Arts & Sciences Magazine

By Emilia Wisniewski (COM`25)

As an undergraduate at Stanford, Takeo Rivera was bothered by the stereotype of Asian Americans as the “model minority” — high-achieving and exemplary members of American society.

While much of Asian American Studies literature focuses on “disrupting” or “dispelling” the “model minority” concept as a “myth,” Rivera, then a student in the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity major, felt that many of his peers embraced the stereotype, despite past marginalization of their community in the UnitedStates.

“I think it bothered me not because of a sense that it was false, but because many Asian Americans in fact willingly accepted it and made it true,” said Rivera, now an Assistant Professor of English in the College of Arts & Sciences. “Even though I agreed with that in political principle, I felt as if many Asian Americans had no interest in actually doing this, embracing the model minority to advance their self-interest.”

Rivera initially expressed his frustrations as an undergraduate by writing a slam poem, titled “Model Minority.” The poem, he says, represented a “ kind of yearning for a previous time when Asian American cultural politics was far more about solidarity and about the constant internationalist opposition to white supremacy and U.S. imperialism.”

The poem transformed into a choreopoem — a form of dramatic expression that combines poetry, dance, music, and song — called “R&L” that looked at Asian American culture in the 21st century. The play, also written during Rivera’s undergraduate years, was staged with the Asian American Theater Project at Stanford University in 2008.

These ideas were laid to rest until Rivera arrived at UC Berkeley for a Ph.D. in Performance Studies. While he thought he would focus on spoken-word poetry, he got inspired to look at the model minority concept through different lenses — queer theory and techno-orientalism, the idea that the Western world holds a certain perception of Eastern Asian technology and culture to represent near-future advancements. He was encouraged by his instructors to take on this subject matter because he had “something interesting and original to say about this.”

Both of those ideas come across in Rivera’s first book, “Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity,” published in April 2022.

In the book, Rivera ties the model minority to “masochism” — the tendency to derive pleasure  from one’s own pain or humiliation — by describing the “pleasure” aspect that drives a lot of Asian Americans and their acceptance of the stereotype. He explained that there are two masochistic avenues one can take when engaging in the model minority: self-pleasure and self-punishment.

“What I thought was interesting about masochism is the way that it produces these uncomfortable attachments, the way that it gives us a language for thinking about these unintuitive flows of power,” Rivera said. “It lets us think about loving that which hurts us, in a lot of ways.”

The discourse of techno-orientalism looks at the relationship between race and technology. Rivera explained this concept by pointing out how Asian people are likely to be associated with pursuing math, science or engineering academic paths.

Several examples of this idea are presented in the book, such as the drug-like attachment to computer screens and social media presented in Tao Lin’s novel Taipei, Tan Lin’s fictional memoir titled Insomnia and the Aunt, which describes the titular aunt’s affinity for late-night television programming and the strange effects it had on race and identity.

Rivera also discusses the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit, MI and the activist discourse that emerged, noting that “a lot of activists who were mourning [Vincent] Chin really emphasize the fact that he was an engineer. That was what made him valuable. That’s why he was grievable.”

“Techno-orientalism also informs model minority discourse because we think about how the model minority is successful largely through their capacity to succeed socioeconomically through the sciences, through these engineering routes and so forth,” Rivera said.

Rivera gave two main ideas he wanted readers to gain from his book: communities have to be “clear-eyed” and recognize their affective attachments in order to achieve some sort of racial justice in the U.S., and to be able to work through the broad acceptance of the model minority to form better bonds with other communities.

When he took his book on tour, visiting campuses including Stanford and Columbia and Princeton, he found that people engaged with the work he produced.

“I’ve had folks from faculty and graduate students and undergrads finding that the book was able to give them a kind of nomenclature to describe this thing that’s bothered them for a long time,” Rivera said.

Looking back a year later after his book was published, there were small things Rivera wished he could have done differently but feels like those imperfections can move him forward to produce more work.

“In a lot of ways, the first book wasn’t my life’s work that said everything I ever wanted to say. [If it was] that would actually be kind of sad, because that would make me not motivated to do more,” Rivera said. “Because the book is imperfect, I feel motivated to produce new work.”