What happens to Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends? (2011)
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I also don’t appreciate the angsty ranting about Asian immigrant culture. Work hard, keep your head down, raise kids, provide for your family, respect your parents, etc. Those are great values and are as much traditional American values as Asian immigrant ones. It’s the American baby boomers and millennials with their fixation on self-gratification that are the outliers.
I am all for civil disobedience, but it has to be done properly.
Lastly, where did you pull out bureaucrat from the previous comment? Non sequitur.
I suspect the definition of properly looks very different when you're a victim, perpetrator, or a (privileged) bystander.
Let's march politely down the street with the rest of my college educated peers doesn't exist for everyone unfortunately.
Police need to maintain discipline and composure regardless of the attitude from people that they are interacting with or they are not worthy of the power that they have been entrusted with.
Yes, the homogeneous entity of Asia and its culture.
How do you even have a productive conversation about this topic when people are this ham fisted and uninformed?
Have you actually been to Asia? Try traveling there and see if you still think there's "too much deference to authority". If anything the opposite is closer to being true, this stereotype is a western cliche.
And yes, I'm Asian and grew up in "Asia".
You really have to work in these countries to feel it though, just visiting isn’t good enough. When I was working tech in China, expats had lots of war stories about working in japan or Korea, which sounded a lot less appealing than working in China (though working for an American company, the culture was necessarily mixed). I’m sure SE Asia and South Asia/India would be fairly different in many respects.
i heard people attribute that to Mao who explicitly encouraged the younger generation to challenge established authority (which was a way to turn and use them against the rest of the state and the Party power who became critical of Mao blaming him for the failures and disasters of the Great Leap Forward) as part of the Cultural Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Red_Guards...
"At the Red Guard rallies, Lin Biao also called for the destruction of the "Four Olds"; namely, old customs, culture, habits, and ideas.".
Obviously every individual is different and I can think of people I met there that don’t conform to that stereotype, but in general, yes I think that on average South East Asians have a tendency to avoid criticising anyone in a position of authority, or at least they do that less often than westerners. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing but it’s definitely there. When I speak of westerners I should point out that I was born in Italy and I now live in Australia and these two countries, rather than the USA, make up much of my idea of “western” (even though Australia is geographically located in the Asia-Pacific region!).
1. I was talking about authority in general, you are not accused of lese majeste for criticising your teacher or your parents.
2. The other country that I mentioned (Indonesia) is a republic.
https://thediplomat.com/2013/07/asiana-airlines-crash-a-cock...
Deference is often baked into Asian language - using different heirarchical expressions for someone based on their age, status and so on. We used to do something similar in Western countries but its nowhere near as marked.
> Work hard, keep your head down, raise kids, provide for your family, respect your parents, etc.
Have you noticed how American media is always set on undermining those qualities?
"a condition exhibited by some individuals when visiting or going on vacation to Paris, as a result of extreme shock at discovering that Paris is different from their expectations."
per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
Basically, Paris is so dirty that it is a shock to many Japanese. And it's not surprising that's the case, given how clean and tidy Japanese cities are.
With that said there are a lot of nice and clean places in Paris. But the tourists area are mostly in the worst neighborhoods. To compare with American cities Moulin Rouge would be a strip club in Skid Row. It’s madness sending tourists in the north/ north center of Paris, travel agencies don’t do their jobs.
Japan has its own share of problems that you just don't see because you are not part of their culture, which is one of the most insular in the world (for better and worse). People in Japan are often no happier than anywhere else they just find their unhappiness in different ways. They have a lot of elderly dying alone in 70s era decrepit apartment blocks, and a lot of young people who have chronic agoraphobia (hikkomori). These are generally not Western/US problems.
They’re not unique problems. Countries just frame other countries as having foreign problems by using different words for the same stuff.
I, for one, enjoy the occasional graffiti. Especially if it's poetic or clever. I enjoy the rebelliousness.
I suppose that if you really wanted a rebellious display in public then the Japanese culture isn't for you. But if you want poetic and clever art then you just need to look.
If it is a monocolored tag made by random kid? I wouldn't.
If it was something that took skill to do, even a tag? why not, if i found that person i would pay them to make something awesome on my wall.
There was a question posed the other day "What car could you possibly be driving that would mean 10% of your driving tickets is a number greater than 1?" Instead of saying the figure may have been an exaggeration the answer was basically, "I drive a racecar."
Graffiti is a natural instinct. REPRESSING that instinct signals a sick society.
Respectfully disagree.
>A sick society inclines people towards damaging the structures built around them because they see those structures as symbolising their own oppression in some capacity.
If you don’t think oppression exists, and that it can be symbolized by structures, I don’t know what to tell you. Are you against the toppling of sculptures of Saddam Hussein?
What do you think of advertising? Do you not consider billboards “damaging to structures”? How do you think advertising differs from graffiti and do you really find advertising non-oppressive? No ad agencies ask my permission to assault my visual field with a billboard, and neither do graffiti artists. All’s fair in art and war.
I said the exact opposite. The advertising industry shouldn't exist and neither should statues of anyone let alone tyrants like Saddam.
Or simply the force of youthful rebellion that seeks to always create something new as a reaction against the old.
Respectfully disagree. Youthful rebellion appears to be driven by hormone-related factors (elevated risk tolerance) rather than being driven by reactions to anything in particular about a society.
Mao’s rise was driven by youthful rebellion in China
Many Islamic suicide bombers are teenagers
The Amish have rumspringa
And yes some western teens are graffiti artists.
Teen rebellion cuts across cultures, that study just doesn’t show it because it is solely attempting to refute the univariate “brain” factor. I’m not talking about brains. I’m talking about hormones and risk tolerance. Teen rebellion cuts across cultures. And no single-variable “cross cultural study” can prove otherwise
Collectivism can produce incredible things, but a dose of individualism wouldn't hurt either.
There's a heavy implicit qualifier on that, which is what your parent commenter is trying to get across.
Though still no graffiti.
Would it be less grating if it came from a place of honest intentions, if that’s even possible? Among other things, this is how I also understand why rural Americans find “liberals” to be stuck up and condescending. It’s weird having empathy for a demographic that’s dissimilar to you, and by all appearances and experience dislikes you, but the dumpster fire of misunderstanding runs pretty deep. It’s hard to take a stand against the politics of the day when everything you hear, from both sides of the aisle, makes you want to watch the world burn.
You are hitting into a salient point I think though. What point do these tropes actually serve? Make people from other cultures conform out of shame? Or is it purely to make the people perpetuating these standards to feel superior?
If you’re in Asia, (which is like saying Africa or Europe), and as long as you don’t stay in the expat bubble, you will meet so many different types of people.
However, one thing to note is how assertive Asians are treated in the workplace,
> East Asians who don't conform to racial stereotypes are less likely to be popular in the workplace. "In general, people don't want dominant co-workers," says Berdahl, "but they really don't want to work with a dominant East-Asian co-worker."
theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/05/study-of-the-day-theres-a-bamboo-ceiling-for-would-be-asian-leaders/257135/
Especially this notion of 'working hard' which is almost purely a corporatist-favoring attitude nowadays. Work harder for no reward, and keep your head down because trying to earn more means you're a selfish millennial. What happened to the value of 'work smarter, not harder'?
You want Asian CEOs, then Asian investors should invest in American companies and make Asians CEOs of those companies. Its that simple. At the end the corporate structure is defined by investor money. That money belongs to people of certain races who trust their race to run their company... and if not their race then white people -- and this goes for Arabs and Asians. The rather have their companies run by whites (which often includes the other whites that must not be named) that know other whites that can make things happen.
Their nuclear reactors blow up.
They still hunt whales and dolphins.
I’m not sure if this is just standard of Asian American coverage. See this article from the NYTimes recently on affirmative action: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/magazine/affirmative-acti.... Most of the interviewees again went to elite universities, even though affirmative action affects more than just elite privates.
Parents, by making an explicit choice to have kids, are bound to the obligation to not harm or mistreat them. However children never chose to be born, and do not have an obligation to accept responsibilities given by parents, or respect their parents' right to mistreat them.
When children complain that the parents are hurting them, parents can avoid responsibility for their abuse by arguing that their children "do not respect them". When children do not go along with their parents' values and orders, parents can easily use "disrespect" as a reason to punish the children. I have Asian parents who physically and mentally abused me, though I'm not sure if they specifically invoked "respect" as justification.
Yes, concentrated in a narrow band around upper middle class professional jobs. The point of the article is that some people want more than that, and can't figure out why they aren't getting it. Well, you don't get above average outcomes without taking some risk, and it's no surprise that the most risk-averse culture is going to be under-represented at the top, while still doing well in the median outcome.
Actually, the article found out pretty well why they aren't getting it: "And yet while only 15 percent of the male population is at least six feet tall, 58 percent of all corporate CEOs are."
Asians are not as tall as other ethnic groups, so are naturally at a disadvantage here. Only 3% of CEOs are 5'7" or less, which is the median height of an Asian-American male. 95th percentile height of Asian-Americans is 5'11.4" or thereabouts (source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_03/sr03_039.pdf ).
Well as an Asian I’d say these delusions of grandeur are part of the problem.
I loved this passage;
Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you’re supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you’re finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you.
"Leadership" in a nutshell!
That is a very insightful observation.
This is actually a noted phenomenon at Google where competitive programming experience correlates negatively with job performance, because by practicing the measure so much, you can display a stronger signal than you actually have (in other words, you can seem better than you are because you are highly practiced at the tests).
Also I think the author is off the mark with their generalizations of white people. Almost all of the stereotypes about Asian people also apply to e.g. white software developers.
The argument is talking about a general stereotype, which means that saying some people don’t fit it is kind of meaningless. Also, White parents are not prohibited from raising their children in an Asian way, and some do. Relevant quote from Amy Chua, the “Tiger Mom”:
> I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120102062419/http://online.wsj...
There is a shockingly large segment of American society that feels pride in its own ignorance. I've had numerous discussions with family members, particularly those from rural areas, who flat-out deny statistical fact because "they know what's right in their heart"
That being said, I think there is an analogue to these ideas in Asian cultures. I think Asian cultures can be similarly resistant to new ideas - particularly in social contexts (LGBTQ rights, as an example.)
Overachievering should not been seen as negative. As humans, we need to be overachievers, to better ourselves in what we are doing. Without the overachievers but achieving just enough, we will never improve.
Furthermore, I have the feeling that negative connotations is more prevalent in western societies than it is eastern societies.
Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone—even the rich—miserable.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritoc...
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Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2530663
A rambling slog. Needs a [2011] tag.