Refusing the Will to Health: Neoliberal Wellness Culture and Asian American Literature

Abstract

© 2021 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System he 1966 article “Success Story of One Minority Group” published by U.S. News and World Report (along with the contemporaneous New York Times Magazine piece “Success Story, Japanese American Style” by William Petersen) launched the construction of Asian Americans as the model minority, which continues to be one of the dominant and most prevalent narratives about Asian Americans today. These articles emphasize the remarkable socioeconomic success and upward mobility this group has managed to achieve despite the long history of anti-Asian exclusion and discrimination in the United States. Scholars have called attention to how Asian American model minority discourse has been used to discipline other racial minorities and counter intensifying demands for redistributive justice, as evidenced by the opening passages of the U.S. News and World Report article: “Still being taught in Chinatown is the old idea that people should depend on their own efforts―not a welfare check―in order to reach America’s ‘promised land.’ . . . At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese-Americans are moving ahead on their own―with no help from anyone else” (6). S H A R O N N. T R A N