Chapter 17 - Jade Snow Wong and the Making of Model Minority Democracy

Summary

This chapter examines how the effect of the model minority myth to deflect attention away from the realities of structural racism helps to explain why Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong is still read today and why many scholars also draw on this text to unsettle the trope of the “good immigrant.” Besides analyzing Wong’s memoir to trace the literary origins of the model minority construct, this piece highlights how US Cold War politics created conditions that made Wong’s account of the “good immigrant” commercially viable, especially in light of how Asian American espousal of the credibility of US democracy became critical to winning the Cold War in Asia. The desire to foster better “East–West understanding” further prompted the federal government to make use of Wong’s dual heritage as a Chinese and as an American and enlist her as a cultural ambassador to East and Southeast Asia. As Wong, like her memoir, promoted the superiority of US democracy at the expense of addressing the realities of structural racism, she fell short of pushing the nation towards the full realization of its democratic principles only to reveal the limits and contradictions of US Cold War democracy.