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Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

This description is very consistent with some comments from parents that I encountered in the peninsula, when I lived there a decade ago. Avoiding heavily east Asian areas would be a factor I'd expect them to make in deciding on school district. Some cafes around Santa Clara were shockingly filled to the brim with Chinese or Korean high schoolers doing schoolwork -- it was an absolutely disturbing sight. I wouldn't call it fear of competition so much as a desire to have kids grow up in a good culture.

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> …filled to the brim with Chinese or Korean high schoolers doing schoolwork -- it was an absolutely disturbing sight

Hard as I try I cannot summon an image of such an eldritch horror as you’ve described. I fear if did I would be driven to a madness that I might never recover from by the very sight of such a terrifying visage.

Kids… doing homework… in a cafe. I taste the bile of a nameless demon rise in my throat even typing the words. I shudder to banish the thought.

Kids still do homework?!

(For additional irony, please see my about me. :D)

"good culture" == "not Asian American culture" apparently?

I think this is exactly the thing that the authors skate right past. "Parental fears of academic competition" is assumed to be fully disjoint with "racial animus". What if "fears of ... competition" is just one way to racial animus without expressing explicitly negative attitudes on surveys?

And yes, this is a swipe at both the parent and the paper authors for not seriously considering this. The authors have literally a 2-sentence paragraph on animus and later claim to have ruled it out. And literally, you cannot take surveys at face value for something like this. People will not and sometimes cannot be honest.

I can't read minds but "racial animus" would certainly be a strange conclusion to jump to with the people I was talking to.

> "good culture" == "not Asian American culture"

Again in just a few replies: What I can honestly only interpret as a bad-faith hyper-reduction. I understand that people tend to jump to accusations of racism with just as much unreasonableness as the people actually being racist, but I'd love a better effort to keep that away from here in particular.

1. Was it like that daily, or just around exams? It's perfectly normal to crunch during exams.

2. Even if it was like that daily, how do you know the Asian kids weren't still playing and enjoying time with friends? Maybe the time they spent studying is just the free time the non-Asian kids spent addicted on the Playstation, and not all their free time.

3. Are there any studies that show Asian-American kids turn out more miserable than other races? Because AFAIK there's no one more depressed than white people. (which is kind of understandable considering modern American culture tries to brainwash them since early childhood to hate themselves, but still...)

This is just second-hand chit-chat from Bay Area parents, mostly living in Palo Alto/Los Altos/MV/Sunnyvale/Cupertino, about their kids' lives, that I'm talking about.

> Even if it was like that daily, how do you know the Asian kids weren't still playing and enjoying time with friends?

I didn't go and measure daily -- I avoided the place because I didn't want to hang around a bunch of high schoolers -- but it's a sight, and a vibe, that would simply never happen, ever, where I grew up.

It's not like every kid in the school district was there, with nobody left to play on the sports teams.

What's the problem with children doing homework in cafes? The homework needs to get done anyways, and if anything it's an indicator of a safe neighborhood where children socialize while they do homework in a third place rather than in school or at home.

Disturbing?

Yes, kids spending their after school time doing homework and maxing test scores instead of having a childhood is disturbing.

Children and their parents exercising their freedom to do whatever they want is disturbing to you? Because some predetermined definition of “having a childhood” is not being met? I’m not arguing that this is the best use of their time, but neither is anything else within bounds of normal decorum.

> Children and their parents exercising their freedom to do whatever they want

Aside from the dubious assertion that the children and parents want the same thing, this is reduced to the point of absurdity. You can disagree with the parent's opinion on the subject, but you should at least formulate that disagreement in the context of the subject.

I would argue that the children are explicitly not free to do whatever they want, which is what is disturbing about it.

I dunno, when I was a kid I didn't want to play sports but my parents kept signing me up for teams. Is that "disturbing"? I also didn't want to eat my vegetables or go to bed on time. A _lot_ of what kids do isn't going to be what they would have chosen for themselves, and that's ... parenting I think?

Is it just the word “disturbing” you take issue with? Maybe it is too strong. Is “weird” okay? Because if I’m being honest, I have never in my life seen a cafe “filled to the brim” with students doing school work, and I live near several large universities. It would indeed be weird to see that, especially so if the students were in high school!

Maybe not disturbing, fine. But very weird.

Have u seen the average successful CEOs resumes like Zuckerberg and Gates about how early they got their private tuitions on programming? Maybe some ppl want those kinds things for their own children. Should they?

I'd argue: no. There's more to life than money and academic achievement, and good parents will convey that to their kids. Nobody needs billions of dollars to be happy. I taught myself programming because I enjoyed it, and now I have a job that I enjoy (that happens to pay really well as well).

You completely missed my point. I was saying that singling out so called 'Asians' parents itself is racist. There are white parents who are doing it. There are black parents who are doing it. There are whatever parents are doing it. There are competitive parents everywhere

Especially when they are talking about California where the silicon valley sits, maybe check out the bigger picuture before pinning it on some races?

Have I lost my mind?

“kids spending their after school time doing homework”

Uh… what do you think homework is for? When is it traditionally done?

Have you ever done homework before???

Traditionally I think it's done as rapidly and haphazardly as possible during homeroom. It's right there in the word, home-room.

What I saw is basically the embodiment of this chart. (And remember that the "Asian" number dilutes out the Chinese and Korean numbers.)

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_35.asp

I have to agree with the parent that "disturbing" is not an unreasonable feeling to have in regards to witnessing a cultural take-over when that culture has features that seem negative from the perspective of one's own culture.

(a) neither whites nor Asians are a "culture"

(b) kids sitting at cafes doing homework is not a "takeover"

(c) California was home to a bunch of Native American nations, who were then genocided by the Spanish. A bunch of foreign people, largely Americans, moved into Mexican Alta California (without papers!), mostly did not learn any of the local languages, and tried to start their own republic before being annexed by the US. There _have_ been takeovers here. Kids doing homework is not one of them.

(d) What's more disturbing, some Asian kids doing schoolwork or white people making sure that schools are more segregated now than they were before Brown v Board?

Kids doing homework? That's horrible, those Asians bringing their homework over here.

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