The cry smile mask is described by Jid Lee as a smile on your exterior face, while inside 
you are really lamenting, crying, or sad. Jid Lee descibres the Cry-Smile mask as, ” effective, but its use came with collective as well as personal harm; it condoned my audiences’ self-righteousness(398)”. When Lee hears people say racial comments against other people, or when she talks about racial struggle to her class, she must use the cry-smile mask. When Lee is at a function with a white coworker, they have a conversation about race that starts as, ” I wish they were all like him”, Susan whispered looking at the back of the black man who had just turned around after asking her for a dance. ” He’s so nice. No bitterness or anger. If all black people were like him, we’d be living in heaven”. Lee thought, ” Susan stung me with her rudeness; I had to bite my tongue, struggling to smile… Facing this forty-year-old lady so mature and loving yet filled with hackneyed racist cliches(397)”. In this situation, Lee wanted to address Susan’s ignorant and rude remark, but the perceived stereotype that was plastered all over the Korean-American Lee, is that Asian-Americans shouldn’t complain about racial struggle.The oppression on Asian during World War II, specifically with the Japanese concentration camps in America, is forgotten by most of society. It is forgotten by Susan in this instance that Asians had to suffer in America like Blacks, and had negative stereotypes attached to them as well. Since Lee is able to not be viewed with negative stereotypes like the Black man by Susan, instead of tell her she is wrong for her views, she puts on the cry-smile mask.
The reason it was hard for Lee to speak up and tell Susan that she was wrong for her comment is because she is supposed to be on the same page as Whites. Susan shows how Whites view Asian American when she writes, ” Frankly, it’s a little hard for me to believe what you say about Asians being discriminated against. They’re white.” ” Those concentration days are over. We don’t want to bring them up again.” ” Immigrants like you work so hard. They rise up so fast. (401)” Such complements and great expectation of the White race is very hard to disregard since Asians have been coined the “model minority” over Blacks, Chicanos, Indian, etc. , in America. If Lee were to speak up to tell Susan that she was incorrect to stereotype all Black people as bad in a serious tone, Susan most likely would not take her correction seriously, since she doesn’t expect her to know anything about other races struggles. Lee might be taken more serious by Susan if she corrected her racial stereotype if she said it with a cry smile-mask. The method of the cry-smile mask Lee used when teaching about racial issues in her class was ” This new layer,…, would be more concealing and suggestive, softer in appearance but harder in reality.” Lee found out while testing her new cry-smile mask technique, that the less serious she appeared when talking about racial issues to her students, the more receptive they were to listening to her and contributing to the discussion. The more serious Lee was in talking about racial issues to her students, the less free they felt to discuss racial problems with a Korean -American that seemed to know nothing about experiencing racial issues. If you are the “model minority” like Asian Americans, in some aspects of your life, the cry-smile mask can have some importance.
Sources:
Jid Lee “The Cry-Smile Mask: A Korean American Woman’s System of Resistance” (From this bridge we call home 397-402).