Once in high school I had a kid come up to me and ask me for help with his Calculus. At the time I was failing pre-calc. One of the more common stereotypes in the United States is the Asians are just smarter. I mean, they're all over campus (I'm being serious here). You can't throw a stone without hitting an Asian student. In my high school this was norm. You find Asian kids in the hardest AP classes, IB, CIS, engineering, science courses. There's a page on Facebook dedicated to the "Asian grading system : A-verage, B-elow average, C-rap, D-eath, F-ucked."
Asian parents are notorious for pushing their kids to excel and be successful doctors, lawyer, something that makes money. Being half-Asian (though sometimes I don't look it, depends on if I'm around white people or Asians) brings up the question of 'are Asians really smarter than the rest of the races?'
Asian countries have a completely different mindset from Western countries. Emphasis is placed on community, honor, and family. You obey your parents, or else you get smacked. You don't question tradition or your teachers. In Western cultures the individual and creativity are valued. We are taught to question the teachers and ask 'how' and 'why.' In tabula rasa we are completely shaped by our culture, how we are raised shapes our strengths, weaknesses, and which we work on.
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I agree with you on somethings. I'm asian and I worked my ass off to get to where I'm at, but sometimes things don't catch on with me in school. I still try my best though. Fortunately, my parents let up after awhile. In regards to the "community, honor, and family," if you think about it, that's all you have left after the material things are gone. If you're missing any of the three, you f*cked something up along the way.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I don't fit the asian stereotype too well lol.
Found a good article about this subject:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080111102934.htm
I'll contribute with an anecdote about my hometown.
ReplyDeleteI live in a redneck village some 400 miles northwest of the Cities. For some reason that I cannot explain, over 10% of the town is Asian--predominantly first and second generation Laotian immigrants. The deeply stereotypical picture of the straight-A Asian prodigy in my mind (and the mind of everyone else) is usually an East Asian, and this was not altered by the Lao kids I grew up with.
You see, by the time we were in 8th grade, at least 80% of the Laotian kids in my school had taken what they had learned from Hollywood about the dress, speech, and behavior of inner-city American black kids and emulated it. (Given that they had grown up in Northwestern Minnesota, I can basically guarantee that none of them had met anyone who called the ghetto "home.") There is something delightfully confusing about a 5'2" Asian guy named Choy--swallowed up by baggy jeans, hoodie, cubic zirconia earring, and cap--casually referring to his Laotian friends as "n*****s" (excuse the asterisks of political correctness).
I try to explain this phenomenon with the possibility that, as Lao immigrants in a predominantly-white town in the middle of nowhere, they had to do SOMETHING to adopt an American identity they could relate to. "Try" is the operative word.