Last Monday, I attended City University of New York professor Cindi Katz's lecture, "Superman, Tiger Mother: Aspiration Management and the Child as Waste." Katz claimed that the "Asian mode of parenting" described in Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" is producing a society of strivers, in which the middle-class Asian family compels students to experience constant pressure to succeed in order to stay competitive. While Asian-American families do value success, it is inaccurate and definitely harmful to perpetuate the idea that Asian families are unique in their regard for "traditional" academic success. Unfortunately, Katz is not alone in her belief that Asian students, particularly at the high school level, are soulless, grade-grubbing automatons fixated on admission to a top university.
Katz said that Asian parents believe they can help their children "engineer their lives" to gain admission into "the only two colleges Asians recognize Harvard and Yale" by joining the right clubs and playing the right sports. Regarding successful Asians with this preconception is not only unjustified but also leads to baseless pre-judgments. When one believes Asian students have lives that are tailored for the express purpose of gaining admission to top colleges, it becomes harder to believe that they are as "deserving" of a liberal arts education. In a sense, the idea of academic success as the realm of the Asian student limits what Asian students can do.
While many Asian students are academically successful, many are also talented athletes, performers and artists who want to pursue careers in fields outside of medicine and law, which prevailing stereotypes suggest are the only two paths they can take. Somehow, the idea of Asians having a limited conception of success has become so prevalent that many people tend to buy into the assumption that Asians, more so than any other group, would pursue a limited number of careers. While it wouldn't be acceptable to joke about "Mexican dishwashers," it is somehow acceptable to joke about "Asian pre-med kids" as accepted fact, despite the fact that not all Asians are pre-med, and not all pre-meds are Asian.
This stereotyping is particularly detrimental to high school students who absorb the stereotypes and continue to embody them in a never-ending cycle of repetition. Even though Asian students do not have to participate in a particular set of extracurricular activities and achieve a certain minimum set of test scores, the persistence of the belief that there is a "typical" Asian continues to push students who might have other interests into taking the "right" classes, joining the "right" clubs and, eventually, applying to the "right" colleges because those who have gone before them in their communities have done it that way.
The precedent that each successive generation of Asian students that does it the "right" way by going into medicine and law only further locks Asians students into feeling that they must pursue the same few career options. Moreover, the lack of Asian mentors in "un-Asian" fields makes it difficult for Asian students who might pursue alternative careers to figure out how to go about doing so thus, the lack of precedent for "alternative" careers is another structural barrier to Asian students' pursuit of other academic and career options.
Cramming Asian students into a narrowly defined set of academic and professional standards is detrimental to both them and the community at large. While Asian students themselves may feel constrained in their academic and professional pursuits, these barriers are also harmful to overall university communities and the greater Asian ethnic community. In college, the high concentration of Asian students in a limited number of course tracks makes certain classrooms much less diverse than they could be. This can become particularly problematic in discussion-based classes, in which productive conversations hinge on having a diverse range of student experiences to draw upon. After college, the dearth of Asian leaders in the arts, politics and community development-focused non-profit organizations weakens the cultural and activist links within the Asian community, as well as the community's relations with other organizations and communities.
It is important for Asian students to begin pursuing more "un-Asian" career pathways and courses of study and for those outside the Asian-American community to become more aware that not all Asians are "tiger cubs" in the way that one might expect. The Asian community, like any other community, is composed of members with wide-ranging academic and personal interests.
