Advanced Search

The story appears on

Page A6

September 13, 2013

GET this page in PDF

Free for subscribers

View shopping cart

Related News

Home » Opinion » Foreign Views

Academic failure can crush Asian students

By Andrew Lam | September 13, 2013, Friday | Print Edition

According to The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, there’s a disturbing trend in SAT score in America.

Since 2006, the score over all has fallen 20 points, dropping from 1518 to 1498 in 2012, six years later. White students’ average score has fallen by a relatively small 4 points, other ethnic groups have fallen by as much as 22 points.

There’s one exception however.

Asian American students are scoring higher than ever before, and on the average this population has seen their score rise by a shocking 41 points.

The news does not shock the population that scores the highest, of course. Academic achievements have long been a nourished dream for many Asian Americans, a population in which 2 out of 3 are immigrants. It harkens back to the imperial courts of China and Japan and Vietnam.

These dreams of academic success have survived long journeys and refugee camps and for many they become a realty in America, where two out three in the Asian American population are immigrants.

Take my friend H. for example. In his first semester at UC Berkeley, H. 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 trangnguyenvelang” — Vietnamese for “Mandarin returns home after passing the Imperial Exam.”

Chopstick nations

But H. didn’t need to explain. Like many Asian students from Confucian-bound countries — Vietnam, 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 three 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 11 to 30 percent at the country’s best colleges. In California, Asians form the majority of the UC system. And at Berkeley, Asian freshmen have reached the 43 percent mark this year, whereas whites are at 24 percent.

Mandarin examinations

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 penchant for education hasn’t changed a whole lot since the fall of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). 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.

The love for education is most self evident in Vietnam’s capital.

Of all the temples in Hanoi, the most beautiful is arguably the Temple of Literature, where all the laureates who passed the extremely rigorous imperial exams of centuries past and became mandarins had their names etched on stone steles that go back nearly 800 years.

Education worshiped

Dedicated to Confucius and founded in 1070, it was Vietnam’s first university. It eventually became a temple, as if only befitting a trajectory in a world where education is literally worshiped.

Thus it is that many Asian parents who work three jobs, live in two separate continents for the sake of their children, or spend all their savings in order that their children will have chance at a good education.

And consequently, their children, sharing a deep sense of filial piety and obligations, find that they need to honor and fulfill their debt by achieving academic success.

The danger is that many consequently learned to measure the world and themselves solely through a pedagogic lens. That is, education is so worshiped that not getting good grades often means failing to achieve one’s destiny and thereby failing one’s own and one’s family’s expectations.

So it does not come as a surprise in the Asian American community that our children score high on the SAT, and that they do well in school.

What’s barely explored, sadly, is the darker narrative, that subterranean stream that runs parallel to this shining path to academic success: many of those who fail to make the grade suffer a profound identity crisis that often leads to disappointment, depression, low self esteem, and, in some cases, even suicide.

Andrew Lam is the author of “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora,” “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres,” and, his latest, “Birds of Paradise Lost,” a collection of story about Vietnamese refugees in the Bay Area, which is now available on Kindle.

 

Foreign Views


 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend