The myth of the model minority has bedeviled Asian-Americans for decades: they are supposed to be the high achievers who bootstrapped themselves through American society, and are held up as role models for other immigrant groups.
Prachi Gupta’s family seemed to fall neatly into this model: a doctor father, a stay-at-home mother who upheld the values of family and culture, two hardworking nerdy kids with exceptional grades. Behind this facade, as per Prachi in this searing but complicated memoir, lay another reality: a physically and emotionally violent father, a cowed and placating mother who supported and enabled the father, and two smart children who faced racism in school from teachers and students as well as violence at home.
This raw, painful memoir is undoubtedly cathartic for the author, and must represent her own truths; as such, it is difficult to criticize. Yet the reader who is exposed to the family history may well have questions about Prachi’s interpretation of them, and of her assignment of blame.
Gupta associates most of her family problems with racism and the Indian attitude of hiding family problems (‘log kya kahenge’). To a reader, though, some of the problems seem to be caused by poor choices. The family was happy in diverse Silicon Valley, but moved to other US states every few years, thus forcing the children to deal with new schools and making friends in unwelcoming communities. These moves were largely because Gupta’s father — a successful Silicon Valley tech worker in the Asian-welcoming Bay Area — decided to start on the long 10 year path to retraining as a doctor. Gupta thinks he made this decision because he wanted to have higher status and be admired, but this is not a very persuasive argument since her father was also the man who said
in 10 years, nerdy techs will rule the world.
The crux of Gupta’s memoir is that the pressure of being a model minority, i.e. the requirement to be successful and happy, puts enormous pressure on the participants to suppress anything that counters that image, which in turn exacerbates all their social and psychological issues.
The tragedy of Prachi’s brother is heartbreaking. He seemed to have it all — brilliance, athleticism (cross country team in school and college) and charm (Prachi says that unlike her, he was popular and happy in school), and the ability to skate past the emotional events that so deeply affected Prachi. He studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon, worked on SpaceX code as an intern, had excellent job offers and eventually chose to work for a startup. He vibrated between salaried jobs and startups for most of his life, by his own choice, apparently enjoying the roller-coaster thrill of the tech world.
Yet, later in life, he found appeal in the worst of misogynistic online communities, the Red Pill group who believe that women run the world while men are oppressed and not allowed to complain. This handsome, accomplished man suffered from depression, attempted suicide, and was insecure enough about his height (5’7”, the same as Mark Zuckerberg’s) to try a tortuous ‘limb-lengthening’ medical procedure with devastating consequences.
Gupta ties her brother’s experiences to institutional racism, where she says Asian men are seen as emasculated and utilized for their technical prowess without ever getting the leadership roles. She makes some good arguments, but I wish she had tackled some inconvenient facts: the current heads of Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, YouTube, and the World Bank, among others, are all Indian-origin men like her brother.
The entire book is written as a letter to her mother, and from a literary standpoint this makes it hard to read. A description of an event suddenly turns to speculation about what ‘you’ felt and did, and such sentences can be awkward reading.
the confusing,turbulent feelings inside me distilled to one question ‘Why didn’t you name me Jessica?’ I think you were taken aback, and in your surprise, you apologized. I didn’t have the words for racism yet. I only understood that if I were more like Jessica, I wouldn’t have been treated that way. ‘I’m sorry’, you said, accepting my feelings as fact, likely unaware of the cruelty children inflict on those who look unlike them. ‘I liked Prachi’.
The Gupta household revolved around the father. ‘In our house, Papa was the colonizer’. The author connects this to traditional Indian households in which men are the providers and uncontested head of household, while women are the supportive household managers.
It was difficult for me to sympathize with the author in the latter third of the book, which reads like an unfiltered therapy session.
I poured the love I couldn’t give you and Papa into my work.
my insecurity over my identity had turned culture into a performance rather than something I inhabited authentically.
because the way that Papa undermined my sense of reality was not so different from the way that white America made me doubt myself, the notion that I deserved any better — or that better was even possible — seemed absurd. Vulnerability felt like delusion.
Once Prachi finds stability with the help of a therapist, every olive branch from the family is rejected. When opportunities arise to support the parents, she declines, for her own self-preservation.
the unbearable wrenching pain […] would become somehow worse as I’d numb my feelings to exist however Papa demanded.
Given that the entire book is written as a letter to her mother, it struck me at several points that her questions and confused feelings might have been clarified with more conversations between mother and daughter, but that door is firmly closed by Prachi in her twenties. I wondered if the relationship with her mother might have recovered a little had Prachi not distanced herself in moments of family crisis. Of course, that is her choice and decision, and the reader can only wish her the best going forward.
[For another take on this book, see Reeta’s review]
Really interesting. I was all excited at first about the topic. but the execution of the novel seems lacking, esp the confusion of voice/identity. Maybe writing everything as a letter to mum wasn’t the cleverest literary move if the author is not fully equipped to carry it through with consistency. Letter writing, moreover, is quite an art in itself, it is not just spilling one’s guts, and it is not just therapy, and it is definitely not for navel gazing. May give this novel a miss; the quotes you included showed a rather pedestrian handling of language.
“Myth of the model minority.” Hmm… I have only ever heard the term (with or without the ‘myth’ part) as part of a discussion of what a bad thing it is, almost always conducted by an Asian American (terrible term) person or someone claiming to speak on their behalf.
I can understand an African-American critiquing the term. A deconstruction would be fruitful in that context. But for Asian Americans to get bent out of shape over it ? Maybe at the patronizing sound of it ? Perhaps ‘model’ could be replaced by a better adjective.
Lisa, I completely agree with you that the 2nd-person writing was not a good choice.
Ajit, I think the author is ‘bent out of shape’ by the model-minority term because she thinks it papers over a host of issues: that the community actually has lots of people who are not wildly successful, that there is pressure to conform to that term, and implicit pressure to hide any family affairs that do not agree with the pretty picture. So in this case, she is criticizing it from the inside. A change of term would not change her view, I think.
I am not sure such a term exists except as an object of criticism. (I’d be happy to be corrected if this were shown to be a term of art in a prevalent dominant social narrative.)
If the author felt such a pressure, that pressure almost certainly came from her parents. Very likely the parents are unaware of this discourse of model minorities.