Globalization and "Asian Values": Teaching and Theorizing Asian American Literature

College Literature, Winter 2005 by Shu, Yuan

Although "Asian values" have continued to define the material success of Asian Americans in American culture and society since the 1980s, these values have equally been deployed to suggest the inability of Asian Americans to embrace the American Dream, a problem that would culminate in the myth of "perpetual foreigner." As historian Sucheng Chan argues in her work, Asian Americans, "the history of Asians in America can be fully understood only if we regard them as both immigrants and members of nonwhite minority groups" precisely because Asian Americans have never been "completely absorbed into American society and its body politic" (1991, 187). Indeed, in the article, "How America Sees Us," carried in Asian Week in April 2001, staff reporter Sam Chu Lin documents a recent survey conducted by "the Committee of 100," an Asian American organization that has aimed to promote communication and understanding between Asian nations and the United States. The survey concludes with the astonishing discovery that the general American public today still considers Asian Americans as foreigners and resents their economic success at some point:

A sizable percentage gave somewhat negative marks to very negative marks against Asian Americans regarding such questions as: "Always like to be at the head of things (82 percent); hard to get close to, make friends with (67 percent); don't care what happens to anyone but their own kind (66 percent); so shrewd in business that other people do not have a fair chance at competition (55 percent)." (Lin 2001, 3)

When Asian Americans are branded as foreigners, the same "Asian values" that have been integrated into "the bedrock values" of America can immediately turn against them. Successful performance can be construed as a matter of showing off, cooperation within the individual family as indifference to American society, and interest and expertise in business as depriving others of opportunities.

The contradictory representation and positioning of "Asian values" in the American context suggest several important things. First, "Asian values" have been deployed by Asian and American governments to accentuate their own political agendas. Whereas the enunciation of "Asian values" in the Asian context coincided with the emergence of the Asian economic power, the affirmation of these same values in the American context was confined to the framework of Euro-American values and ethics. Moreover, though "Asian values" were invented and positioned at various points as an alternative to Western discourses by Asian politicians, business people, as well as academics, these same values ended up being identical and similar to the discourses of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Which is to say that the Asian economic success was more the result of global capitalism than the effect of Asian cultural values. Finally, even though Asian American intellectuals have expressed their skepticism toward "Asian values" and considered the "model minority" myth as a conspiracy of the dominant culture that pitts Asian Americans against other racial minorities in America, the emergence of Asian economic power and the circulation of the Asian American success story has reinforced and will continue to reinforce the images of Asians and Asian Americans as being successful in American culture and society.