(Link to Part 1: Citizenship, Belonging, and the Emotional Legacies of Immigration)
Part 2: The Model Minority Myth and the Politics of Proximity
Editor’s Introduction: In Part 1, we explored how first-generation Taiwanese immigrants often understand citizenship as something earned through discipline and compliance— a framework shaped by colonial history, martial law, and immigration regimes. But these beliefs intersect with powerful narratives like the model minority myth, which casts Asian Americans as obedient, high-achieving, and apolitical—an image that many internalize, embrace, or resist in different ways.
In Part 2 of our conversation, Professor Hsin-I Cheng and I examine how that myth shapes Taiwanese American self-perception, obscures the legacies of Black-led liberation movements, and reinforces harmful hierarchies across communities of color. At a time when ICE detainments and state violence are escalating, these narratives don’t just define us—they determine who we believe we need to protect, and who we allow to be harmed through our neutrality.
Hsin-I, you and I have both led intergenerational programming for Taiwanese Americans on topics of migration and identity. What has struck you about these conversations, and how do they feel relevant to the diverging discourse about the ICE detainments happening right now?
I believe it’s prudent to seek wisdom from Taiwan’s ancestors. This past March, the Taiwanese American Federation of Northern California (a primarily first-gen coalition, founded in 1973) screened the film: “In Search of a Mixed Identity” on Thng Tek-chiong/Tokushō Sakai, a lawyer and community leader who inhabited both Japanese and Taiwanese identities between the 1900s and 1940s. His example of choosing to stand up against injustice despite the fact that he could have passed as privileged Japanese, reminds me of the workings of the “model minority” ideology.
In 1966, the New York Times Magazine had an article on “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.” Later, the U.S. News and World Report featured Chinese Americans as another minority success story. In addition to the media popularizing this trope, the portrayal of Asian Americans’ financial and educational success as a result of their “cultural superiority” and individual hard-work fits well with the American myth in the universality of “pulling oneself up by their own bootstraps.”
So the reasoning is, if Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, or people like me can achieve these, those who can’t must have not worked hard enough to earn this status. For those who believe that Asian Americans are the model of all minorities, they attribute their economic success to individual or cultural accomplishment, unrelated to how themselves or their immigrant parents, due to the US immigration preferences, emigrated with some forms of economic (i.e., money), cultural (i.e., education), and social (i.e., networks) capitals. Essentially, not only should we ask who arrives, but also who could voluntarily choose to leave.
When one zooms out to examine individual or group achievements with historical and societal contexts, the self-made “model minority” label becomes problematic. For example, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (Hart-Celler Immigration Act) shifted preference from the national quota system that favored northern European immigrants to family unification and skill-based immigrants. Ten years later, the population of Asian immigrants doubled. The passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 contributed significantly to the Immigration and Nationality Act that abolished discrimination against non-White immigrants.
In other words, Asian or Taiwanese Americans would not have enjoyed today’s financial stability as “the model” in the United States had there not been decades-long struggles, led primarily by African Americans, to extend equality for all minorities. In fact, White capitalists brought Chinese over as cheap and exploitable laborers to counter against African Americans’ struggles for better treatment after the Civil War. So this “model minority” sentiment was present even prior to the creation of the term in the 1960s. It maintains the racial hierarchy of the “superior Whites” and “submissive Asians” as the model for the “rebellious Blacks.” I use quotation marks to describe how these groups are framed, rather than their actual behaviors.
This is a tough, existential question – but something I feel demarcating our community is how we view being characterized as “model minorities.” Some of us truly resonate with it as an earned badge of honor; others, like myself, critique the myth as a racial wedge that ignores structural inequalities. Can you walk us through these divergent interpretations, and how they reflect broader ideological frameworks?
I appreciate your framing this thorny issue as an existential question. It is. The model minority trope is attractive because it brings a certain degree of surface-level security, similar to the above comment: “Aren’t you glad that you do not wear a turban!” As long as it is a behavior, appearance, or cultural value approved by the dominant group in the society, there is always “the Other” before “us” to be reprimanded. Many Taiwanese (immigrant) Americans have another layer of insecurity for PRC’s threats to take over their (ancestors’) homeland. This fear could certainly increase their desire to be perceived as “good immigrants” in need of support from their current country of residency.
While understandable, the belief that Taiwanese Americans are and need to be the model minority poses three risks in our collective wellbeing.
First, our false belief in the need to be the “good” model minority prevents us from seeing the fact that Asians, with its heterogeneity, continue to be discriminated against. For example, according to Urban Institute, the mortgage denial rate for Whites was 13.6% in 2020. For Asians, it was 14.9%, while for Blacks was 27.1%, and 21.9% for Hispanics. In 2021, an investigation reporting showed that minority buyers were discriminated against when purchasing homes in Long Island. Even though the 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed the practice of redlining, minority groups including Asians continue to encounter hidden discrimination. The label of model minority does not translate into equal treatment.
Second, striving to be(come) a model minority leads to the missed opportunity to move the society toward a more just one for all of us. This stereotype has brought much psychological stress to Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI), including Taiwanese Americans. It also strained our relationship with non-White Americans, for it is often used to silence claims of systemic inequality as shown in Dr. Stacey Lee’s research with Asian American youths. In 2024, Ellie Yang Camp, a child of Taiwanese immigrant parents, shared her struggling journey to unpack her complex identity as a Taiwanese American. She called on Taiwanese Americans to reflect on and challenge the model minority myth, which heightens the pressure to meet the mainstream White society’s expectations, interferes with building meaningful relations with marginalized Americans, and hampers the possibility of becoming their own-version of authentic Taiwanese Americans.
Lastly, when we as non-White Americans buy into the model minority framework, we (unknowingly) help to keep the status quo of racial hierarchy in the United States. In 2020, I developed a concept called “injured privilege” after analyzing the mainstream comments in reaction toward the SFFA v. Harvard verdict. Describing Asian Americans’ experiences, I defined “injured privilege” as an “advantage partially unearned, yet inexplicable because it is out of the norm of how privilege is communicated.” The idea is that Asian Americans are benefited from the hard-fought liberation led primarily by Black Americans; however, we continue to endure differential unjust treatment. Our injured privilege induces “misplaced ressentiment,” which means “the antagonism arisen from unjust systems being projected onto a strawman.” In this case, both Asian and Black Americans are pitted against each other by putting each other down like “crabs in the barrel.” The result is that both minority groups became weaker and grew even further apart relationally when the actual culprits with generational wealth, power and unlawful land amassed unjustly were left off the hook. My hope for the concept of “injured privilege” is to better describe our diverse experiences as Asians, and steer away from perpetuating the model minority myth.
In trying to understand those who embrace the model minority narrative—what makes it so compelling? Why is it important for some Taiwanese Americans to be seen as the “good, deserving” immigrants? And how can that rhetoric be harmful to ourselves and to other marginalized communities?
Indeed, both Taiwan and the United States are settler colonies where waves of immigrants occupied the land and cohabit together for centuries. At the same time, there are differences in ways the societal members are positioned hierarchically with sociocultural, political and historical specificities. This is why I believe it is important to think about citizenship from a relational perspective, rooted in the local contexts. The essential question I asked was “What impacts relational proximity in each society?” Therefore, the analyses focused on what mechanisms were enacted to manage relationality among people. For example, the cultural element qing is significant in Taiwan. This term does not have direct English translation. The closest meaning would be “affection,” “feeling,” or “emotion.” A simple act of referring to certain newcomers from Southeast Asia as our “sisters” (姐妹) and others from the same region as our “friends” (朋友) evokes immediate visceral reactions and hierarchical relational distance based on qing.
With the relationality established, newcomers receive differential treatment. In 2013, a female immigrant named Chen faced deportation after being found to have overstayed her residency. With knowledge about her struggles to raise four children independently, a new Alien Resident Card was not only issued but personally delivered to her hands. A similar situation occurred during the same year to an overstayed Malaysian male migrant worker Huang Weiming, who had donated approximately US$8,000 to Taiwanese charities in four years. However, Huang was deported. In these two similar cases, the qing (sympathy, 情) was employed to empathize with Chen while fa (law, 法) was activated to Huang. The intertwined factors of familial connections, class, gender, and nationality complicate how immigrants experience law in Taiwan.
If qing is the salient cultural element evoking emotions in managing relationality in Taiwan, race is that activator in the United States. I examined the role of relationality between groups in the United States during the first Trump presidency and the Great Depression years—two periods of high anti-immigration sentiment. After analyzing the mainstream newspapers (2017–2018), and national broadcasted series Americans All–Immigrants All (1938–1939), I found that race played a significant role in how immigrants were described in both periods. While Eastern and Southern European immigrants, Asians and Blacks were portrayed as the “culturally different” racial Other than the “old White immigrants” in Americans All program, they were not demonized like our present time. In addition, the strong economy during the 2017–2018 period suggests that the anti-immigration attitude was not about economic insecurity. The prevalent acceptance toward how immigrants are criminalized under both Trump’s presidencies is evidence of how quickly the latent racial wound can be re-ignited into a blaze to dehumanize the “Other” and damage our collective accomplishments. Given the fact that almost 60 White South Africans were granted US residency without due process or legitimacy, it is clear that race affects how the law is employed and experienced in the United States.
Lastly, I really resonated with your recent piece in Global Taiwan Institute, in which you propose that Taiwan must earn buy-in from beyond “mainstream America,” and that our current focus (“our” referring to the collective will of institutions like the Taipei Economic & Cultural Representative Office, the Overseas Community Affairs Council, and diasporic organizers) risks framing “Taiwan issues” as conditional and strategic “elite issues.”
I interpreted your call to action here as one for Taiwanese Americans to be more proactive in sincerely building multi-racial, multi-class support for Taiwan – not as a transactional strategy, but to better reflect our shared aspirations, values, and fate. What complicates this goal? What would you like for us as Taiwanese Americans to do differently or better?
This is a huge and important question. In my policy report, I shared the Carnegie Endowment’s 2023 American Statecraft Program Report, showing that only two out of ten Black Americans support an active role for the United States if China invades Taiwan. Other racial minorities, such as Hispanics also showed a low level of military support for Taiwan in another study. In addition, reports showed that Americans with more formal education and higher incomes are more likely to be concerned over a Taiwan Strait conflict. Given the fact that only about 37 percent of the American population held a bachelor’s degree in 2022, I believe more endeavors should be made to connect Taiwan’s condition to those of other marginalized communities whose desire for dignity and freedom is undermined.
Indeed, such endeavors cannot be superficial “transactions” as you pointed out. Rather, what I propose is the sustained relationality built through mutual understanding and deep learning of various oppressed groups’ struggles to be seen, respected, and given space for self-determination. It is not an easy feat but an imperative one to see how we have been and will continue to be interconnected.
One of the most challenging obstacles is how segregated we are from each other. Researchers use the diversity index to indicate how integrated a neighborhood is. I have written about how physically separated Asian and Black American communities are. Many areas popular for Asian Americans have become more racially segregated. I am including a resource link here for readers to check out how integrated their neighborhood is. So when Asians Americans, including those of Taiwanese descent, say “if we can make it, they should too,” it is virtually impossible for us to comprehend how different resources are available to them, and what types of challenges they face on a daily basis. This is not to suggest that Asians do not face challenges. Rather, my point is that regardless of race/ethnicity/class, relationality cannot be built when we do not encounter one another.
Another challenge is that even when there is proximity between minoritized groups, there are scarce resources to attend to all the needs, and therefore, trusting relationships are hard to build. During my research interviews with many Asian and Black Americans, I heard from both groups expressing legitimate concerns over their wellbeing. Essentially, at varying degrees, there was a sense that “our house is on fire and we simply don’t have enough bandwidth to learn or care about others’ problems.” This is one of the harmful outcomes of what I shared earlier about the model minority myth. Taiwanese understand in our bones what it feels to have our dignity denied, truth smeared, and history rewritten. When we are all crabs in the barrel, it is difficult to see that the only way to break free is to dismantle the barrel all together, rather than stepping on top of each other. My hope is for Taiwanese Americans to learn about our relations to the US historiography as a starting point to see the barrel, our positions in it, and potential ways out with other trapped crabs.
In a moment marked by uncertainty and political urgency, conversations like this remind me that solidarity is not a statement but an everyday practice. Professor Cheng offers no easy answers—only layered reminders to examine where we come from, how we are positioned, and who we choose to stand with.
Our identities as Taiwanese Americans are shaped by inherited histories, personal negotiations, and collective responsibilities. If we are to move toward a more just future, we must be willing to ask harder questions of ourselves—about privilege, proximity to power, and the stories we choose to tell or ignore.
I hope this conversation offers clarity of purpose and empowers us to engage each other across differences with curiosity, compassion, and care; to reject fear-based binaries and embrace a more expansive vision of who we are and who we might become someday soon, leaving no one behind.
Hsin-I Cheng studies human communication through historical and sociopolitical lenses with methods such as ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviewing, and discourse analyses. Her research and teaching interests focus on how multiple identities intersect and influence human interaction and relationships. Her first book Culturing interface: Identity, communication, and Chinese transnationalism investigates the experiences of Taiwanese and Chinese communities living and working on the U.S.-Mexico border. Her second book Cultivating Membership in Taiwan and Beyond: Relational Citizenship proposes the theory of “relational citizenship,” rooted in the Taiwanese context, to explain the communicative nature of membership and belonging.
Her most recent co-edited collection Resistance in the era of nationalisms: (Per)Forming identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong will be published in 2023 by Michigan State University Press. This collection focuses on how people in Taiwan and Hong Kong, two post-colonial and cosmopolitan societies, strive for autonomy over their democratic ways of life. Her work is published in Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Western Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, Language and Intercultural Communication, and Women & Language. Her current research focus is on Asian American diasporic communities in their identity negotiations, and relationships between racial minorities in the United States. She collaborated with her students to build the Asian & Black Alliance website to promote Black-Asian solidarity. Cheng is a member of the 2023-2025 U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group in the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC-Berkeley.
Related posts:
Where we come from, who we stand with: A Conversation with Professor Hsin-I Cheng (Part 1/2) 
A Canon of Our Own: Q&A with Michelle Kuo, Author of Reading with Patrick 
“To be left ignorant about Asian American history is to erase who we are as a people”: Ellie Yang Camp’s “Louder Than the Lies” 
Lunchbox: Anne Hu Serves a Taste of Taiwanese America in 90s-Era Cleveland
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