iris chang on chinese as formerly portrayed in the media

"The lack of strong Chinese American role models in popular culture--or even of realistic images of Chinese Americans as diverse and multifaceted human beings--bothered me deeply. People tend to perform at a level society expects of them, not their actual potential, and I imagined there must have been many young Americans of Asian descent who suffered a crisis of confidence as a result of coming to see themselves as they thought others saw them. But worse , I also knew that, based on my knowledge of the literature on genocide, atrocities are more likely to occur if the perpetrators do not see their victims as real people. The first, essential, step toward getting a population to visit torture and mass murder on a group is to dehumanize the group, to reduce them to alien things. This is what those books, films, and television programs were doing they were far from depicting the kinds of fascinating, complex, accomplished people I knew."

I have to read this book called The Chinese in America for my history of chinese americans, and I am amazed by some surprisingly dead on observations about the "culture," tendencies moreso, of chinese immigrants (how most came over to seek higher education, lived in college towns, and seeked to gain a foothold intellectually rather than politically; this ultimately set them up to for the model minority myth). Crazy interesting observations. My dad lived in to denton to get his masters in computer engineering at UNT, before moving our family to plano-- i was not yet born then.