The main thesis of this article is that Asian people still live in and suffer from the racist, misleading society that White people constructed. The author had many arguments throughout the article to support her thesis. Plastic surgery is one of them. She uses this example of plastic surgery, straight from her personal experience with her own sister, to imply the misleading beauty industry in the United States (p.65), which worships the facial features of white people and impose that on the society.
Another example that implies a misleading racist society comes from the quote “I blame dominant institutions and mainstream society because of the impossible alternatives they set up for us. They set what is ‘good,’, what is ‘normal’ –everything else is secondary” (p.67). People believe what they believe is the mainstream now because the society is set up like this, with white superiority, and the white people still reinforce this “white-is-better-so-be-like-us” idea within the U.S. society. This then gives white people the rights, which should be nonexistent, to feel and act superior than other races.
One of the key terms appeared in this article is “model minority”. In definition, a model minority is a demographic group whose members are perceived to achieve a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average. However, Asians are criticized no matter which way they go: those who don’t succeed, as well as those who succeed too much. It is very commonly known that many top universities accept less Asians students than they should because they want more white students and use “balance of percentage of different races” as an excuse, or a disguise.
From the first group of Chinese immigrants to today, like the author said: silence was disciplined into us. Silence has become and been an Asian American culture in respond to the racism in the United States since the past. However, more and more Asian Americans started to stand up and speak up for the race, which is very important to the “fighting-racism-process”.
