This passage in the article stood out to me:
Things that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs and have parents who are culturally assimilated.? I pressed him for specifics, and he mentioned that he had visited his white girlfriend’s parents’ house the past Christmas, where the family had "sat around cooking together and playing Scrabble." This ordinary vision of suburban-American domesticity lingered with Mao: Here, at last, was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge--about social norms and propriety--had been transmitted. There was no cram school that taught these lessons.
What's beautiful about this "ordinary vision" is that it's a portrait of domestic tranquility and love, simple and unpretentious, not that it's some sort of cultural transmission conduit; and it's totallly perverse to even frame it that way.
Another:
One succinct evocation of the situation appeared in the comments section of a website called Yellowworld: "If you’re East Asian, you need to attend a top-tier university to land a good high-paying gig. Even if you land that good high-paying gig, the white guy with the pedigree from a mediocre state university will somehow move ahead of you in the ranks simply because he’s white."
The second, conditional sentence is the one that seems to get all the attention, but I've always felt that it's the first one, the premise, that deserves criticism. The article makes a head-fake toward it, but then lets it slide. This is the real problem with our culture: not that we aren't getting enough of the highest-paying or highest-status jobs, enough wealth, enough exposure, or enough recognition. The problem is that that's all we care about.
The tragic truth about putting everything into breaking through the "bamboo ceiling," I suspect, is that it doesn't actually look any different on the other side of it.
None of this is to say that wealth, exposure, or recognition are inherently bad or wrong. 1 Timothy 6:10 says "Love of money is the root of all evil." Not money; love of it. It's our preoccupation with wealth, exposure, and recognition, our search for these to the exclusion of all else that leaves us with nothing truly substantial inside.
Yes, the author briefly mentions artistic pursuits in passing, but it's still in the framework of external measures of success. What's the takeaway?
And though the debate she sparked about Asian-American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be interesting.
"[Be] interesting," he says. Interesting to whom?
I have a different message: Be interested.
Yesterday's xkcd explicates it better than I can: http://xkcd.com/896/