Not Your Model Minority

Winning Against Yourself: Aidan Cuy ‘23

By Andrea Dalagan ‘22 | APIA Major & Staff Writer

At the height of the pandemic, Aidan Cuy ‘23 and the W&M gymnastics team saw their academic and athletic lives in peril with the team among the sports that were canceled and then reinstated (at least until 2021-22) after community protests and advocacy, with athletes like Aidan at the forefront. To illuminate their experience, we are featuring Aidan’s story here. Mask-cladded on a November night, Aidan took a study break for our quick interview. While now relieved, this wasn’t how he felt months earlier. Aidan disclosed his feelings about the abrupt news in September. Arriving at William and Mary from Rhode Island with the expectation of being a student athlete for the next four years, it felt like the rug was pulled from under him. “I just had that mindset that this is what it’s gonna be, that I’m gonna have a solid foundation to build off of…” Aidan has been a competitive gymnast since he was six years old. Spirited and a climber, his parents decided to place him in gymnastics as a way to release his energy in a safer way. As the years went by, gymnastics became a mode of bringing himself to another level. He saw himself as the competition and pushed himself to be better. He simply wanted to see how far he can go even without a clear-cut path to walk on in front of him.

“That’s kind of like how it is on a day to day basis too when you first start, you kind of just throw yourself into the fire a bunch of times, and you kind of just hope something comes out of it.” While it has always been a part of his life, it wasn’t until high school that he saw potential in gymnastics as something beyond an after-school activity. In his first year of qualifying for national championships, Aidan did better than he had anticipated. Even years and years after this, Aidan found himself coming back to these competitions. It was only then that he saw a future in gymnastics. “You start to see all the pieces that have been building up from the years kinda start to come together and it’s very rewarding at that point…bringing yourself to new heights, like winning against yourself.” This sense of accomplishment and bringing himself to new heights continues to push Aidan in gymnastics to this day. For a while, however, the combination of the abrupt news in September 2020 and the different structure of life during the pandemic took a toll on him. Aidan sees all of this as an opportunity to involve himself in things beyond school and the gym while staying positive, patient, and resilient--just as he was when his parents first brought him to the gym.

Breaking Blatant Bottlenecks: Aidan Lowe ‘24

By Mey Seen ‘23 | APIA Major & Staff Writer

For many of us, college is an intellectual transitionary period produced by an increased exposure to critical analysis of things that we experience day-to-day. Concepts like identity become elaborate and complex. We notice that it is muddled by the ideals of strangers, misconceptions that they obtain from pop culture, and centuries of both overt and covert hostility. Our identity is not to be a product of our own fashioning, but dictated to us and manipulated by the hands of those who have no stake in it. It is often the liberation from our past experiences and reinforced messages through the discovery of knowledge that enables us to take agency in the formation of our identities.

“Model minority” is a modern example of such imposed identity that lines the subconscious of Asian American lives. It is generally understood as the conceptualization of Asian Americans as essentially perfect students and workers, quietly successful members of society, and the best model for immigrant and minority upward mobility. From Aidan Lowe’s understanding, model minority actively streamlines Asian Americans into a particular pathway through life. The myth is not simply representation but a pressuring force. But it wasn’t until registration freshman year that Aidan became familiar with the model minority stereotype. Like many others, Aidan grew up with the myth embedded into his self concept and was forced to accept it as fact because, simply, no one showed him otherwise. Isolated throughout childhood as the only or one of few Asian Americans in school, Aidan grew accustomed to being expected to succeed because of his race. Despite being regularly racially othered, Aidan doesn’t view his Asian American identity as having played a key role in his life until college. First semester freshman year he stumbled upon Intro to Asian & Pacific Islander Studies (APIA 205). It piqued his interest and he asked his mother, a Pacific Islander American activist in Washington for the APIA community, what APIA studies is about. It was this conversation that enlightened Aidan to modern Asian discrimination via the model minority myth. Aidan decided to wait until this fall semester to take the class, but it’s the class that he’s enjoyed most during his time at William & Mary. Unlike any other class he’s thus taken, Intro is truly relevant to his life. It has provided an avenue for not only selfrealization, but a deeper understanding of his Hawaiian heritage. It seems Intro has unlocked a missing part of Aidan; his discussion of APIA history has its own inertia, one thought leaping full-bodied into the next, pushing to let everyone know the history of a silenced people. Pushing to know more. Though empowered and impassioned by this new connection with a long-neglected part of his identity, Aidan isn’t consumed by it. He continues to pursue his other interests and passions like philanthropy as a member of a W&M fraternity. When Aidan isn’t engulfed in schoolwork or taking a video game break, he’s (now virtually) hanging out with his favorite people on campus - his fraternity brothers. The community that they built - one in which all the members are not only accepted but appreciated - has made Aidan feel at home in school.

26 Navigating the Boxes and Bubbles: Alex Park ‘24

By Andrea Dalagan ‘22 | APIA Major & Staff Writer

With the red string lights glowing faintly in the background and a desk lamp illuminating her, Alex Park ‘24 logged in to our Zoom interview. Gentle voiced and introspective, she began to tell me about her experiences. Growing up in a small town in Kansas, Alex has felt that her Irish and Korean roots are something uniquely hers. Thinking about her identity and how it affected the way she saw the world, she has learned early on that people cannot be simply categorized. “I try to think more broadly in that sense for other people too. And it’s not like everybody is going to fit in these boxes and these bubbles,” she said, looking to the side as she gathered her words. After moving from Kansas to Northern Virginia, Alex recounted a particular moment in which she was confronted with her mixed identity. Her family had just moved to Fairfax, Virginia, and as tourists and newcomers do, they planned to see the sights in Washington DC. However, these plans were cut short when her mother decided to cancel the day trip at the last minute. The reasoning? A white supremacy riot. Having grown up in a white town in Kansas and predominantly around her white relatives, Alex thought that her family would be fine; she was white, she looked white.

No, you don’t. Her mother’s response hit her like a ton of bricks. It was at that moment Alex realized she wasn’t fully white and that others were going to perceive her differently because of it. While other preteens were navigating the different contours of who they are as people, Alex was doing this through her race. “I don’t know. It’s taken me until now to be fully comfortable in the fact that I don’t belong any less and I can still be very proud of my heritage and my family even if I’m not fully Korean or fully Irish.” As a freshman in her first semester of college, Alex deliberately enrolled in APIA 205: Introduction to Asian Pacific Islander American Studies. The course has affected how she now sees a lot of the things around her. She became more perceptive to the problems within systems and to the experiences and voices of other minority groups. She explained that while broad topics are tackled in the class, there is a focus on individual stories and events intentionally made by people. Thoughtful with her words, Alex brought up to me and emphasized that these events involved individual people with their own experiences; that with these experiences, people have mobilized and actively worked against systems that she had not seen before in her life. As she continued with the class, others’ individual stories, such as that of Eddie Kim, in the backdrop of large events like the LA Riots, reflected back to Alex’s family and others in her life. Although Alex’s time with the class is limited to this fall semester, she sees herself carrying the knowledge she gained beyond. “The biggest thing for me is taking what I know and using that to inform other people and help create these larger movements... I think that I do have the opportunity to do so here and I’d like to take advantage of those opportunities to help as much as I can.”

For Grace Liscomb, discovering and embracing her identity is informed by a lifetime of being accepted to a point. As an Asian American transnational adoptee growing up in a predominantly white Virginian town, she lived on a cusp of belonging. “I grew up in white culture so I feel more in alignment with whites, but obviously with ‘American culture’ I don’t look the part. So it’s just walking that line of ‘who are you really? Where do you fit?’ There’s definitely this idea of liminality that’s race based and between who I am supposed to be.” Like others torn between cultures, Grace sometimes questions authenticity. “It’s never really a perfect balance or equilibrium, and then within that there’s this subculture of being a transnational adoptee. There’s this kind of racial imposter syndrome that everything I do that’s remotely Asian or Chinese makes me feel like a fraud.”

Arriving to William & Mary was jarring. It awakened Grace to Asian American experiences across the nation and throughout history. “There’s so much that I didn’t know that I found out. I’ve basically relearned twelve years of public education just because there’s a lot of issues that I didn’t know that were plaguing the community — a lot of stereotypes that I myself held and didn’t even realize and internal biases.”

In realizing her own internal biases, Grace also began noticing the prevalence of those same attitudes in others from home. “I couldn’t take a picture of a latte I ordered without it being ‘white.’ But I couldn’t talk about the Harvest Moon Festival and going to Peter Chang’s afterwards without it being ‘so Asian’ of me. It can’t ever just be ‘Grace wanted to get food and get crunk.’” Arriving to William & Mary was jarring. It awakened Grace to Asian American experiences across the nation and throughout history by participating in AASI (Asian American Student Initiative) and taking Intro to APIA with Professor Aguas. When asked about the highlight of this immersion in the program and community, Grace confidently replied: “Decolonizing myself. The public education system sucked in general, but especially when you go to the public education system in a white baptist town. There’s so much that I didn’t know that I found out. I’ve basically relearned twelve years of public education.“ Grace’s increasing awareness arose against a backdrop of reasssurance. As an adoptee, her family made constant efforts to assure Grace she belonged, which, while making for a positive home life, led to unexplored and confusing discomfort outside the home. “Biology doesn’t make a family, but that kind of rhetoric kind of shielded me from the fact that I was...you can’t sugarcoat that you’re different.” That feeling of difference was bidirectional. “It’s not that I thought I was white — there were times I forgot I was Asian.”

Decolonizing Myself: Grace Liscomb ‘24

By Mey Seen ‘23 | APIA Major & Staff Writer