May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPI). To mark the occasion, we're excited to introduce you to some members of the Biblio Lotus Team! This blog post is by Jung Mee P., Quincie Douglas Library.
Am I a Model Minority?
In many ways, I lived up to the model minority stereotype (Cheng 1997). I played violin and piano, obtained Ivy League degrees, and stayed out of trouble. My parents believed that if I did well in school, I wouldn’t have to struggle the way they did, working 7 days a week as small business owners who had to constantly keep the coin laundry open for customers. Unless I had orchestra rehearsals afterschool, I could be found at my family’s coin laundry. It was right next to a Wendy’s. I can shamelessly say I ate everything that appeared on a Wendy’s menu from 1996 to 2001, including those pita wraps that were supposed to be healthy options.
Luckily, I enjoyed school and did well. When I went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, I realized that I was a rarity as a first-gen college student. My friends had parents who were doctors, lawyers, or financiers. The ivy walls allowed me more freedom to follow my interests. Instead of pursuing safer tracks like pre-med, law, or finance, I studied history and sociology, where I learned that inequalities in society are hard to overcome within a generation.
Penn was very pre-professional. Mix that with my aversion to take bigger risks meant I would pursue more schooling thereafter. I wish at times that my move to New York City after college was to pursue fiction writing or join an improv group like The Upright Citizen’s Brigade. Instead, I was there to get a master’s in quantitative methods in the social sciences from Columbia. That was me going out of my comfort zone.
Even after my master’s degree, I did not feel ready to jump into the workforce so I prolonged my education. Luckily Cornell accepted me into their fully funded PhD program in sociology. At Cornell, I co-authored an award-winning journal article, but I am equally proud of the fact that I left grad school with a Roth IRA and some savings to start my postdoc at the University of Southern California in LA. I still love the discipline, but instead of focusing on an academic career, I got a series of jobs that ranged from teacher to data analyst. At each job, I felt somewhat out of place. Or was it the glass-bamboo ceiling combined with a sprinkle of motherhood penalty?
In Tucson, I was able to get another graduate degree—supporting the overeducation thesis of the Model Minority Myth (Sakamoto et al, 2012), this time in the Master of Library and Information Science program. My entry into librarianship has been deliberate though. Instead of taking another job as a data analyst, I wanted a job that combined my passions for research and public service.
I found my footing as a librarian at PCPL. My ability to speak Korean and German (through a series of study abroad trips, topic for perhaps another post) are considered assets, same with my ability to analyze qualitative and quantitative data (thanks Columbia). Most people think being a librarian is a safe choice. But like Donna Reed’s character in the alternate timeline of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), where she becomes a librarian instead of Jimmy Stewart’s wife, being a librarian at least for me, is a bold choice.
Works Cited
Cheng, Cliff. “Are Asian American Employees a Model Minority or Just a Minority?” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, vol. 33, no. 3, Sept. 1997, pp. 277–90. SAGE Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886397333002.
It’s a Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. Perf. James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, and Thomas Mitchell. RKO, 1946. Film.
Sakamoto, Arthur, et al. “The Myth of the Model Minority Myth.” Sociological Spectrum, vol. 32, no. 4, July 2012, pp. 309–21. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/02732173.2012.664042.
