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For many Asian-Americans, their dreams of academic success have survived long journeys and refugee camps. Yet there are dark perils that run along the same path to achievement.
By Andrew Lam
DURING his first semester at the University of California, 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 lined with watching peasants.
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 did not need to explain. Like many Asian students from Confucian-bound countries - Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and of course, China - I could easily decipher the image. For us scholarship boys, it is the equivalent of Michael Jordan flying through 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 had posters of film stars and sports heroes, he drew and hung above his desk a visual sutra to help him focus.
There was no question of failure. Back home, there was an army of hungry, ambitious and capable young men and women 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 in the US. Though they account for less than 5 per cent of the country's population, Asian-Americans typically make up 10 to 30 per cent at the country's best colleges.
In California, Asians form the majority of the University of California system. And at Berkeley - said by US News & World Report to be a top-ranked university - Asian freshmen have reached the 46 per cent mark this year (whites are at 29 per cent, blacks at 3.9 per cent and Latinos at 11 per cent).
On the surface, academic success is a source of collective pride. The mythology of scholarship Asian boys and girls who honour their parents by getting straight A's and then having brilliant professional careers is sown deep into our collective psyche. Many of us go on to measure the world and ourselves solely through a simple pedagogic lens. You are how well you do in school.
But inevitably, there is a dark subterraneous stream that runs parallel to this shining path to academic success. Stress, disappointment, depression, low self-esteem, identity crisis. And at one far end of that continuum we now also have a name: Cho Seung Hui.
When the news came that the person responsible for the mass shooting at Virginia Tech was an Asian, many Asian-Americans were shocked. The 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, and became a writer instead, I wrote down questions. What am I doing? Who am I exactly? Why am I studying so hard to please my parents who are not 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 is an unwritten contract. Parents will sacrifice - work two jobs, eat less, take no holiday, 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 reeks of dishonour 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 went the rumour, 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 1990s was on four Vietnamese teenagers who took over an electronics store in Sacramento, California, demanding US$1 million and helicopters to fly back to Vietnam and 1,000-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 is now serving several life sentences.
The media originally thought the boys were gang members, but it turned out they were anything but. They had 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 films-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 confronted with dreaded feelings of loss and despair.
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 in the extremely rigorous examinations. Those brilliant few who passed were given important 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, honouring his ancestors and clans in the process. It all hinged on his ability to pass the exams.
That East Asian penchant for education has not changed a lot since the fall of the late Qing dynasty in 1905. If anything, it has intensified because the modern education system in various countries - but especially in the US - 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 in 10 college students said they 'felt so depressed it's difficult to function'. One out of 10 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 he had problems, did not 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?
After all, he did fulfil 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. 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 had not 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.
A writer and editor with New America Media, Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections On The Vietnamese Diaspora.
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