A Foreign Mirror

You would probably be very disappointed if you were rejected from your dream school and a kid who scored significantly lower than you did on standardized tests got your spot. Asian Americans are treated unfairly in many elite college admissions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. They score higher and achieve higher on average compared to other races and are forced to outperform them by a significant margin to gain acceptance into the same college. They are also fairly underrepresented at top colleges as a larger percentage of them that have the required test scores are denied spots than any other race. They are also now pitted against each other for a certain spot as they will only take a “specific” amount of Asians which causes a significant amount of stress. To truly provide fair access to education and opportunity, universities should accept people based mainly on their abilities rather than their ethnicity.

Historian Daryl Joji Maeda called the The Asian American movement “a multiethnic alliance comprising of all ethnicities by drawing on the discourses and ideologies of the Black Power and anti-war movements in the United States as well as decolonization movements around the globe.” By the 1960s, a new generation, less attached to the ethnic differences that plagued Asian immigrant groups, began to grow and work together. The black and white binary race treatment in the US alienated Asian-Americans as an other, causing some to begin their own rally for Asian-American civil rights.

Asians are one of fastest growing minority groups in America today. During this century, various factors at home and abroad have caused people from Asia to immigrate to the United States for better or for worse. Due to these factors, Americans and American teachers, in particular, need to educate themselves and become aware of the Asian American students’ needs in terms of success and happiness. Before beginning my research, I felt I had an easy subject: studying Asian Americans in relation to their education in public schools. How simple! Everyone knows they are smart, hard working, driven to succeed in spite of their nerdish, geeky, non-athletic, broken-English stereotype. Of course they are

Possessing different physical attributes and cultural customs to the majority can make it difficult to feel like one belongs to a certain group. Groups are formed on opinion and common interests, not feeling like a person shares any of these things with another can make a person feel like an outsider especially a migrant.

There is a phenomenon happening in most schools throughout the country. Asian students as young as seven years olds are labeled as gifted and enrolled in various accelerate programs to further develop their talents. Certainly, most of these students are deserving of the honorable recognition. However, many skeptics do question how many of them are viewed as exceptional students based upon the stereotype: they are genetically smarter than their non-Asian peers.

In his article, “The Harmful Myth of Asian Superiority,” Ronald Takaki criticizes the stereotypes set for the Asian population living in America. Takaki engages and convinces the reader to see the reality of how Asians Americans live, and compares it to the stereotypes for Asians. Takaki leaves his readers with a completely different and opposite perspective on Asians and their “superiority” amongst other races in America. Through the way he has structured his essay, his word choice and simple language, as well as his consistent use of statistics and examples, Ronald Takaki is able to leave his audience to rethink their thoughts about Asian Americans and in fact, sympathize with them.

To be young and Asian in America is a special brand of torture. There is an unspoken dictum of silence that grips Asian youth, a denial of our place in popular culture. Asian youth walk in America not quite sure where we fit in-black children have a particular brotherhood, Hispanic children have a particular brotherhood, white children own everything else. We cannot lay claim to jazz or salsa or swing; we cannot say our ancestors fought for equality against an oppressive government or roamed the great hallways of power across the globe. We do not have a music, a common hero, a lexicon of slang. Asian youth experience personal diasporas every day.

The air would always be humid and stuffy while riding the bus to school, and the slightest bump in the road would result in tossing up the kids like salad. The backseat would provide carriage for all the popular and tough kids shouting out at pedestrians on the street or flipping off a middle finger to the bus driver that would shout for them to calm down. I despised those kids in the back. They were the same people that made my life a living hell, while growing up and attending an American school.

I am a girl with two heads. At home, I wear my Chinese head, in school I wear my English head. Being an Asian, or Chinese, as it is commonly referred to, my culture plays a key role in the development of who I am and what I do, my personal identity. An identity is the distinguishing character or personality of an individual. Parents are often one of the key factors of this culturally developed personal identity.

Although Asian Americans comprise only about 5% of the U.S. population, this group is the fastest growing segment of American society. Despite such rapid expansion, Asian Americans are widely underrepresented throughout media, whether in television, cinema, or literature. Moreover, there are different stereotypes associated with Asian Americans. One of the most pervasive stereotypes details how Asian Americans are a “model minority”. In essence, this myth describes how anyone who is Asian American will become a successful individual able to achieve the “American dream”.

For 20 years, Asian Americans have been portrayed by the press and the media as a successful minority. Asian Americans are believed to benefit from astounding achievements in education, rising occupational statuses, increasing income, and are problem-fee in mental health and crime. The idea of Asian Americans as a model minority has become the central theme in media portrayal of Asian Americans since the middle 1960s. The term model minority is given to a minority group that exhibits middle class characteristics, and attains some measure of success on its own without special programs or welfare. Asian Americans are seen as a model minority because even though they have faced prejudice and

In the 1990s, there were more than 7 million Asian Americans in the United States of America. Bureau of the Census has published that there is a total of 3,726,400 Asians, which includes Pacific Isalnders, which is represented to about 1.6 percent of the population. Chinses Americans were the first Asian to be migrated in the United States.

Where are you from? Are you Chinese by chance? Are you really Vietnamese? In the poem “ What Kind of Asian Are You?” Alex Dang tells us why these questions could annoy someone. He also addresses the stereotypes good or bad and prejudices Asians or any other race faces using allusions and many other literary and sound devices like imagery in his poem. The many things he talks about Asians could be applied to other races and that other races could connect with.

The pain and the suffering, the oppression, and the exclusion all describe the history of Asia America. When they arrived to the United States, they become labeled as Asians. These Asians come from Japan, China, Korea, Laos, Thailand, and many other diverse countries in the Eastern hemisphere. These people wanted to escape from their impoverished lives as the West continued to infiltrate their motherland. They saw America as the promise land filled with opportunity to succeed in life. Yet due to the discrimination placed from society and continual unfair

As the immigrant population currently projected to overtake latinxs and hispanics as largest group of residents in the United States of America, Asian Americans have shown their will to survive in a way that many groups have not, and that is by banding together in order to achieve the life they deserve. Taking the overgeneralization of pan-ethnicity and using it as a device for increased numbers and support for the causes of a group of people who otherwise may not have much to do with each other, is a testament to how vulnerable they must have felt as well as how successful they have managed to be many aspects of progress. What I have gained from this course is the understanding that at the root of ethnic studies and the Asian American community is the “for us, by us” sentiment that contributed to the blurred lines between the different part of their communities as social, political and cultural, structures, collectives and groups which came out of an obligation and necessity to protect those immigrants and their future generations from a country which has always pushed European superiority in all aspects of society.