8 Asians

For the last few days, the Asian American websphere has been buzzing about two possibly related incidents at UCLA which campus police are investigating as hate crimes. On Tuesday, a student discovered a piece of paper with the words “asian women R Honkie white-boy worshipping Whores” attached to a Vietnamese Student Union sign in Kerckhoff Hall at UCLA. On Wednesday, another student found the words “Asian Women are White-Boy Worshipping Sluts” handwritten in the women’s [...] Continue »

Whenever I visited Taiwan as a child, my family and friends there were always so very impressed with my Taiwanese, and not just because I was the American kid. Other kids my age or generation who had grown up in Taiwan often couldn’t speak it, even if it was their home language. In fact, kids coming back to visit Taiwan from America were often more fluent in Taiwanese than their Taiwanese counterparts, thanks to the [...] Continue »

My family in Taiwan is always raving about how awesome health care is there. Some of them were recently reading off some health care prices to me. U.S. abdominal ultrasound: $500-$600. In Taiwan, it’s $27 without insurance and $1 with insurance. The difference is ridiculous. Recently in Taiwan, someone suggested that they entice more Mainland Chinese students over to the small island’s colleges and universities by offering them health care. Of course, not a lot [...] Continue »

Andy Marra, a Korean adoptee, shares the touching story about tracking down her Korean birth mother, whose love and acceptance allowed her to continue her male-to-female transition: “To this day I am astounded by my mother’s supernatural intuition despite the language and cultural barriers that still exist between us. I felt a great sense of relief when she helped me come out. My mother started to show her acceptance through simple acts. She would brush [...] Continue »

New York City’s top academic high schools like Bronx Science (pictured above) and Stuyvesant have one entrance criteria:  performance on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). While many Asian American families look at SHSAT preparation courses as a stepping stone to these elite schools and to a better life, others consider test prep to be an unfair advantage and are suing to have the system changed, saying that having one test as the entire [...] Continue »

NYU Shanghai, the first US China Joint College, was established this month.  A joint venture of New York University and Shanghai’s East China Normal University, the school will open its doors next year to some 300 students of which about half will be for Chinese students.  It is hoped that providing choices like this one will reduce the number of Chinese students going overseas for study (estimated at around 340,000 in 2011), some of whom [...] Continue »

The Florida Board of Education joined Virginia in setting race based achievement goals that hold Asian American students to a higher standard.  The rightmost column in the above excerpt from Florida’s educational strategic plan shows the differing expectations.  As you might expect, this standard generated some angry responses.

I usually regard alarmist stories about Chinese college students in the U.S.with suspicion, but this particular story about a University of San Francisco (USF) administrator resigning over aggressive recruitment of Chinese students seems to have some substance. Dayle Smith, dean of undergraduate studies in USF’s school of management, resigned over “the aggressive recruitment of Chinese” students. 781 out of 10017 students there are Chinese nationals, mostly in the business school and representing an increase from [...] Continue »

By John Kim Even as the Tiger Mom debate has started to fizzle out, she’s still making some press. It seems that Singapore’s prime minister has caught some flak for denouncing tiger mother-style parenting. I couldn’t help but wonder if things are looking hopeful for overburdened children in Asia. It’s no small feat that the prime minister of Singapore, whose country has experienced a great deal of success arguably as a result of tiger mothering, [...] Continue »

You do find that some Asians can be disadvantaged in the process, and not only because admissions committees think about Asians in a specific way, but because recommenders do too. These are the words of a former Ivy League Admissions Officer from an interview from Business Insider. While I have talked about comments from other admissions officers, this interview reveals how one Ivy league admission process (that of Dartmouth) deals with Asian Americans, athletes, and [...] Continue »

When I first read the report by the New York Times’ Kirk Semple over Japanese officials’ request to remove a comfort women memorial back in May, I was livid. So livid in fact that I tried to write and rewrite about this but ended up feeling all I could do was rant about how angry I was and not be able to put together a coherent article. So let me just tell you what happened. [...] Continue »

A Hong Kong couple is suing an “Education Consultant” for the $2 million that they paid to get their sons into Harvard. The suit alleges that Mark Zimny of IvyAdmit Consulting Associates asked Gerald and Lily Chow to entrust money to him to donate on their behalf to improve their sons’ chances at admission.   Zimny’s attorney denies the charges. From their web page, it seems that IvyAdmit specializes in consulting for international clients. While the [...] Continue »