groups.
In an essay for Plan A Magazine, a platform for Asian American writers, a conference attendee named George Qiao wrote about how Asian Americans are trying to grapple with mental health. Very often, strict parenting and unreasonable expectations are pointed to as the cause for the younger generation's mental struggles—versions of the "Tiger Mom" that some Americans claimed were psychologically damaging their kids.But what's really going on is more complicated, experts agree. Even before the model minority myth, China had a long history of valuing education, as seen by the civil service exams that date back over a thousand years, as well as upholding the ideals of face. Rather than erasing these cultural touchstones that has been present for thousands of years, perhaps the situation could be addressed elsewhere.“The idea that Asian families and Asian-ness are uniquely harmful to Asian Americans needs to be abandoned….We must shift our blame onto the model minority, perpetual foreigner, and Orientalist stereotypes that constitute our oppression," Qiao wrote.Wu thinks that there are some Asian Americans who are still very invested in the narrative that they are a hardworking group, and that they earn their mobility, and some that are interested in overturning it. “It some ways, there’s a kind of internal battle within Asian American communities about this very dominant understanding of Asian Americans,” she said.When Asians were declared a model minority—by the community itself, and then embraced as such by Westerners—face put on the pressure to maintain it. It needs to be recognized that Asian Americans are a diverse amalgam of different cultures that contains both ends of the spectrum: those that have “succeeded," in the traditional sense, but many who haven’t. Then, perhaps there can be the acknowledgement that anyone can break under immense pressure, and discussions of mental health can be normalized.Chrysty thinks that the younger generations are talking about these issues more. “A lot of people my age are looking to break out of this,” she said. “I can see among my friends, and myself as well, we’re trying hard to be as transparent as possible— especially about mental health and mental well-being.”Shi goes to art school now. She said that their parents have come a long way in recognizing their mental health disorders and allowing them to pursue what they’re passionate about, even if it’s not a "model minority" career path. Her mom now even tries to spread mental health awareness for other East Asian parents. But Shi still has a lingering concern about messing up, losing face, that she's not sure will ever disappear."Being a certain race doesn’t make you automatically good at things," she said. "But people continue to perpetuate the idea that it does. It will always make parents want their kids to uphold this kind of value. It feeds itself. It makes it hard to break out of the cycle. Because it’s not just one person, it’s the entire Asian community.”*Because of the sensitive information shared, first name only has been used.Follow Shayla Love on Twitter.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily."When your community embraces the idea that you are destined to succeed due to your racial background, failure comes as a devastating hit to your mental health."