Melodrama Unmade
The model minority in the Chinese diaspora
Amy R. Wong
Jarod Lew, The Most American Thing (Tina), 2021
About six months after I graduated from college, I heard that a former high school classmate of mine had died by suicide. She had gathered Unisom pills from several different pharmacies, driven to the parking lot of a junior college almost two hours out from where she lived, and climbed into the trunk of her car. She and I had shared several Advanced Placement classes in our public high school in southern California, whose high ranking in college admissions depended largely on the test scores of its Asian American students, many of whom lived outside the school’s wealthy district. Like me, this classmate was Chinese American. The reporting that followed her death was banal and predictable: another high-achieving child of Asian immigrants, pushed too hard to succeed. The emphasis was placed on her academic achievements: a perfect score on the SATs, studying STEM at an elite college, and recently passing her PhD candidacy exam in electrical engineering. Before you could even say “model minority,” the judgment had been made. The pressure had been too great.
I remember her, though, for her effortlessness. Not just in her studies, but of her being. There was also a kindness that felt both distant and intimate, practiced and yet utterly authentic. She spoke confidently and briskly, with a precise and somewhat British articulation that never felt flashy, but that stunned people with its perfect balance of efficiency and small flourishes of an unmistakable brightness. She was deeply charismatic—and, if we’re honest, that’s not a description often accorded to studious Asian Americans. I can see in my mind’s eye the small message of encouragement that she left in my yearbook; her impossibly perfect, contained lettering, slightly curved with serifs.
As I sat in front of my computer scanning the news reports, I fixated on a particular detail: that she had rolled her sweater into a small pillow on which to lay her head. I felt a flash of recognition—this is the way to do it. If I were to kill myself, the intractable problem I always come back to is that you can’t get rid of your own body. You can’t control who has to find it, deal with it, and it might be your immigrant parents. A suicide is messy, beyond your control, and liable to getting taken up for someone else’s melodramatic ends. As the Chinese diasporic writer Yiyun Li has hinted in her writing, memory is by nature melodramatic, but it is especially easy for the child of Chinese parents to become a victim of her parents’ melodrama. Li suggests that the power differential between parents and children more generally facilitates melodrama’s tyrannical logic—which “neither doubts nor justifies its right to be” and which can “imprison another person in it.” As a feeling, its too-muchness threatens to sweep others into its tide. Lost in my own thoughts, I somehow imagined the extreme tidiness of my classmate’s small act of rolling up the sweater saying: Don’t make this your melodrama.
Lost in my own thoughts, I somehow imagined the extreme tidiness of my classmate’s small act of rolling up the sweater saying: Don’t make this your melodrama.
Recalling this small detail, once again, sends me into a reverie on what such tidiness—or perhaps containment, or control?—might mean for the second-generation Chinese American daughter, besides a symptom of model minoritization’s achievement-oriented perfectionism. Especially for those of us with parents who lived through some part of the Maoist era before emigrating to North America, it seems remiss not to consider how the psychic conditions of China’s turbulent second half of the twentieth century have distorted family relations in the diaspora. Under Mao’s infamous party purges, one season’s proletarian hero could become the next’s traitor; and by the time the Cultural Revolution was underway, many had learned that surviving always-shifting grounds for denunciation meant that one had better be the denouncer, rather than the denounced. It proved immaterial whether one was guilty or not of any moral crime; what mattered was whether one was seen to occupy the position of guilt or not. As with melodrama, Maoism leaves no room for reality checking: it “neither doubts nor justifies its right to be,” and it can imprison you in a role you would rather not have to play.
It’s a history, too, with a potentially outsize influence on familial relations. The cruelties of this particular period involved, after all, the turning of intimates against one another and spectacles of personal betrayal as dramatic acts of moral righteousness, public humiliation, and torture. My own mother was “lucky,” in that she spent only a few months in China during the Cultural Revolution—but it was enough time to have its survivalist ethos seared into her mind.
During those months, a former teacher of hers poisoned herself, and afterwards, my mother witnessed her body hung from a tree. One of the many denounced and humiliated, in life and in death alike, the teacher perhaps found in self-destruction the only means of saying: Things are not as they seem. What happens to people who live through such large-scale psychotic conditions, and who then leave and start new families in the West? What happens to parents and children in the Chinese diaspora when there has been no collective reckoning, in the home country, with authoritarianism that turned students against teachers, children against parents?
In her first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), based on her own life, Sigrid Nunez, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese Panamanian father, writes: “Authoritarianism was, of course, in keeping with my upbringing; but now all the rules had a purpose.” Here, while subtly gesturing toward a link between state and parental authoritarianisms, Nunez is referring to her obsessive embrace of ballet as a more predictable form of authoritarianism, where “all the rules had a purpose.” In effect, Nunez suggests that, unlike the shifting grounds of morality in her household, the authoritarian demands of ballet had clear, unchanging, and therefore attainable, ends. What she notes here resonates with how, when I was a child, some of my own serious investments in closed systems of achievement—tests, essays, piano competitions—gave me a sense of security. It mattered not what the rules or ends of such things were, but only that they would not shift.
At the same time, Nunez’s psychic investments in ballet went hand in hand with a death drive: hers had to do with starving herself. I’ve often wondered: In carefully and effortlessly playing the games of achievement she knew she could win, was my classmate trying to live in other self-contained worlds, ones that might offer a respite from the kinds of melodramatic distortions that seem, particularly, to follow Chinese survivors of the Maoist era? Did she feel, as I have felt, that from exams to handwriting to the perfectly executed form of self-destruction, there was a reparative solace as well as perverse resistance in following such rule-bound containment and discipline, to a tee?
The perverse fantasy is that this secret distance, somehow, insures you against melodrama’s psychotic force.
Discussions of Asian American subject formation and psychoanalysis have generally focused on the social impacts of racialization. Under these frameworks, such acts of self-discipline easily read as the particular success of Foucauldian power in the case of ethnically Asian subjects hailed by the figure of the model minority. According to literary scholar David Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han, the reigning power of the model minority myth in the 1990s and early 2000s specifically produced “racial melancholia” as a “normative psychic state” for many Asian Americans. In holding out a promise of assimilation (to whiteness) that, however, also forecloses such transformation, Eng and Han argue that the structure of the model minority position produces psychic conditions of “unresolved grief.” Anne Cheng, meanwhile, has theorized how the racialization of Asians in the U.S. has historically occupied a “ghostly” triangulating position between Black and white, provoking a specific form of hidden racial grief.
The kind of self-discipline I describe, through Nunez, contains an unmistakable destructive drive, but it also has its masochistic pleasures: ones that stem, though I can only posit this from my own intuitions, from a certain carelessness and detachment that run things the other way from a pressurized investment in model minoritization. I venture that it could go something like this: the authoritarianism of something like ballet, or piano, or the SATs, is more logical than that of your melodramatic, immigrant parents, so there’s a distinct therapeutics in playing a game you’re allowed to play and “win” (to a degree). But the pleasure derives not from succeeding at the game or even the material benefits that may accrue from “achievement,” or a proximity to whiteness, but from others misunderstanding that you actually care about any of it. In fact, you might not even care about your life. The perverse fantasy is that this secret distance, somehow, insures you against melodrama’s psychotic force. This is what I cannot help but see in my classmate’s final act of rolling up that sweater.
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In Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (2011), the literary scholar erin Khuê Ninh offers a bracing account of how the subject position of the second-generation Asian American daughter is defined by a debt that can never be repaid to her parents. Rejecting wholesale the stranglehold that the older generation’s narrative of sacrifice for the younger has on the Asian diasporic imagination, Ninh argues that the position of ingratitude that the daughter is forced to inhabit is a result of collusion between capital’s logic of endless surplus and a discursive inheritance of filial piety. In some measure, I see Ninh gesturing toward the possibility that the ultimate ends of such collusion may be less the actual accrual of material wealth and more the authoritarian maintenance of power within the family. Some examples that Ninh offers as evidence include how first-generation immigrant parents persist with discursive justifications of the girl-child as a poor economic investment, even as such a claim becomes increasingly ahistorical materially; or how Asian parents continue their allegiance to classical music’s disciplinary regime despite the fact of its increasing obsolescence in the world of cultural capital. Ninh’s point is that indebtedness functions as a compulsory identity that maintains power within the Asian diasporic family as well as outside of it. If we acknowledge such collusions, we could come to a better understanding of how Asian American daughters suffer.
Ninh’s work offers a welcome approach to the difficulties the second generation faces when trying to make any claims of grievance. The game of comparison (e.g., you are depressed because you cannot go out with your friends; your ancestors were sent to the countryside to dig graves) is canon to Asian America, and it always results in checkmate. As Ninh reveals, however, what is maddening about the game of supposedly objective comparison is that it is ultimately an alibi for a different game, which is one of maintaining power through the discursive use of existing cultural tropes. In his recent collection of stories, Afterparties (2021), the late Cambodian American writer Anthony Veasna So foregrounds such discursive dynamics, too, by having his second-generation protagonists repeatedly refer to the trauma of their parents’ generation as “the genocide.” In deployments of this darkly comedic and opaque reference, he finds a gentle means of acknowledging the older generation’s unmetabolized trauma, while simultaneously revealing that trauma in such a state can also be put to use in ways that generate more suffering. This is a clever way of refusing to play the game of comparison when its ends are not directed toward justice, but toward the maintenance of certain relations of power in the family.
When trying to understand the recent historical forces that have shaped a specifically Chinese “moral psychology,” Nan Z. Da has cautioned that we must parse with care the precise ways in which gaslighting has functioned under the modern Chinese state. According to Da, as a writer, Yiyun Li is especially skilled at registering “the predicament of being left with no logical way to register a complaint,” which Da links to large-scale authoritarian tactics that have focused on eliminating spaces where “discernment” could receive any meaningful sense of shared recognition. Though Li’s stories of “isolated victimizations” are not always concentrated on Chinese characters, they capture the quality of suffering such tactics cause among intimates. My own sense is that Chinese parents of a certain generation may be driven less by a desire to collude with neoliberalist achievement and racial capitalism in the West, as a more generalized account of “Asian America” might emphasize, but by a need to reenact psychic relational patterns that premise survival on being “not guilty.” In the family, the parent maintains a not guilty position by demanding endless rituals of expiation from the child. In this dyad, both assume their positions in relation to a feeling, guilt, as identities forged within a zero-sum game.
Coerced toward endless reparation as a performance to iteratively prove a guilty position with no empirically verifiable grounds, repair does not so much repair as consolidate the relative positions of who is guilty and who is not.
I can see these games of who is and isn’t guilty (it/not-it) playing out in the story my mother tells of my grandmother, a divorcée and single mother. My grandmother, who was born to a wealthy landowning family, was a bright and ambitious young person who became kindled by revolution when communist reading groups began infiltrating her elite college, St. John’s University in Shanghai, in the late 1930s. As Mao’s revolution gained momentum, she denounced, with fervor, the very wealth and privilege that had allowed her to be among the handful of young women of her generation to follow intellectual pursuits. My mother blames my grandmother for abandoning my great-grandparents, and for upholding the justifications that would strip them of their livelihoods and send my great-grandfather to a labor camp from which he would never recover. Leveling the same charge of abandonment, my mother blames my grandmother for leaving her, her only child, to the care of boarding schools, nannies, and what was, in effect, an ever-shifting network of foster homes associated with the Communist Party. I was too young to have had the opportunity to talk about such things with my grandmother before she died, but I could see from the way that my mother took care of her in the months before she succumbed to colon cancer that my mother was doing so from a position of guilt, likely received from my grandmother, someone who would have needed, perhaps, to split off her own guilt.
As a twelve-year-old, I sensed in my mother’s overly conscientious routines of care a desperate impulse toward repair that made me want to avert my eyes, though I was not quite sure why. After my grandmother died, my mother told me that she had left her all her money, because in the end my grandmother saw how strong she was. She specifically said it was because my grandmother saw how she took care of me, alone, for two years when my father took a job in Hong Kong and my older sister had gone to college. Any accusations of guilt my mother wanted to throw back at my grandmother, she only spoke to me and my sister, her guilty daughters. It was true that my mother’s childhood was cruel, and my grandmother authoritarian. But it felt like my mother was concerned not so much with justice as with frantically shifting the game of guilt forward.
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For Melanie Klein, guilt is an important catalyst in the infant’s development of the reparative instinct and the capacity for love. According to Klein, the pre-Oedipal, primary attachment of child to parent is conditioned from the start by both love and hate, and it is the destructive instinct of hate that drives the infant toward a fantasy of destroying the loved object, typically the mother. Guilt thus enters the picture as a feeling of fear at one’s own capacity for destruction, and becomes the engine of repair. If we route the dynamics of authoritarianism and guilt in Chinese diasporic families through Kleinian theory, it follows that the fixing of guilt as solidified identity (rather than catalyzing feeling) leads to the short-circuiting of the normal development of a drive toward repair. The reparative drive—which in Kleinian development must be authenticated by a freely given and true sense of remorse—might thus become alienated from the child stuck in a position of guilt. Coerced toward endless reparation as a performance to iteratively prove a guilty position with no empirically verifiable grounds, repair does not so much repair as consolidate the relative positions of who is guilty and who is not. Here, the reparative drive short-circuits, because what might have begun as a genuine impulse becomes un-authenticated through the repeated demand to perform it.
I wonder, to what extent can psychoanalysis offer paths out of such incapacitating attachment, conditioned by a particular authoritarian history, and the suffering that it has wrought? In thinking about this question, I find myself returning to the constrained pleasures of subjecting oneself to disciplinary systems of achievement that gather under the sign of the model minority, which function through a relatively stable set of rules—and which also happen to be conveniently at hand if one is Asian American. I want to offer a risky hypothesis: that the rigid scripts of the so-called model minority, however compromised and complicit with social harm, provide a limited venue for enacting a genuine reparative drive. If the grounds for guilt are always transforming under your feet, putting an unshifting system of rules to therapeutic use makes a certain kind of sense. Of course, as a coercive, racialized script, the model minority functions through its own authoritarian logic, exerting a strong centripetal force that demands conformity. But it is not melodramatic in the way that it imprisons.
Under a Kleinian model of the reparative drive, turning away from people and toward work constitutes a displacement of repair’s necessary investment outward to new relations with persons beyond one’s primary attachments. I can see that to seek comfort in the scripts of the model minority is also to seek forms of self-destruction—however therapeutic it might feel to engage in games that offer some limited wins. It is a fantasy to imagine that these scripts offer a self-contained world; not only are such scripts complicit in systems of social harm, but also, the motivating fantasy spills inward from “outside” of it.
Let us stay a minute, though, with the reparative drive—a genuine desire to make whole, a fantasy of getting beyond guilty and not guilty. I see an instinct for living and for feeling real, but in a social landscape that has limited the scope of possible relations for Asian Americans. The promise I see in psychoanalysis is that it can show us something we have missed about the persistent pull of model minoritization: its seductively predictable operations, and an attendant capacitation of a melancholic’s refusal to live with terms that short-circuit the possibilities of repair.