The importance of maintaining “face” in Asian cultures goes back thousands of years. In the US, where Asian Americans also grapple with a rampant high-achiever stereotype, people are suffering silently.
For 20-year-old Annie Shi, nothing was scarier than messing up during a piano lesson while her mom was sitting next to her. She could feel the anger and disapproval emanating from her. She knew that once they got into the car, her mom was going to scream at her. And yet, in front of the teacher, her mother remained calm and smiling.
This was one of Shi’s early exposures to the cultural idea of face, or mianzi in Chinese. Face is a loaded psychological concept, but at its core, it’s how a person is viewed in the eyes of others. Maintaining and keeping face is a crucial part of upholding you and your family’s honor. Losing face is a terrible thing—that’s what would have happened if Shi’s mom had yelled at her in front of the piano teacher, and what was taking place with each wrong note that Shi played.
Face isn’t new—it dates back to the 4th century B.C. in China. But its presence in modern American life is colliding with a newer construct that Asians grapple with: the model minority myth. Since the 1950s and 60s, Asian Americans have been designated as the success story for immigrants coming to the U.S. The model minority myth says that all Asians are hardworking, non-disruptive, have strong family values, and raise kids that are preternaturally intelligent, excel at classical music, and go to Ivy League schools for engineering and medicine.
Mental health is already stigmatized and a topic not broached in Asian families or amongst friends, partially because of face. That combined with the pressures to uphold the standards of the model minority can result in anxiety, depression, and suicide. Shi said she was burned out by the time they were 11 years old. “I was just completely depressed,” she said. “I’m a good example of how badly the model minority myth hurt me, because I became suicidal in middle school and no one would listen to me.”
Asian Americans don’t report as many mental health disorders, but according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), are more likely to consider and attempt suicide. Asian Americans are also three times less likely to seek out treatment compared to white people. The U.S. non-profit Mental Health America found that Asian Americans are the least likely to have a mental health diagnosis, even though 57 percent who took a mental health screening had scores that indicated they were moderately to severely depressed.
“Being a certain race doesn’t make you automatically good at things,” she said. “But people continue to perpetuate the idea that it does. It will always make parents want their kids to uphold this kind of value. It feeds itself. It makes it hard to break out of the cycle. Because it’s not just one person, it’s the entire Asian community.”
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