Saving Face

While I was watching the film "Saving Face" today in class, one of the ideas that kept popping out at me was the Critical Race Theory term of model minority myth. While the characters in "Saving Face" did not interact with other races in a way that demonstrated that other races felt that the Chinese American characters were model minorities, it did appear that many of the Chinese American parents acted with model minority myth assumptions about their children. Whilemina, for example, becomes a surgeon at a hospital, and is seemingly better off than her parents and her grandparents in terms of career success. Vivien becomes a dancer, but dances ballet to fulfill her father's wishes, rather than dancing modern dance like she wants to. Both Whilemina and Vivien exhibit the model minority myth in that their parents (and grandparents in Whilemina's case) all seem to believe that they are hardworking and intelligent and push them to be successful in ways that don't align with the girls' dreams.

When people in the film didn't follow the 'model minority' myth, they were shunned by Chinese American society: Whilhemina's mother becomes pregnant out of wedlock and is kicked out of her father's house because she will not disclose the name of her child's father and will not marry the father. In going against Chinese traditions regarding family and women's behavior, the mother goes against the model minority myth, causing her to be shunned by society. A similar thing happens when Whilhemina reveals to her mother that she is a lesbian: rather than accepting Whilhemina for who she is, her mother tells her that she cannot both love her and be a lesbian, since it goes against the Chinese family tradition. It is Chinese tradition for a woman to marry and to have children, no matter what their sexual orientation is - by telling her mother that she is a lesbian and that she does not want to marry a man, Whilhemina goes against the model minority myth since her behavior is something that should not be emulated.