In his book “Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture,” Robert G. Lee examines instances of international, cultural, and economic events that developed model minority race relations throughout the American Cold War era. Lee defines the concept of model minority in accordance with a 1960’s conflict in race relations between Lyndon Johnson’s recognition of the historical effects of racism on a minority’s ability to succeed economically and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s blaming of “culturally deprived” families for their inability to effectively make use of supposedly equal legal opportunities (Moynihan, qtd. Lee, 151). In this lens the model minority myth acts as a cultural product of Moynihan’s work that aims to praise ethnic assimilation into a white-centric society while simultaneously demonizing minority requests for governmental welfare. It promotes an institutional practice of continuously trying to ethnically integrate into society while remaining racially exoticized.
One method Lee uses to support his argument is a reading into two movies produced during the reestablishment of the nuclear family unit, Sayonara and Flower Drum Song. In both movies the Asian American women follow a goal of “domestication” into housewives with white husbands as “a sign of American triumph” and “the highest stage of assimilation” (Lee, 177-179). In addition, Sayonara’s dialog on epicanthic fold surgery implies how minority myths must still be racially othered, as “the utopian dream of “going native” or “passing” is not a viable alternative” (Lee, 171). Lee upholds the movies’ themes of anticommunism, the nuclear family, consumerism, and ethnic assimilation as indicative of America’s political and economic values following World War II.
In addition to the term model minority, Lee uses the terms Fordist Compromise and nuclear family to describe the economic and cultural atmosphere of the time. The Fordist Compromise is defined as a joint desire between capital owners and labor workers to produce and subsequently consume products in a middle-class lifestyle. The nuclear family unit is a manifestation of such a consumerist economy consisting of a heterosexual, presumably white man working in industry while his wife remains at home to provide care for both him and their children.
Lee’s work parallels ideas of Kim Park Nelson’s book, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism. Nelson’s book attacks the obliteration of Korean cultural knowledge for transnational adoptees brought into America after the Korean War. Lee and Nelson use different Asian American subgroups to state that Cold War America defined successful assimilation as the replacement of a permanently racial group’s culture with white America’s values, and both examine how America used its assimilation to reframe international relations in terms of a benevolent white savior.
Sources:
Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Temple University Press (1999)
Kim Park Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism, (2016)