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Permission and Perfectionism: A Conversation with erin Khuê Ninh

“I think if we can hear from each other that being a model minority is not the only way to have value, and that being the good child is not the only way to be a good person, what might that unlock?”

I first learned of erin Khuê Ninh’s scholarship a few years ago, while attending a writing workshop. A fellow writer very helpfully suggested I read her former professor’s first work of literary criticism, Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (NYU Press, 2011), based on the themes she noticed it shared with the piece I had brought in for feedback. It would be another year before I finally cracked open the book during a residency in Banff, where I was still struggling to make sense of my own novel manuscript and its autobiographical elements. It was Ninh’s words that finally enabled me to confront my experience coming of age as a young Asian American woman.

The best critical writing not only introduces readers to new ideas but also helps us better understand ourselves and our place in the world. Ninh’s new study, Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities (Temple University Press, 2021), examines with great care and research two ripped-from-the-headlines cases of individuals posing as students at universities they did not actually get into: Azia Kim passed as a Stanford freshman for eight months before being exposed in 2007; Jennifer Pan feigned four years of undergrad, followed by pharmacology school, then hired hitmen to kill her parents in 2010.

Ninh also revisits the “Honor Roll Murder” of 1992, where five teenagers in California’s Orange County killed their classmate Stuart Tay. In revisiting the case that inspired Justin Lin’s film Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), Ninh searches for answers beyond Hollywood mythologizing by interviewing two of the real-life perpetrators, Robert Chan and Kirn Young Kim. Perhaps it is her background as an academic that allows the associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to refrain from moralizing, and thereby avoid the trap of respectability politics. Passing for Perfect does not so much debunk the caricature of the high-achieving Asian student and their “Tiger parents” as ask why these stereotypes persist. Over Zoom, Ninh and I discussed the realities, as well as the toxicity, of model minority identity and what’s at stake for all of us.

—Mimi Wong

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Mimi Wong

In the book’s introduction, you describe Passing for Perfect as a “prequel” to your first book, Ingratitude. What was it that you didn’t feel ready or more prepared to tackle in Ingratitude that you wanted to explore in this new book?

erin Khuê Ninh

I know that “prequel” is such an odd way of describing this relationship between the two books, but I wanted to convey that they were telling the same story. When I was writing the first book, I needed for it to be very identifiable as an academic book. I was still so close to the subject. I needed all the barriers [scholarship provided] in order to manage the writing of it. Being autobiographically based, the first book was a way to work out what I needed to work out. But I ended it prematurely. I wanted things to turn out well. The second book feels more to me like I am still able to tap into those feelings in a way that is vivid, but not overwhelming. And this time around, I don’t diminish anything. This ending is real.

MW

I feel like you’ve named something that I really struggled my entire life to figure out how to put into words. In Passing for Perfect, you connect all the dots:

This book considers life at the intersections of some demanding social, familial, and educational realities—among them, neoliberal abandonment of the middle class, “Tiger” and “helicopter” parenting, and increasingly racialized and intensified competition for admission at top-tier universities.

I’m so curious about how you arrived at seeing this larger picture, which is a storm of different issues. I don’t think it’s really been framed that way in mainstream conversation. How did you get here?

eKN

I wouldn’t vouch for having been able to nail all the pieces, or having been able to get them to snap tightly together. But the starting point that differentiates my work, and maybe gave me a different angle on things, is that I came at this from a middle-class sensibility. Granted, my family were refugees. We started off with very little. But by [the time I was in] high school, we were comfortable enough. The particular way that we were moving through “model minority” life, we had made the very earnest transition from refugee to model minority. We were Doing It. And so, in the 1980s and 90s, when neoliberalism starts to really gain speed, post-1965 immigrants’ kids hit high school—we were part of that first wave of these things coming together.

I also think that being middle-class is an interesting vantage point. Because when you’re the kids of a poor family, the narrative of parental sacrifice is much more experientially and visually compelling. Those kids see the kinds of hours that parents put into grueling work, and that kind of evidence of the senses will overwhelmingly persuade one of the power of that sacrifice.

But for me, from our by-then-middle-class lifestyle, I was able to pick up on this disconnect between the hyperbolic narrative of sacrifice as if done for me, specifically for me, and the relatively normal way of getting a paycheck and paying the mortgage. What would my parents have done differently? Would they not have gone to work? Would they not have made dinner? What would they have not done? That enabled me to delaminate the narrative of familial sacrifice that is not seeing itself in an American context of capitalism. That was the entry point from which other things became visible.

Over the decades, helicopter parenting has actually just become more prevalent, more intense. It’s also particularly strong among the Asian American middle class. There’s this additional way that kids who are in this privileged pocket of the middle class are able to position themselves as really damn close to perfect. I think for them it also becomes more tormenting to be deemed failures. To be hitting all of these marks, from the outside world and from within the family, and still not be enough? That can become more visible in its cruelty.

MW

This idea of perfection is an impossibility, so you can never quite achieve it. It’s just something you’re chasing. It’s interesting that when you describe the model minority life, I know exactly what you’re talking about. You write, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a model minority: this being the social identity that American society demands of the biologically Asian subject.” For those who have not read your book yet, can you explain what that means?

eKN

I have this tongue-in-cheek SAT analogy that I use. It’s woman is to feminist as Asian is to Asian American. So that’s how I tend to explain Asian Americans. But I think the flip side of that is woman is to sexist as Asian is to model minority. Both of these positions, where they are ideological investments that are actually self-destructive, support and perpetuate the status quo. This is what the gender/racial hierarchy wants.

MW

You draw from the idea Judith Butler puts forth about gender as performance, and you take it one step further to talk about race as performance. And that’s what this model minority mask that we’re all wearing is.

eKN

Do you wear the mask because you feel unsafe without it?

MW

I think it becomes a tool. Maybe it provides some cover. But in terms of safety, I think that’s what’s been so eye-opening about the past year and a half as conversations about anti-Asian hate are part of our everyday consciousness. It doesn’t provide any safety to hide in this identity. As a woman, I feel like I’ve always known the darker side: that being an Asian woman is to be perceived a certain way that actually makes me feel less safe.

eKN

Absolutely. We’ve witnessed very literally that it does not provide safety. I do think that we still perform it in the hopes of [being able] to distinguish ourselves as the acceptable ones, the ones who know the rules, even distinguishing ourselves from the immigrant foreigner. Perform your model minority-ness and people’s anxieties abate, at least in these white spaces that you go into. I feel like among other Asian Americans—since we can judge ourselves by the same standards—being able to keep up with performance also shields us from criticism. Or jockeying.

MW

Do you mean competition among ourselves?

eKN

Yeah, the little bit of sniping. This is how the model minority is constructed. It’s constructed competitively. That is part of the core DNA of the model minority. How many slots are there? Can I grab one? So I feel like part of the model minority performance is defensive.

MW

I really enjoyed reading your deep dive into the cases of the college impostors. There’s a certain way these stories are reported. They’re very sensationalized. But I think when you come from an ultra-competitive Asian American (or Asian diasporic) minority community like the one I grew up in, they sound like people I went to high school with. They don’t sound that different from me, or people I know. They did something very extreme, but I can see that path. Maybe one wrong turn, and that could have been me.

eKN

That sentiment was so commonly echoed. The mainstream coverage [provided] for a lot of laughing and pointing and entertainment value, turning up the absurdity, but there was a refusal to understand where this was coming from. And then, there would be this other current of people going, Oh my god, that could have been me.

What I hear you echoing in terms of the thesis that I write is kind of a controversial one. It’s something that my readers have felt a little leery of. Part of my argument is that what we’re seeing here with the outlandish college impostor, they’re actually part of the same decision tree. Other branches lead to suicide, and yet other branches lead to homicide. College impostoring is one. Lifelong perfectionism is another. And I’m not equating all the outcomes as the same. These are different people going through the decision tree, too, but the tree they’re navigating, the problem they’re trying to find solutions for is pretty much the same problem.

MW

What distinguishes these college impostor cases from something like the recent college admissions scandal that involved rich, white celebrities? Why is it important that we don’t just write off what you call “passing for model minority” as a problem of privilege or class?

eKN

I think there’s a qualitative difference between the “Varsity Blues” types of scandals and these college impostors that I’m looking at. In the Varsity Blues instance, these are all students or their parents, already very privileged, who decide to cheat the system. So they take shortcuts and get the advantages in the game and the system.

But what makes college impostors like Azia [Kim] fascinating, is that what they’re doing garnered them no inherent, financial, educational advantage whatsoever. In fact, it was a disadvantage in terms of economic opportunity costs. Why would someone go through the performance of college, and maybe even do a lot of the work in college and spend whatever money it takes to do that, and gain no degree? That requires a whole different set of explanations.

Wherever we fall on the income spectrum, we are all measured by the same inflated standard. And then kids with fewer resources just have less chance of actually measuring up to that same inflated standard. So class does make a difference. But I don’t think it’s exclusive to the middle class.

I do think it’s a First World issue. That it’s a function, quite literally, of immigration to First World countries and Western ones with similar histories of Asian labor, multiracial racialization, and also similar capitalist systems of education and opportunity. And so, it computes that one of the main subjects that I talk about [Jennifer Pan] is Canadian, not American. And there is model minority discourse in Australia. You know, I Googled “model minority” and “Australian” experimentally and there are results: people saying that they thought of themselves as model minority Asian Australians.

MW

How do you see mental health factoring into all of this?

eKN

Seen from some angles, mental health is what the book is all about. Some of the outcomes [of model minority life] are obviously depression, anxiety, etc. But after I’d written this book, I noticed it is actually very restrained in its use of mental health language. I feel like I’ve taken a Betty Kershner–like position, the psychologist [in chapter 3], who refrained from using DSM language, diagnostic terms for mental disorders. I did a word search in my own book. Depression turns up unbelievably just three times, which is kind of amazing to me because in Ingratitude that was basically a whole chapter. Three times. I think suicide actually comes up 13 times.

I think that with these particular subjects it’s too easy to dismiss them with those kinds of clinical labels. And so, I didn’t use them. I didn’t use diagnostic labels because it makes it too easy to dissociate ourselves from these kids, that they have personal disorders or personal pathologies. I wanted to stay with the cultural. I kept framing the question in terms of what do these mindsets and messages feel like as lived experiences, and not to compartmentalize them and make them shrink-wrappable.

MW

For the college imposters, it seems like a lot of their decisions were made out of desperation. Why do you think it was so difficult for them to believe they could escape or find an alternative way forward?

eKN

If you can pick and choose what you want to lose, it’s very different from forfeiting everything. I think that part of the problem is that it’s presented to us within the moment as all or nothing—either you are perfect, or you are nothing. And what you lose when you’re nothing includes family, community, and a sense of who the hell you are. If your buy-in or upbringing within this mindset has been complete, and you do not have available alternatives to imagine, then nothing also means losing a sense of identity. How do you opt for that? How does somebody forfeit all that?

MW

When we talk about stereotypes, we’re talking about something that is externally imposed. But I think it’s important to explore, as you do, the ways in which we’ve internalized expectations. How would you describe what that distinction is?

eKN

We talk in scholarship more often about stereotypes being internalized even when they’re hateful—so internalized hate and stereotype threat. But if you can internalize stereotypes even when they’re hateful, then surely you can internalize them when they are shiny and flattering. Yet we don’t talk about that so much. How people end up wanting to be what the model minority stereotype says they are. 

MW

You devote an entire chapter to the case that served as the inspiration for Better Luck Tomorrow. I remember as a teenager going with my best friend, sitting in a movie theater full of other Asian Americans watching that movie, and feeling like it was the most accurate depiction I had seen, maybe ever, about my own high school experience. During the pandemic, I found myself rewatching it and picking up on what you observed about BLT operating as a masculine fantasy. What is happening in the mythologizing of the true story? And what’s missing, what don’t we see?

eKN

I think both things are true. When you were watching with your friend, you did initially experience a sense of recognition?

MW

Yes, 100 percent.

eKN

And you didn’t experience that from the perspective of Stephanie, the cute love interest, right? You weren’t like, “That’s who I am.”

MW

No. She was the pretty girl.

eKN

In the commentary I’ve read, even women who watched the movie identified as the protagonists, the male main characters. And I don’t think enough was said about that. Instead, what we talked about was that it was this triumphant film redeeming Asian American masculinity. And yes, there’s a lot of textbook Asian American masculinity going on here—the textbook denigration and then the textbook Western redemption of it.

When I talked to Robert [Chan], and Kirn [Young Kim], one of the questions that I had floating around in my head was how much would that map on to what they actually felt as children, and how much was it the driving force of what they themselves had done. It turned out it wasn’t. The film had projected so much textbook Asian American masculinity anxiety onto this story that was actually about something newer. Second-generation Asian American life as this emerging and recognizable thing. It was zeitgeist.

MW

With Passing for Perfect, I really appreciate that you’re able to zero in on that high school educational culture, and really dive into that, because that hasn’t been thoroughly talked about. What do you hope readers will take from your work?

eKN

I feel like that high school space is where the wider expectations, racial issues, and our family just zip into each other. This [book] is not exclusively focused on family. But it’s the ways that all these things interlock that make them so impossible to hack our way out of. 

You’re asking about what I hope my readers would take away from this book, and if I had to say it in a word, it would be permission. It’s not that I’ve been authorized to permit anything—no one is authorized—but I think if we can hear from each other that being a model minority is not the only way to have value, and that being the good child is not the only way to be a good person, what might that unlock?

Like I said, this book ends where the first one wasn’t ready to end. I wanted to end without the assurance that things would be redeemable. Maybe we shouldn’t redeem them. Maybe the desire to redeem them is the problem.