Crazy Rich Asian International Students

In this chapter, we examine microaggressions between Asian international and Asian American students in US higher education, demonstrating how the racialization of Asians as the model minority and the pressures to assimilate into white, hegemonic American society reinforce such microaggressions. While made hypervisible by stereotypes of wealth, Asian international students also face racialization in the US context that portrays them invisible, submissive, and palatable to whiteness. As such, they are subject to microaggressions from their Asian American peers, either critiqued for a submissiveness that characterizes them as subservient to the US social order, or for a hypervisibility which marks them as perpetual foreigners. In perpetuating microaggressions against Asian international students, Asian American students strive to distance themselves from foreignness through intraracial Othering. Asian international students, on the other hand, also perpetuate microaggressions that deem Asian Americans less “American” than whites, thus upholding whiteness as the cultural norm. Underneath the microaggressions described in this chapter lie a destructive model minority myth which works to pit groups both racialized as “model minorities” against each other. Through three stories of microaggressions experienced by the authors, we illuminate the racialization and evolving construction of the model minority myth that enable these incidents to take place.