Week 3 - Armanjot Bhangu - A04

Armanjot Bhangu

Section: A04

Week #3

For this week, I chose to read “Navigating Graduate Education as a First-generation, Hmong American
Woman: An Autoethnography”, written by Manee Moua. This journal revolved around Moua’s struggles
as a Hmong women in terms of her graduate education experiences and the hardships she faced trying
to receive her education. According to her, the primary reason she wrote this piece was to “highlight
stories such as mine to challenge traditional understandings of Southeast Asian American (SEAA)
identities in education by providing a more complex and deeper understanding of Hmong American
women in education”. By doing so she simultaneously is able to describe the oppression that students
of color face when trying to simply get an education. She explains how even though in recent years there
is a greater representation of women in academia, there is still an underrepresentation of women of
Hmong descent in areas such as “literature and graduate education”. She also goes into detail about
the “model minority” dynamic that Asian-Americans face and how negative it is towards Asians who do
not fit those arbitrary standards and the effect it can have on them. Specifically, towards Hmong
Americans, it seems to make all the work that they put into their studies seem much easier than it really
is due to it being expected of them as a model minority.

QUESTION:

What impact does the idea of Asian-Americans being the model minority have on them in terms of
societal pressures and expectations?

REFERENCES:

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