ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the author's teaching experience as a personal journey toward unmasking the self. It outlines the racial and gender stereotypes pertaining to her dual minority status that provided a context for constructing a mask. The chapter explains how these two stereotypes converge in the professional experiences of an Asian American woman. What she hope to reveal in this chapter is how converging racial and gender stereotypes of Asian American women as model minority and lotus blossom penetrate the power dynamics between a teacher and students, and thus necessitate the struggle to reclaim selfhood for Asian American female faculty in American public universities. The model minority stereotype is based on statistical data on the group-wide educational, economic, and social achievements of Asian Americans. Historically, Asian and Asian American women have been trivialized and exoticized by American mainstream popular culture and media.
