Now, I should start by disclosing that I do not have any children of my own, as I’m 24 and spend my weekends drinking aggressively with my friends. That said, I feel that I’ve experienced enough of life to have a rough idea of what skills and values lead to success, which means that I have an opinion on how to educate a child to instill those things.

I disagree with what I will term as the ‘Raymond Zheng’ approach to education for two reasons: first, it seems to poorly provide for the types of interpersonal skills that are critical for success. Schools are about more than transferring academic knowledge; they are communities where people bond, form relationships, and go through the process of maturing into adulthood together. This program misses that by thrusting these kids into impersonal lecture halls with students who they can’t possibly relate to in any meaningful way. It’s telling that when the reporter asked Raymond to explain his computer program, Raymond gave the wrong answer. Not wrong in a technical sense, but wrong in that it failed to take into account the reporter’s level of understanding of the subject and was thus useless. It lacked a level of human understanding that you can’t learn by taking more advanced classes but which comes naturally to anyone who has spent time meeting people and making friends.

Similarly, the girl who dismissed going to prom completely missed the point; yes, she can still go with her friends (although I question how close she can remain with her friends given that she won’t see them in school anymore and is going through a completely different set of experiences as they are). But prom is a communal ritual, and she is no longer part of that community. It is a step towards adulthood — it’s no accident that so many high schoolers choose to lose their virginity at prom — that has a certain collective emotional resonance that she will likely miss out on.

Kids who grow up going through the normal education system are getting a lot more out of it than just an academic education. By being constantly surrounded with other people who are their same age and going through the same maturation process as them, and going through communal school events like prom, they are developing the ability to interact with other human beings. This is critical to success, not only because most careers involve a high amount of collaborative work, but more importantly because being a content, well adjust human being requires forming good relationships with other people. When I said earlier that I have a rough idea of what skills lead to life success, one of the things I meant is that I have never met a single person who is happy but does not have a lot of friends.

The Raymond Zheng approach also emphasizes the knowledge acquisition over creativity, when in most real life settings (at least the settings a high powered achiever like Ray is likely to get involved in) the latter is far more important. Creativity is a nebulous subject, but everything I’ve witnessed, read about, or experienced first hand suggests that it starts with play (there is an excellent book on improvisational acting called Impro that goes into this subject in more depth.) Watching Raymond, you don’t get the sense that he plays very much, which makes me wonder how he’ll do once he’s gotten through all the academic knowledge that he’s learning and moves on to the real goal of adding to knowledge and creating something new.

Raymond seems like a nice kid, and for all I know I might have the specifics of his story wrong. But I do want to call attention to and indict a way of thinking that is prevalent within Asian and Asian American communities — the exclusive emphasis on academic performance creates real problems and prevents children from growing up into successful, well adjusted human beings.

Yet ever since that game I’ve been disappointed by Yao. I don’t mean that Yao is a bad player – he puts up 20 points and 10 rebounds night after night and shoots a high percentage, both on the floor and on the foul line. He is an all star and one of the few good centers in the NBA. But he is not transcendent, and watching him play doesn’t inspire confidence that he will lead his team to a championship (it’s telling that Kobe Bryant and Lebron James both have more jersey sales than him in China).

There are all sorts of explanations for why Yao has not truly lived up to his potential, and some of them are valid: he has gotten unlucky with injuries. He is forced to play during the summer with the Chinese national team. His teammates have been ball hogs and not let him be the centerpiece of the offense. But the explanation that I think is the most interesting is that he isn’t aggressive enough. He passes too often. He doesn’t demand the ball when the game is on the line. He doesn’t dominate a game the way Shaq does. And what is interesting about this explanation is that it’s usually followed up with, he isn’t aggressive enough because he’s Chinese.

For example, the New York Times ran an article that asks why doesn’t Yao dunk. Their answer came down to cultural factors: “If you think of how community-oriented most young people growing up in China are, it’s just a different way of being brought up … There’s a lot more unity, and it seems like it’s a culture that promotes a more unselfish, ‘what’s best for everyone is what’s best for you’ mentality.”

I think there are a couple of interesting points here: First of all, where does the line between stereotyping and legitimate differences in cultural values get drawn? If I flipped this article on its head and said that black players dunk because their culture promotes physical aggression, I think a lot of people would be offended, but when the New York Times calls out Asians for being passive and lacking in individuality, this is okay?

But more important than asking whether this argument is politically correct is asking whether it is true. There’s something to the claim that Asian cultural values don’t emphasize aggression. While there are exceptions, most Asian people I know don’t rock the boat; they tend to be less loud and rambunctious than my non-Asian friends. And having grown up with Asian parents who never emphasized the idea of asserting one’s individuality, I can understand why.

In Yao Ming’s case, I believe that yes, he would be a better player if he were more aggressive, and that yes, at least some of that lack of aggressiveness comes from his cultural background. What is really interesting here is that this line of thinking implies a normative judgment – within the realm of professional basketball, I am saying that there are aspects of Chinese culture that are straight up bad (although I don’t see it quite such black and white terms; for example, Yao is also probably a better passer because of his cultural background). Moreover, I think this judgment potentially extends way beyond basketball. I feel like I’ve observed many situations where an Asian person’s passivity ends up working against them.

The next day I was getting coffee with a friend of mine from Taiwan, and I mentioned this story to her. Her response: “Yeah! My parents do the same thing!” I got the same response from the next four Asian people I mentioned this to, so I don’t think this is uncommon. Also, all the people who were discussing this at the dinner party were intelligent, caring people, yet none of them seemed to think that there was anything wrong or even strange about disliking someone on the basis of race.

So, what’s the extent to which these problems exist? I’m reasonably convinced that amongst first generation Asian immigrants, racial stereotypes abound (especially against other non-Asian, non-white minorities), in large part because the homogeneity of most Asian countries doesn’t really prepare immigrants for the racial and cultural diversity that is America. Also, based on everything I’ve ever heard, non Asian non-white races are treated in Asian countries with at best, amused curiosity and at worst, outright disdain (as hard as it is for a Chinese person to deal with racial issues in America, imagine how much harder it is for a black man to deal with racial issues in China). But I’m curious what happens to immigrant children, people of my generation. Do they tend to adopt the attitudes of the society they grew up in, or does racism pass on through the family?

And what’s the impact of this to the Asian community? The most immediate impact is that it makes the Asian community a bit hypocritical – the same dinner guests who didn’t want their daughter dating a black man also complained about racial glass ceilings in the workplace, and while that point might still be valid, it’s harder to make persuasively when you are essentially guilty of the same behavior. It also has the effect of isolating the Asian American community. I don’t think my parents have any non Asian non white friends, and I don’t think any of their Asian friends do either. When others complain about Asians being insular, this strikes me as being one of the root causes.

What are your thoughts?

(Flickr photo: jeremybarwick)

As my friends and I went to various parties, the crowd was young, fratty — never before have I seen so many dudes wearing short sleeve shirts over long sleeve shirts — and extremely white. In fact, I would have been willing to bet that I was the only Asian person in a 10 block radius.

This changed when at one party another Asian guy strolled in. I didn’t notice him until some random white guy came up to me and said, “Yo, now there’s two of you here…You Asians have to fight each other!” To which, I responded something equally absurd: “Yeah, we’re like the movie Highlander. I take down other Asians to absorb their souls.” He laughed, and the two of us shared a beer.

But I spent some time reflecting on this exchange today, and I’m feeling a little weird about it, because it fits in with a pattern of non overt but still racist remarks that I’ve encountered my entire life, and I’ve never been sure how to react to them; one thing I hear sometimes is, “Rob, you are the coolest Asian person I know,” or its slightly more demeaning variant, “Rob, you are the only cool Asian person I know.”

Is that a compliment or an insult? And what does it say about the lens through which people view their friendship with me? The first time a friend said that to me I was moderately pleased, because I thought it signified his willingness to engage with and think past his existing racial boundaries. Now, however, I am beginning to think that the opposite is true – that he and others still view Asian people the same way, but they see me as some sort of weird anomaly and thus not really even Asian at all. Sometimes I get direct confirmation of this, as when one of my friends told me less than a week ago that, “for an Asian person, you don’t act very Asian.”

What to make of all this? After all, these people are my friends, and the fact that they seem to have negative racial stereotypes about my ethnic group doesn’t make me care about them any less, or want to stop associating with them. But that doesn’t mean that I like when this happens, or that I’m okay with the stereotypes.

And more importantly, how do we change this? I argued in a previous post that assimilation is important, and that we need to resist the urge to self segregate. I’ve always lived by that belief, in part because I see it as being my small way of contributing to the cause of Asian Americana, but mostly because it’s always been more natural for me to associate with people outside of a racial filter. But if all I’ve accomplished is gotten myself labeled token white, then either I haven’t done a very good job, or there aren’t enough other Asian people doing the same thing. I don’t know the answer, but I’m interested in all of your thoughts.

(Flickr photo credit: r0sss)

By this I do not mean that Park serves Tsingtao, or that people go there to karaoke. As I have described, Park is like most other New York bars in its design and function. What makes Park different is that it caters to a mostly (but not exclusively) Asian clientele. This raises an obvious question of why Asian people choose to congregate there. I do not know the answer to this, but would like to hear other people’s thoughts. It also raises a subtle question (and this is what I am interested in exploring) of whether it is bad, in some social sense, for Asian people to congregate this way.

At first glance this question may seem ridiculous, even insulting. After all, people should be able to choose who they hang out with, and there’s nothing wrong (and many things right) about having an Asian American community. And at the end of the day there are many organizations still run primarily by and for white people (by which I don’t just mean WASPy country clubs; try going to a Foo Fighters concert), but no one is up in arms telling them to branch out more.

That said, I think there’s something to the notion of communal responsibility – I am a representative of the Asian American community, and my actions will impact perceptions not only of myself but also of my communal group. I also think there is some difference in communal responsibility between members of the dominant culture and various minority groups. One key difference between whites and all minority groups is that white people do not have to assimilate. Now technically we don’t have to assimilate either, and there’s nothing actually wrong with the idea of an Asian America that both exists within and outside of mainstream American culture.

Except, perhaps, for one thing: the Asian community seems to want it both ways. That is to say, Asians want the freedom to exclusively associate with other Asian people (and therefore not assimilate), but are also bothered by racism, glass ceilings, media stereotypes, and the like. Fair or not, these things go hand in hand. For example, I often hear complaints that Asians are portrayed in the media as geeky and uncool, and that as a result, other people stereotype and form preconceived notions of us in this light. But how quickly would those preconceived notions shatter if every time anyone walked into any bar the loudest, most fun guy who was the life of the party and had all the girls gravitating towards him was also Asian? It’s a shallow example, I know, but it gets at something important. People form their views based on what’s around them, and if what’s around them are lots of interesting and unique Asian people doing their thing, then inevitably Asians stop being viewed as a homogenized cultural blob with a set of stereotypical characteristics, and more as the individual people that we are. Unfortunately, that isn’t happening right now, not because there aren’t fun and charismatic Asian guys out there, but because they all go to Park.

Fixing the problems of racism and stereotyping requires engagement, not self segregation. This, to me, is what assimilation really means: not a way for us to adopt the broader culture and ‘act white’ (whatever that even means), but a way for the broader culture to connect to us and come to appreciate who we are as individuals. As far as I can tell, that’s the only way that perceptions begin to change, and if we as a community view that as being important then we need to put ourselves out there.

Because this isn’t a review, I won’t go into details about the quality of acting (somewhat mixed) or the plot (except to say that there’s kind of a twist halfway through the show that has enormous metaphysical implications and creates a number of weird time paradoxes, but the author is sadly uninterested in exploring those issues.) What I am concerned with, and what I kept thinking about during the show, is the question of why. Why put on a show about Russian Jews and cast Asian people? What value is there, either artistically or or otherwise, in doing this?

Artistically, if there was some purpose in using Asians to tell the story of Leah’s Train, I missed it. Having never seen a NAATCO performance before, I came with the expectation that the director would use the juxtaposition of “non Asian play/Asian cast” to make some sort of statement. There was a bit of that, when I caught myself thinking that one of the characters really resembled a lot of yuppie Asian people that I know, and realized that the qualities I associate with yuppie Asians are actually true of all yuppies. But somehow I don’t think that was the intended message of the show. In fact, after looking through some of their other performances (Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Our Town, Othello – one wonders how they put that one on) I don’t think they intended for this juxtaposition to send any message at all.

Even without any artistic benefit, I think there’s some social value in what NAATCO does; we always hear about how there aren’t enough Asian Americans in the media, and judging from the fact that the theater is located on the third floor of an obscure building, I’m not naive to think that an obscure and not particularly well funded theater group is going to change that. But I do think that NAATCO, by its very existence, encourages Asian people to participate in the arts. At one level I mean this literally, in that NAATCO gives Asian actors another stage to perform on.

But I’m also saying something bigger than that; when I was growing up, all the Asian adults I ever met were doctors, or scientists, or engineers. This created a belief in my head that only those career paths were open to me, and things like theater and the arts were for other people. Then I stumbled upon the Stanford Asian American Theater Project, a theater group on campus founded by David Henry Hwang that, like NAATCO, put on shows with mostly Asian cast members. It was a revelation to me because it made me realize that art is created by and for Asian Americans, and that it’s vital to the health of the Asian American community. This is a message that I think gets lost, or underappreciated, and NAATCO’s doing its part to put it back on the forefront.