Education
White Man’s Life Among Asian Students
California guy loved his mostly-Asian high school because of the cultural ethos
A reader writes with a fascinating story. I have edited out at his request parts of his letter that could identify him, and publish this with his permission:
I read your post about “The Problem With ‘Nice White Parents”, and I felt moved to share a bit of my own personal history which I think is relevant to the discussion, and which may touch on some aspects of the story that tend to go under-discussed. (I’m going to talk about what it was like growing up as a white kid in a town largely composed of whites and asians, where it was the white kids who were the relative underachievers.)
I grew up in Arcadia, California in the ’80s and ’90s. Arcadia is a quiet, comfortable suburb in the San Gabriel Valley immediately east of Los Angeles. Even when my parents moved there in 1983 (when I was one year old), it was expensive, due in no small part to the reputation of its public schools. My parents were both attorneys, but even so, they needed considerable financial help from both sets of their parents to afford their house, and they nearly lost it in the late ’80s when the balloon payment came due. They hung on and stayed in Arcadia largely for me and my sister, because the schools had such a good reputation.In the 1980s, Arcadia was a mostly white suburb that was rapidly transforming due to a high volume of immigration from Asia, particularly Taiwan. That transformation continued and accelerated through the 1990s. Today, Arcadia is a heavily Asian neighborhood. Specifically, it’s mostly Chinese, with the immigration now mostly coming from mainland China while the Taiwanese old guard gradually moves further east to Walnut, Diamond Bar, and Rowland Heights.Growing up, I occasionally overheard my parents grousing with other white parents about the Asian newcomers. Things to the effect of “they make their children study all the time, there’s no balance in their lives, and they’re (unfairly) making our kids look bad by comparison (because we, the white parents, don’t force our children to do homework all day and they, the Chinese parents, do).”The thing is, when I went to Arcadia High School, I found myself largely surrounded by those Asian kids because I took a lot of honors and advanced placement classes. I can be more specific than that: mostly Asians; of those, mostly Chinese; of those, mostly Taiwanese; and of those, the very highest achievers were mostly girls.When I was there, Arcadia High School was certainly not officially segregated in any way, but it was kind of de facto segregated: the honors and advanced placement classes were mostly Asian, with a few white kids, and the regular classes were mostly white with a smattering of other ethnicities (mostly latinos and a few so-called “dumb” Asian kids). The “prestigious” (read: intellectual) extracurriculars (the debate team, the AP government team, academic decathlon)? Mostly Asians, a few white kids. The less prestigious (read: more hands-on) extracurriculars? Mostly whites and other non-Asians. I saw both sides because I took both kinds of classes: every honors/AP humanities class I could get my hands on; some honors math and some regular math classes; regular science classes; Speech & Debate team on the one hand, drama and television production on the other hand. (My parents, incidentally, were horrified that I chose advanced drama in my senior year over the government team.)I was the only white male National Merit scholar in my graduating class; there were one or two white girls too, I think, but again the vast majority of National Merit scholars in my graduating class were Asian, and the majority of those were girls. My father half-jokingly referred to me as “The Great White Hope.” I say this not to brag but to underscore the racial milieu at my high school.The thing is — I liked it that way! The Asian kids were an absolute pleasure to be with in my advanced classes. They thoughtfully participated in class discussions that were often lively and interesting, they never caused any disruption, and they certainly never made me feel like I had to hide or keep quiet in order to avoid bullying.I respected my Asian classmates and enjoyed their company, and if they gave me a run for my money in terms of the grading curve, that was a small price to pay (even a challenge to be relished). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I ended up marrying a Chinese immigrant.Not so the white and Latino kids in my regular academic classes, who were at best bored and uninterested, and who at worst would go after you if you made them “look bad” by (heaven forbid) showing interest in the subject matter. I took advanced classes in large part to get away from those kids. I had been mercilessly bullied by a gang of white and Latino kids in middle school, and I wanted to get as far away from that as possible; and anyway, given the choice between being surrounded by people who treat your class as a prison term and being surrounded by people who find the subject matter as interesting as you do, what would you choose?
I should add that the extracurricular activities I took that were majority non-Asian were also informally segregated – but not along racial lines! They were informally segregated between the kids who were motivated and hard-working and those who just wanted to coast. Some of my fondest high school memories were working late into the night on video production projects with the cream of my television production class: a black guy (one of the only ones at our high school), a Latino guy, a very Jewish guy, and a handful of other average white guys. There was a mutual respect and esprit de corps among us because we all knew that everyone else in our little group was reliable, competent, and committed to doing an excellent job.I had white and Asian friends growing up, and looking back on it, my white friends had home lives that were relatively more chaotic than my Asian friends did. No drugs or crime or domestic abuse or anything like that, but certainly divorce. My best white friend’s mother had three marriages (he was her son by the first); my other white friend’s mother had five marriages and four children, one by each of the first four husbands (my friend was the first). Hell, my parents divorced (although they remarried each other around the time I entered high school). In contrast, all of my Asian friends? Stably married parents, all of them. And I can also confirm that my Asian friends generally did study harder and longer after school than my white friends did, because their (the Asians) parents made them.If this rambling diatribe has a point, it’s that the black/white dichotomy we hear about endlessly in the media misses a lot of important nuance. And that my experience is consistent with your intuition that culture — specifically, the home culture of the students — matters far more than race when it comes to school atmosphere and success.
What a great letter. I found myself reading along thinking, “That would have been me.” If I had to choose between sending my children to a school where they were the only non-Asian kids, but it was a school like the one the reader attended, or an ordinary all-white school, you’d better believe I’d send my kids to school with the Asians, and be grateful for the opportunity. The kind of values that the kids that the white reader went to school with are the kind of values my parents tried to instill into me, and that I try to do with my kids.
Reading this letter makes me reflect on one of the biggest differences I noticed between myself and the non-Southern friends I made when I moved to DC in 1992, and lived outside of the South for the first time (I was 25). I had not realized until then how deeply my inner life had been shaped by hierarchy, courteous manners, and respect for authority — especially the authority of older people. I thought this was just the way the world was. I’ve mentioned in this place many times before how utterly bizarre and scandalous it was to us kids when, in elementary school, the power company built a nuclear power plant near our town, and suddenly our school was filled with the children of construction workers from up North. These kids referred to adults by their first names! It is impossible to express strongly enough how taboo this was. It would be like high-fiving the Queen of England.
Gestures like that carried within them an entire culture. I don’t want to get into defending traditional Southern culture here, but I just want to say that the way the reader describes the Asian culture he encountered in school resonates deeply with me. Mind you, our schools were not like the one he describes, because not every Southern family was as traditional and as patriarchal as mine was. Still, I get what this reader is saying. Boy, do I get it. My father instilled in us that to behave badly was to dishonor yourself, and to bring dishonor onto the family. Though that culture was declining even back then, that is how we were raised, and I’m grateful for it, despite its problems.
If it puzzles you, reader, why I react so strongly to disorder, well, this is a big part of your answer. I was raised in a family culture that regarded disordered behavior as an outward sign of inward disharmony, and indeed as a moral fault. Mine was a culture that valued authority and authority figures: the pastor, the teacher, the coach, the police officer, and above all, elderly people of any race or class. Nobody reasoned this stuff out; everybody simply knew that if we did not have hierarchy and “respect” (that was the usual word) for these people, we would have nothing. To disrespect these authority figures was ultimately to show yourself to be not worthy of respect. That was the world I grew up in.
We all know the injustices and even cruelty that this Dixie Confucian order allowed, most especially towards black people. In my own history, the people who bullied me in high school were white, and of the social elite. This is not, though, a sign that a traditional authoritarian order is in principle bad, only that it is far from perfect, and like every other human system, needs constant reform. On those occasions when that order sanctioned, usually implicitly, injustice or cruelty, it was being untrue to itself. It ought to have been ashamed of itself.
It would not be unfair to say that that culture — and maybe the Asian culture in which my white reader studied as a kid — is one that places too much value on outward behavior. But when it was working well, that culture ennobled everyone within it, and made us all aristocrats of manners. Poor kids, black and white, sometimes had better manners than well-off white kids — and they won honor for it. In the worldview of my parents, what made a person trashy was not their money or lack of it; it was whether or not they had manners, which is to say, a personal culture that honored honorable conduct: fair play, courtesy, respect for authority (especially elders), chivalry towards women, and so forth.
My parents — to be honest, this was mostly my dad — were relics even in their own time. I am so very grateful that they raised me like this, though it does put me out of step with my own time. I don’t think that’s bad. The reader’s letter, though, makes me wonder what it would be like if I lived as a minority, raising a family, within an Asian community with the same values. I suspect that had, for some reason, my wife and I found ourselves raising our children in suburban Los Angeles, we would have gravitated toward schools and communities that were predominantly Asian, simply because we held similar values, especially on the role of family and communal order. In a pluralistic society like ours, I consider my “tribe” to be the kind of people who may not espouse the same religion as I do, but who value hard work, fairness to others, personal decency, good manners, a general respect for hierarchy and authority, and the other values with which I was raised.
The reader’s letter really does reveal how the standard American racial narrative (black vs. white) makes it hard to see what’s really going on in stories of school, neighborhoods, and racial conflict. And we cannot speak honestly and openly about any of this. I’m grateful that you readers feel that you are safe to share your own experiences in this space, and trust me to keep your identities secret.
