Georgetown as an Asian American

I started this post on May 29, 2010 and now I'm editing it on January 14th, 2011. Perhaps that's some indication of how much I have to say on this subject, or perhaps how difficult it is for me to say it. Without a doubt, transforming my understanding of race, especially my own race, was one of the most important legacies my college education left me. This post is titled Georgetown as an Asian American but it could just as well be titled America as an Asian American, or simply The Asian American Experience.

I would like to say this is not a social critique. I am not trying to make statements I am not qualified to make but simply to explain my own experiences. And on the whole, my own experiences are pretty good. I have never suffered a racist attack, been disparagingly called a racial slur or been directly refused service on account of my race. I don't think my being an Asian American has negatively affected my chances for success in my country and I don't use my race as an excuse for anything.

Growing up, we were taught that race matters.  We were also taught that we are all created equal and to judge a person by his/her character and not their skin color.  However by studying or celebrating race, whether it was stressing the history of Hanukah during the Christmas season or African-American History month, we learned that race matters.  This is good because it does. I’m fine with the education that I had and have issues instead with education that glosses over racial differences.  Ignorance of racial inequality in modern America is inexcusable for US citizens.

However, armed with this knowledge that race matters, our conception of different races would gradually evolve as we became aware of stereotypes. Sure, we were also taught in school that stereotypes were bad, but this didn’t correspond with what we could observe in society. Most of the NBA was black – the stereotype that blacks are good at basketball must be true.  The Asian kids at school were good at math – clearly that was genetic. Even when we saw contradictory examples, our mind ignored them. Stereotypes simplified the big, scary, complicated world and it was easy to choose to believe them.

So coming from a predominantly white town (87%) with a strong Jewish minority (about one third), I went to a diverse but small private high school where there were 3 and a half Asians in my graduating class of 50 – and I’m counting myself as a full Asian. Here I became very self-conscious of stereotypes. I was a strong, unique person, and I didn’t want people to be able to glean details of my life immediately upon meeting me.  Shedding stereotypes was a motivating factor in my decision to drop chess and piano and devote myself to sports.  I worked out obsessively, aiming to make up for my perceived lack of athleticism with hard work. It may seem silly, but I didn’t know if it was possible for me to succeed as an athlete.  I looked around for Asian athlete role models but there were precious few. Even at the ISL level, there were no Asian basketball players. I took this to mean that there was no way I could make varsity basketball.  Now this was true, I wasn’t a good enough dribbler, shooter or passer, but even if there was an Asian basketball star at RL, that wouldn’t have changed my ability.  I had never played organized ball and I didn’t have phenomenal hand-eye coordination – none of that had anything to do with race.  I did see Asians succeed in wrestling, including Milton’s star Ken Lee and our own captain Pete Holland.  I tried to model my own style off of their success, which turned out to be another ill-advised decision.  Ken was a sturdily-built Judo champion and Pete was a flexibility freak – they were not too similar to me athletically, even though they were both Asian.  It wasn’t until senior year when I developed moves that matched my own strengths.

From here I moved on to Georgetown where there were a lot more people of all sorts of backgrounds.  By the end of my freshman year, I discovered that there were two divergent stereotypes of Asians within Georgetown: the white-washed and the fobs.  The white-washed were described as Asians in appearance only, who hung out with white people and didn’t care about their cultural heritage.  The fobs were Asians who only hung out with other Asians and whose mannerisms and interests visibly reflected their cultural heritage.  I found the fob stereotype to be extremely unfamiliar.  At RL, it never crossed my mind to hang out with other Asians.  When there were only two and half others, this seemed bizarre and exclusive.  So who were these people who deliberately sought out other Asian friends? Were they uncomfortable hanging out with other races? But as confusing as the fob stereotype was, I was much more unsettled by the white-washed one.  Clearly, if people were to put one of these two labels on me, they would place that one.  But I didn’t view myself as white-washed – I certainly cared very much about my Chinese upbringing.

Now critics can say that I was white-washed.  Even though I spoke Cantonese and used chopsticks at home and technically was a minority, my social upbringing aligned me much more with the white majority. In outward style, mannerisms, speech and interests, I conformed to that of many white Americans.  There’s some truth in that. Certainly I don’t think the way I was raised qualifies me for affirmative action or that I was disadvantaged.  However, calling me white-washed is a very ignorant viewpoint that glosses over the experiences that all hyphenated Americans share, regardless of upbringing.  An article by Dean Obeidallah reminded me of this.  As Obeidallah writes, whenever an outrageous act of human criminal behavior occurs, minorities inevitably have the same fear: “I hope the guy wasn’t [insert own race].” When Seung-Hui Cho massacred 32 Virginia Tech students, like other Americans I was horrified and saddened. But I was also ashamed because Cho was Asian. I felt the need to prove to other Americans that we as a race were not bad people, that we belonged in this country. And Cho wasn’t even Chinese. I very much doubt that white Americans felt this way when they heard that Jared Loughner was white.  Another shared feature of minorities in this country is our mutual “perking up” of interest when we hear a member of our own race entering uncharted territories.  We naturally follow their careers, but might initially be reluctant to display publicly our support for fear that others will perceive that we are supporting this individual just because we share the same race.

Anyways there I was, not fully comfortable with my identity as an Asian American when I arrived in Beijing on June 1, 2008.  There my conception of race permanently changed. Obviously I saw a society nearly entirely run by Chinese.  Everybody, from the police officers, the street cleaners, the immigration officers, the beggars, the businessmen, the soldiers, the media and the politicians were Chinese.  This struck me because I was used to seeing Chinese people in only limited societal roles.  In the America I grew up in, Asians were either working in restaurants or were successful professionals who had studied hard and done well.  I didn’t know of too many lower middle class Asians or truly influential Asians.  Nor were there many Asians in Hollywood, professional sports, comedy or on the evening news.  But here they did it all, and I was confronted with the simple truth that race was not a physical barrier to any of these professions. There must have been other explanations.  I thought more about the subject.  In my American classrooms, Asians were immediately pegged as nerds.  Here however, there must be Chinese jocks and class clowns and prom kings.

The Chinese people I taught were wholly unaware of the stereotypes we have here in America. They may have had their own stereotypes about themselves, but the fact that they were supposed to be good at math did not affect their life nearly as much as it did mine.  Essentially that summer, I learned all about the power of culture.


In America, many relatively upper class Asian immigrants came to study more a generation or two ago. My mom was one of them. The linguistic and cultural boundaries that they had to overcome was tremendous. My mom wasn't used to learning quietly by rote memory, and was terrified of speaking in class and had to learn painfully how to write research papers before majoring in History.  To that generation, breaking into the white-dominated white collar world was very intimidating.  It was difficult to ace interviews, manage office politics or push people around. It was much easier to study, where hard work paid off in a much more linear manner. And so a lot of Asian immigrants went to law school or medical school, where their degrees were simply too valuable to not merit employment.  I'm forever indebted to my parents, who found success along this path. Perhaps however, this has created both an Asian American stereotype of nerdy bookworms and an Asian American culture of valuing education.  Especially nowadays for poor recent immigrants, education and hard work is seen as the only way out.  As a result, Asians have become so overrepresented at some areas of American life and woefully underrepresented at others.  


This bothered me a little bit, and I tried to live my life as best I could the way I wanted, and defy as many stereotypes as I could along the way.  However, I didn't realize how much effect this could have on young Asian-Americans growing up.  It was my senior year in college on an outreach day to a public high school in Arlington, VA that had hundreds of students of Asian descent. I saw many kids who had grown up like me feeling limited by the stereotypes in our country, but felt even more burdened by them because they were often not of the socioeconomic class that they were assumed to be. Unlike me, many of them felt pressured by their parents to work towards a certain esteemed profession, or rebelled against the high academic standards expected of them. I sensed some teenage angst from kids who felt misunderstood, partly since they couldn't understand themselves. I felt kids who didn't feel like they could complain because they were supposed to be the "model minority." I realized how damaging that term really is, to both other minorities implicitly belittled in the title as well as to the people supposedly exalted by the designation.  I realized then that the environment that Asian-Americans grow up in is extremely varied, evolving, prone to many different responses, and not studied nearly as much as it needs to be.  But culture isn't just about how you're raised, it's also about how society treats you, which is why Asian-Americans do tend to share similar experiences, whether they are wealthy immigrants of Filipino descent or poor 3rd generation Korean-Americans.

The environment in which we grow up is so instrumental to who we are. I now believe that culture is significantly more meaningful than genetics.  Both ultimately have a lot to say with how we look, act, think and believe.  However, lost in this discussion is perhaps the most important trait that defines us as individuals: our individuality. Excuse this recursive definition but I don't know how else to describe precisely those traits that can be wholly attributed to neither genetics nor culture, neither nature nor nurture.  These are the traits that may ultimately determine whether you are a good person or not.  Everyone is an individual first and foremost and should be treated as such.