| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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The complexities of being part of a diverse society cannot be addressed solely by academic achievement. Moreover, Stacy Lee (1996) and others have shown that the overemphasis on Asian American children’s academic successes has perpetuated the model minority myth and has prevented them from receiving attention from teachers and administrators if they are failing academically.
There is an inherent contradiction between how assimilation is portrayed and how people of Asian American descent fit into this paradigm. On the one hand, since Asian Americans are able to climb the socioeconomic ladder by the native-born generation, they are regarded as being able to assimilate successfully into the American capitalist structure. This phenomenon can be interpreted also as an example of a group of people who has been able to transcend Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron’s (1990) structural reproduction model despite beginning their lives in the United States as immigrants. Of course, this interpretation ignores their position in the socioeconomic structure in their homeland and assumes that everyone starts with a fresh slate when they immigrate to the United States. Nevertheless, it buys into two American characteristics of success and assimilation: the frontiersman mentality of “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” and modernity often described as forging a life in the New World by shed-ding the strictures of the Old World.
On the other hand, this rate of success is attributed not only to the social factors that contribute to upward mobility such as social and financial capitals, but also to Asian cultural capital associated with Eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Confucianism.