The Perils
of Academia for Asians
By Andrew Lam
CA
His
first semester at UC Berkeley, H, a freshman, painted
a picture that harked back to a foreign and distant
past. In it, a young mandarin in silk brocade and
hat, flanked by banner-carrying soldiers, rides
an ornate carriage down the road along which peasants
stand and watch.
We had just met then, and when he saw me looking
at his painting, H said, “Do trang nguyen
ve lang” – Vietnamese for “Mandarin
returns home after passing the Imperial Exam.”
H didn’t need to explain. Like many Asian
students from Confucian-bound countries –
Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Japan, and of
course, China; what a family friend often called
“chopstick nations” – I could
easily decipher the image. In some ways, for us
scholarship boys, it is the equivalent of Michael
Jordan flying in the air like a god doing a slam-dunk
– a dream of glorious achievements.
H was driven with an iron will to achieve academic
success. While his dorm-mates put up posters of
movie stars and sports heroes, the image he drew
and hung above his desk was a visual sutra that
would help him focus. There was no question of failure.
Back home, an army of hungry, ambitious and capable
young men and women were dying to take his place,
and for H, a boat person who barely survived his
perilous journey across the South China Sea, “dying
to” was no mere idiomatic expression.
No surprise then that almost two decades since my
college days, Asian-Americans dominate higher education.
Though less than five percent of the country’s
population, Asian-Americans typically make up 10
to 30 percent at the country’s best colleges.
In California, Asians form the majority of the UC
system. And at Berkeley – considered by U.S.
News & World Report as a top ranked university
– Asian freshmen have reached the 46 percent
mark this year (whites are at 29 percent, blacks
at 3.9 percent and Latinos at 11 percent).
On the surface, academic success is a source of
collective pride. The mythology of scholarship Asian
boys and girls who honor their parents by getting
straight A’s and then making their ways to
brilliant professional careers has been sown so
deeply into our collective psyche. Many of us consequently
learn to measure the world and ourselves solely
through a simple pedagogic lens. You are how well
you do in school.
Inevitably, there’s a dark subterraneous stream
that runs parallel to this shining path to academic
success. Stress, disappointment, depression, low
self-esteem, and, identity crisis. And at one far
end of that continuum we now also have a name: Cho
Seung-Hui.
When news reached the world that the person responsible
for the worst modern day mass shooting in the United
States was in fact an Asian student at Virginia
Tech, many Asian-Americans were shocked. But shock
slowly gave way to collective shame, and then some
modicum of recognition. The most telling sign in
the news report was – for me at least –
that when Cho was asked to write down his name,
he instead drew a question mark.
That struck a chord. Until I defied my parents,
refusing to go to medical school after graduating
in biochemistry at Berkeley and became a writer
instead, I wrote down questions on my notebooks.
What am I doing? Who am I exactly? Why am I studying
so hard to please my parents who aren’t happy
anyway? When do I begin to live for myself?
Without these questions, I was more or less on autopilot
in college. Like so many of my bright-eyed peers,
I was trained to take exams, but my life was woefully
un-examined. For often in many Asian-American families,
especially immigrant ones, there’s an unwritten
contract. Parents will sacrifice – work two
jobs, eat less, take no vacation, wear old clothes,
sell blood if need be – in order to guarantee
their children the best education. In return, their
children will do well in school and succeed. Failing
the grades is the same as breaking a sacred oath,
not to mention one’s parent’s heart.
In the Confucian mindset, an Asian child who drops
out of school is a child who reeks of dishonor and
shame.
The same year I met H, a Chinese boy from my dorm
unit attempted to jump from Berkeley’s Campanile
tower after receiving a bad grade. It took police
officials several hours to talk him down. He considered
suicide because, so goes the rumor, he had never
gotten a lowly B before, until Vector Calculus bested
him.
When I became a journalist one of the biggest stories
I covered in the early 1990’s was about four
Vietnamese teenagers who took over an electronics
store in Sacramento, California, demanding one million
dollars and helicopters to fly back to Vietnam and
thousand-year-old ginseng roots. They shot hostages
when their demands were not met, and a SWAT team
went in, killing three and wounding one who now
serves several life sentences. The news media originally
thought the boys were gang members, but it turned
out that they were anything but. They failed school.
Being recent arrivals from the refugee camps, they
no longer saw a future for themselves. Education
being the be all and end all, they took their own
Hong Kong gangster movies-inspired way out.
Reporting from East Asia, I often read stories in
the local papers of students committing suicide,
throwing themselves on train tracks or out the windows
when they failed an important exam. Robbed of what
they know best, many are often confronted with dreaded
feelings of loss and despair.
But why is education so deeply ingrained in the
Confucian mindset?
Long before America existed, something of the American
Dream had already taken place in East Asia, through
the system of Mandarin examinations. Villages and
towns pooled resources and sent their brightest
to compete in the imperial court. Mandarins of various
rankings were selected by how well they fared through
the extremely rigorous examinations. Those brilliant
few who passed were given important bureaucratic
duties and it was they who ran the day-to-day operations
of imperial court. A mandarin could become governor,
a judge, or even marry into the royal family. A
peasant thus could rise high above his station,
honoring his ancestors and clans in the process.
It all hinged on his ability to pass the exams.
That East Asian penchant for education hasn’t
changed a whole lot since the fall of the late Qing
dynasty in 1905. If anything it has become intensified
because the modern education system in various countries
– but especially in the United States –
has given opportunities to far more people than
ever before. But the competition remains fierce.
In 2005, The American College Health Association
reported that four of 10 college students said that
they “felt so depressed it’s difficult
to function.” One out of ten had contemplated
suicide. I wonder, given the disproportionately
high number of Asians in higher education, how many
suffer from depression and stress, and how many
contemplated suicide?
Which comes back to the question of Cho Seung-Hui.
That his murderous rampage is due to mental illness
and not race is indisputable. But I wonder if Cho’s
parents, who knew that he had problems, didn’t
take the illness and rage as seriously as they should
have because, well, how crazy could their son possibly
be when he managed to get into Virginia Tech? Didn’t
he, after all, fulfill their expectations in some
ways by getting into a prestigious college? And
for that matter, given his existing psychological
impairments, how much had being caught in the traditional
educational pressure cooker robbed him of much needed
social skills?
I do not know the answers but I do know that a far
more muted if typical tragedy is that of H. He was
a talented painter. His paintings were so beautiful
that art professors offered to buy them. In fact
he was offered a place in graduate school in the
arts. Though tempted, H declined. He wanted to be
a doctor as his mother expected of him. He had to
come home in his own way in the modern brocade and
mandarin hat.
A few years ago I saw him again. There was a deep
sadness to H that I hadn’t seen before, despite
the coveted title of doctor. That old iron will
to do well was gone. He had no vision left, no tests
to take. I asked him if he still painted. “No,”
H answered and looked wistfully away. - New America
Media
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