Long Reads

Undoing Asian Parenting?

Why do Asian students struggle after the testing ends?

Readers with some extra time on their hands this morning would be wise to check out Wesley Yang’s long essay on the plight of Asian-American children. “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,” Yang writes in New York magazine. “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.” Yang, himself the child of Korean immigrants, looks at the academic success of Asian-American students and finds, “It is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation.” The problem, at least partially as Yang diagnoses it, is that Asian men in particular are not raised to be assertive. “ [The solution] is about altering the perceptions of Asian men—perceptions that are rooted in the way they behave, which are in turn rooted in the way they were raised—through a course of behavior modification intended to teach them how to be the socially dominant figures that they are not perceived to be.”