What Is The Asian American Model Minority Myth?

Tomas uses passing as a method to gain material wealth. Tomas has a dog selling business where he sells overpriced attack dogs to celebrities as well as pit bulls from poorer parts of LA for higher prices in West LA; his business runs on the falsely created perception of the dogs’ pedigree and their German training. In one of the first scenes, Tomas is selling an attack dog to a young director. “Tomas always gives the dogs German names and trains them with foreign words… He liked to tell them Nazi scientists did experiments in dog breeding just as they did in genetics and rocketry… All this is a lie” (Roley 20). Although we talked about passing within the context of humans, this animal example serves as an important aspect of Tomas’s passing.
While the Asian American Model Minority Myth exists, the brothers do not follow that narrative. The brothers are 2nd generation Asian Americans from a family where the mother is not a skilled worker. Their father married their mother “because he wanted someone meek and obedient but had been fooled because she came with a nagging extended family” (Roley 24). His perception of Asian Women as “weak and obedient” is reflective of a large stereotype which is the mainstream narrative of Asian women in the US. According to Page, his racism against her and her victimization “replays the cultural experience of white imperialist domination in the Philippines” (Page 186). The experience of watching their father victimize their mother has ingrained the idea of Asian submissiveness into the two brothers. It has rendered the Asian American as a weak role, incapable of protecting itself and gaining wealth. This tale the Asian body being seen as weak is presented over and over again in the form the mother. The mother is forced to move around engineering students when they easily would have moved for anyone else (Roley 179). The mother is afraid of asking the girls at the makeup counter to ring her up (Roley 180). The mother is pestered by Ben’s mom to pay $800 for an insignificant dent on a back of their new car (Roley 210). The last example of the mother being forced to pay excessive amounts of money for a small dent shows the race and economic power imbalance between white and Asian American women. Because we know money is an important influencing factor in this book, the fact Ben’s mother can demand so much for a small accident shows how much power whites have over Asians. The mom cannot say no to Ben’s mom and is placed at the mercy of a white woman. If Tomas and Gabe see how race plays a