Katherine Tran
Section 1
Week 2
Reading both Asian Americans and Affirmative Action: From Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back Again and "Beyond Tiger Mom Anxiety: Ethnic, Gender and Generational Differences in Asian American College Access and Choices" were pretty interesting in terms of comparing the content of these articles to my own experiences as a child of refugees and a student from an elite high school not unlike the one mentioned in Asian Americans and Affirmative Action. To provide some background, my high school was technically a public one, but about half of the student body, myself included, were part of the Troy Tech magnet program, which is a heavily STEM-focused curriculum that includes, among other things, a 150-hour internship as part of its requirements. Troy also boasts one of the best National Science Olympiad teams in the country - as of 2018 the reigning champions - and a student body that regularly sees admission into elite colleges like CalTech, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.
With me attending a school like that, it’s no wonder that the first reaction was normally to ask whether my parents had any hand in my enrollment. In general, as an Asian American student, the most widely made assumption is that my parents had some greater degree of control over my school and major choices than they actually do. Most people think that my parents were the ones who had me go to Troy, and who helped me choose which universities to apply to. The truth, though? They weren’t really that involved in any of my decisions - going to Troy was out of spite for the majority of my middle school classmates and all of my colleges were chosen based on distance away from home and a vague idea of what I wanted for myself (which excluded the STEM majors so many others chose probably at least partially because of parental pressure). Ending up in Davis was just a matter of finances and timing. Thinking about my situation does make me wonder about a demographic that is probably understudied: Asian American students who choose not to go into stereotypically “Asian parent-approved” fields like medicine, law, or engineering. Would these students be considered an exception to the rule, and is their decision to follow paths they may not receive support for a symptom of rebellion against the corporatization of the family, where they are the products as well as the workers?
References:
Allred, N.C. January 2007. Asian Americans and Affirmative Action: From Yellow Peril to Model Minority and Back Again. Asian American Law Journal
Poon, O. & Byrd, A. (2013). Beyond Tiger Mom Anxiety: Ethnic, Gender, and Generational Differences in Asian American College Access and Choices. Journal of College Admissions, 23-31
Video Credit:
Falletta, J. (Producer). (n.d.). We Are Warriors 2016-2017 [Video file]. Retrieved January 13, 2019, from https://www.fjuhsd.org/Page/2906
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