z****0
发帖数: 3942 | 1 http://nymag.com/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/
去年就听说，但昨天才有空读完了Wesley Yang在2011年写的Paper Tiger，这篇非常有
力，用词不拘一格的文章对我的冲击很大。文章非常尖锐，结合具体人和事例讨论了为
何亚裔在美国融入困难，为何对亚裔有那么多stereotype，为何亚裔在职场难于晋升，
等等值得在美亚裔思考，反思的问题。建议每一个亚裔父母都读一下，也建议看一看文
章后面的读者评论，其中有很多亚裔读者的切身体会和思考。
因为作者的写作手法，俺建议通读全文，否则容易断章取义。 | u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 2 十一页啊？！没那么多工夫翻成中文（在脑海里）然后读。给个摘译吧。 | S**********b
发帖数: 3142 | 3 Just complaining, nothing new.
【在 u*****a 的大作中提到】
: 十一页啊？！没那么多工夫翻成中文（在脑海里）然后读。给个摘译吧。
| u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 4 谢谢。
【在 S**********b 的大作中提到】
: Just complaining, nothing new.
| z****0
发帖数: 3942 | 5 呵呵，这篇文章有不少艰深的词汇，完全读下来并理解确实是个挑战。
【在 u*****a 的大作中提到】
: 十一页啊？！没那么多工夫翻成中文（在脑海里）然后读。给个摘译吧。
| z****0
发帖数: 3942 | 6 我不这么觉得。文章有很深入的思考，比如面对现状，亚裔有哪些option？不同人物有
不同的perspective。
【在 S**********b 的大作中提到】
: Just complaining, nothing new.
| z****0
发帖数: 3942 | 7 Ed. Note: Wesley Yang's piece, "Paper Tigers", presents fascinating insight
into the lives of Asian-Americans faced with life and career disappointment
after the diplomas, along with ways Asian-Americans are changing the game
to avoid these pitfalls, stemming from their values, upbringing, and
cultural norms. The take-aways are many, and we've selected only a few to
highlight in this venue. It's a recommended read in its entirety to
appreciate the full context and nuances.
......
Sometimes I'll glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what
I see. Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-
green-toned skin. An expression that is nearly reptilian in its impassivity.
I've contrived to think of this face as the equal in beauty to any other.
But what I feel in these moments is its strangeness to me. It's my face. I
can't disclaim it. But what does it have to do with me?
(snip)
Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an
invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble
it. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any
individuality. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but
that it in fact patronizes and exploits. Not just people "who are good at
math" and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused,
conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.
(snip)
Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck
grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck
humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the
future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility.
I understand the reasons Asian parents have raised a generation of children
this way. Doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer: These are good jobs open to
whoever works hard enough. What could be wrong with that pursuit? Asians
graduate from college at a rate higher than any other ethnic group in
America, including whites. They earn a higher median family income than any
other ethnic group in America, including whites. This is a stage in a
triumphal narrative, and it is a narrative that is much shorter than many
remember. Two thirds of the roughly 14 million Asian-Americans are foreign-
born. There were less than 39,000 people of Korean descent living in America
in 1970, when my elder brother was born. There are around 1 million today.
Asian-American success is typically taken to ratify the American Dream and
to prove that minorities can make it in this country without handouts. Still
, an undercurrent of racial panic always accompanies the consideration of
Asians, and all the more so as China becomes the destination for our
industrial base and the banker controlling our burgeoning debt. But if the
armies of Chinese factory workers who make our fast fashion and iPads
terrify us, and if the collective mass of high- achieving Asian-American
students arouse an anxiety about the laxity of American parenting, what of
the Asian-American who obeyed everything his parents told him? Does this
person really scare anyone?
Earlier this year, the publication of Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger
Mother incited a collective airing out of many varieties of race-based
hysteria. But absent from the millions of words written in response to the
book was any serious consideration of whether Asian-Americans were in fact
taking over this country. If it is true that they are collectively
dominating in elite high schools and universities, is it also true that
Asian-Americans are dominating in the real world? My strong suspicion was
that this was not so, and that the reasons would not be hard to find. If we
are a collective juggernaut that inspires such awe and fear, why does it
seem that so many Asians are so readily perceived to be, as I myself have
felt most of my life, the products of a timid culture, easily pushed around
by more assertive people, and thus basically invisible?
(snip)
Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in
the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: The top 3.7
percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools
Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-
asides for the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other
privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage "diversity" or any
nebulous concept of "well- roundedness" or "character." Here we have
something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian-
Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of
the high school.
This year, 569 Asian-Americans scored high enough to earn a slot at
Stuyvesant, along with 179 whites, 13 Hispanics, and 12 blacks. Such
dramatic overrepresentation, and what it may be read to imply about the
intelligence of different groups of New Yorkers, has a way of making people
uneasy. But intrinsic intelligence, of course, is precisely what Asians don'
t believe in. They believe - and have proved - that the constant practice of
test-taking will improve the scores of whoever commits to it. All
throughout Flushing, as well as in Bayside, one can find "cram schools," or
storefront academies, that drill students in test preparation after school,
on weekends, and during summer break. "Learning math is not about learning
math," an instructor at one called Ivy Prep was quoted in the New York Times
as saying. "It's about weightlifting. You are pumping the iron of math."
Mao puts it more specifically: "You learn quite simply to nail any
standardized test you take."
And so there is an additional concern accompanying the rise of the Tiger
Children, one focused more on the narrowness of the educational experience a
non-Asian child might receive in the company of fanatically preprofessional
Asian students. . . . (snip) . . . In 2005, The Wall Street Journal
reported on "white flight" from a high school in Cupertino, California, that
began soon after the children of Asian software engineers had made the
place so brutally competitive that a B average could place you in the bottom
third of the class.
Colleges have a way of correcting for this imbalance: The Princeton
sociologist Thomas Espenshade has calculated that an Asian applicant must,
in practice, score 140 points higher on the SAT than a comparable white
applicant to have the same chance of admission. This is obviously unfair to
the many qualified Asian individuals who are punished for the success of
others with similar faces. Upper-middle-class white kids, after all, have
their own elite private schools, and their own private tutors, far more
expensive than the cram schools, to help them game the education system. . .
.
(snip)
"At Stuy, it's completely different: If you looked at the pinnacle, the
girls and the guys are not only good-looking and socially affable, they also
get the best grades and star in the school plays and win election to
student government. It all converges at the top. It's like training for high
society. It was jarring for us Chinese kids. You got the sense that you had
to study hard, but it wasn't enough.
(snip)
The researcher was talking about what some refer to as the "Bamboo Ceiling"
- an invisible barrier that maintains a pyramidal racial structure
throughout corporate America, with lots of Asians at junior levels, quite a
few in middle management, and virtually none in the higher reaches of
leadership. . . .
(snip)
Maybe it is simply the case that a traditionally Asian upbringing is the
problem. As Allyn points out, in order to be a leader, you must have
followers. Associates at Pricewaterhouse Coopers are initially judged on how
well they do the work they are assigned. "You have to be a doer," as she
puts it. They are expected to distinguish themselves with their diligence,
at which point they become "super-doers." But being a leader requires
different skill sets. "The traits that got you to where you are won't
necessarily take you to the next level," says the diversity consultant Jane
Hyun, who wrote a book called Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling. To become a
leader requires taking personal initiative and thinking about how an
organization can work differently. It also requires networking, self-
promotion, and self-assertion. It's racist to think that any
given Asian individual is unlikely to be creative or risk-taking. It's
simple cultural observation to say that a group whose education has
historically focused on rote memorization and "pumping the iron of math" is,
on aggregate, unlikely
to yield many people inclined to challenge authority or break with inherited
ways of doing things.
(snip)
In the book, Chua (Ed. Note: Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)
portrays her distaste for corporate law, which she practiced before going
into academe. "My entire three years at the firm, I always felt like I was
playacting, ridiculous in my suit," she writes. This malaise extended even
earlier, to her time as a student. "I didn't care about the rights of
criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me.
I also wasn't naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write
down everything the professor said and memorize it."
At the AASA gathering at Yale, Chua made the connection between her
upbringing and her adult dissatisfaction. "My parents didn't sit around
talking about politics and philosophy at the dinner table," she told the
students. Even after she had escaped from corporate law and made it onto a
law faculty, "I was kind of lost. I just didn't feel the passion."
Eventually, she made a name for herself as the author of popular books about
foreign policy and became an award-winning teacher. But it's plain that she
was no better prepared for legal scholarship than she had been for
corporate law. "It took me a long, long time," she said. "And I went through
lots and lots of rejection." She recalled her extended search for an
academic post, in which she was "just not able to do a good interview, just
not able to present myself well."
In other words, Battle Hymn provides all the material needed to refute the
very cultural polemic for which it was made to stand. Chua's Chinese
education had gotten her through an elite schooling, but it left her
unprepared for the real world. She does not hide any of this. She had set
out, she explained, to write a memoir that was "defiantly self-incriminating
" -- and the result was a messy jumble of conflicting impulses, part
provocation, part self-critique. Western readers rode roughshod over this
paradox and made of Chua a kind of Asian minstrel figure. But more than
anything else, Battle Hymn is a very American project - one no traditional
Chinese person would think to undertake. "Even if you hate the book," Chua
pointed out, "the one thing it is not is meek." (cont.) | u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 8 听着和中国大学生毕业后，找不到工作有些像。
亚裔能考试是路人皆知啊。碰上不是用考试成绩评估表现的事情就抓瞎，也合情合理。
别人看着傻，笨，其实骨子里的鬼点子也不见得少，或者把聪明用到别的地方去了。
既然光凭考试能力不能让亚裔出头，那是不是可以换个能力试试？ | a*****g
发帖数: 19398 | 9 能考试是因为愿意投入愿意专注
【在 u*****a 的大作中提到】
: 听着和中国大学生毕业后，找不到工作有些像。
: 亚裔能考试是路人皆知啊。碰上不是用考试成绩评估表现的事情就抓瞎，也合情合理。
: 别人看着傻，笨，其实骨子里的鬼点子也不见得少，或者把聪明用到别的地方去了。
: 既然光凭考试能力不能让亚裔出头，那是不是可以换个能力试试？
| u*****a
发帖数: 6276 | 10 你的意思是“愿意投入愿意专注”就应该成功？貌似很多反例啊。比如临床试验，花了
老多的钱和力，一样失败。哭死。
下围棋也是:“愿意投入愿意专注”的棋手比比皆是啊。都成功了吗？
【在 a*****g 的大作中提到】
: 能考试是因为愿意投入愿意专注
| | | a*****g
发帖数: 19398 | 11 愿意投入不会保障成功，但会更容易成功
你的意思是“愿意投入愿意专注”就应该成功？貌似很多反例啊。比如临床试验，花了
老多的钱和力，一样失败。哭死。
下围棋也是:愿“愿意投入愿意专注”的棋手比比皆是啊。都成功了吗？
【在 u*****a 的大作中提到】
: 你的意思是“愿意投入愿意专注”就应该成功？貌似很多反例啊。比如临床试验，花了
: 老多的钱和力，一样失败。哭死。
: 下围棋也是:“愿意投入愿意专注”的棋手比比皆是啊。都成功了吗？
| S*******l
发帖数: 4637 | 12 这个人tries to be white way too hard.作者把亚洲人的“不成功”都归结为亚洲
bringing up。其实作为少数民族，亚洲人远比其他少数民族成功。第一条评论反驳的
非常好。
凭什么72%亚洲学生的哈佛就不能是最优秀的大学？
另外他忽视了家庭资源。本地白人有深厚的家族资源可以动用，在一个networking,
nepotism 极端重要的社会，对一代亚洲孩子是不公平的。
中国开放以后涌入美国的新一代中国技术移民的孩子才刚开始进入社会，他们有着老一
代亚洲移民所没有的优势，经济优越，智力遗传优秀，教育良好，而且更重视软实力的
教育，而不是仅仅着眼于academic上。亚洲孩子在更高的social strata上会有更多的
比例。
还有更positive的做法是advocate for Asian kids. 让社会接受亚洲孩子的
uniqueness,文化的，社会的和其他方面的.
感觉作者和他访问对象们都是年轻人还对自己很没有信心，还很敏感自己being
different in certain ways， bought into Asian stereotypes readily without
criticism。然后简单归因偏了。
【在 z****0 的大作中提到】
: http://nymag.com/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/
: 去年就听说，但昨天才有空读完了Wesley Yang在2011年写的Paper Tiger，这篇非常有
: 力，用词不拘一格的文章对我的冲击很大。文章非常尖锐，结合具体人和事例讨论了为
: 何亚裔在美国融入困难，为何对亚裔有那么多stereotype，为何亚裔在职场难于晋升，
: 等等值得在美亚裔思考，反思的问题。建议每一个亚裔父母都读一下，也建议看一看文
: 章后面的读者评论，其中有很多亚裔读者的切身体会和思考。
: 因为作者的写作手法，俺建议通读全文，否则容易断章取义。
| y***n
发帖数: 4103 | | z****0
发帖数: 3942 | 14 我觉得应该看完文章再评论不迟，只看前几页容易误解作者想表达的意思。
我刚看完前几页时也是你这样想的。
【在 S*******l 的大作中提到】
: 这个人tries to be white way too hard.作者把亚洲人的“不成功”都归结为亚洲
: bringing up。其实作为少数民族，亚洲人远比其他少数民族成功。第一条评论反驳的
: 非常好。
: 凭什么72%亚洲学生的哈佛就不能是最优秀的大学？
: 另外他忽视了家庭资源。本地白人有深厚的家族资源可以动用，在一个networking,
: nepotism 极端重要的社会，对一代亚洲孩子是不公平的。
: 中国开放以后涌入美国的新一代中国技术移民的孩子才刚开始进入社会，他们有着老一
: 代亚洲移民所没有的优势，经济优越，智力遗传优秀，教育良好，而且更重视软实力的
: 教育，而不是仅仅着眼于academic上。亚洲孩子在更高的social strata上会有更多的
: 比例。
| s***i
发帖数: 503 | | p******e
发帖数: 677 | 16 NPR上播过，听了感受和你说的很像。
【在 S*******l 的大作中提到】
: 这个人tries to be white way too hard.作者把亚洲人的“不成功”都归结为亚洲
: bringing up。其实作为少数民族，亚洲人远比其他少数民族成功。第一条评论反驳的
: 非常好。
: 凭什么72%亚洲学生的哈佛就不能是最优秀的大学？
: 另外他忽视了家庭资源。本地白人有深厚的家族资源可以动用，在一个networking,
: nepotism 极端重要的社会，对一代亚洲孩子是不公平的。
: 中国开放以后涌入美国的新一代中国技术移民的孩子才刚开始进入社会，他们有着老一
: 代亚洲移民所没有的优势，经济优越，智力遗传优秀，教育良好，而且更重视软实力的
: 教育，而不是仅仅着眼于academic上。亚洲孩子在更高的social strata上会有更多的
: 比例。
| z****0
发帖数: 3942 | 17 Wesley Yang哪里要代表所有亚裔了？
你不觉得这样的文章，这样的思考对在美亚裔很有意义吗？
【在 s***i 的大作中提到】
: 好扯啊。哗众取宠。他能代表所有的亚裔吗？
| c******i
发帖数: 4091 | 18 这是从种族主义的角度展现被歧视的loser怨天尤人的entitlement，本质上和施行歧视
的种族主义是sm的关系。
各个国家种族的现代价值观没有根本区别，在美国种族歧视的问题，需要用个体平等的
价值观来真正替换肤色价值观。
【在 z****0 的大作中提到】
: Wesley Yang哪里要代表所有亚裔了？
: 你不觉得这样的文章，这样的思考对在美亚裔很有意义吗？
| t*******r
发帖数: 22634 | 19 属实，就好比 CIT 火星车工程队，自恨没有墨西哥腔无法融入老墨建房工程队。
当然，无底线苦逼刷题，最终导致失去存在感，那属于损人又害己。。。
【在 c******i 的大作中提到】
: 这是从种族主义的角度展现被歧视的loser怨天尤人的entitlement，本质上和施行歧视
: 的种族主义是sm的关系。
: 各个国家种族的现代价值观没有根本区别，在美国种族歧视的问题，需要用个体平等的
: 价值观来真正替换肤色价值观。
|
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