Assimilationists and the Postwar
Assimilationists and the Postwar
Model Minority Politics in Little Saigon
This chapter focuses on the politics of respectability in Little Saigon during the 1980s, in which the Vietnamese American middle class and younger white conservatives shared a mutual interest in promoting “a responsible image of the refugees,” as evidence of who had really won the Vietnam War. Their collective intervention sought to win the postwar by constructing an asymmetrical dichotomy of model minority “good refugees” who typified the race in contrast to aberrational “bad refugees” who had a habit of attracting negative press. In reality, the “bad refugees” represented many of the practices—from using taxpayer dollars to purchase medicine for relatives in Vietnam to exceeding the legal limit for remittances—that accounted for 50% of the ethnic economy.
Keywords: model minority, assimilation, good refugees, remittances, middle class, Republican, Westminster, Kathy Buchoz, Chuck Smith, Tony Lam, Bolsa, Frank Jao, Little Saigon
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