My Father Is More Than a Model Minority

What makes immigrant parents like mine worthy of love, respect, and admiration in our country?

Before leaving Hong Kong for Hawaii, my father’s family posed for a studio portrait. They sit and stand shoulder to shoulder, a sweeping panorama of China’s countryside visible behind them. Against the opulent background, they appear like cutouts, almost fake. My popo is there, as are my two aunts and my uncle. My gunggung is still alive.

And then there is my father, age seven, on the far left, standing stiff and still like a soldier called to attention. His hands are rigid, his hair flat, his gaze focused—perhaps on the camera, or perhaps even further, into a dawning horizon of possibility, just beyond his view. In that moment, his future remains unclear. He’s unaware that his father will soon die from lung cancer; that his mother, alone and unable to speak English, will work two jobs—making noodles in the morning, waiting tables in the evening—to support her children while he watches his baby sister. When he starts school, he’ll quickly advance in math and struggle through English with students two years his junior. But once he gains fluency, he’ll excel, eventually graduating as high school valedictorian. He’ll study biology at the University of Hawaii on scholarship, shoveling popcorn into paper bags at the movie theater and cleaning bedpans during night shifts at St. Francis Hospital between classes. He’ll be accepted to all but one of twelve medical schools to which he applies, and graduate from Harvard.

On call one evening at Harborview Hospital in Seattle, a nurse will invite him to a movie that she doesn’t have tickets to, and they’ll eat Mexican food instead. On their wedding night, they’ll laugh and dance and be thrown into a swimming pool, still dressed in their suit and gown. They’ll move to Minnesota, then back to Hawaii, where they’ll raise their family. Their son will come second, bright and mischievous. Their daughter will arrive first and become thoughtful and defiant. It will be years until they fully understand her—the unexpected surprises she will bring—but she’ll view him as her brilliant father, the embodiment of the American dream.

*

I can’t remember where I found the photograph. I can recall its inky colors, its smoothness in my hands, my own disbelief that the people in the photograph were my father’s family members. It looks so ancient, I thought to myself. Everyone looks so young.

The portrait, taken for their US immigration application, is one of a family I have never known—which is to say, a complete one. For years, I knew my gungung only from the framed wedding photos in my popo’s apartment and his smooth granite tombstone in the Manoa graveyard, where we lit incense and burned paper money near his grassy mound during Bisan. My father and his family say so little about him, even about themselves, before America; before he died. I know so little about him.

I am far more familiar with my father’s achievements: the scholarships, the 4.0 GPAs, Harvard Medical School, an MBA. His positions as chief of surgery, professor of medicine, Vice President of Medical Affairs. As a general and transplant surgeon, my father remains always on call. When I was a child, he’d leave early in the morning for rounds. In the evening, the steady thrum of his pager would often draw him back to the emergency room. “Hello, Dr. Alan Cheung,” he would say, retreating from dinner into another room to return the call. “Did somebody page?” Growing up, my brother and I knew he was home when the garage door would lift and a sonic “aiyayayai” would echo through our halls. He was imitating the battle cry in Xena: Warrior Princess, our favorite TV show at the time, making us laugh with delight.

In those days, our mother worked long evenings as a professor of nursing. After our babysitter went home, our father would read to us before bed. He’d often fall asleep while doing so, an open book always resting on his chest.

*

My father tells me that the Chinese once called Hawaii tahn heung sahn, or fragrant mountain, after the sandalwood trees that sprouted there. Those towering, golden gods, which his countrymen hacked and harvested, were shipped and whittled into incense sticks and lit, their whisper-thin smoke curling gently in the air. America, my father tells me, they called gam sahn, or golden mountain, after the precious metal that filled the hidden veins of California’s hillsides, which his countrymen mined during the state’s fevered gold rush.

I find these Cantonese endearments striking for their similarities, their underlying assumptions about America: its abundance, its prosperity, its generosity, all somehow inherent, which allows outsiders to claim these riches as their own.

Yet in response to the Chinese immigrants who entered the country in the 1800s, the government instituted its first immigration ban, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which restricted their entry and ability to become naturalized citizens. In the 1890s, the federal government mandated a Chinese registry. Later came the Magnuson Act of 1943, which established immigration quotas based on national origin and permitted only 105 Chinese immigrants per year.

Before the “model minority,” Asians were the “yellow peril.” 

My father immigrated one year after the Immigration Act of 1965, which allowed unfettered Chinese immigration for the first time in over eighty years. My father came by boat, on the USS Elizabeth II: “a big passenger ship, like the Titanic.” He tells me of the berths full of bunk beds, men in one room and women in another. How my gunggung, whose lung cancer had been diagnosed in Hong Kong, lay inert most days, only rising for meals. My popo was constantly seasick.

When they arrived in Honolulu Harbor, he remembers seeing Aloha Tower. My aunt, gunggung’s sister, picked them up from the pier. For three months, his family lived in her small, spare bedroom in the back. She had two bunk beds and one full-size mattress for the six of them to share. My gungung, whose cancer had worsened, was taken to the hospital. “We came in June,” my father says. “He died that September.”

*

When my father comes to visit me, he wears a crimson polar fleece with “Harvard” emblazoned over his heart. In his thin shell and washed jeans and running sneakers, his choice feels both pragmatic (it’s cold) and proud (he’s an alum), but also preemptive: The jacket, intentional or not, indicates some form of belonging.

In Hawaii, my father had played alongside kids of all kinds: Hawaiian, hapa, Portuguese, Pacific Islander, Filipino, Japanese, Korean. Because of the plantations, immigrants from across Asia settled in the islands, creating an imperfect but inclusive culture of their own. On his first day of medical school, during his first lecture, my father noticed that the students had separated themselves. Black students sat together, Latino students sat together. “Being from Hawaii, I didn’t know where to sit,” he said. “So I sat in the back with the jocks.”

Boston in the ’80s was notoriously racist. In 1989, after my father had decamped for Seattle, Charles Stuart—a white man who had murdered his wife—lied and described the assailant as a black man to the police. The city upended black communities in pursuit of a man to fit his description.

During medical school, my father encountered the police only once. One sunny day, he rode his bike across the Charlestown bridge, onto Commonwealth Avenue, when a patrol car hit him. My father was unhurt, but his bike was badly bent. The officer, who was a black man, apologized. Then he drove my father home and paid to fix his broken tires.

My father’s experiences with racism are mostly limited. Or they’re uneventful. When recalling how the chairman of surgery often confused him with the only other Asian resident at the University of Washington—a Japanese man named Tom—he laughs.

It’s only when he remembers the psychiatrist that his mood changes. The psychiatrist was a white man who was admitted into the hospital late one evening when my father was still a nurse’s aide. He was drunk and surly, and as my father cleaned the blood and vomit from his body, the white man spat, “Your kind will never amount to anything,” into his ear. As my father tells me this, his voice changes, turns tense—like a loosely curled fist, suddenly gripping itself.

*

In the book The Racial Imaginary, Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine discuss the role of race in creation, as well as the illusion that the stories we tell are somehow untethered to reality, to history, to the slight or dangerous discriminations we inflict on one another daily. “Our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are,” they write. They explain that our feelings, our thoughts, are not wholly ours—they proceed from the past, germinate and grow, take root in our minds, nourishing the racial imaginary.

By filling my father’s life only with his achievements, I engaged with the racial imaginary. I gave him those “certain predictable performances of race,” as Rankine and Loffreda write, then felt a swelling of pride in him for sustaining that performance. In so doing, I failed to consider any alternatives to his experience, denying him a range of nuance and emotions—like failure, fear, wanting—that all of us share.

But before the “model minority,” Asians were the “yellow peril.” “Fu Manchus.” “Orientals.” “Coolies.” Criminals. Rapists. Terrorists. Animals. Aliens. Staccato stereotypes that feel so familiar today, even if they are applied to East Asians less often than they are to other groups. “The Chinese must go,” chanted the Workingmen’s Party in California. In the 1800s, Asians were viewed as threatening, exotic, degenerate.

For my father, a Chinese immigrant, work was all he had to prove his worth, to demonstrate that he belonged.

By the 1960s, they were viewed as industrious and law-abiding. Quiet and persevering. Some “exemplary,” like my father. This change didn’t occur because white Americans suddenly believed Asians were fully human, deserving of the same rights and freedoms white people enjoyed. Instead, it allowed some to believe that America was a racial democracy, even as the model minority myth was weaponized against other races—especially Black Americans—and used to dismiss their experiences of discrimination. Projecting the model minority stereotype on an entire group of people also undermines their humanity, ascribing rules for individuals to follow; conditions they must clear in order to belong.

“We are all, no matter how little we like it, the bearers of unwanted and often shunned memory, of a history whose infiltrations are at times so stealthy we can pretend otherwise, and at times so loud we can’t hear much of anything else,” write Loffreda and Rankine. In the months since the election—since swastikas have appeared on college campuses, since visitors from many Muslim-majority countries have been banned, since immigrants have been deported and children taken from their parents—I’ve realized how true this is.

As children of immigrants, we’re often forced to wonder: What makes our families worthy of love or respect in our own country? For my father, a Chinese immigrant, work was salvation. Work was the salve. Work was all he had to prove his worth, to demonstrate that he belonged.

*

Although I love my father for more than his achievements, they are hard to overlook. And I am his daughter. I know so much more than what people see, what some people perceive him to be: alien, overachiever, indistinguishable Asian, chink.

Yet when I look at my father, I remember early Saturday mornings when he’d brush my hair into buns before ballet class. I recall that hot summer day when jellyfish wrapped around my arms and legs like ivy strangling slender branches, and how he rushed my small body home, coating my welting skin with meat tenderizer to soothe the sting. I think of the evenings when he would come home to find me sulking, wooden splinters from our deck burrowed into my toes; how he’d attempt to remove them with tweezers, but I’d scream so loudly that he’d place the sticky side of a Band-Aid over the tiny wound instead. He would wait beside my bed until I fell asleep, and by morning, both splinters and bandages would be gone.

Growing up, my father often took my pulse in place of holding my hand. He never mentioned what he was doing. Instead he simply grabbed hold, wrapping his hand around my wrist, letting his fingers sink into my skin until my pulse, at first hard for him to sense, suddenly fluttered. He once taught me how to find that soft, tender spot where the radial artery beats beneath the skin, undetected until pressed. How to place my fingers away from the tendon that neatly tunnels and divides the forearm into two planes. How to take hold until the silent thrum comes, then count quickly and quietly—1, 2, 3, 4, 5—before releasing.

He still does this, even though I’m grown. He doesn’t ask, but I see it coming—in the car, while we’re walking, waiting in line. It’s a subtle gesture, almost unremarkable. But his grasp holds so much: It cradles an ocean crossing; his father’s death; everything he learned and everything he achieved—the entire messy, surprising story that brought us both here. I feel my father’s hand, how it wraps around my wrist. And together we silently feel the gentle drum, drum, drum of history pulsing between us.