Aging of a Model Minority: A Diachronic Analysis of Two Quantitative Research Studies on Aging of Japanese in New York

This is a diachronic analysis of two quantitative research studies on the aging of Japanese and Japanese Americans living in Greater New York. How have older Japanese individuals, who once have been referred as “model minority,” lived and aged in Greater New York? All the data in this paper are based on the first research study conducted in 2006 and the second in 2018 (Ethical approval reference number 6, 2018). This paper reveals both the social transitoriness and the cultural immutability of the Japanese elderly community in Greater New York. The following is a summary of the findings: (1) a growing Japanese American community with US citizenship, higher academic qualification, and better communication competency has been observed. (2) The allowable range of private expense to hire personal caregivers has been widened. (3) Not only the concerns and anxieties for later lives but also the plans and preparations for aging are much the same. (4) The elderly are provided with culturally specific care (with regard to language, food, and concept of care)—even allowed to live with other Japanese people—and the needs of caregivers who can understand Japanese culture are satiated. (5) Almost half of those in the community find it difficult to eliminate the possibility of returning to Japan, and some of them have already chosen to migrate back to Japan.

Korean Female Graduate Students’ Experiences in the United States

The unique experiences of Korean female graduate students (KFGS) in the United States (US) have not received much attention or been discussed although Korea has been one of the leading countries sending students to the US. By examining literature regarding the experiences of KFGS studying and living in the US, this paper reports their challenges (e.g., racial and gender discrimination, the model minority stereotype, and multiple roles as students and as wives and/or mothers) and ways to respond to those challenges. This paper also urges to conduct more research on lives of KFGS to make them visible and heard in US academia.

Cultivating STEAM Literacy: Emphasizing the Implementation of the Arts through Reading Practices Supporting the Asian Diaspora

This paper explores the cultivation of STEAM literacy through the employment of practices derived from traditional reading strategies. This teaching and learning framework focuses on utilizing multimodal texts to increase exposure and opportunities for students to creatively explore diverse realms of STEM through the arts. Featuring student-centered endeavors through self-selected texts and in-class reading practices followed by tiered scaffolded discourse engagements, this framework initiates greater interest, autonomy, and culturally and linguistically authentic practices enhancing STEAM literacy. Embedded in the implications is the deconstruction of frequently aggregated STEM data that “overrepresents” the Asian demographic. Using the lens of the model minority myth, this paper attempts to disaggregate the Asian category, illuminating the actual diaspora that makes up the Asian and Asian American communities, many of which are not represented in STEM fields. Through more reading opportunities and fostering discourse practices, the arts contribute greater inclusion, cultivating STEAM literacy for all students.

“The Model Man:” Shifting Perceptions of Asian American Masculinity and the Renegotiation of a Racial Hierarchy of Desire

Although Asian-descent men in the United States have been subjected to negative race-gender stereotyping and sexual racism, evidence suggests that mainstream perceptions and Asian American men’s self-definitions are in flux. Drawing on in-depth interviews of U.S.-born and -raised, middle-class, heterosexual Asian American men, supplemented by popular media textual analysis, we examine how these men are drawing upon a new form of alternative Asian American masculinity— one that we call “The Model Man”—in order to renegotiate their position within the present hierarchy of romantic preference. “The Model Man,” a hybrid masculinity construction that combines the elements of White hegemonic masculinity and model minority-based “Asian” masculinity, is co-opted and deployed by men as sexual/romantic capital—especially in relation to White women—because it enables the men to present themselves as desirable romantic partners. Although this masculinity strategy contains possibilities for further straitjacketing Asian American men via the model minority stereotype—and for re-inscribing heteronormativity and patriarchy/heterosexism—it may possess an unexpectedly subversive potential in allowing the men to contest their masculinity status and even remap hegemonic American manhood.

The heathen, the plague, and the model minority: Perpetual self-assessment of Asian Americans as a panoptic mechanism

Incidents of racism against Asians have been rising since the COVID-19 pandemic turned global in early 2020. Employing Foucault’s concept of panopticism and Kathryn Lofton’s insights on the function of religion to demarcate group boundaries, this article argues that American religion constructs Asian American stereotypes to limit the discursive space within which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. These discursive limitations have, in turn, buttressed white supremacy. This article examines how some Asians and Asian Americans respond to anti-Asian sentiments during the pandemic by performing a close reading of an op-ed by prominent Asian American politician Andrew Yang in The Washington Post. This reading reveals that Yang’s colorblind solution upholds whiteness as the American gnosis and limits the discursive space in which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. This article also discusses how the myth of America as a white Christian country withstands challenges from minority groups contesting its dominance.

Exploring deep neural networks via layer-peeled model: Minority collapse in imbalanced training

In this paper, we introduce the Layer-Peeled Model, a nonconvex, yet analytically tractable, optimization program, in a quest to better understand deep neural networks that are trained for a sufficiently long time. As the name suggests, this model is derived by isolating the topmost layer from the remainder of the neural network, followed by imposing certain constraints separately on the two parts of the network. We demonstrate that the Layer-Peeled Model, albeit simple, inherits many characteristics of well-trained neural networks, thereby offering an effective tool for explaining and predicting common empirical patterns of deep-learning training. First, when working on class-balanced datasets, we prove that any solution to this model forms a simplex equiangular tight frame, which, in part, explains the recently discovered phenomenon of neural collapse [V. Papyan, X. Y. Han, D. L. Donoho, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 24652–24663 (2020)]. More importantly, when moving to the imbalanced case, our analysis of the Layer-Peeled Model reveals a hitherto-unknown phenomenon that we term Minority Collapse, which fundamentally limits the performance of deep-learning models on the minority classes. In addition, we use the Layer-Peeled Model to gain insights into how to mitigate Minority Collapse. Interestingly, this phenomenon is first predicted by the Layer-Peeled Model before being confirmed by our computational experiments.