Paper Tigers
What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?
By Wesley Yang
Published May 8, 2011
Sometimes I’ll glimpse my reflection in a window and feel
astonished by what I see. Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancakeflat 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?
Millions of Americans must feel estranged from their own faces. But
every self-estranged individual is estranged in his own way. I, for
instance, am the child of Korean immigrants, but I do not speak my
parents’ native tongue. I have never called my elders by the proper
honorific, “big brother” or “big sister.” I have never dated a Korean
woman. I don’t have a Korean friend. Though I am an immigrant, I
have never wanted to strive like one.
Wesley Yang
(Photo: Marco Grob. Grooming by Reneé Majour
for Orlando Pita T3/Jump.)
You could say that I am, in the gently derisive parlance of Asian-
Americans, a banana or a Twinkie (yellow on the outside, white on
the inside). But while I don’t believe our roots necessarily define us,
I do believe there are racially inflected assumptions wired into our neural circuitry that we use to sort
through the sea of faces we confront. And although I am in most respects devoid of Asian characteristics, I
do have an Asian face.
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.
I’ve always been of two minds about this sequence of stereotypes. On the one hand, it offends me greatly
that anyone would think to apply them to me, or to anyone else, simply on the basis of facial characteristics.
On the other hand, it also seems to me that there are a lot of Asian people to whom they apply.
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 AsianAmericans 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?
A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a young man named
Jefferson Mao, who after attending Stuyvesant High School had
recently graduated from the University of Chicago. He wanted my
advice about “being an Asian writer.” This is how he described
himself: “I got good grades and I love literature and I want to be a
writer and an intellectual; at the same time, I’m the first person in
my family to go to college, my parents don’t speak English very well,
and we don’t own the apartment in Flushing that we live in. I mean,
I’m proud of my parents and my neighborhood and what I perceive
to be my artistic potential or whatever, but sometimes I feel like I’m
jumping the gun a generation or two too early.”
One bright, cold Sunday afternoon, I ride the 7 train to its last stop
Jefferson Mao
(Photo: Marco Grob. Grooming by Reneé Majour
for Orlando Pita T3/Jump.)
in Flushing, where the storefront signs are all written in Chinese and
the sidewalks are a slow-moving river of impassive faces. Mao is
waiting for me at the entrance of the Main Street subway station,
and together we walk to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant.
Mao has a round face, with eyes behind rectangular wire-frame
glasses. Since graduating, he has been living with his parents, who emigrated from China when Mao was 8
years old. His mother is a manicurist; his father is a physical therapist’s aide. Lately, Mao has been making
the familiar hour-and-a-half ride from Flushing to downtown Manhattan to tutor a white Stuyvesant
freshman who lives in Tribeca. And what he feels, sometimes, in the presence of that amiable young man is
a pang of regret. Now he understands better what he ought to have done back when he was a Stuyvesant
freshman: “Worked half as hard and been twenty times more successful.”
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. Jenny Tsai, a student who was elected president of her class at the equally
ఆ
competitive New York public school Hunter College High 鳀Ẽ 鐃
, remembers
frequently hearing that “the
school was becoming too Asian, that they would be the downfall of our school.” A couple of years ago, she
revisited this issue in her senior thesis at Harvard, where she interviewed graduates of elite public schools
and found that the white students regarded the Asians students with wariness. (She quotes a music teacher
at Stuyvesant describing the dominance of Asians: “They were mediocre kids, but they got in because they
were coached.”) 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.
You could frame it, as some aggrieved Asian-Americans do, as a
simple issue of equality and press for race-blind quantitative
admissions standards. In 2006, a decade after California passed a
voter initiative outlawing any racial engineering at the public
universities, Asians composed 46 percent of UC-Berkeley’s entering
class; one could imagine a similar demographic reshuffling in the
Ivy League, where Asian-Americans currently make up about 17
percent of undergraduates. But the Ivies, as we all know, have their
own private institutional interests at stake in their admissions
choices, including some that are arguably defensible. Who can
seriously claim that a Harvard University that was 72 percent Asian
would deliver the same grooming for elite status its students had
gone there to receive?
Somewhere near the middle of his time at Stuyvesant, a vague sense
Eddie Huang
(Photo: Marco Grob. Grooming by Jane Choi for
Clairisonic at Stockland Martel.)
of discontent started to emerge within Mao. He had always felt
himself a part of a mob of “nameless, faceless Asian kids,” who were
“like a part of the décor of the place.” He had been content to keep
his head down and work toward the goal shared by everyone at
Stuyvesant: Harvard. But around the beginning of his senior year, he began to wonder whether this march
toward academic success was the only, or best, path.
“You can’t help but feel like there must be another way,” he explains over a bowl of phô. “It’s like, we’re
being pitted against each other while there are kids out there in the Midwest who can do way less work and
be in a garage band or something—and if they’re decently intelligent and work decently hard in school …”
Mao began to study the racially inflected social hierarchies at Stuyvesant, where, in a survey undertaken by
the student newspaper this year, slightly more than half of the respondents reported that their friends came
from within their own ethnic group. His attention focused on the mostly white (and Manhattan-dwelling)
group whose members seemed able to manage the crushing workload while still remaining socially active.
“The general gist of most high-school movies is that the pretty cheerleader gets with the big dumb jock, and
the nerd is left to bide his time in loneliness. But at some point in the future,” he says, “the nerd is going to
rule the world, and the dumb jock is going to work in a carwash.
“At Stuy, it’s completely different: If you looked at the pinnacle, the girls and the guys are not only goodlooking 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.”
Mao was becoming clued in to the fact that there was another hierarchy behind the official one that
explained why others were getting what he never had—“a high-school sweetheart” figured prominently on
this list—and that this mysterious hierarchy was going to determine what happened to him in life. “You
realize there are things you really don’t understand about courtship or just acting in a certain way. Things
that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs and have parents who are
culturally assimilated.” I pressed him for specifics, and he mentioned that he had visited his white
girlfriend’s parents’ house the past Christmas, where the family had “sat around cooking together and
playing Scrabble.” This ordinary vision of suburban-American domesticity lingered with Mao: Here, at last,
was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge “about social norms and propriety” had been
transmitted. There was no cram school that taught these lessons.
Before having heard from Mao, I had considered myself at worst lightly singed by the last embers of Asian
alienation. Indeed, given all the incredibly hip Asian artists and fashion designers and so forth you can find
in New York, it seemed that this feeling was destined to die out altogether. And yet here it was in a New
Yorker more than a dozen years my junior. While it may be true that sections of the Asian-American world
are devoid of alienation, there are large swaths where it is as alive as it has ever been.
A few weeks after we meet, Mao puts me in touch with Daniel Chu, his close friend from Stuyvesant. Chu
graduated from Williams College last year, having won a creative-writing award for his poetry. He had
spent a portion of the $18,000 prize on a trip to China, but now he is back living with his parents in
Brooklyn Chinatown.
Chu remembers that during his first semester at Williams, his junior
adviser would periodically take him aside. Was he feeling all right?
Was something the matter? “I was acclimating myself to the place,”
he says. “I wasn’t totally happy, but I wasn’t depressed.” But then
his new white friends made similar remarks. “They would say, ‘Dan,
it’s kind of hard, sometimes, to tell what you’re thinking.’ ”
Chu has a pleasant face, but it would not be wrong to characterize
his demeanor as reserved. He speaks in a quiet, unemphatic voice.
He doesn’t move his features much. He attributes these traits to the
atmosphere in his household. “When you grow up in a Chinese
J.T. Tran
(Photo: Marco Grob. Grooming by Jane Choi for
Clairisonic at Stockland Martel.)
home,” he says, “you don’t talk. You shut up and listen to what your
parents tell you to do.”
At Stuyvesant, he had hung out in an exclusively Asian world in
which friends were determined by which subway lines you traveled. But when he arrived at Williams, Chu
slowly became aware of something strange: The white people in the New England wilderness walked
around smiling at each other. “When you’re in a place like that, everyone is friendly.”
He made a point to start smiling more. “It was something that I had to actively practice,” he says. “Like,
when you have a transaction at a business, you hand over the money—and then you smile.” He says that
he’s made some progress but that there’s still plenty of work that remains. “I’m trying to undo eighteen
years of a Chinese upbringing. Four years at Williams helps, but only so much.” He is conscious of how his
father, an IT manager, is treated at work. “He’s the best programmer at his office,” he says, “but because he
doesn’t speak English well, he is always passed over.”
Though Chu is not merely fluent in English but is officially the most distinguished poet of his class at
Williams, he still worries that other aspects of his demeanor might attract the same kind of treatment his
father received. “I’m really glad we’re having this conversation,” he says at one point—it is helpful to be
remembering these lessons in self-presentation just as he prepares for job interviews.
It is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that meritocracy
comes to an abrupt end after graduation.
“I guess what I would like is to become so good at something that my social deficiencies no longer matter,”
he tells me. Chu is a bright, diligent, impeccably credentialed young man born in the United States. He is
optimistic about his ability to earn respect in the world. But he doubts he will ever feel the same comfort in
his skin that he glimpsed in the people he met at Williams. That kind of comfort, he says—“I think it’s
generations away.”
While he was still an electrical-engineering student at Berkeley in the nineties, James Hong visited the IBM
campus for a series of interviews. An older Asian researcher looked over Hong’s résumé and asked him
some standard questions. Then he got up without saying a word and closed the door to his office.
“Listen,” he told Hong, “I’m going to be honest with you. My generation came to this country because we
wanted better for you kids. We did the best we could, leaving our homes and going to graduate school not
speaking much English. If you take this job, you are just going to hit the same ceiling we did. They just see
me as an Asian Ph.D., never management potential. You are going to get a job offer, but don’t take it. Your
generation has to go farther than we did, otherwise we did everything for nothing.”
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.
The failure of Asian-Americans to become leaders in the white-collar workplace does not qualify as one of
the burning social issues of our time. But 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. If between 15 and 20 percent of every Ivy League class is Asian, and if the Ivy
Leagues are incubators for the country’s leaders, it would stand to reason that Asians would make up some
corresponding portion of the leadership class.
And yet the numbers tell a different story. According to a recent study, Asian-Americans represent roughly
5 percent of the population but only 0.3 percent of corporate officers, less than 1 percent of corporate board
members, and around 2 percent of college presidents. There are nine Asian-American CEOs in the Fortune
500. In specific fields where Asian-Americans are heavily represented, there is a similar asymmetry. A third
of all software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian, and yet they make up only 6 percent of board members
and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area’s 25 largest companies. At the National Institutes
of Health, where 21.5 percent of tenure-track scientists are Asians, only 4.7 percent of the lab or branch
directors are, according to a study conducted in 2005. One succinct evocation of the situation appeared in
the comments section of a website called Yellowworld: “If you’re East Asian, you need to attend a top-tier
university to land a good high-paying gig. Even if you land that good high-paying gig, the white guy with the
pedigree from a mediocre state university will somehow move ahead of you in the ranks simply because
he’s white.”
Jennifer W. Allyn, a managing director for diversity at PricewaterhouseCoopers, works to ensure that “all of
the groups feel welcomed and supported and able to thrive and to go as far as their talents will take them.”
I posed to her the following definition of parity in the corporate workforce: If the current crop of associates
is 17 percent Asian, then in fourteen years, when they have all been up for partner review, 17 percent of
those who are offered partner will be Asian. Allyn conceded that PricewaterhouseCoopers was not close to
reaching that benchmark anytime soon—and that “nobody else is either.”
Part of the insidious nature of the Bamboo Ceiling is that it does not seem to be caused by overt racism. A
survey of Asian-Pacific-American employees of Fortune 500 companies found that 80 percent reported
they were judged not as Asians but as individuals. But only 51 percent reported the existence of Asians in
key positions, and only 55 percent agreed that their firms were fully capitalizing on the talents and
perspectives of Asians.
More likely, the discrepancy in these numbers is a matter of unconscious bias. Nobody would affirm the
proposition that tall men are intrinsically better leaders, for instance. And yet while only 15 percent of the
male population is at least six feet tall, 58 percent of all corporate CEOs are. Similarly, nobody would say
that Asian people are unfit to be leaders. But subjects in a recently published psychological experiment
consistently rated hypothetical employees with Caucasian-sounding names higher in leadership potential
than identical ones with Asian names.
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 PricewaterhouseCoopers 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.
Sach Takayasu had been one of the fastest-rising members of her cohort in the marketing department at
IBM in New York. But about seven years ago, she felt her progress begin to slow. “I had gotten to the point
where I was overdelivering, working really long hours, and where doing more of the same wasn’t getting me
anywhere,” she says. It was around this time that she attended a seminar being offered by an organization
called Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics.
LEAP has parsed the complicated social dynamics responsible for the dearth of Asian-American leaders
and has designed training programs that flatter Asian people even as it teaches them to change their
behavior to suit white-American expectations. Asians who enter a LEAP program are constantly assured
that they will be able to “keep your values, while acquiring new skills,” along the way to becoming
“culturally competent leaders.”
In a presentation to 1,500 Asian-American employees of Microsoft, LEAP president and CEO J. D.
Hokoyama laid out his grand synthesis of the Asian predicament in the workplace. “Sometimes people have
perceptions about us and our communities which may or may not be true,” Hokoyama told the audience.
“But they put those perceptions onto us, and then they do something that can be very devastating: They
make decisions about us not based on the truth but based on those perceptions.” Hokoyama argued that it
was not sufficient to rail at these unjust perceptions. In the end, Asian people themselves would have to
assume responsibility for unmaking them. This was both a practical matter, he argued, and, in its own way,
fair.
Aspiring Asian leaders had to become aware of “the relationship between values, behaviors, and
perceptions.” He offered the example of Asians who don’t speak up at meetings. “So let’s say I go to
meetings with you and I notice you never say anything. And I ask myself, ‘Hmm, I wonder why you’re not
saying anything. Maybe it’s because you don’t know what we’re talking about. That would be a good reason
for not saying anything. Or maybe it’s because you’re not even interested in the subject matter. Or maybe
you think the conversation is beneath you.’ So here I’m thinking, because you never say anything at
meetings, that you’re either dumb, you don’t care, or you’re arrogant. When maybe it’s because you were
taught when you were growing up that when the boss is talking, what are you supposed to be doing?
Listening.”
Takayasu took the weeklong course in 2006. One of the first exercises she encountered involved the group
instructor asking for a list of some qualities that they identify with Asians. The students responded:
upholding family honor, filial piety, self-restraint. Then the instructor solicited a list of the qualities the
members identify with leadership, and invited the students to notice how little overlap there is between the
two lists.
At first, Takayasu didn’t relate to the others in attendance, who were listing typical Asian values their
parents had taught them. “They were all saying things like ‘Study hard,’ ‘Become a doctor or lawyer,’ blah,
blah, blah. That’s not how my parents were. They would worry if they saw me working too hard.” Takayasu
had spent her childhood shuttling between New York and Tokyo. Her father was an executive at
Mitsubishi; her mother was a concert pianist. She was highly assimilated into American culture, fluent in
English, poised and confident. “But the more we got into it, as we moved away from the obvious things to
the deeper, more fundamental values, I began to see that my upbringing had been very Asian after all. My
parents would say, ‘Don’t create problems. Don’t trouble other people.’ How Asian is that? It helped to
explain why I don’t reach out to other people for help.” It occurred to Takayasu that she was a little bit
“heads down” after all. She was willing to take on difficult assignments without seeking credit for herself.
She was reluctant to “toot her own horn.”
Takayasu has put her new self-awareness to work at IBM, and she now exhibits a newfound ability for horn
tooting. “The things I could write on my résumé as my team’s accomplishments: They’re really impressive,”
she says.
The law professor and writer Tim Wu grew up in Canada with a white mother and a Taiwanese father,
which allows him an interesting perspective on how whites and Asians perceive each other. After
graduating from law school, he took a series of clerkships, and he remembers the subtle ways in which
hierarchies were developed among the other young lawyers. “There is this automatic assumption in any
legal environment that Asians will have a particular talent for bitter labor,” he says, and then goes on to
define the word coolie,a Chinese term for “bitter labor.” “There was this weird self-selection where the
Asians would migrate toward the most brutal part of the labor.”
By contrast, the white lawyers he encountered had a knack for portraying themselves as above all that.
“White people have this instinct that is really important: to give off the impression that they’re only going to
do the really important work. You’re a quarterback. It’s a kind of arrogance that Asians are trained not to
have. Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to
understand which rules you’re supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you’re finished. And so the
easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is
understanding what rules are not meant for you.”
This idea of a kind of rule-governed rule-breaking—where the rule book was unwritten but passed along in
an innate cultural sense—is perhaps the best explanation I have heard of how the Bamboo Ceiling functions
in practice. LEAP appears to be very good at helping Asian workers who are already culturally competent
become more self-aware of how their culture and appearance impose barriers to advancement. But I am not
sure that a LEAP course is going to be enough to get Jefferson Mao or Daniel Chu the respect and success
they crave. The issue is more fundamental, the social dynamics at work more deeply embedded, and the
remedial work required may be at a more basic level of comportment.
What if you missed out on the lessons in masculinity taught in the gyms and locker rooms of America’s high
schools? What if life has failed to make you a socially dominant alpha male who runs the American
boardroom and prevails in the American bedroom? What if no one ever taught you how to greet white
people and make them comfortable? What if, despite these deficiencies, you no longer possess an
immigrant’s dutiful forbearance for a secondary position in the American narrative and want to be a player
in the scrimmage of American appetite right now, in the present?
How do you undo eighteen years of a Chinese upbringing?
This is the implicit question that J. T. Tran has posed to a roomful of Yale undergraduates at a master’s tea
at Silliman College. His answer is typically Asian: practice. Tran is a pickup artist who goes by the handle
Asian Playboy. He travels the globe running “boot camps,” mostly for Asian male students, in the art of
attraction. Today, he has been invited to Yale by the Asian-American Students Alliance.
“Creepy can be fixed,” Tran explains to the standing-room-only crowd. “Many guys just don’t realize how to
project themselves.” These are the people whom Tran spends his days with, a new batch in a new city every
week: nice guys, intelligent guys, motivated guys, who never figured out how to be successful with women.
Their mothers had kept them at home to study rather than let them date or socialize. Now Tran’s company,
ABCs of Attraction, offers a remedial education that consists of three four-hour seminars, followed by a
supervised night out “in the field,” in which J. T., his assistant Gareth Jones, and a tall blonde wing-girl
named Sarah force them to approach women. Tuition costs $1,450.
“One of the big things I see with Asian students is what I call the Asian poker face—the lack of range when
it comes to facial expressions,” Tran says. “How many times has this happened to you?” he asks the crowd.
“You’ll be out at a party with your white friends, and they will be like—‘Dude, are you angry?’ ” Laughter
fills the room. Part of it is psychological, he explains. He recalls one Korean-American student he was
teaching. The student was a very dedicated schoolteacher who cared a lot about his students. But none of
this was visible. “Sarah was trying to help him, and she was like, ‘C’mon, smile, smile,’ and he was like …”
And here Tran mimes the unbearable tension of a face trying to contort itself into a simulacrum of mirth.
“He was so completely unpracticed at smiling that he literally could not do it.” Eventually, though, the
student fought through it, “and when he finally got to smiling he was, like, really cool.”
Tran continues to lay out a story of Asian-American male distress that must be relevant to the lives of at
least some of those who have packed Master Krauss’s living room. The story he tells is one of AsianAmerican disadvantage in the sexual marketplace, a disadvantage that he has devoted his life to
overturning. Yes, it is about picking up women. Yes, it is about picking up white women. Yes, it is about
attracting those women whose hair is the color of the midday sun and eyes are the color of the ocean, and it
is about having sex with them. He is not going to apologize for the images of blonde women plastered all
over his website. This is what he prefers, what he stands for, and what he is selling: the courage to pursue
anyone you want, and the skills to make the person you desire desire you back. White guys do what they
want; he is going to do the same.
But it is about much more than this, too. It 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. It is a program of, as he puts it to me later, “social change through pickup.”
Tran offers his own story as an exemplary Asian underdog. Short, not good-looking, socially inept, sexually
null. “If I got a B, I would be whipped,” he remembers of his childhood. After college, he worked as an
aerospace engineer at Boeing and Raytheon, but internal politics disfavored him. Five years into his career,
his entire white cohort had been promoted above him. “I knew I needed to learn about social dynamics,
because just working hard wasn’t cutting it.”
His efforts at dating were likewise “a miserable failure.” It was then that he turned to “the seduction
community,” a group of men on Internet message boards like alt.seduction.fast. It began as a “support
group for losers” and later turned into a program of self-improvement. Was charisma something you could
teach? Could confidence be reduced to a formula? Was it merely something that you either possessed or did
not possess, as a function of the experiences you had been through in life, or did it emerge from specific
forms of behavior? The members of the group turned their computer-science and engineering brains to the
question. They wrote long accounts of their dates and subjected them to collective scrutiny. They searched
for patterns in the raw material and filtered these experiences through social-psychological research. They
eventually built a model.
This past Valentine’s Day, during a weekend boot camp in New York City sponsored by ABCs of Attraction,
the model is being played out. Tran and Jones are teaching their students how an alpha male stands
(shoulders thrown back, neck fully extended, legs planted slightly wider than the shoulders). “This is going
to feel very strange to you if you’re used to slouching, but this is actually right,” Jones says. They explain
how an alpha male walks (no shuffling; pick your feet up entirely off the ground; a slight sway in the
shoulders). They identify the proper distance to stand from “targets” (a slightly bent arm’s length). They
explain the importance of “kino escalation.” (You must touch her. You must not be afraid to do this.) They
are teaching the importance of sub-communication: what you convey about yourself before a single word
has been spoken. They explain the importance of intonation. They explain what intonation is. “Your voice
moves up and down in pitch to convey a variety of different emotions.”
All of this is taught through a series of exercises. “This is going to feel completely artificial,” says Jones on
the first day of training. “But I need you to do the biggest shit-eating grin you’ve ever made in your life.”
Sarah is standing in the corner with her back to the students—three Indian guys, including one in a turban,
three Chinese guys, and one Cambodian. The students have to cross the room, walking as an alpha male
walks, and then place their hands on her shoulder—firmly but gently—and turn her around. Big smile.
Bigger than you’ve ever smiled before. Raise your glass in a toast. Make eye contact and hold it. Speak
loudly and clearly. Take up space without apology. This is what an alpha male does.
Before each student crosses the floor of that bare white cubicle in midtown, Tran asks him a question.
“What is good in life?” Tran shouts.
The student then replies, in the loudest, most emphatic voice he can muster: “To crush my enemies, see
them driven before me, and to hear the lamentation of their women—in my bed!”
For the intonation exercise, students repeat the phrase “I do what I want” with a variety of different moods.
“Say it like you’re happy!” Jones shouts. (“I do what I want.”) Say it like you’re sad! (“I do what I want.”
The intonation utterly unchanged.) Like you’re sad! (“I … do what I want.”) Say it like you’ve just won $5
million! (“I do what I want.”)
“She was trying to help him. ‘C’mon, smile, smile, and he was like …” And here
Tran mimes the unbearable tension of a face trying to contort itself into a
simulacrum of mirth.
Raj, a 26-year-old Indian virgin, can barely get his voice to alter during intonation exercise. But on Sunday
night, on the last evening of the boot camp, I watch him cold-approach a set of women at the Hotel
Gansevoort and engage them in conversation for a half-hour. He does not manage to “number close” or
“kiss close.” But he had done something that not very many people can do.
Of the dozens of Asian-Americans I spoke with for this story, many were successful artists and scientists; or
good-looking and socially integrated leaders; or tough, brassy, risk-taking, street-smart entrepreneurs. Of
course, there are lots of such people around—do I even have to point that out? They are no more morally
worthy than any other kind of Asian person. But they have figured out some useful things.
The lesson about the Bamboo Ceiling that James Hong learned from his interviewer at IBM stuck, and after
working for a few years at Hewlett-Packard, he decided to strike off on his own. His first attempts at
entrepreneurialism failed, but he finally struck pay dirt with a simple, not terribly refined idea that had a
strong primal appeal: hotornot.com. Hong and his co-founder eventually sold the site for roughly $20
million.
Hong ran hotornot.com partly as a kind of incubator to seed in his employees the habits that had served
him well. “We used to hire engineers from Berkeley—almost all Asian—who were on the cusp of being
entrepreneurial but were instead headed toward jobs at big companies,” he says. “We would train them in
how to take risk, how to run things themselves. I remember encouraging one employee to read The
Game”—the infamous pickup-artist textbook—“because I figured growing the cojones to take risk was
applicable to being an entrepreneur.”
If the Bamboo Ceiling is ever going to break, it’s probably going to have less to do with any form of behavior
assimilation than with the emergence of risk-takers whose success obviates the need for Asians to meet
someone else’s behavioral standard. People like Steve Chen, who was one of the creators of YouTube, or Kai
and Charles Huang, who created Guitar Hero. Or Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos.com, the online shoe
retailer that he sold to Amazon for about a billion dollars in 2009. Hsieh is a short Asian man who speaks
tersely and is devoid of obvious charisma. One cannot imagine him being promoted in an American
corporation. And yet he has proved that an awkward Asian guy can be a formidable CEO and the unlikeliest
of management gurus.
Hsieh didn’t have to conform to Western standards of comportment because he adopted early on the
Western value of risk-taking. Growing up, he would play recordings of himself in the morning practicing the
violin, in lieu of actually practicing. He credits the experience he had running a pizza business at Harvard
as more important than anything he learned in class. He had an instinctive sense of what the real world
would require of him, and he knew that nothing his parents were teaching him would get him there.
You don’t, by the way, have to be a Silicon Valley hotshot to break through the Bamboo Ceiling. You can
also be a chef like Eddie Huang, whose little restaurant on the Lower East Side, BaoHaus, sells delicious
pork buns. Huang grew up in Orlando with a hard-core Tiger Mom and a disciplinarian father. “As a kid,
psychologically, my day was all about not getting my ass kicked,” he says. He gravitated toward the black
kids at school, who also knew something about corporal punishment. He was the smallest member of his
football team, but his coach named him MVP in the seventh grade. “I was defensive tackle and right guard
because I was just mean. I was nasty. I had this mentality where I was like, ‘You’re going to accept me or
I’m going to fuck you up.’ ”
Huang had a rough twenties, bumping repeatedly against the Bamboo Ceiling. In college, editors at the
Orlando Sentinel invited him to write about sports for the paper. But when he visited the offices, “the editor
came in and goes, ‘Oh, no.’ And his exact words: ‘You can’t write with that face.’ ” Later, in film class at
Columbia, he wrote a script about an Asian-American hot-dog vendor obsessed with his small penis. “The
screenwriting teacher was like, ‘I love this. You have a lot of Woody Allen in you. But do you think you
could change it to Jewish characters?’ ” Still later, after graduating from Cardozo School of Law, he took a
corporate job, where other associates would frequently say, “You have a lot of opinions for an Asian guy.”
Finally, Huang decided to open a restaurant. Selling food was precisely the fate his parents wanted their
son to avoid, and they didn’t talk to him for months after he quit lawyering. But Huang understood
instinctively that he couldn’t make it work in the professional world his parents wanted him to join. “I’ve
realized that food is one of the only places in America where we are the top dogs,” he says. “Guys like David
Chang or me—we can hang. There’s a younger generation that grew up eating Chinese fast food. They
respect our food. They may not respect anything else, but they respect our food.”
Rather than strive to make himself acceptable to the world, Huang has chosen to buy his way back in, on his
own terms. “What I’ve learned is that America is about money, and if you can make your culture
commodifiable, then you’re relevant,” he says. “I don’t believe anybody agrees with what I say or supports
what I do because they truly want to love Asian people. They like my fucking pork buns, and I don’t get it
twisted.”
Sometime during the hundreds of hours he spent among the mostly untouched English-language novels at
the Flushing branch of the public library, Jefferson Mao discovered literature’s special power of
transcendence, a freedom of imagination that can send you beyond the world’s hierarchies. He had written
to me seeking permission to swerve off the traditional path of professional striving—to devote himself to
becoming an artist—but he was unsure of what risks he was willing to take. My answer was highly
ambivalent. I recognized in him something of my own youthful ambition. And I knew where that had taken
me.
Unlike Mao, I was not a poor, first-generation immigrant. I finished school alienated both from Asian
culture (which, in my hometown, was barely visible) and the manners and mores of my white peers. But
like Mao, I wanted to be an individual. I had refused both cultures as an act of self-assertion. An education
spent dutifully acquiring credentials through relentless drilling seemed to me an obscenity. So did adopting
the manipulative cheeriness that seemed to secure the popularity of white Americans.
Instead, I set about contriving to live beyond both poles. I wanted what James Baldwin sought as a writer
—“a power which outlasts kingdoms.” Anything short of that seemed a humiliating compromise. I would
become an aristocrat of the spirit, who prides himself on his incompetence in the middling tasks that are
the world’s business. Who does not seek after material gain. Who is his own law.
This, of course, was madness. A child of Asian immigrants born into the suburbs of New Jersey and
educated at Rutgers cannot be a law unto himself. The only way to approximate this is to refuse
employment, because you will not be bossed around by people beneath you, and shave your expenses to the
bone, because you cannot afford more, and move into a decaying Victorian mansion in Jersey City, so that
your sense of eccentric distinction can be preserved in the midst of poverty, and cut yourself free of every
form of bourgeois discipline, because these are precisely the habits that will keep you chained to the
mediocre fate you consider worse than death.
Throughout my twenties, I proudly turned away from one institution of American life after another (for
instance, a steady job), though they had already long since turned away from me. Academe seemed another
kind of death—but then again, I had a transcript marred by as many F’s as A’s. I had come from a culture
that was the middle path incarnate. And yet for some people, there can be no middle path, only
transcendence or descent into the abyss.
I was descending into the abyss.
All this was well deserved. No one had any reason to think I was anything or anyone. And yet I felt entitled
to demand this recognition. I knew this was wrong and impermissible; therefore I had to double down on
it. The world brings low such people. It brought me low. I haven’t had health insurance in ten years. I didn’t
earn more than $12,000 for eight consecutive years. I went three years in the prime of my adulthood
without touching a woman. I did not produce a masterpiece.
I recall one of the strangest conversations I had in the city. A woman came up to me at a party and said she
had been moved by a piece of writing I had published. She confessed that prior to reading it, she had never
wanted to talk to me, and had always been sure, on the basis of what she could see from across the room,
that I was nobody worth talking to, that I was in fact someone to avoid.
But she had been wrong about this, she told me: It was now plain to her that I was a person with great
reserves of feeling and insight. She did not ask my forgiveness for this brutal misjudgment. Instead, what
she wanted to know was—why had I kept that person she had glimpsed in my essay so well hidden? She
confessed something of her own hidden sorrow: She had never been beautiful and had decided, early on,
that it therefore fell to her to “love the world twice as hard.” Why hadn’t I done that?
Here was a drunk white lady speaking what so many others over the years must have been insufficiently
drunk to tell me. It was the key to many things that had, and had not, happened. I understood this
encounter better after learning about LEAP, and visiting Asian Playboy’s boot camp. If you are a woman
who isn’t beautiful, it is a social reality that you will have to work twice as hard to hold anyone’s attention.
You can either linger on the unfairness of this or you can get with the program. If you are an Asian person
who holds himself proudly aloof, nobody will respect that, or find it intriguing, or wonder if that
challenging façade hides someone worth getting to know. They will simply write you off as someone not
worth the trouble of talking to.
Having glimpsed just how unacceptable the world judges my demeanor, could I too strive to make up for
my shortcomings? Practice a shit-eating grin until it becomes natural? Love the world twice as hard?
I see the appeal of getting with the program. But this is not my choice. Striving to meet others’ expectations
may be a necessary cost of assimilation, but I am not going to do it.
Often I think my defiance is just delusional, self-glorifying bullshit that artists have always told themselves
to compensate for their poverty and powerlessness. But sometimes I think it’s the only thing that has
preserved me intact, and that what has been preserved is not just haughty caprice but in fact the meaning
of my life. So this is what I told Mao: In lieu of loving the world twice as hard, I care, in the end, about
expressing my obdurate singularity at any cost. I love this hard and unyielding part of myself more than any
other reward the world has to offer a newly brightened and ingratiating demeanor, and I will bear any costs
associated with it.
The first step toward self-reform is to admit your deficiencies. Though my early adulthood has been a
protracted education in them, I do not admit mine. I’m fine. It’s the rest of you who have a problem. Fuck
all y’all.
Amy Chua returned to Yale from a long, exhausting book tour in which one television interviewer had led
off by noting that Internet commenters were calling her a monster. By that point, she had become practiced
at the special kind of self-presentation required of a person under public siege. “I do not think that Chinese
parents are superior,” she declared at the annual gathering of the Asian-American Students Alliance. “I
think there are many ways to be a good parent.”
Much of her talk to the students, and indeed much of the conversation surrounding the book, was focused
on her own parenting decisions. But just as interesting is how her parents parented her. Chua was plainly
the product of a brute-force Chinese education. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother includes many lessons
she was taught by her parents—lessons any LEAP student would recognize. “Be modest, be humble, be
simple,” her mother told her. “Never complain or make excuses,” her father instructed. “If something seems
unfair at school, just prove yourself by working twice as hard and being twice as good.”
In the book, Chua 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.”
“The loudest duck gets shot” is a Chinese proverb. “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down” is a
Japanese one. Its Western correlative: “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Chua had told her story and
been hammered down. Yet here she was, fresh from her hammering, completely unbowed.
There is something salutary in that proud defiance. And though the debate she sparked about AsianAmerican life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance,
willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women,
to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to
their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be
interesting.
Paper requirement
How is the conversation of cosmopolism can reduce the bamboo
ceiling?
Reading 1” paper tiger” --wesley yang
Reading 2 “making conversation “ -----kwame anthony appiah
What is bamboo ceiling?
Bamboo ceiling
The term "bamboo ceiling" was popularised in writer Jane Hyun's book,
Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians. It is defined as a
combination of individual, cultural, and organisational factors that impede
Asian Americans’ career progress inside organizations. Since then, a variety of
sectors (including nonprofits, universities, the government) have discussed the
impact of the ceiling as it relates to Asians and the challenges they face. As
described by Anne Fisher[disambiguation needed], "bamboo ceiling" refers to
the processes and barriers that serve to exclude Asians and American people
of Asian descent from executive positions on the basis of subjective factors
such as "lack of leadership potential" and "lack of communication skills" that
cannot actually be explained by job performance or qualifications. Articles
regarding the subject have been written in Crains, Fortune magazine, and The
Atlantic.The term is a derivative of the glass ceiling, which refers to the more
gendered metaphor used to describe invisible barriers through which women
and minorities can see managerial positions, but cannot reach them.Based on
publicly available government statistics, Asian Americans have the lowest
chance of rising to management when compared with Blacks, Hispanics and
Women in spite of having the highest educational attainment. When it came to
in terms of adding gender into the evaluation of the Bamboo ceiling it was
revealed that Asian American men faced higher rates of promotion
discrimination than Asian American women, while Asian American women
faced a pay equity discrimination in comparison to payment with Asian
American men.
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