There they were looking out from the back page of the Tribune’s main section Wednesday. Those brainy bespectacled young Asian women who “year after year … outpace their peers on state tests,” the story said.
And there they were on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Styles section last month: two Korean sisters flogging their book “Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers–and How You Can Too.”
And then there I was at my desk Wednesday reading an e-mail from a stranger who reminded me that exactly one year ago the high-achieving Asian-American author Iris Chang escaped it all by ending her own life.
That’s when I knew I had to write this little rant.
You see, as much as the mainstream press wants to applaud Asian-American emphasis on high achievement and never bringing “down the whole race” with “a B,” as one Asian student said to our reporter, we rarely look at the downsides of such pressure.
Those downsides can include extreme fear of failure, unpleasantly competitive natures, withdrawal from society, stress-related disorders and most sadly, Asian-American women holding the highest suicide rates in the nation among women age 15 to 24–an American age category that holds the highest general suicide rates to begin with, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
6 suicides in 4 months
Between December 2003 and April 2004, the Chicago-based Asian American Suicide Prevention Initiative anecdotally recorded six suicides in the Chicago area of Asian-Americans under age 30, according to Aruna Jha, the agency’s founder and a professor at University of Illinois at Chicago.
And an article in the latest issue of the journal Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior states that for reasons not clear, Asian students are 1.59 times more likely to seriously consider attempting suicide than their white peers.
This isn’t big news in the Asian-American community, but rather our dirty little secret.
Just about everyone knows someone whose relative died mysteriously. But no one wants to talk about it. And for some who are living with the terrible shameful secret, they couldn’t talk about it even if they wanted to.
Just last month a fellow Asian journalist told me about a local Korean mother who spent an afternoon sobbing in the journalist’s car as she recounted her daughter’s suicide at an Ivy League school. No one in the community knew about it. And she was forbidden by her husband to speak of it. So for years she’s kept her daughter’s story locked up inside, just as her daughter kept her frailties locked up inside until she saw no escape from high expectations except in death.
Later in an e-mail, the journalist, who was from New York, told me that she, in fact, met three such Korean mothers during her visit to Chicago.
But the pressures don’t just come from parents. In the United States, where the model minority myth is peddled regularly by the media, and in books such as “Top of the Class,” the stereotypes begin to perpetuate themselves. Luckily, Asians and others familiar with the issue are starting to talk back.
The New York Times’ interview with “Top of the Class” authors Soo Kim Abboud and Jane Kim noted that, “Some educators believe such a single-minded focus on achievement can be harmful.” It quoted anthropologist and Asian studies professor Kyeyoung Park, who observed that some Asian-American kids can seem lost and disoriented when they get to a university.
Still, the angry letters came flowing in the following week. Ruchika Bajaj, the mental health policy coordinator for the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families in New York, wrote, “The Kim sisters believe that strict households and associating failure with family dishonor is the best way to raise a successful child. Taking this position, they do a disservice to the Asian community by perpetuating the model minority myth that all Asians are successful and over-achievers. The results reported provide an image of success that is only skin deep. By stressing the model minority myth, we are placing undue academic, social and emotional burdens on youth and further supporting unrealistic stereotypes.”
Another passage from the Times interview read, “The authors themselves acknowledge that Asian career values can be hazardous to one’s health if taken to an extreme degree, as in Japan, where pressures to excel in an exam-focused educational system have been linked with high dropout rates, social withdrawal and suicide.
Jha says many Asian-American students don’t feel like they have the freedom to tell parents what they really want to do in life, “So the students are performing but not necessarily in arenas that they enjoy.”
A grain of truth
Indeed, when we yellow scribes get together at Asian American Journalism Association conferences, there is almost always a crack during some speech that goes like this: “I think it’s clear why we are all here today. [Pause] Because we were no good at science and math.”
Sure, we all crack up because we see a kernel of truth in it, but the fact that a bunch of Asian-American journalists are meeting at all makes it clear that not all of us have gone the lucrative smarty-pants route. And that we–the disappointing losers who went into a low-paying profession like writing–can be reasonably happy too, even if our parents probably lie to their friends about what we do.
But as the immigrant generations march on and greater acceptance of Asians-Americans in non-traditional fields grows, so may a greater acceptance of non-traditional Asian academic mediocrity.
State test result day also happens to be report card day for Chicago Public Schools, a day that inspired terror in some of my Asian-American pals growing up. In my Asian-Hispanic household, however, it was never a big deal. When I get home tonight to look at the report card of my one-quarter Asian son who started 1st grade in CPS this year, I will applaud his good grades and discuss the bad ones. But I won’t love him any less for them. As a half-Asian parent, sure I’d like my son to be a high academic achiever, but most of all I’d like him to be a kind and happy little guy.
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To reach the Asian American Suicide Prevention Initiative, e-mail arunajha@uic.edu.
meng@tribune.com
