Search the archive.

II. RIGHTS, EXCLUSION, AND STRUGGLES FOR INCLUSION: A GENERAL FRAMEWORK My theoretical interpretation of historical experience is somewhat unusual in that it suggests that rights conventions are complicit in excluding certain persons from full citizenship and protecting social hierarchy, as well as in advancing the causes of inclusion and formal equality.4 The basic logic at stake is that citizen rights in every polity are grounded in general criteria defining the deserving person, or legal subject, who qualifies for rights.5 That constructed image of the qualified or deserving individual subject is often reflected in nationalist ideals6 of heroic virtue. It is also manifest in the construction of aliens as the dangerous “Other” that, as a negative mirror image, reinforces national ideals and conceptions of virtue or merit.7 In short, at various historical moments, dominant groups—working both through the sovereign power of the state8 and in civil society—extend rights to people whom they view as like themselves, and deny some or all rights to others in turn. In most modern constitutional republics, the general legitimating criteria for rights qualification usually emanate from individual capacities to demonstrate disciplined, rational self-governance. Dominant or insider groups rely on a variety of ascriptive markers—for example, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender or sex, religion, and education—as well as personal behavior to justify such assessments of deserved inclusion or exclusionary “Other-ing,” although these markers are often viewed through the stereotypical lens shared by insiders.9 From the start, the default standard for the disciplined rights-bearing individual in the United States, for example, has been the propertied white male. Every claim of rights thus raises the question, at least implicitly, about whether claimants actually qualify by this norm as members of the community of rights-bearing subjects. Qualification for rights in the United States has entitled people to expect and demand treatment according to principles of “liberal” law, including due process, equal protection, freedom of civic and political participation, humane treatment, and the other rights we often identify with our Bill of Rights and “rule of law” generally. Those who are deemed as entitled to less than full citizen status, by contrast, are vulnerable to treatment that is more discretionary, arbitrary, coercive, and even brutally violent: what often is called “repressive law”10 or lawless “social abandonment.”11 We know those subjugated Others by different labels at different times: slaves, indentured and other types of servants, indigenous peoples, dependent women, and others treated as forms of “property”; immigrant aliens from Asia, Mexico, and the Global South for the last century, continuing today, and still lingering for subsequent generations; and the ubiquitous labels of un-American, subversive, and/or dangerous criminals.12 Periods of anxiety or fear often exacerbate exclusionary actions and the denial of rights privileges for specific groups (as well as, to a certain degree, for all persons) in the name of security or life.13 This point is well illustrated by the post-civil rights legacy of the domestic mass incarceration state, and the recent War on Terror’s campaign against dangerous Others, such as enemy combatants. This recent experience is hardly unique, however; periods of division, anxiety, and fear over dangerous Others at home and abroad have been more the norm in American life than the exception.14 At the same time, liberal rights traditions provide those persons and groups denied full citizen status potential discursive and institutional resources that can be mobilized to challenge, exclusion, hierarchy, and subjection to repressive law. In the US, such mobilization of rights has usually required people marked as Others to attempt to demonstrate the discipline, virtue, and merit associated with the “white standard” of insiders in order to qualify for rights as full citizens.15 Sometimes the equality principle of liberalism can even be pushed beyond its formal abstract terms to demands for more substantive social justice, often called social or positive rights. Very often, efforts to overcome repressive exclusion or to advance social rights fail. And, while they sometimes succeed, even then success is limited and entails a long process of struggle. In any case, rights “cut both ways”—routinely fortifying as well as sometimes facilitating challenges to exclusion, repression, and hierarchy.16

“I would only hire Asians if I could,” a professor once told me. “You all are so hard-working.”¶ She meant it as a compliment.¶ Her words came back to me last week, as Asians were the victims of two mass shootings in California: at a dance studio in Monterey Park and at two farms a mile apart in Half Moon Bay. In both cases, the suspects are older Asian men.¶ The attacks come during an existential moment for Asian communities—and an America historically conflicted over our presence. The initial December 2019 reports of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China, unleashed a spate of hate crimes in the US. Between 2020 and 2021, anti-Asian violence rose by 339%, according to California State University Santa Barbara’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. The passage of time has not helped much; more Americans now blame Asian Americans for Covid than at the height of the pandemic in 2020.¶ And the perception affects Asians at work, both in day-to-day treatment and prospects for ascension. A study from the global think tank Coqual finds one in three Asian and Asian American professionals have experienced racial prejudice, and Asians report facing microaggressions at higher rates than other races.¶ That Asians are struggling mightily in the workplace might surprise well-meaning folks like my former professor. Except her perception of Asians being diligent and dutiful is precisely a part of the problem: To some, Asian work matters more than Asian lives.¶ There are so many misconceptions over the Asian experience in the US that create this image. It starts to feel conditional, as if the only place for Asians in the US is that of work, of subservience. Also dangerous is when this becomes how we see ourselves.¶ Arriving on US shores as guests, then neighbors.¶ Our history in the US, of course, is impossible to separate from labor. The first waves of Asian migrants came to toil on ships, plantations, railroads. After centuries of exclusionary and discriminatory practices, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ushered in new faces and new reasons for arrival on US shores, jobs, education, and political freedom among them.¶ For much of the last century, this willingness to serve as a final destination distinguished the US’s immigration policy from that of other countries. Late 20th-century Germany, for example, had its “Gastarbeiter,” or guest worker, program for foreigners only intended to work short stints. As stays grew longer and families followed, migrants never quite shook a sense of impermanence, forming “parallel societies” that struggled to integrate into mainstream German institutions. The problematic idea of immigrants as “guests” has gained political momentum in more recent US history, particularly through the H-1B program, launched in 1990 to allow employers to hire skilled workers on temporary visas. The current wave of mass layoffs is underscoring just how fragile a place in this country can before those employees.¶ Today, Asians are the nation’s fastest-growing racial or ethnic group, projected to reach 46 million by 2060. The stereotype of Asians as hard-working and studious comes with great expectations—and a steeper fall if things don’t go according to the script. And it’s hardly just external pressure. Asian immigrants’ dreams for their children are often expressed as an extension of professional ambition—“You can be anything you want, as long as it’s a doctor or lawyer”—versus what such jobs actually represent: stability, acceptance, and the achievement of the American Dream.¶ Great workers, not great leaders?¶ Thus comes the challenge for Asians who might be seen as efficient workers but not effervescent leaders. The Coqual report says: “Pervasive stereotypes such as being seen as quiet, and hardworking outsiders affect the workplace experiences of Asian and Asian American employees.”

Throughout Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM), I have reflected on the stories I’ve heard about the deeply frustrating lack of visibility of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs). While many Asian Americans are often referred to as “model minorities” whose stereotyped high achievements provide them a proxy to whiteness and American identity, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. We continue to suffer from microaggressions, are still seen as perpetual foreigners, and have repeatedly been denied the ability to shine beyond the stereotypes of our communities — which were shaped by decades of American history and foreign policy. So on the last day of APAHM, I’m still thinking about why we are still striving to figure out where and how we fit into the fabric of this country. Because oftentimes, we have to fight just to be seen as American.

On May 3rd, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and her family received a rude awakening. Chao is a member of the Trump cabinet and married to the most powerful Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, and she is the product of a successful immigrant family with its own rags-to-riches story. After immigrating to this country, Chao’s father built up a multi-million dollar business empire. Chao and her family are, as some might argue, “as American as it gets” in the eyes of conservatives. But when Don Blankenship, a West Virginia GOP Senate candidate, wanted to attack McConnell as an outsider, he perpetuated the ugly message America has given immigrants for centuries in one sentence. He said McConnell’s “China family has given him tens of millions of dollars.”

Hip hop emerged in spite of the brutal logic of capitalism, out of centuries-old traditions, to insist upon and amplify black voices and black political consciousness. But as Brittney Cooper, Questlove, and Jeff Chang have recently pointed out, it has been exploited to the point that black cool now serves as transnational currency in the global market. This is a version of what organizer Alicia Garza rightly rails against in her important piece on #BlackLivesMatter: the power of white supremacy to take an act of political insurgency and empty it of meaning, to flatten it into coinage, or an anemic symbol of post-racial liberalism.

But as long as there is resistance, the insurgency lives on, and new strategies are constantly being born.

Method Given their long history in the community, Asian American communities have taken part in mutual aid activities more extensively during this epidemic. To support this claim, I searched the website “ProQuest” in the newspaper section, using the terms "Mutual aid", and "Asian Americans", language: English, and publication date: March 1, 2020 - December 1, 2021. The number of articles found by this search was 276, of which I could analyze 50, only 15 of which applied to mutual aid networks in Asian American communities during the pandemic. Findings In these articles, the Asian American community is described as a hardworking group that came together more after being discriminated against during the pandemic, and their sense of mutual aid was strengthened. "During times of crisis, it's easy for us to forget that our AAPI communities are based upon a long history of grassroots action, especially via varied artistic forms of expression.” says the program manager for Pao Arts Center. Indeed, Chinatowns and other Asian community enclaves have always been sites of creativity, aesthetic innovation, and imaginative production that are not well known or often highlighted. (Corrie, 2021). Despite the range, complexity, and sheer volume of Asian American art production, Chinatowns, in particular, remain stigmatized in the public consciousness as places of urban degradation, mysterious foreignness, and even sickness. (Corrie, 2021). Historically, Chinatown and other Asian communities have always countered such representations and beliefs with creativity. Asian American communities have also been reshaped by the pandemic. Meanwhile, an online course about identity and history sparked a connection between a group of Asian American women across the country. It soon led to a group chat and a monthly Zoom support group. “I feel so bonded to them, even though their experiences might not be the same as mine,” Amy Ding says of her new virtual cohort. “As Asian women, there was deep healing and a deep yearning for more of this type of community.” At a time in which staying 6 ft. apart has often hampered intimacy (Lang & Monn, 2021). Following the murder of George Floyd, Ding felt compelled to learn more about her Asian American identity to be a better BIPOC ally. Ding and the six other Asian American women—ranging in age from their mid-20s to their late 30s—wanted to continue to meet regularly after the course ended. Located across the U.S. in states from New York (where Ding lives) to Missouri to Texas, they started a WhatsApp group chat and have met virtually on Zoom every month since January. In these video calls, the group discusses topics ranging from books and podcasts that celebrate Asian American voices to navigating relationships, both personal and professional, as Asian American women. The conversations are lighthearted, and in others, the women share their stories about microaggressions and racism. “There’s been a lot of experiences of being gaslit,” Ding tells her story as an Asian woman in the United States. “When I think of how I’ve been supported by this group, a lot of it is feeling reaffirmed that there are other people who know what I’m talking about or who understand the hesitations of having [thoughts] like, ‘Oh, was that racist?’” (Lang & Monn, 2021). During uncertain times, communities of color have provided a different perspective and created connections that will endure. Throughout the pandemic, one of the many challenges that Asian American communities experienced was racism. A year after the coronavirus started spreading across the globe, Asian American activists ignited a movement against racism. Propelled by former President Trump's vitriolic comments about the "China virus," there has been an uptick in hate crimes. Members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community were already rallying and ringing alarm bells before a white gunman allegedly shot and killed eight people in Atlanta spas, six of them Asian women, on March 16. The massacre has opened the public's eyes, and Asian American activists are hoping to harness the momentum and turn it into sustained action (Reyes-Velarde, 2021). For example, Ana Iwataki, 32, founded J-Town Action & Solidarity, which collaborates with "We the Unhoused" to give resources such as clothing, food, and hygiene products to homeless people in Little Tokyo. Following the Atlanta assaults, J-Town has increased its attempts to engage with Asian Americans in the Los Angeles region. Iwataki is mentored by a powerful teacher, her aunt Miya Iwataki, who began her activism in the 1960s under the auspices of the Brown Berets, a seminal Chicano rights organization. In an interview with the Times, Miya explains how for decades, most people didn't know that there was an Asian revolutionary movement in the '60s and '70s and that our programs were inspired by groups. According to Miya, "The Black Panthers" were the ones that established free breakfast programs, free housing, clothes, and health clinics, and it was these programs that inspired the Asian American movement (Reyes-Velarde, 2021). As coronavirus-fueled anti-Asian hate crimes surged across the country, a virtual workshop sought to address a herculean task: how do we define Asian American and Pacific Islander (API), an umbrella term for over 50 ethnicities, and how can the API community come together to combat anti-Asian racism? (Ross, 2021). Every two weeks, The Non-Standard Project hosts a virtual affinity space for youth of color to discuss social issues without the eyes of authority. Topics that have been discussed include racial sexualization, Yellow Fever, patterns of white supremacy, mental health, Asian American invisibility, and the Model Minority Myth. According to their website, which contains a resource toolkit, the two core values of the organization are community care and accessibility (Ross, 2021). “One thing many grassroots organizations lack is empathy beyond attachment to group identity,” Kim said. “Many Asians that are heavily involved in Asian American organizations do not stand in solidarity with other communities. We should not see ourselves as just boxes.” The goal of these workshops, such as the one mentioned above, was to bring Asian Americans and other communities of color together so that they may combat racism and oppression more effectively. During the pandemic, mutual aid networks not only brought Asian American groups together but also created a sense of belonging and cultural appreciation among this community. "For so long, people knew nothing about Asian Americans. Showing who we are and being proud of who we are, it's really important during this time." Jennifer "Nuky'' Phqm, 37, helps run the Celebrate Argyle campaign and books, musicians, and artists, at pop-up events for Haibayo, whose cross-cultural creative collaborations aim to energize Asian culture in the Argyle district. Phqm is a Chicago-born Vietnamese American who co-owns her family's company. She expresses her desire for more people to learn about and respect her people. Jennifer describes how Asians are stereotyped as being all the same. However, Asian-Americans as a group are extremely varied. She describes how, as an Asian, she was taught to keep her head down and not make any disturbance. Not to cause any quote-unquote trouble. For a long time, no one knew anything about Asian Americans. She emphasizes the importance of being proud of who she is during this time, and she encourages others to do the same. Phgm also encourages individuals to give to groups working for justice, particularly AAPI businesses. Over six companies shuttered on Argyle between 2020 and 2021. It's nine—some owing to retirement or a lack of succession, and the majority because of COVID (Montoro, 2021). Ellen Duang, another Argyle member, expressed several of her worries regarding Asian hatred. She describes how a few weeks ago, a Vietnamese man was walking around at night and was assaulted. Ellen claims that there has been a lot of racism in the words and videos she has seen throughout the world. Ellen is concerned about how Asians are being associated with the virus. She then explains why they made the Stop AAPI Hate video with other members of the Asian American community. "We felt it would be a nice idea to showcase our distinct culture with this outdoor event," Ellen says. We want to create a venue where Asian American literature is available, and we want to include the community by allowing them to sell their wares outdoors. We would want to see cultural performances. If it makes people feel better, we encourage them to wear traditional garb. I'd be dressed in an “Áo dài”, which is a traditional Vietnamese garment. We want to establish a safe environment where we can be proud of who we are. Instead of putting our heads down and being afraid, we're choosing love over hatred right now." (Montoro, 2021). Conclusion The present findings show that mutual aid networks in Asian Americans have expanded and strengthened during the pandemic. Asian Americans have grown closer together as a community to protect its members from bigotry and racism since COVID first started. According to the literature review, mutual aid networks are not as prevalent in the Asian American community as they are in the findings section. While mutual aid networks positively affected Asian American communities, it is also important to acknowledge the prejudice and other challenges that these communities experienced. As part of this study, I will continue to examine newspapers to support my research, and will soon undertake in-person interviews with Asian Americans to get additional data for this project. Future studies can expand on the significance of mutual aid networks in other minorities. It would also be interesting to study mutual aid networks in Asian American communities post-COVID considering the growth that has been seen during the pandemic. Mutual aid networks may expand in response to future concerns about supporting Asian American communities.

Cooperation and mutual aid have been a part of the Asian American experience ever since the earliest documented examples of immigration. Collective help took the form of family associations and rotating credit practices. Early Chinese immigrants who arrived in San Francisco were met at the pier by representatives of family associations, who would escort the new arrivals to the association building and provide housing.¶ The associations also connected immigrants to employment and provided basic social insurance for their membership, such as medicine, burial expenses for the poor, and money for travel back to China for the indigent elderly. Membership was open to descendants of a particular clan or, even broader, those who shared the same regional affiliation in China.¶ Family associations and benevolent societies weren’t unique to immigrants from Asia. Germans had a version, Landsmannschaft, which supported students from the same part of the country studying abroad. However, what made these institutions was the political context of exclusion. Chinese were barred from entering into the U.S. if they were common laborers. Immigrants were admitted if they could prove they were merchants, scholars, or diplomats under the 1882 Exclusion Act. In addition, trade unions pitted white workers against Chinese workers, who were portrayed as docile and susceptible to the boss’ whims. Mutual aid associations provided benefits for members with shared family or ancestral histories.¶ Cooperatives flourished in broader Asian American communities as exclusionary laws initially passed to restrict Chinese immigration were applied to all Asians. Filipinos, for example, started arriving in California in large numbers in the 1930s. The workers organized themselves as informal cooperatives under a leader from the same region who spoke the same language. That leader was responsible for getting farm jobs for his cooperatives and provided accommodations to the new arrivals. Members of the cooperative could borrow money without interest in the winter when seasonal farm work was at a standstill. The cooperative would also cover medical bills and burial expenses for members without resources.¶ Anh-Thu Nguyen’s mother, Phi Dang, is one contemporary beneficiary of cooperative economics. When Nguyen’s father passed away, Dang moved to Texas and supported herself by taking care of children in the neighborhood.¶ The parents of the local children worked long hours in low-wage service jobs such as nail salons and weren’t available to drop off and pick up their young children from school. Dang also provided meals for weary parents to pick up along with their children at the end of their shifts. “This was done informally not as a cooperative but as a loose mutual aid network,” Nguyen says.¶ Asian American immigrants also pool financial resources to help each other because, like many immigrants, they face obstacles to participating in mainstream banking and financial institutions, because they might not have access to financial information needed by banks, encounter strong language barriers, be distrustful of banks, or simply not have enough money to save. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) recently found that more than 20 percent of Asian Americans are “underbanked” or turned to alternative financial services in the past year.¶ Asian American immigrants instead turn to rotating credit associations, whose members grew up in the same region or attended the same school, and who contribute a fixed amount of money into a fund which is then distributed, at intervals, to each member in turn. Each ethnicity has its own form of these organizations, including the Chinese (who call this practice hui or ko), Japanese (tanomoshi or mujin), Koreans (kyes), Indonesians (arisan), and Indians (chits or kuries).¶ Most nail salon workers, for instance, are recent female immigrants. Most don’t have a history of work experience in their home countries, and many lack the legal paperwork to live in the U.S. and open a bank account. A study of nail salon workers in New York City published in the International Migration Review found that many participate in these lending circles in order to pay for household expenses, children’s college tuition, and mortgage or rent payments. In addition to sharing money, the associations also help to bridge the social isolation and stress the low wage workers often face.¶ Cooperative practices sometimes originate in the ancestral country and are replicated in the U.S. Julia Ho, for instance, is a second generation Taiwanese American whose grandfather started a farmers cooperative in rural Taiwan. The members of the co-op would pool their money to purchase seeds every year for harvest. Although Julia’s mother, Jui-Lien Chou, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s to study medicine, in 1999 she purchased a 259-acre cotton farm in Lubbock, Texas, which she converted into a USDA-certified organic farm. Named Tree Grace Farms, after Chou’s father Shu-En (樹恩), the farm is now a hub for organic agriculture, supporting edible school gardens, donating produce to a local food bank, and offering shares in a community-supported agriculture.¶ Ho credits her mother’s influence on her decision to become a community organizer against police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri, and to work as coordinator of Solidarity Economy St. Louis.¶ “I realize that I’m doing the work my mom does,” Ho says. “My goal is to make room in the solidarity economy movement for people like my mom, who doesn’t consider herself a social justice organizer, but is clearly doing the things that all of us are talking about.”¶ Although cooperative economics have been practiced out of necessity by Asian American immigrants as a way to survive a hostile country that excluded their participation in the mainstream economy, Nguyen thinks that there are lessons that all communities could draw from.¶ “In our current age, with the ensuing climate crisis and widening wealth gap, our mutual survival is at stake. It’s not really an option to go at it alone,” she explains. “That’s the big thing to learn from refugee communities, we have to lift each other up.”

Mutual aid happens when members of a minority, primarily the Asian American community, join to meet each other's needs, with the common understanding that the institutions in which they live are failing to meet their needs. Mutual aid is a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable (Brigade, 2019). The framework of mutual aid is significant in social movements resisting capitalist and colonial domination, in which wealth and resources are extracted and concentrated and most people can survive only by participating in various extractive relationships. Providing for one another through coordinated collective care is radical and generative (Spade, 2020). It is important to underline that mutual aid is not charity, but it is the formation and maintenance of new social connections in which individuals give what they can and get what they need outside of unjust power systems. ¶ The framework of mutual aid is significant in social movements resisting inequalities. Providing for one another through coordinated collective care is radical and generative. Effective social movements always include elements of mutual aid (Spade, 2020). The most famous example on the left in the United States is the Black Panther Party’s survival programs, including the free breakfast program, the free ambulance program, free medical clinics, a program offering rides to elderly people doing errands, and a school aimed at providing a liberating and rigorous curriculum to children (Collier, 2015). ¶ Mutual Aid Work in Asian American Communities ¶ The existence of community-based organizations in Asian American communities is crucial to meet their needs, especially during the pandemic, when minorities were left behind. However, the underlying principle of early voluntary associations is that communities should help their members. These organizations were typically started by volunteer laypeople and based on the special interests, trades, and needs of their members. Racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, in particular, relied on these organizations for financial, spiritual, and emotional support (Gamm & Putnam, 1999). As a minority in the United States, the Asian American community established community-based organizations from the mid to the late 1800s to have a sense of belonging to something in common with other people who share their cultural perspectives. ¶ Ethnic community-based organizations have since developed to provide human services, but they still keep the same values and spirit as their predecessors. Usually, in the communities they serve, ethnic community-based organizations are often familiar with the obstacles and needs of service users and typically sponsor a variety of events and activities to promote community building and social support (Holley, 2003). As a result, ethnic CBOs can provide services that respond to the needs of minority populations in a supportive community setting, especially for new immigrants from Asia (Chow, 1999). As a result, ethnic community-based organizations can provide services that are sensitive to the needs of minority communities in a supportive community context, particularly for the Asian American community. However, scholars argue organizations can help with assimilation. ¶ Mutual Aid during COVID-19 ¶ While collaboration is one form of how these organizations provide services, sometimes community organizations independently provide it. For example, between March and June 2020, residents in north London faced the Covid-19 pandemic by creating neighborhood Mutual Aid groups on WhatsApp and Facebook. These groups not only addressed basic survival needs such as bringing groceries and medicines to infected people, the elderly, and other vulnerable populations in quarantine; they also offered opportunities for social interactions between strangers living in the same neighborhood during the lockdown. Their success was linked to their rapid mobilization, adaptability, and local knowledge. Their bottom-up organization, based on the principle ‘Solidarity not Charity’, showed a singular way to express dissent with policy response to the pandemic and brought them closer to the horizontal social movements of the 2010s (Chevee, 2021). ¶ During the Covid-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020, the support provided by mutual aid groups has included shopping, collecting prescriptions, providing meals, dog-walking, informational and emotional support, and involvement in running food banks (Solnit, 2020). Their flexibility and local connections meant they were better suited to play this role than centralized or official bodies (Tiratelli & Kaye, 2020). As of May 2021, there were at least 4317 mutual aid groups operating in the United Kingdom (Covid-19 Mutual Aid UK, 2021). However, the existing power dynamic between helper and helped was reinforced along racial lines, a dynamic which resonates particularly given the wider context of the UK Covid-19 mutual aid movement; research shows that membership in Covid-19 mutual aid groups was overwhelmingly white and middle-class (O'Dwyer, 2020), while the virus itself disproportionately affected on lower-income and minority ethnic groups (Public Health England, 2020). ¶ Disease threat often gives rise to discrimination and scapegoating of “others,” for example, foreigners, immigrants, and marginalized groups. In the pandemic brought on by COVID-19, it is not just Chinese immigrants, but any Asian American perceived as having connections to China (e.g., some Southeast Asians and other East Asians) because of false stereotypes that Asians are “look-alike” and anti-Asian/Chinese sentiment (e.g., the “yellow peril” stereotype as discussed later), have become potential targets (Tessler, Choi, & Kao, 2020). While establishing relationships with other marginalized racial groups and the Asian American community as large may not be limited to a few Chinese and Vietnamese Americans, it is unlikely to limit solidarity among most members of these communities. To strengthen emotions of solidarity among Asian ethnics and other racial minority populations, it is critical to identify strategies to foster a sense of connected fate among Asians, Blacks, and Latinx, which improves both intra and inter-racial solidarity (Nicholson, Carter, & Restar, 2020; Sanchez & Masuoka, 2010). ¶ In particular, members of minority ethnic groups may feel marginalized, creating barriers to engagement with healthcare or other services (Public Health England, 2020). In the present case, that the interaction took place in what appeared to be a racist area stressed both the power dynamic between “helper” and “helped,” and the participant's self-perception as being from a potentially hostile outgroup in the eyes of the recipient, creating an uncomfortable feeling of intrusion (Mao, et, 2021). Asian American communities continue to engage in mutual aid work through the pandemic, given this long history within the community.

As a nation constituted on the founding pronouncement, “We the People,” the narrative of the American nation is invariably tied to how citizenship is defined, both legally and discursively.1 Asian Americans have always occupied an ambiguous space within the American body politic, caught between competing discourses of inclusion and exclusion that have been determined as matters of law, primarily in respect to citizenship and immigration. As Lisa Lowe has observed,

In the last century and a half, the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally. These definitions have cast Asian immigrants both as persons and populations to be integrated into the national political sphere and as the contradictory, confusing, unintelligible elements to be marginalized and returned to their alien origins.2

Asian American Stories and the Law: Remembrance and Resistance

By producing literature, Asian American writers contribute to the development of Asian American culture as an equally important but forgotten facet of American culture that was silenced and marginalized by discriminatory laws. Maxine Hong Kingston, for example, engages in countermemory in her novels to challenge the assumption that national memory and history are necessarily objective. In a chapter entitled “The Laws” that appears squarely in the center of China Men, Kingston interrupts her narrative with a list of laws to illustrate how the experiences of not only the characters in her book but also all Asian Americans have been mediated through the laws. Brook Thomas has noted that because of the inclusion of “The Laws,” the publishers did not know how to classify the book and labeled it “Nonfiction/Literature.”62 The section, however, is not intended to be an exact legal chronology, and as a work of fiction, it takes creative liberties with historical accuracy. Kingston’s purposeful imprecisions in her retelling of “The Laws” serves as a reminder that American legal structures are not objective but rather mired in a history of racism and exclusion that promotes only one dominant perspective and silences others.

Method Given their long history in the community, Asian American communities have taken part in mutual aid activities more extensively during this epidemic. To support this claim, I searched the website “ProQuest” in the newspaper section, using the terms "Mutual aid", and "Asian Americans", language: English, and publication date: March 1, 2020 - December 1, 2021. The number of articles found by this search was 276, of which I could analyze 50, only 15 of which applied to mutual aid networks in Asian American communities during the pandemic. Findings In these articles, the Asian American community is described as a hardworking group that came together more after being discriminated against during the pandemic, and their sense of mutual aid was strengthened. "During times of crisis, it's easy for us to forget that our AAPI communities are based upon a long history of grassroots action, especially via varied artistic forms of expression.” says the program manager for Pao Arts Center. Indeed, Chinatowns and other Asian community enclaves have always been sites of creativity, aesthetic innovation, and imaginative production that are not well known or often highlighted. (Corrie, 2021). Despite the range, complexity, and sheer volume of Asian American art production, Chinatowns, in particular, remain stigmatized in the public consciousness as places of urban degradation, mysterious foreignness, and even sickness. (Corrie, 2021). Historically, Chinatown and other Asian communities have always countered such representations and beliefs with creativity. Asian American communities have also been reshaped by the pandemic. Meanwhile, an online course about identity and history sparked a connection between a group of Asian American women across the country. It soon led to a group chat and a monthly Zoom support group. “I feel so bonded to them, even though their experiences might not be the same as mine,” Amy Ding says of her new virtual cohort. “As Asian women, there was deep healing and a deep yearning for more of this type of community.” At a time in which staying 6 ft. apart has often hampered intimacy (Lang & Monn, 2021). Following the murder of George Floyd, Ding felt compelled to learn more about her Asian American identity to be a better BIPOC ally. Ding and the six other Asian American women—ranging in age from their mid-20s to their late 30s—wanted to continue to meet regularly after the course ended. Located across the U.S. in states from New York (where Ding lives) to Missouri to Texas, they started a WhatsApp group chat and have met virtually on Zoom every month since January. In these video calls, the group discusses topics ranging from books and podcasts that celebrate Asian American voices to navigating relationships, both personal and professional, as Asian American women. The conversations are lighthearted, and in others, the women share their stories about microaggressions and racism. “There’s been a lot of experiences of being gaslit,” Ding tells her story as an Asian woman in the United States. “When I think of how I’ve been supported by this group, a lot of it is feeling reaffirmed that there are other people who know what I’m talking about or who understand the hesitations of having [thoughts] like, ‘Oh, was that racist?’” (Lang & Monn, 2021). During uncertain times, communities of color have provided a different perspective and created connections that will endure. Throughout the pandemic, one of the many challenges that Asian American communities experienced was racism. A year after the coronavirus started spreading across the globe, Asian American activists ignited a movement against racism. Propelled by former President Trump's vitriolic comments about the "China virus," there has been an uptick in hate crimes. Members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community were already rallying and ringing alarm bells before a white gunman allegedly shot and killed eight people in Atlanta spas, six of them Asian women, on March 16. The massacre has opened the public's eyes, and Asian American activists are hoping to harness the momentum and turn it into sustained action (Reyes-Velarde, 2021). For example, Ana Iwataki, 32, founded J-Town Action & Solidarity, which collaborates with "We the Unhoused" to give resources such as clothing, food, and hygiene products to homeless people in Little Tokyo. Following the Atlanta assaults, J-Town has increased its attempts to engage with Asian Americans in the Los Angeles region. Iwataki is mentored by a powerful teacher, her aunt Miya Iwataki, who began her activism in the 1960s under the auspices of the Brown Berets, a seminal Chicano rights organization. In an interview with the Times, Miya explains how for decades, most people didn't know that there was an Asian revolutionary movement in the '60s and '70s and that our programs were inspired by groups. According to Miya, "The Black Panthers" were the ones that established free breakfast programs, free housing, clothes, and health clinics, and it was these programs that inspired the Asian American movement (Reyes-Velarde, 2021). As coronavirus-fueled anti-Asian hate crimes surged across the country, a virtual workshop sought to address a herculean task: how do we define Asian American and Pacific Islander (API), an umbrella term for over 50 ethnicities, and how can the API community come together to combat anti-Asian racism? (Ross, 2021). Every two weeks, The Non-Standard Project hosts a virtual affinity space for youth of color to discuss social issues without the eyes of authority. Topics that have been discussed include racial sexualization, Yellow Fever, patterns of white supremacy, mental health, Asian American invisibility, and the Model Minority Myth. According to their website, which contains a resource toolkit, the two core values of the organization are community care and accessibility (Ross, 2021). “One thing many grassroots organizations lack is empathy beyond attachment to group identity,” Kim said. “Many Asians that are heavily involved in Asian American organizations do not stand in solidarity with other communities. We should not see ourselves as just boxes.” The goal of these workshops, such as the one mentioned above, was to bring Asian Americans and other communities of color together so that they may combat racism and oppression more effectively. During the pandemic, mutual aid networks not only brought Asian American groups together but also created a sense of belonging and cultural appreciation among this community. "For so long, people knew nothing about Asian Americans. Showing who we are and being proud of who we are, it's really important during this time." Jennifer "Nuky'' Phqm, 37, helps run the Celebrate Argyle campaign and books, musicians, and artists, at pop-up events for Haibayo, whose cross-cultural creative collaborations aim to energize Asian culture in the Argyle district. Phqm is a Chicago-born Vietnamese American who co-owns her family's company. She expresses her desire for more people to learn about and respect her people. Jennifer describes how Asians are stereotyped as being all the same. However, Asian-Americans as a group are extremely varied. She describes how, as an Asian, she was taught to keep her head down and not make any disturbance. Not to cause any quote-unquote trouble. For a long time, no one knew anything about Asian Americans. She emphasizes the importance of being proud of who she is during this time, and she encourages others to do the same. Phgm also encourages individuals to give to groups working for justice, particularly AAPI businesses. Over six companies shuttered on Argyle between 2020 and 2021. It's nine—some owing to retirement or a lack of succession, and the majority because of COVID (Montoro, 2021). Ellen Duang, another Argyle member, expressed several of her worries regarding Asian hatred. She describes how a few weeks ago, a Vietnamese man was walking around at night and was assaulted. Ellen claims that there has been a lot of racism in the words and videos she has seen throughout the world. Ellen is concerned about how Asians are being associated with the virus. She then explains why they made the Stop AAPI Hate video with other members of the Asian American community. "We felt it would be a nice idea to showcase our distinct culture with this outdoor event," Ellen says. We want to create a venue where Asian American literature is available, and we want to include the community by allowing them to sell their wares outdoors. We would want to see cultural performances. If it makes people feel better, we encourage them to wear traditional garb. I'd be dressed in an “Áo dài”, which is a traditional Vietnamese garment. We want to establish a safe environment where we can be proud of who we are. Instead of putting our heads down and being afraid, we're choosing love over hatred right now." (Montoro, 2021). Conclusion The present findings show that mutual aid networks in Asian Americans have expanded and strengthened during the pandemic. Asian Americans have grown closer together as a community to protect its members from bigotry and racism since COVID first started. According to the literature review, mutual aid networks are not as prevalent in the Asian American community as they are in the findings section. While mutual aid networks positively affected Asian American communities, it is also important to acknowledge the prejudice and other challenges that these communities experienced. As part of this study, I will continue to examine newspapers to support my research, and will soon undertake in-person interviews with Asian Americans to get additional data for this project. Future studies can expand on the significance of mutual aid networks in other minorities. It would also be interesting to study mutual aid networks in Asian American communities post-COVID considering the growth that has been seen during the pandemic. Mutual aid networks may expand in response to future concerns about supporting Asian American communities.

Mutual aid happens when members of a minority, primarily the Asian American community, join to meet each other's needs, with the common understanding that the institutions in which they live are failing to meet their needs. Mutual aid is a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable (Brigade, 2019). The framework of mutual aid is significant in social movements resisting capitalist and colonial domination, in which wealth and resources are extracted and concentrated and most people can survive only by participating in various extractive relationships. Providing for one another through coordinated collective care is radical and generative (Spade, 2020). It is important to underline that mutual aid is not charity, but it is the formation and maintenance of new social connections in which individuals give what they can and get what they need outside of unjust power systems. ¶ The framework of mutual aid is significant in social movements resisting inequalities. Providing for one another through coordinated collective care is radical and generative. Effective social movements always include elements of mutual aid (Spade, 2020). The most famous example on the left in the United States is the Black Panther Party’s survival programs, including the free breakfast program, the free ambulance program, free medical clinics, a program offering rides to elderly people doing errands, and a school aimed at providing a liberating and rigorous curriculum to children (Collier, 2015). ¶ Mutual Aid Work in Asian American Communities ¶ The existence of community-based organizations in Asian American communities is crucial to meet their needs, especially during the pandemic, when minorities were left behind. However, the underlying principle of early voluntary associations is that communities should help their members. These organizations were typically started by volunteer laypeople and based on the special interests, trades, and needs of their members. Racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, in particular, relied on these organizations for financial, spiritual, and emotional support (Gamm & Putnam, 1999). As a minority in the United States, the Asian American community established community-based organizations from the mid to the late 1800s to have a sense of belonging to something in common with other people who share their cultural perspectives. ¶ Ethnic community-based organizations have since developed to provide human services, but they still keep the same values and spirit as their predecessors. Usually, in the communities they serve, ethnic community-based organizations are often familiar with the obstacles and needs of service users and typically sponsor a variety of events and activities to promote community building and social support (Holley, 2003). As a result, ethnic CBOs can provide services that respond to the needs of minority populations in a supportive community setting, especially for new immigrants from Asia (Chow, 1999). As a result, ethnic community-based organizations can provide services that are sensitive to the needs of minority communities in a supportive community context, particularly for the Asian American community. However, scholars argue organizations can help with assimilation. ¶ Mutual Aid during COVID-19 ¶ While collaboration is one form of how these organizations provide services, sometimes community organizations independently provide it. For example, between March and June 2020, residents in north London faced the Covid-19 pandemic by creating neighborhood Mutual Aid groups on WhatsApp and Facebook. These groups not only addressed basic survival needs such as bringing groceries and medicines to infected people, the elderly, and other vulnerable populations in quarantine; they also offered opportunities for social interactions between strangers living in the same neighborhood during the lockdown. Their success was linked to their rapid mobilization, adaptability, and local knowledge. Their bottom-up organization, based on the principle ‘Solidarity not Charity’, showed a singular way to express dissent with policy response to the pandemic and brought them closer to the horizontal social movements of the 2010s (Chevee, 2021). ¶ During the Covid-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020, the support provided by mutual aid groups has included shopping, collecting prescriptions, providing meals, dog-walking, informational and emotional support, and involvement in running food banks (Solnit, 2020). Their flexibility and local connections meant they were better suited to play this role than centralized or official bodies (Tiratelli & Kaye, 2020). As of May 2021, there were at least 4317 mutual aid groups operating in the United Kingdom (Covid-19 Mutual Aid UK, 2021). However, the existing power dynamic between helper and helped was reinforced along racial lines, a dynamic which resonates particularly given the wider context of the UK Covid-19 mutual aid movement; research shows that membership in Covid-19 mutual aid groups was overwhelmingly white and middle-class (O'Dwyer, 2020), while the virus itself disproportionately affected on lower-income and minority ethnic groups (Public Health England, 2020). ¶ Disease threat often gives rise to discrimination and scapegoating of “others,” for example, foreigners, immigrants, and marginalized groups. In the pandemic brought on by COVID-19, it is not just Chinese immigrants, but any Asian American perceived as having connections to China (e.g., some Southeast Asians and other East Asians) because of false stereotypes that Asians are “look-alike” and anti-Asian/Chinese sentiment (e.g., the “yellow peril” stereotype as discussed later), have become potential targets (Tessler, Choi, & Kao, 2020). While establishing relationships with other marginalized racial groups and the Asian American community as large may not be limited to a few Chinese and Vietnamese Americans, it is unlikely to limit solidarity among most members of these communities. To strengthen emotions of solidarity among Asian ethnics and other racial minority populations, it is critical to identify strategies to foster a sense of connected fate among Asians, Blacks, and Latinx, which improves both intra and inter-racial solidarity (Nicholson, Carter, & Restar, 2020; Sanchez & Masuoka, 2010). ¶ In particular, members of minority ethnic groups may feel marginalized, creating barriers to engagement with healthcare or other services (Public Health England, 2020). In the present case, that the interaction took place in what appeared to be a racist area stressed both the power dynamic between “helper” and “helped,” and the participant's self-perception as being from a potentially hostile outgroup in the eyes of the recipient, creating an uncomfortable feeling of intrusion (Mao, et, 2021). Asian American communities continue to engage in mutual aid work through the pandemic, given this long history within the community.

Hip hop emerged in spite of the brutal logic of capitalism, out of centuries-old traditions, to insist upon and amplify black voices and black political consciousness. But as Brittney Cooper, Questlove, and Jeff Chang have recently pointed out, it has been exploited to the point that black cool now serves as transnational currency in the global market. This is a version of what organizer Alicia Garza rightly rails against in her important piece on #BlackLivesMatter: the power of white supremacy to take an act of political insurgency and empty it of meaning, to flatten it into coinage, or an anemic symbol of post-racial liberalism.

But as long as there is resistance, the insurgency lives on, and new strategies are constantly being born.

This premise of public education as offering a better life has been challenged by critical race legal scholars such as Cheryl Harris and Devon Carbado, who suggest that the desire to make college more accessible to all citizens deploys the language of progress, neutrality, and merit to mask our public educational system’s massive failure to boost social mobility and diversity in general.28 In the aftermath of Proposition 209 there remains a “new racial preference” for certain minority groups (e.g., Asian Americans) able to capitalize on the university’s demands for a diverse pool of talent targeted not because of their race but because of their skills. In this manner Asian Americans, as a desirable or worthy minority group, are rewarded with education. 29 This new preference ironically favors upwardly mobile Asian global elites, a phenomenon that ends up negatively impacting native-born Asian Americans who need the University of California as a less expensive alterna- tive to private schools. According to the scholar-activist Don Nakanishi, “the University of California has been the major vehicle for social mobility for the Asian-American community,” which values an affordable, high-quality public education.30 The complex relationship between Asians and Asian Americans, which for decades has gone unnoticed due to the lumping of all Asians into one group, has now reached a turning point. While the number of U.S.-born Asian students in the uc system has reached critical mass and plateaued after decades of explosive growth, the number of foreign students from Asia has skyrocketed, particularly in the 2000s, due to increased allotment of spaces for them over in-state residents as a means of getting more outside sources of revenue. In 2009 the administrators at the San Diego campus reduced its number of in-state freshmen by five hundred and filled those spots with out-of- state and international students. As a result close to two hundred freshmen from China enrolled in the school, a twelvefold increase from just barely sixteen individuals the year before, while the number of Asian American California freshmen fell by almost 30 percent. 31 Asian American students must now fight against rising tuition prices and systematic efforts to push them out from the very place they helped build into prominence.32 That the university is a conduit for life-restricting forces and projects can be seen in a range of issues, such as the institution’s ongoing diminishment of organized labor union rights, the erosion of indigenous tribal sovereignty and land rights, the restriction of student dissent and free speech protest on campuses, and the administration’s resistance to calls for divestment of university capital funds in corporations operating in countries with a history of human rights abuses.33 The battle over life-and- death matters can be discerned in the balancing act between state funding for prisons and schools. California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made this obvious when he publicly stated his interest in outsourcing the care and housing of inmates in California’s overcrowded prisons to Mexico to pay for the state’s insolvent college system. He hoped to restore the University of California to its former rightful place as the number-one public school system in the world lest it slip into obsolescence and face its own demise.34 Such overtures to institutional martyrdom, sacrifice, and survival gesture to what Mbembe calls the “state of siege” characteristic of our everyday realities in late capitalist society. Recognizing the necropolitical logics inherent in such neoliberal rationales serves to explain necropolitics at a broader level, which disavows certain undesirable populations to save the most productive and privileged groups in society. As state investment in public schools decreases every year, the ballooning funding deficit in California’s prison system siphons precious monies and resources away from poorer schools, which in term further reduce the chances of marginalized youth and poor communities to get a basic education. (In 2010 state funding for education was 7.5 percent of California’s total budget, with prisons receiving 11 percent, but ten years earlier universities received close to 10 percent and only 3 percent went to the penitentiary system.)35 The interrelationship between state prisons and public schools is a moral crisis not addressed by many educational advocates, who focus only on the bureaucratic problems of schooling. That the steadily gaining numbers of Asian-identified students who make up more than 40 percent of the total uc undergraduate population might also speak to the growing incarceration of black, brown and indigenous youth (as well as Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians) who make up the supermajority of the state’s jails and prisons is a teachable moment that needs to be deconstructed. Left alone, we become blind [ignorant] to what Dylan Rodriguez describes as the “genocidal logics” buttressing the push toward a multicultural liberal society.36 Schwarzenegger’s wish to “terminate” California’s responsibilities to its prisoners for the sake of assisting the college-bound pits those already consigned to “social death” against those with better life opportunities, enabling certain educated subjects prejudged as having the right to life, liberty, and happiness to receive more state entitlements and protection than criminalized people of color deemed undeserving in their “rightlessness” as nonwhite racialized subjects.37 Racialization of Asians is concealed, even though their overrepresentation at the University of California makes them powerful cultural liaisons (or potential disruptive spies) between the American university and Asian nations at a crucial time, when cash-strapped public universities with dwindling state financial support seek to magnify their outreach and partnerships in the East (e.g., ucla-National University of Singapore). Coincident with the greater demand for more math and science education to bolster national security, there is increasing stress at the University of California on stem fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), where students of Asian descent can be found in disproportionate numbers.38 Asian minds and bodies, perceived as easily assimilated into neoliberal and neocolonial ideas of educational competitiveness, embody the type of modular (post) racial subjects able to fill the globalizing necropolitical economies of a multitiered U.S. college system skewed to match the competitive talents of graduates from Asia. This is not to suggest a direct causal relationship between the corporatization, militarization, and globalization of the university and the enlarging of the Asian presence in college, but there exists a connection between what the research university represents as the “best and brightest” and what particular racial groups appear to fit its high standards of excellence. The boundary between Asians’ reliance on the life force of education and their inadvertent contribution to the military-academic industry is a testy relationship; as the activist Helen Zia notes, Asian Americans are “part of the problem [as] collaborators in our own oppressions.”39 Asians are not simply another minority easily lumped together with other nonwhite groups, since their de facto status as an institutional model majority essentially deminoritizes them in a state apparatus that wants to exploit them as racialized human capital but does not consider them racially marked in some way.40 Within the blurred lines of academic life and death, one finds that higher education can be the pathway to our salvation or to our destruction. Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Life and Death If we view college education only as an exalted public domain for improving quality of life, this limited perspective misses out on a larger critique that implicates us all profoundly. According to the Chicana scholar Rosaura Sanchez, “The discourse of ethnic power, opportunity, and pluralism led to an unrealistic assessment of the extent of struggle possible at the institutional level and masked our incapacity to avoid serving privilege and class domination within academia.”41 Sanchez says the pressure to address educational social justice through ethnic empowerment is unsustainable once administrative concessions are made toward students, staff, and faculty. Identifying the institutional absorption of Asians and Asian Americans within the academic-industrial complex helps undercut the myth of educational meritocracy but makes noticeable the necropolitical forces through which the university derives its broad powers. Critical attention must be paid here to the defunding of the arts and humanities (fields often critical of institutional power schemes)—a revamping of the traditional liberal arts curriculum that relates to Asian Americans because their stunning success in vaunted niche science industries has augmented the university’s desire to extract more foreign capital and value from Asian labor while diminishing the cultural capital of ethnic studies and Asian American studies in their longtime advocacy for the oppressed. Perhaps owing to the field’s emphasis on professionalization, many ethnic studies scholars have argued that Asian Americans are not model minorities, for although many have been successful, many still face racism and some, such as Southeast Asians, have not found success. There is a flaw to this pedagogical-political strategy since it fails to critique the institution beyond not doing a good job for its clients, as students are called these days by school administrators. Acknowledging the crucial role that Asians and Asian Americans play in the necropolitics of higher education serves to redefine the vague parameters of ethnic studies to forge new philosophies, ethics, and forms of consciousness raising. This chapter touched upon the ambiguous and thorny place of Asians and Asian Americans in higher education. It demonstrates how our sense of moral crisis regarding the public university as an endangered public good might relate to the specter of death that lurks within the dark corridors of learning. If Asians are the new preferential subjects within the neoliberal “postracial” university, how do ethnic studies scholars, students, and activists promote antiracist politics and educational policies beyond prima facie concerns with minority discrimination and representation? How might we better teach critical ethnic studies by drawing attention to the shifting demographic composition and reconfiguration of our classes produced as a historical byproduct of the American war machine and U.S. geopolitical relations in Asia? How do we advocate for improving education without dealing with the uncomfortable fact that our educational system participates in lethal practices and processes? To even attempt to answer these hard questions there needs to be a reeducation in the meaning of ethnic studies to launch a radical critique enabling new lessons in matters of both life and death.

The Model Minority and Theories of Asian American Subjectivity First and foremost, model minority masochism is a theory of Asian American subject formation that centers the psychic and affective effects of the model minority “myth,” based on the material positionality of Asian Americans of the past half-century. This theory presents a critique of model minority ideology itself but also serves as an analytic of its adherents and detractors alike. Whether as an antiblack “racial wedge” or as ideological fodder for the denial of Asian American racial suffering, the model minority has been a stubborn phantasm impeding the project of Asian American radical politics and has thus been the persistent specter of Asian Americanist critique. Indeed, the racialization of Asian Americans in the United States cannot be separated from model minority ideology (which I will henceforth abbreviate to “model minoritarianism”), which is in turn intertwined with the economic and affective dimensions of modernity. In Colleen Lye’s words, the Oriental in America demonstrates “a putatively unusual capacity for economic modernity, extend[ing] to moments when the affect of the racial discourse has been hostile (‘yellow peril’) as well as admiring (‘model minority’)” (2005, 3). The model minority is oft mentioned but rarely firmly defined; loosely, the model minority is the minoritized subject who, despite their ostensible marginalization, is able to prosper and successfully assimilate into the dominant society. Although not limited to Asian Americans (the label has, at times, been applied to upper-middle-class gay communities and African immigrants, for example), the model minority has been most persistently wedded to Asian Americans, and there are few racial demographics in North America for which the model minority is more constitutive. For the purposes of my argument here, the model minority is only secondarily “cultural,” although culturally essentialist underpinnings of the model minority run the gamut from assimilationist to orientalist, from a purported propensity for adaptation and assimilation to a maintenance of “Confucian values” that emphasize hard work and education.2 This aspect of model minoritarianism is more obviously “myth,” and I will not belabor a refutation here. Rather, I emphasize primary focus on the political-ideological function of the model minority in the maintenance of U.S. racial formation. In the United States, the model minority has principally served two ideological purposes within racial discourse: first, to provide evidence for the prominence of meritocracy over the structural barriers faced by nonwhite peoples, and second, to implicitly blame less “successful” minoritized populations for their own subjugation (most notably, but not exclusively, those racialized as Black). Moreover, as Tara Fickle has recently and incisively observed, the model minority coagulated in the 1960s around Japanese Americans not only as exceptional minorities, but as exceptional Americans in general, perceived as obedient capitalist subjects relative even to whites, prompting white Americans to catch up (2019, 90). For much of its life as a field, Asian American studies has tended to actively disprove or discredit the model minority as a myth, either insisting that (1) Asian Americans have been and continue to be subject to considerable racism and structural barriers, and (2) the model minority does not adequately reflect the socioeconomic diversity of Asian Americans, which can correlate loosely according to disaggregated identity. Thus, anti–model minority critique locates the model minority as a harmful stereotype produced by a white racial order, one that can cause harm to both Asian Americans (such as the increased pressure to “succeed,” via stereotype threat) and to non-Asian people of color. Consequently, since its radical beginnings with the Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley in 1968, and continuing through a wide range of demographic and ideological shifts, Asian American studies has often sought to idealize what Christopher Lee has termed “the ideal critical subject,”3 that is to say, an Asian American subject position that has achieved a kind of Lukácsian racial “consciousness” against white racism. Asian American cultural critique has often accordingly read Asian American literature and theater in terms of its “resistant” potential, seeking out characters and thematics that adequately demonstrate a rejection of whiteness and an assertion of Asian American identity, whether in the vein of so-called “cultural nationalism” of Frank Chin, of feminist empowerment in Maxine Hong Kingston, or of a resistance against logocentric intelligibility in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Tellingly, the first major scholarly study of Asian American literature, Elaine Kim’s Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982), values Asian American works primarily by their resistant potential rather than their aesthetic attributes, a tendency that persists in the field to varying degrees to this day. This premise possesses a range of problematics, most notably that “Asian America” is itself what Susan Koshy provocatively called “a fiction,” an imagined community insofar as it is overwhelmingly diverse in terms of its diasporic cultural origins, but also in imagining its politically “resistant” position against white racism when, as David Palumbo-Liu has written, the position of Asian America has certainly structurally fluctuated between “of color” and honorary whiteness. Moreover, a persistent problem is that judgment of the resistant potential of anti–model minority Asian American literature is not persistent in what precisely it is resisting, whether that be “assimilation” (understood variably as cultural, such as through ethnic marking, or political, understood as allegiance to racially reactionary political positions), racist policy, or economic adherence to (racial) capitalism. To take the internment of Japanese Americans as an example, those Issei (immigrants) who chose to accept incarceration (with the saying “shigata ga nai,” or, “it can’t be helped”) but who remained anti-assimilationist with regard to their cultural practices, exercised a different form of resistance than Nisei “No No Boys,” who primarily spoke English and willingly adopted mainstream “American” cultural mores but refused to serve in the U.S. armed forces. Who is more of a “model minority” in this contrast depends entirely upon the lens through which we judge complicity—cultural, sociopolitical, economic, et cetera. One component of this problematic is that we principally take the “model” of “model minority” in its adjectival, rather than in its verb, or even noun, form. What, precisely, does the model minority model? And then, conversely, what model of minority does the model minority produce? I suggest conceptualizing the model minority (or perhaps, minority modeling) as a scenario, which is, according to Diana Taylor, “a meaning-making paradigm that structure[s] social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes” (2013, 28). The scenario includes narrative “but also demands that we also pay attention to milieux and corporeal behaviors such as gestures, attitudes, and tones not reducible to language” (Taylor 2013, 28)—that is, the scenario is as constructed by affect and performance as it is by the familiar story it signifies. The model minority is phantasmal yet instantly recognizable because of its performatic, scenario quality; it can be simultaneously exemplar and sellout, but its modeling tends toward the gravitational pull of social domination along variable axes. Yet, the modeling may also pull in its opposite direction, as well—there is also the model anti–model minority, the “ideal critical subject” of Asian American consciousness referenced earlier. To nod to Homi Bhabha, to “model” is almost, but not quite, to mimic. Bhabha’s mimic is a postcolonial figure who positionally resembles the model minority, the assimilated, educated native who threatens the colonial-racial order with their uncanny resemblance. Not unlike the model minority and the perpetual foreigner, “The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry—a difference that is almost nothing but not quite—to menace—a difference that is almost total but not quite” (Bhabha 1994, 131). However, unlike the mimic, the model minority is marked less by uncanny resemblance to whiteness than by an aspiration to white ideals; resistance to this accordingly supplants those ideals with other ones. Within cultural productions associated with Asian American panethnicity, and certainly within literary representation, “resistance” tends be legible more through affect than through actual political position, and it very frequently takes on masculine characteristics. Frank Chin’s work is particularly emblematic of this trend, misogynistically configuring performative masculine “authenticity” as the route to resisting the pull of whiteness, the will to servility to white institutions, cultures, and bodies. In Chin’s mode, it is an affective disposition to favor whiteness, more than any materialist imperative, that forms the meat of resistance. As Việt Thanh Nguyễn has noted, many artists and scholars who have committed to an Asian American politic would go so far as to limit Asian Americanness to those who perform the required “resistant” identity, dismissive of those Asian Americans who are satisfied with the status quo of capitalist white racism.4 Frank Chin, after all, derided Asian Americans with model minority inclinations as “Uncle Tom minorities.” Nguyễn writes, “critics tend to evaluate resistance as positive and accommodation as negative, without questioning the reductiveness of such evaluations” and suggests instead an Asian Americanist scholarship accounts for the flexible strategies of Asian Americans who “pick and choose their tactics of struggle, survival, and possible assimilation” (2002, 7). Thus, with Foucauldian irony, the principal mode of resistance to the model minority reproduces its transitive structure, modeling what it means to model. Anti–model minority resistance becomes modeling by other means. I assert that it necessarily follows that the signifier “Asian American,” as problematic as it is, must also incorporate the politically less savory presence of those subjects who are an anathema to Asian American cultural resistance, that is, the dreaded “good subjects,” model minorities, the “hard-working, successful” nonwhites discursively positioned in an antiblack racial paradigm to invalidate the structural oppression against other subjects of color. Queer of color critics may note that my configuration bears some similarity to José Esteban Muñoz’s formulation of disidentification, that is, like a melancholic subject holding on to a lost object, a disidentifying subject works to hold on to this object and invest it with new life. [ .. . ] it is the reworking of those energies that do not elide the ‘harmful’ or contradictory components of any identity” (1999, 12) There is certainly a disidentificatory element to this theoretical project, although I believe it would be accurate to say that my project here is more accurately an exposure and undoing of, and meditation on, prior disavowal. As historical monographs by Ellen D. Wu and Madeline Y. Hsu have detailed,5 the production of the Asian American model minority throughout the twentieth century is not entirely the result of a white racial hegemony but is partly the result of the strategic racial positioning by Asian Americans themselves, especially by Chinese and Japanese Americans. Strategic self-stereotyping as ideal conformists to the U.S. social order, while simultaneously self-orientalizing to associate “Asian values” as congruent with both U.S. capitalist culture and heteronormative sexual and kinship relations, allowed Chinese and Japanese Americans to adapt to the changing political circumstances between the United States, Japan, and China, particularly in response to Japanese American internment and anticommunist anxiety toward China. Thus, to put it obtusely, the “model minority” is not merely a “myth”; or, rather, it is not a historical untruth, socioeconomically speaking. Certainly, in addition to being a scenario, the model minority is a myth in the Barthesian sense, a semiological system of signification that “points out and . . . notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes on us” (Barthes 1972, 87). Yet, it is a scenario actively embraced by some, if not many, Asian American subjects. So when Frank Chin provocatively decries Asian Americans as “racial Uncle Toms,” he refers to both the Asian American positionality of accommodation and the presence of Asian American actors who comply with and further such racial ideologies (although again, this production is more consistently affective than ideological). The masculinist “cultural nationalist” project of which Frank Chin is emblematic does not deny the presence of the model minority (which is often coded in femininized, homophobic language), but it abjects the model minority as “false” Asianness. And although generations of xx Introduction Asian Americanist critique have long since consigned the casual misogyny of Chin’s work to the dustbin of history, the specter of the accommodationist racial Uncle Tom remains, haunting the Asian Americanist project as a constitutive Other, a supposed falsehood that lures Asian Americans into white supremacist and/or bourgeois accommodation. My point here is that from the perspective of Asian American subject formation, we must take seriously the model minority not as an object of immediate disavowal to support the reigning primacy of exclusion as the ontological condition of Asian Americanness, but rather as a foundation for the psychic and affective condition of being racialized as Asian in the United States; that is, as a fabric inextricably woven into Asian American subjectivity itself.

In an open letter, New York Times Editor, Michael Luo, addresses the woman who yelled at him on the streets of New York and demanded that he and his American-born family go back to China. The initial shock and anger that Luo experienced from this encounter of racial insults in Manhattan later transformed into pangs of sadness. Luo describes an experience of being othered, being treated as a foreigner, and not feeling a sense of belonging in this country that is familiar to many Asian Americans in the United States. When discussing the model minority myth, it is imperative to acknowledge the origin and deconstruct the meaning of this racial stereotype of Asian Americans as a model of upward mobility, socioeconomic success, and traditional family values. Sociologist William Petersen 2 first coined the term “model minority” in 1966 in an article that he wrote for the New York Times. The term model minority refers to an ethnic minority who has achieved success in the United States despite marginalization. However, the model minority myth ignores and circumvents the discourse of over a hundred years of pervasive anti-Asian sentiments, prejudice, discrimination, and collective trauma. Preceding the model minority myth were the years of relentless use of dehumanizing rhetoric to mark Asians as “racially inferior,” “threatening,” “exotic,” and “degenerate,” (Guo, 2016). The “yellow peril” was a racist and xenophobic phrase constructed in the 19th century in response to Chinese and Japanese migrant workers during the gold rush. The term yellow peril has been used to denigrate Asians in the United States, with “yellow” referring to the color of their skin and “peril” referring to the fear of Asians expanding and overpowering the West. The model minority myth flattens the nuances and complexities of Asian American identities and experiences. The model minority myth disregards and makes invisible over a hundred years of historical racism and discrimination, perpetual othering, treatment as foreigners, disenfranchisement, racial and collective trauma, immigrant and refugee experiences, and psychological harm and emotional distress. The myth ignores all that Asians have suffered, endured, and been transformed by – including racial exclusion, starting with the ban on Asian migrant labor in 1882; the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII; and the legacy of American wars in the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam (Wu, 2012). The hegemonic construction of a new public image of Asian Americans as the model minority – capable of assimilating and politically nonthreatening – created a new dominant narrative about Asian Americans that has strategically served as a model for political cooperation. 3 Experts draw parallels between the political climate of the exclusion era and today, including a presidential election that amplified anti-immigrant sentiment, the growing economic fears of White Americans, and proposed implementation of policies that would drastically shape immigration laws in the United States (Chow, 2017). Cynthia Choi, Executive Director of Chinese for Affirmative Action warns us: "This is important for the Chinese American and broader Asian American community, to stand up against the new targets to this new form of exclusion, for us to say it was wrong 135 years ago and it's wrong today. We're in a unique period where accurate information is not as easily attained, so there are a number of people who are on the fence, who are confused about the policies, who — more dangerously — feel as though this doesn't affect them." Understanding subjective history is paramount to deconstructing the origins of the model minority myth and how Asian Americans are positioned in the current dominant discourse on race in the United States. Subjective history includes the legends, myths, successes, exaggerations, and events remembered selectively or as never having taken place (Fisher, 1998). It is critical to recognize the underappreciated significance of history as actually remembered, as well as history as fact. When the nature of conflict issues and historical events involving Asian Americans are ignored and erased from American history, Asian Americans are cast into singular hegemonic narratives, such as the yellow peril and the model minority myth. Newer generations of Asian Americans may hold less compelling memories of their racial or ethnic group’s history and new history dilutes the old (Fisher, 1998), creating a subjective history in the current generation’s sense of ethnic identity, an erasure and invisibility of historical and present collective traumas, and a susceptibility to believing in and accepting the model minority myth. 4 In order to understand the current fight for Asian American visibility, it is essential to address how the media portrays, erases, distorts, and shapes the image of Asian Americans and the way that political leadership presents Asian American identity in public discourse with respect to the process of contesting power. The media reinforces stereotypes of Asian Americans by portraying them as foreigners who cannot assimilate, immigrants who “take” from the U.S. without giving back, the flawless model minority with no humanity, Asians occupying restricted clichéd professions and are limited to supporting roles, Asian males with negative or nonexistent sexuality, and highly exoticized and subservient Asian females (Media Action Network for Asian Americans, n.d.). In order to understand this seemingly drastic shift of Asian Americans from yellow peril to model minority, one must critically examine and evaluate how the media and political leadership strategically influences these hegemonic narratives. While myths may hold some truth, their origins are often rooted in complicated histories with unintended consequences. Over time, the perpetuation of these hegemonic narratives and myths draws its strength from belief. The model minority myth is no different in that it has a complex history in the United States. Its meaning and impact on individuals of the Asian American community are vast, dynamic, and ever changing. The internalization of the expectation that one can be a model of success by working hard, climbing up the socioeconomic ladder, maintaining traditional cultural and familial values, while remaining politically invisible and seen as a perpetual foreigner has implications for the larger Asian American community. This paper will discuss the implications of the model minority myth on Asian Americans and their perceptions of self and others, identity formation, racism and discrimination, mental health, help-seeking behaviors, and barriers to accessing culturally sensitive resources. 5 CHAPTER II Literature Review Introduction From “hard working, studious, unassuming, and thrifty” to “inscrutable, sneaky, and competitive” (Naito, 1997), perceptions of Asian Americans continue to shift as they always have throughout the course of history in the United States. Asian Americans are believed to be able to overcome their status as minorities to achieve success by working hard, studying and achieving in higher education, and saving and sacrificing for the future. However, this present hegemonic narrative and seemingly positive stereotype of Asian Americans cannot be discussed in public discourse about race without also discussing how Asian Americans have also been perceived as the yellow peril: “military, cultural, or economic enemies and unfair competitors for education and jobs” (Naito, 1997, p. 72). By "Asian American" I will be referring to individuals of Asian descent who live in the United States, regardless of their citizenship status. The 2010 Census Bureau defines “Asian American/Pacific Islander” as including persons from over sixteen nations of origin and ethnic groups and over twenty Pacific Island cultures. I use "Asian American," rather than "Asian Pacific American" or "Asian American/Pacific Islander," not to exclude those from Pacific Island cultures, but because of the continual evolution of the language used to describe this highly heterogeneous group. I also include in my usage of “Asian American” those from 6 multiracial and multiethnic heritage who may not be included in the government's definition of "Asian American/Pacific Islander." The model minority stereotype has been used to purport a story of Asian Americans as a model of success in the discourse about ethnic and racial minorities, but in fact has deeper implications for the Asian American psyche and beliefs about self in society. The model minority myth has many repercussions: it dismisses the reality of racial prejudice and discrimination, leads to the erasure and loss of repressed Asian American histories and identities, silences and makes invisible disenfranchised grief which may present as traumatic grief that is unresolved and transmitted across generations, and shapes identity and emotional distress (Tummala-Narra, 2016, p. 20). This literature review highlights the importance of understanding the concepts such as internalized racism, racial trauma, and immigration trauma when working with the Asian American population. The purpose of this study was to explore Asian American beliefs and experiences related to the model minority stereotype and other forms of racial prejudice, discrimination, and bias. It also studied their attitudes towards the current system of mental health services, particularly psychotherapy, and their ideas about how these services can be adapted to become more culturally sensitive and improve rates of access and retention in treatment. This study aimed to answer the following research question: How does the internalization of the model minority myth impact Asian American mental health and attitudes towards help-seeking behaviors? My research study aimed to provide cultural validity by addressing the limitations of treating all Asian Americans as the same and by focusing on a small subgroup of Asian Americans as the research population. For the purpose of this study, aspects of the model minority myth and Asian American mental health will be distinguished and discussed: (1) Asian Americans, (2) The 7 Model Minority Myth, (3) The Yellow Peril, (4) Anti-Asian Racism and Discrimination, (5) Asian Cultures and Traditional Values, (6) Asian American Mental Health, and (7) Culturally Sensitive Treatment.

***Modifications for gendered language indicated in [brackets]

***If you are not asian, do not say “coolie” or “oriental” in reference to asian folk

While the news coming out of forests is often dominated by deforestation and habitat loss, research published today in Nature Climate Change shows that the world has actually got greener over the past decade. Despite ongoing deforestation in South America and Southeast Asia, we found that the decline in these regions has been offset by recovering forests outside the tropics, and new growth in the drier savannas and shrublands of Africa and Australia. Plants absorb around a quarter of the carbon dioxide that people release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. With a greening globe, more plants may mean more absorption of carbon dioxide. If so, this will slow but not stop climate change. However, questions remain over how long plants can keep pace with our increasing emissions in a warmer climate. Measuring Carbon In Plants We studied how plants and vegetation are faring by determining the amount of carbon stored in living plant mass (or “biomass”) above the ground. We developed a new technique to map changes in vegetation biomass using satellite measurements of changes in the radio-frequency radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface, a technique called passive microwave remote sensing. The radiation varies with temperature, soil moisture and the shielding of water in vegetation biomass above the ground. We extracted this vegetation information from several satellites and merged them into one time series covering the last two decades. This allowed us to track global changes in biomass from month to month, something that was not possible before. For the period 2003-12, we found that the total amount of vegetation above the ground has increased by about 4 billion tonnes of carbon. Still Losing Rainforests, But Gaining Forests Elsewhere Our global analysis shows losses of vegetation in many regions, particularly at the frontiers of deforestation in the tropics of South America and Southeast Asia. As expected, the greatest declines have been in the so-called “Arc of Deforestation” on the southeastern edge of the vast Amazon forests. In Southeast Asia we found the most widespread declines in the Indonesian provinces of Sumatra and Kalimantan - the Indonesian part of Borneo. However, we found that these rainforest losses have been offset by increases in biomass in other parts of the world. For example, forests have spontaneously regrown on farmland abandoned after the fall of communism in Russia and neighbouring countries, while large-scale tree planting projects in China have measurably added to the global biomass. This roughly offset half of the carbon loss by tropical deforestation. We also found unexpectedly large vegetation increases in savannas and shrublands of Australia, Africa, and South America. Previous analyses have focused on closed forests and did not measure this increase.

Since most species live in forests, chiefly tropical forests, we should take a look at global forest cover trends. Happily, the deforestation rate is slowing. The Food and Agriculture Organization's State of the World's Forests 2012 report notes that the global rate of deforestation slowed from 0.2 percent per year between 1990 and 2000 to 0.14 percent between 2005 and 2010. Between 2000 and 2010, a total of 130 million hectares were cut, but 78 million hectares returned to forests. So globally, forests declined on average by 5.2 million hectares per year—at which rate, the report notes, "It will take 775 years to lose all of the world's forests." It adds, "This would seem to provide enough time for actions to slow or stop global deforestation." And indeed, researchers in 2006 found that more and more countries are passing through a "forest transition" in which their forest area starts expanding. Roger Sedjo, a forest ecologist at Resources for the Future, predicts that by 2050 most of the world's industrial wood will be grown on forest plantations covering only 5 to 10 percent of the extent of today's global forests. One dark blot on forest restoration trends is biofuel mandates in rich countries, which have spurred tropical countries to chop down forests to grow palm oil to produce biodiesel. By one estimate, 87 percent of the deforestation in Malaysia and 118 percent in Indonesia occurred as result of expanding palm oil plantations.

A recent study says there are enough rare earth metals on Earth for new “low-carbon electricity generation” technologies.

Rare earth metals come from minerals found in countries around the world.

Electric cars, wind turbines, and LED lighting all help keep the environment clean, but making them can be a dirty business. The high-performance magnets in motors and generators and the glowing phosphors in LEDs and flat screens all depend on substances called rare earth elements (REEs). And capturing REEs from the clay deposits in which many are found requires leaching agents that pollute soil and groundwater.

Now, a Chinese group has developed—and tested on tons of soil—an approach called electrokinetic mining that relies on electric currents to free the REEs, sharply reducing the need for polluting chemicals. The strategy, described this week in Nature Sustainability, could be “a game changer, providing that it is feasible at a large scale,” says Anouk Borst, a geologist at KU Leuven.