Performing the "Oriental": Professionals and the Asian Model Minority Myth

This article examines how young Chinese American and Korean American professionals perform the role of the Asian model minority in an attempt to navigate through the privileged realm established by successful transpacific Asian professionals of the 1980s to early 1990s. Ironically, respondents' cultural production and forced embodiment of their imagined selves as the Asian model minority facilitates their marginalization as the Asian "Other" while problematizing the Asian model minority myth.