The Perpetual Foreigner Stereotype

The stereotype of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners is the general misconception that Asian Americans are people from an "exotic" faraway land called the Far East. The misconception that peoples from far away do not necessarily understand mainstream American culture is the Perpetual Foreigner stereotype. This misconception becomes especially jarring when Asian Americans, born and raised in the United States, are still treated as if they do not speak English or understand the customs of the US and are not often viewed as true Americans.

This is described in (Sue et al., below) as "a microaggression which embodies the assumption that all Asian Americans are foreigners or foreign-born. An example of this theme was universally voiced by Asian Americans of all ethnicities and manifested in questions or remarks like “You speak such good English” and “Where are you from?” and “What country were you born in?”

This is problematic for Asian Americans because despite the fact that the US is a country of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, Asians are still treated like "strangers on our own shores" and "strangers in our own land" without the equal status granted by citizenship that white Anglo Americans are granted.

Furthermore, this leads to more serious problems like hate crimes committed against Asian Americans due to the misconception brought about by yellow peril racism misdirected against Asian Americans for being scapegoats for economic problems.



This quote from Kipling at the height of British Imperialism in Asia (both India and China) nicely sums up the sentiments many in "the west" has about East Asia.



From since time antiquity, East Asia and India has been a source of mystery and otherworldliness for the imagination of Europeans. From the silk road days to the European Renaissance to the history of colonialism and also the 20th century wars in Asia to overthrow imperialism, the story of Europeans and Asians is one of misunderstandings and intentional wrong characterizations by Europeans and their American descendants.

Before the existence of the USA, Europeans always viewed the different cultures, people and achievements of Asia as "exotic" and therefore "not normal" according to their beliefs and traditions. "The mysterious Orient" has always been a source of both wonder and disdain to them. Both "more developed" and "backwards" at different periods in history in terms of science and technology and society and culture, East Asia and India have always been a source of extreme contrasts to "the Occident."



With the creation of the United States and its promotion of European immigration, this set of prejudices carried on over to "the new world." And direct contact with Asian Americans and Asian immigrants have only served to magnify and not mitigate certain prejudices due to direct competition in the American racialized view of society.

Due to its self anointed ideology and role of a capitalist democracy, the USA have always operated on competition, both with itself and the rest of the world. Thus, with Asian immigration many white European Americans thought of Asians and Asian Americans as "the inscrutable other" which is completely different and separate from the rest of American society. Economic competition with Asian Americans have led to the racist notion of the yellow peril and one way to distinguish and deny rights for Asian Americans is by not making them citizens like the many Chinese and Japanese exclusion acts passed by Congress.

Thus, it's easy to differentiate "true Americans" from the foreigners simply based on skin tone and eye shapes by Anglo Americans. For Asian Americans who cannot obtain citizenship despite being born in the USA in those formative years of America, they were foreigners in their own land. They were not granted equal rights and protections of the law simply because of their skin color and eye shape.

For the mainstream white European American society, this label and stereotype of the perpetual foreigner means less direct economic and political competition from Asian Americans if Asian Americans cannot vote nor enjoy social benefits granted to citizens of the USA. This is the basis of the US stereotype of Asians as being perpetual foreigners, despite being just as equally integrated into the history of America, if not more, as European Americans.



Perpetuation of the perpetual foreigner stereotype against Asian Americans today comes from the recent Asian immigration of the last half of the 20th century.

The US led wars in Korea and Vietnam has contributed to an influx of Asian immigrants to America's shores. The "boat people" of Vietnam and other South East Asian countries that were affected by the Vietnam War especially contributes to the recent influx of Asian immigrants.

Another source of Asian immigration in the 80s and 90s was Chinese graduate students and scholars. The "brain drain" of China has led to vast numbers of intellectuals leaving China's poverty in those years to come to the US in hopes of a better future. The US wanted and still supports Chinese (and more recently Indians and Koreans) highly educated immigrantion in order to pick up the slack of white European Americans in the sciences and technological research fields.

Like any previous generation of immigrants, whether be it Asian or European, these new waves of Asian immigrants bring with them their own cultural and linguistic traits that distinguishes them from other immigrant populations. This fact, coupled with the newly formed effects of mass media's homogenizing effects on the population makes these new Asian immigrants stand out even more drastically from the "normal" Americans that is of white European descent, as popularized in the mainstream mass media.



Being the unofficial arbiter of social opinions and phenomena, the mass media sets itself up as the definitive voice of what's considered vogue and "normal" as far American lifestyle and society goes.

Thus, the new Asian immigrants bring with them even more contrasts that run against the grain of what's considered "normal American lifestyle" simply because of their own cultural differences. Despite the fact that "real American culture" is an oxymoron in the sense that America is a mishmash and mixture of "melting pot" (or "tossed salad") of people and cultures, for the mass media and US society to function at a basic level an arbitrary standard of what's considered normal and average is created to have a common denominator effect for the whole society.

This arbitrary concept of a normal American usually consists of a white European American and almost never are Asian Americans considered "normal" or "real" Americans. Despite the fact that people themselves create and shape culture, the effect of American mass media serves to dictate and define what culture is to the masses.

This totalitarianism of mass media and popular culture has willfully and intentionally left out Asian Americans as an integral party and participants of the American experience.

Numerous examples can be found on the media portrayals page, but suffice to say here that the perpetuation of Asians in America as being perpetual foreigners manifest itself as depicting Asians speaking in a stereotypical "FOB" accent, or having strange eating habits, or behaving raucously contrary to "normal" American society.

The fact that American mass media rarely acknowledges or accepts Asian American contributions ranging from the scientific contributions of Chinese Americans to the heroic efforts of Japanese American "Nisei" soldiers of the 442nd regiment during WW2 and instead focus on Japanese soldiers in movies like Letters from Iwo Jima underscores the fact that there is an intentional promoting of "the perpetual foreigner stereotype" for social and political agendas by white European Americans.