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

(An Asian friend of mine refers to Asians as “Schrodinger’s minority”; they’re white if you test them, but if you don’t test them, they’re still people of color.)

Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, “Things are so much better,” while you think, Things are the same. You are told, “Asian Americans are so successful,” while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up f

With the dissolution of feudal, old-world bonds, new possibilities of economic and social mobility emerged, and this transience infected the soul. People began to wonder whether we possessed some innate essence that might be discovered by peeling away layers of our surface. Or maybe there was nothing innate, and we were always in the process of sel

To make myself, and by proxy other Asian Americans, more human and a little more relevant to American culture.

I had come to New York five years earlier, to create a life for myself there. I had not created a life for myself there. I had wanted to find the emerging writers and thinkers of my generation. I had found the sycophants, careerists, and media parasites who were redefining mediocrity for the 21st century.