Asian failure is key to subverting the model minority myth – ballot accumulation gets coopted and gets used by the university as proof of “progress”

Halberstam's argument in The Queer Art of Failure rests on three theses, the first two of which pertain particularly well to Asian America. The first—the need to resist mastery—seems to concern only academic professionalization, as it originates in a rejection of disciplinarity's inherent conservatism: "We may, ultimately, want more undisciplined knowledge, more questions and fewer answers" (Halberstam 10). Halberstam argues that disciplinarity suppresses minoritized and indigenous knowledges—the examples of indigenous peoples' long-standing disputes with Western anthropology are pertinent here—and the pursuit of those knowledges necessarily moves inquiry outside the comforts of academia. This is almost, but not [End Page 112] quite, an argument for a kind of reverse ethnography—inquiry of colonizers from within colonized communities—that scholars are not trained to practice.

The second thesis—the need to privilege whatever is stupid, naïve, nonsensical (Halberstam 12)—seems almost to invite failure, if not to defend strident anti-intellectualism. Here Halberstam might usefully address contemporary American conservatives' distrust of higher education, expressed during the writing of The Queer Art of Failure in the rise of the Tea Party and more recently in a 2017 Pew Research Center survey finding that 58 percent of "Republicans and right-leaning independents think higher education has a negative effect on the country" (Turnage). But for Halberstam and other critics, the constrictions of disciplinarity and universities' investments in neoliberal economic principles1 make these institutions the allies of those very conservatives. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the so-called Paradise Papers disclosure, published in 2017 in The Guardian, that many "US universities and colleges have interests offshore where they pay little or no tax and seek to grow their already phenomenal riches away from public scrutiny" (Pilkington). This desire for secrecy hides agendas that subvert schools' public image. For example, "some of the offshore funds are invested in carbon-polluting industries, despite US universities playing a key role in the fight against climate change" (Pilkington). According to The Guardian, Northeastern University publicly boasts of a commitment to sustainable energy practices in its facilities and its scholars' well-funded research, yet it is heavily invested in a hedge fund described as the nation's leading benefactor of "oil and shale gas exploration and production … an aggressive financial backer of carbon-emitting industries" (Pilkington).2 Conservatives who distrust higher education may know nothing about these investments and may thus be unwitting allies of universities, but even if they know, their distrust is aimed at faculty and the curriculum, not at administrators. University leaders make their investments quietly, almost secretly, while the very purpose of research is to make knowledge public. Leaders may therefore be betraying a public trust, but their investments partake anyway of a neoliberalism that aims to privatize everything in the name of freedom. Whether conservatives know of these investments is irrelevant. Success—more financial than educational, more private than public—is the goal regardless. And success is as likely to be fiercely anti-intellectual as deeply intellectual and disciplinary.

Here Ty needs to bolster Halberstam's argument for failure, especially if Asian Americans, the perceived model minority, are to embrace it. For even if rejecting mastery and adopting the naïve and stupid only seem to be the default position of anti-intellectual conservatives, this is certainly a position inimical to an assimilated racial model. Why would Asian Americans reject mastery? Even when an anomalous Asian American success emerges—Jeremy Lin, for example, in his brief time as a basketball star—racists jeer partly because of a grudging recognition of that success. [End Page 113] Asian American students who joke about getting only a B+ on a physics test—which is the example given by Urban Dictionary of "Asian fail"—are not embracing failure as much as they are struggling with parents' expectations. This is especially true of children of the hyperassimilated "tiger mother," who pressures her children toward perfection.3 These students and children want not to fail but to succeed on their own terms—and not on their mothers' terms. In this way, then, "Asian fail" as Urban Dictionary defines it is not real failure in mainstream culture but is merely a diminished success. And this is not the "Asianfail" Eleanor Ty advocates.

After discussing social media jokes on Asian failures, Ty offers the obligatory debunking of the "model minority" stereotype, arguing that "model minority discourse assumes that individuals can transcend specific historical and material conditions in order to achieve happiness" (3). She also invokes Rey Chow's argument for an "ethnicization of labor," by which perceived Asian American success is programmed into the racial agenda of neoliberal whiteness (Ty 7). Then, drawing on the work of Susan Koshy, she charges that the success model of the "tiger mother" type assumes private solutions to public problems (Ty 9). She ends her preliminary remarks on failure by observing that recent Asian American works of film and literature challenge success narratives by "chronicling the unhappy or failed life":

[P]rotagonists of these works feel disenchanted with their daily lives. Many are depressed, and some are haunted by memories of their childhood, including experiences of war, trauma, or refugee camps. Instead of aiming for professional success and economic capital, they look for other ways of achieving satisfaction, emphasizing affective bonds and personal and cultural success. Their disavowal of the work ethic and values of their parents signals a rejection of the narrowly defined road to success … and consequently a rejection, in many cases, of neoliberal capitalism.

(Ty 10)

Ty argues too vehemently for the currentness of such cultural productions, for after all, Marxist and labor-centered Asian American writers such as Carlos Bulosan, H. T. Tsiang, and Ronyoung Kim exposed the lies of success narratives in their work several decades ago.4 Also, Ty overlooks the fact that many protagonists in contemporary Asian American books and films, regardless of their personal struggles, take for granted their middle-class comforts, and that these comforts were probably an outcome—or a reward?—of their immigrant parents' more public struggles.5 Still, just as Halberstam's argument for failure knows that practitioners must occupy a position in which they are considered successes before they may choose failure as a strategy of resistance, so too does Ty's argument know that Asian Americans positioned as model minorities may choose failure, and that, making this choice, they not only fight stereotypes but also, more important, aim to dismantle an economic order that alone defines success and failure. Of course [End Page 114] the project of social justice depends partly on choices to resist made by those who have privilege on behalf of those who lack it—that is, to the extent that the privileged may claim such a right.

Ty reads social media "Asianfail" self-disclosures "as ambivalent articulations of contemporary Asian North American youthful subjectivity—not of a sense of a mortifying failure to belong, but of a vacillation between embarrassment and pride in not conforming to or belonging to anything imagined as 'Asian'" (23). Troublingly, though, while Ty claims these young Asian Americans reject "tiger mother" professionalism, she also observes "their failure to comply with normative expectations of being Asian" (23)—but a "failure to comply" is not the same as a refusal to comply. Before "Asianfailure" can work, it must originate in refusal, in protest. And for many Asian Americans, that refusal is imbricated into their Asian identities.

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The other manifestation of "Asianfailure" that bears notice is not strategic but is rather a mark of a difference between real whiteness and "yellow whiteness," a difference that makes Asian Americans targets of a subtle and near-invisible racism borne of the "model minority" stereotype. People of color generally suffer their depressions silently—among the many memoirs of depression topping best-seller lists, almost none are by writers of color—but Asian Americans have been particularly quiet in mental health discourse. Here Ty's argument is most valuable for its observation of recent cultural works that construct failure as emotional trauma and suicidal depression.