Hood Asians, Model Minority, and Black and White America
By: Y. Vue
Tags: Race, African American, White Supremacy, Refugees, Asian American

Race

Hood Asians, Model Minority, and Black and White America

My older brother and I in a refugee camp in Thailand in the late 1970s. Photo credit my dad.

I’m not your model minority. I never have been, but people have assumed I am because I’m well-read, I’m well-spoken, and I write well. I often get mistaken for Chinese or Korean. At times, I’ve benefited from the model minority myth because people don’t see me as a threat. They think I’ll be meek and quiet. They also assume I’m good with numbers. I’ve met some Asians who fall into the model minority myth perfectly and it’s always annoyed me. Even my brother thinks Asians are just naturally better at numbers than they are at the arts. (Tsk tsk, brother.)

I once got into a heated argument with my ex-brother-in-law (who is Puerto Rican), where he accused me of being “rich and you don’t understand what struggling is like. Your parents probably owned a store and you’ve never been poor.”

Yeah, alright, dude, and that’s why I live in the ghetto, just to get a taste of poverty before I return to my white house on a hill in suburbia.

What he — and many, many others — don’t know and don’t care to know is that I’m a hood Asian. That’s right. When Americans think of “poor Asians,” they generally think of “other” countries and not their own cities. All of my childhood and the first 10 years of my adulthood, I lived in poverty in the lowest income neighborhoods. I grew up across the street from some dangerous gang-ridden apartment complexes until I left Fresno, California at the age of 18. When I arrived in the Tri-State area with $60 in my pocket (in the 90s), I lived in a low-income, mostly Latin neighborhood for 10 years while I struggled to finish college and establish myself in White corporate America. I was a poor Hmong kid with no community in NYC, trying to figure out adulthood and survival amongst a community that thought I was privileged and foreign.

When we first got to America, my parents tried to work menial labor jobs, but the pay and the racism became unbearable. They eventually became farmers in the Central Valley, renting a small 5 acre plot of land that they worked 365 days a year, usually about 16 hours a day, and bringing home barely enough to cover the bills, much less enough to feed our family of ten. I wore my mother’s hand-me-downs all through high school and when I got my license, I drove around my family van because it was my responsibility to pick up my siblings from school and to help transport our field workers home after a long day at the farm.

This is hardly the picture of the model minority.

I still remember the elastic taste of government-issued giant bricks of orange-yellow, processed American cheese that came in brown boxes. I still remember days where the hunger would gnaw away at your spine and all that was available in the cupboards were the large jars of nondescript peanut butter distributed from the welfare office. I still remember the judgmental and disgusted stare of the White cashier as I handed over my food stamps to buy chicken for my family.

But these memories of extreme poverty aren’t just my own. They are shared by the majority of my people, the Hmong; and they are shared by many other Asians too who come here as war refugees and dirt poor immigrants. We don’t fit into the model minority myth, yet we live with its heavy burden.

Growing up under the hefty shadow of the model minority myth was oppressive. Mainstream Asians didn’t understand our struggle because they couldn’t see beyond themselves either. Most Asians have never heard of the Hmong. Many don’t believe we exist, even those in whose country we lived, like the Lao, the Thai, the Chinese, and the Vietnamese. Meanwhile, the mass populace of Black and White people all assumed our privileges were the same as that of East Asians, whom we physically resembled.

In the decades after the first Hmong were resettled into the US, the micro- and macroagressions we suffered from White and Black communities would shape our own community, building up prejudices that we didn’t know about until we landed here. Before resettlement, our only brushes with White people were the CIA operatives and the downed American soldiers that we rescued. Our first encounters with the other minority communities was when we were placed in low-income projects. For many of us, our first introductions to Black people was in the ghetto and at the hands of hate and violence.

The projects and broken down poor neighborhoods are dangerous places to be even when you are part of the majority, but to be a minority there, we were lambs for the wolves.

In the 80s and 90s, there wasn’t a day that passed where you didn’t hear about a family member being robbed, beaten, or harassed. A friend once told me about her brother being shot in the face in his car by two Black men in a botched car-jacking. It happened in front of his home. At work, my dad would regularly be bullied by his White co-workers for taking up an “American” job. What we quickly learned was that America was not safe, that our Black neighbors were dangerous and that White people hated us; but we also couldn’t go back either because we’d helped the Americans and now the Pathet Lao government had called for an open genocide for our people.

Our views on the majority races in America weren’t just words and prejudices that someone else taught us. It was our every day lived experiences. We were afraid to play outside. We couldn’t walk home alone from school. We couldn’t leave our windows open at night. The brutality from our White and Black neighbors traumatized the majority of two entire generations of Hmong folks, compounding onto them more PTSD than what they already carried from surviving the Secret War. It was an embittering experience for a people who had risked everything for these Americans.

Majority of our adults didn’t speak English and there was little to no advocacy for our people. There was no way to be heard by the authorities or the larger community around us, who most of the time didn’t even know how or why we were suddenly in their communities. We were brought to America and then mostly abandoned by the government that had sacrificed our bodies for American interests.

We didn’t know what this “model minority” was. We didn’t know about the Civil Rights or the racial tensions and aggression between White and Black people. We had no idea what we were being thrust into. Majority of the Hmong at the time of resettlement were largely uneducated, agrarian hill people. Many of us were families of soldiers. Our PTSD taught us that if we fought back, we’d be raped, beaten, or murdered, which made us easy targets.

But what Black and White people didn’t count on, though, was that Hmong people were not like the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. Our entire history has been built on toughness and survival. We’d always been the minority wherever we went, and with that, we’d learned to fight. We weren’t as “genteel” as our East Asian counterparts. We still had jungle in us. Though our parents were collectively traumatized by the Secret War, many of their children would rise up against bullying and hate, and thus, Hmong street gangs were born.

In all of this though, perhaps one tenet of model minority was true for the Hmong. Our parents pushed hard for education. You see, back in the old country, education was a privilege provided to only a handful of sons. Hmong people lived in remote hills, which made us the perfect strategic guerrilla allies for the CIA during the Secret War; this also meant that access to schools and teachers were hard. But after the Secret War and the Refugee Act of 1980, many Hmong people found themselves in America, where education was suddenly accessible and free.

Through constant drumming into Hmong children the importance and value of education, we started to see a meteoric rise of the Hmong community into middle class America and into roles of social and government prominence. Hmong gangs began to fall away as we collectively raised our people out of the ghettos. Perhaps one of our biggest strengths has been the willingness to reach down and come together to help each other out of rough situations. Living in remote hills and through a history of oppression, we’d learned that community and family came first before the self; and although the mask of success makes it easy to think that Hmong people now fit into model minority, the truth is that there is still a large portion of our people who live in utter poverty.

Though some of the rough racial tensions of the 80s and 90s have eased, it has not disappeared. It’s still pervasive. It’s still commonly felt in microagressions wherever we go. Sadder still is that many of our youth who grew up with the privileges provided by their parents’ sacrifices have little understanding of our Hmong American history. They, in turn, cannot grasp the social nuances of the model minority myth and how it plays for the Hmong in this White, Black, Brown, and Yellow race discussion. There is a concerted effort now from older millennial Hmong and Gen X Hmong to record our stories and our history, to ensure that our space in the race discussion is true and accurate and not washed out by the louder majority voices. Before our elders all fade back into the earth, we’re fighting to maintain their legacies.

I acknowledge that my life growing up in the hood is not identical to those of other Black and Brown people, yet so much of our histories overlap. By the virtues and traditions of my people and my parents, I grew up hyper-focused on getting out of poverty. I knew what my duty was. I know what my duty is still to my community and to my family. And yes, I’m sure that once I broke free of my neighborhood, I benefited from society’s misconception of me as a Model Minority, yet my history and my sense of justice makes it so that label feels like a poorly cut jacket. I can’t wear it. I can’t embrace it. And I can’t allow others to continue to think that that’s me also.

When I look at my face in the mirror, I see my shades of yellow and tan. I am not White, regardless of how others try to tell me how Asians are White adjacent. I can never be White, even when Black and Brown don’t want to make space for me. I find myself at this odd intersection of not belonging to either camp, yet still pushed to be a side-kick for both sides. At my crossroads, I find that even other mainstream Asians have a difficult time understanding why some of their overt misconceptions and ignorance about my people are irritating.

In the end though, I’m choosing not to be anyone’s sidekick. My story and the history of my people deserve their own space in this race discussion. We are not your model minority and we won’t adjust quietly into the background to keep the narrative comfortable for the majority. We’ll fight on to create the space for the nuances needed for true liberation and equity. I won’t go quietly into your boxes and I refuse to accept your easy explanations of who I’m supposed to be. I’m a shade of Asian, but I am not your model minority.