What Happens to All the Asian-American Overachievers When the Test-Taking Ends? -- New York Magazine - Nymag

Like many immigrants who prized education, my parents retained faith in the mastery of technical fields, like the sciences, where answers weren’t left to interpretation. You couldn’t discriminate against the right answer. But I preferred to spend my time interpreting things.

During this period the model minority myth was popularized to keep Communists—and black people—in check. Asian American success was circulated to promote capitalism and to undermine the credibility of black civil rights: we were the “good” ones since we were undemanding, diligent, and never asked for handouts from the government. There’s no discrim

I feel comfortable in these spaces, but I don’t really understand the Asian kids who sit nearby. They, like all Berkeley students, wear lumpy Cal sweatshirts and mostly complain about schoolwork, but they also seem completely uninterested in making friends with people of other races or backgrounds. Their insularity always feels banal and unwarrante

It revealed the bait and switch at the heart of standardized tests—the exact thing that made them unfair: She was teaching test-taking form for standardized exams that purportedly measured intellectual strength. My classmates and I would get higher scores—two hundred points, as promised—than poorer students, who might be equivalent in intellectual

There’s a telos of self-improvement baked into the immigrant experience.