Coming from a middle class family in China, every return back home (Christmas, Spring Break, or Summer) means that I will be interrogated closely by my parents, grandparents, distant family members, or family friends on my experience in the United States. The topics of questions range from campus life to national politics. Obviously, these conversations take a casual form that I can comfortably answer most of these questions with the truth of my heart. However, I realize that there are always two topics that people ask.
The first is centered on academics. Despite that the American educational system has always been portrayed as a haven from standardized testing—a reason why many Chinese families send their children abroad, they still want to ensure that intellectual challenges remain. When I say intellectual challenges, these people really mean by the difficulty of STEM courses. Most of the Chinese parents (family friends) who I have talked to still firmly believe the superiority of STEM. In their eyes, humanities and social sciences represents a limited and worrisome career path, an unachievable idealism, or a complete waste of time. Even my parents, who always told me to discover and to follow my passion, still actively attempt to convince to study business or economy in college and to put my academic interests away as a minor.
However, I still consider myself lucky that I am born in a time when Chinese parents start to reconsider and to redefine education. During my parents’ time, studying humanities meant “losing face” for the family. My mom always told me the story of how she was interested in and good at social sciences in high school. She aspired to become a lawyer, but her dream was soon dashed as my grandfather firmly believed in the superiority of STEM. Fortunately, just a generation after, Chinese families, especially the socioeconomically privileged ones, came to realize that education is not just about employment, but also passions, ideals, and self discovery.
Interestingly, Chinese parents often think about education as one of the best ways of “investment”. STEM symbolizes a practical gateway for a person to advance socioeconomically and to return such investment back to his or her parents. In that context, studying social sciences represents a betrayal to the family and a lack of familial responsibility—in other word, losing face of the family.
Similarly, Losing Face presents this conflict between personal wants (intellectual interest) and social standing (practical career) as expected from the family as a multi-generational conflict. The movie more specifically examines how this conflict would intersect with gender identity: for the Chinese women, it is often a fight between true love and arranged marriages.
Yet, one question still remains: why and how does this conflict persist in the Chinese American community? One can argue that Chinese people are inherently practical, considering the previous generations of Chinese had to endure severe poverty under the Communist regime. But why has the White American educational culture of “well-roundedness” not successfully changed the Chinese American concept of education?
This goes back to the second most common question I received from other people: whether I can successfully fit in and become a part of the White American cultural circle. They perceive the successful America as the suburban White America. Some of the family friends did not even bother to hide their explicit racism, “how many black students are there in your school? I hope that there are not many.” Chinese American immigrants today, often socioeconomically privileged, feel a sense of insecurity on holding onto their socioeconomic status and prioritize the need to pass as white or at least present themselves superior to people of other minority groups.
Trespasser? offers a deeper examination into this Asian American insecurity. Although the model minority myth presents Asian Americans as the successful examples of racial uplifting, their status on the racial hierarchy is not as secured as that of white Americans. Asian Americans do not enjoy white privileges, and not everyone enjoys socioeconomic privileges that can easily be nullified. The model minority myth creates a perpetual motion upward. Those successful Asian Americans fight hard to retain their privileges for their children and themselves, while the unsuccessful ones fight even harder to move upward under the threat and fear that other minority groups might catch up later. White America uses the Model Minority myth to pit Asian Americans against other races, thus making solidarity among minorities more fragile and more inviable.
This insecurity binds Asian Americans to the familial responsibility of retaining their social standings and therefore saving the face of the family.