Week3 Bradley Kitaoka Section:A04

For this week’s reading I read the article called “Navigating Graduate Education as a First-generation, Hmong American Woman: An Autoethnography” by Manee Moua. There was a section in the article titled “Vignette: The “Good” Graduate Student. This story talks about how her actions of being polite and flexible where mistaken for as being passive and showing a lack of motivation. I related to this story because when I was younger, I always got trapped into volunteering and doing extra work because I feared that if I declined or questioned the work I would be coming off as rude or lazy. However, now that I’m older I can tell that these actions aren’t connected, and they are not always seen as a negative. This misunderstanding is also because of the difference on how Asians are raised compared to others. For example, Asians are taught to never question and to always respect their elders and people who have more authority which is different compared to how some people are raised in the United States. This causes some people in the United States to assume Asians are meek and quiet because they don’t speak up and question things which isn’t true. A solution I can think of for this problem is that Asians begin to speak up more to make people believe we are not a pushover which is true.

Question: What other ways are there to help a majority of people believe that Asians aren’t meek?

References:

Moua, M. (2018, Jan). Navigating Graduate Education as a First-generation, Hmong American Woman: An Autoethnography. Hmong Studies Journal, Volume 19 (1): 1-25

Photo retrieved from: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/asian-little-girl-finger-lips-making-253125844