Week3_Zaige Wang_A04

From one of this week's reading, Navigating Graduate Education as a First-generation, Hmong American Woman: An Autoethnography by Manee Moua, I learned about the racial identity of a specific community, Hmong American women, and was able to connect the author's story to the issue that what asian American are expected to be as a "model minority". Hmong people live in many east and southeastern asian countries including China and Vietnam. As an international student from China, I have heard about Hmong people's lives in their hometown, but haven't thought about their community here in America. The author mentioned a concept, "model minority myth", that I have seen and felt to exist among asian American people. At first, I thought that model minority was a positive thing that people believe asian people does well at everything and "should" do so. However, from this article I found that such stereotype can also harm asian American people. For example, it is widely believed that asian are good at math and science. However, this could also mean that "if an asian does poor in math and science, he or she must be lazy" or "asian can only do well in math and science", which are obviously negative. Also, from the author's story, I learned that how difficult it can become when she wants to work hard toward her Ph.D degree but was just given small personal tasks but now any research program, because of her Hmong American identity. I feel from this week's reading and week1's reading that the academia really need to have changes to avoid any stereotype treat asian American more fairly.




Reference:
Moua, M. (n.d.). Navigating Graduate Education as a First-generation, Hmong American Woman: An Autoethnography. Hmong Studies Journal, Volume 19(1).
Majorconfusion [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons