Save the Tigers

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Here’s the story of my immigrant family. We came from Korea to the United States in late 1997. I was 16 years old, my brother 14. Immigrant life was hard. Our immigration lawyer was a crook, stealing most of our family’s money while leaving us with an uncertain immigration status. We lived in a succession of shitty little houses, dealing with nasty landlords who never repaired broken fixtures in time. 

My brother and I waited for the once-a-week special from the neighborhood McDonalds’, when it would sell ten hamburgers for 99 cents. (It was one dollar and seven cents after taxes.) Ever bought a hamburger from McDonalds’, because a cheeseburger cost too much? (Ten cheeseburgers were $1.29.) We would bring home those shit sandwiches, and our mother would improve them by taking them apart and sliding in the cheap vegetables from the Korean market. Our parents had to adjust from a comfortable upper middle class life in Seoul to that. My father was in a constant state of simmering rage, ashamed that he could not provide for us in California like the way he did in Seoul and fearing we might lose our immigration status because he was duped. My mother, a smart and proud woman, cried all the time. 

Things worked out in the end. My parents threw away their lives that they have built for decades and came to the U.S. for the sole purpose of giving my brother and me a better path of education. Knowing this, we ensured that our parents would accomplish that mission. Both my brother and I entered school knowing minimal English, but we picked it up quickly. We both benefited from the University of California systems, which gave us excellent education and a good diploma. I am a lawyer at a big law firm, my brother an engineer at a big tech company whose name you’ve certainly heard of. People around us say we’re successful.

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Right now, there is a confluence of two major education policies that involve claims of discrimination against Asian Americans. With New York high schools, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan would eliminate the entrance examination for the city’s magnet schools and instead have the schools take the top students from each of the city’s middle schools—a move to bring in more black and Latino students in place of Asian students. At Harvard, a lawsuit filed by an Asian American group claims Harvard’s admission has marked Asian applicants as scoring low on the “personality” category, taking fewer Asian American students as a result. 

I’ll be honest: I don’t find these debates all that important. Obviously, I think education is important. It’s just that I am not at all convinced marginal improvement on one’s high school or college changes one’s life in a meaningful way. If you insist that I state my position, I’d give a lukewarm, split-the-difference answer: keep the entrance exam with New York high schools, but it’s also fine for Harvard to maintain an informal racial ceiling against Asian Americans for the sake of diversity. This is mostly based on practical considerations. College is the time for the young adult to leave the home, and a student who narrowly misses out on Harvard surely has a dozen other comparable options around the country. On the other hand, if a New York high school student misses the cut for one of the magnet schools, the drop-off might be significant, and it would require the entire family to move to a different city to mitigate the drop-off. My attitude probably stems from the fact that I neither attended my town’s magnet high school nor an Ivy League college, but feel that my life worked out mostly fine. But given this obviously anecdotal basis, I have no strong commitment to my position. 

What I do find interesting, however, is the debate underlying the admissions debate. The way in which each Asian American draws her battle line usually relates to how she processes the current reality of Asian Americana: a group with all-abiding dedication to education, such that it produces a wildly disproportionate number of high-status professionals such as doctors, lawyers and engineers—what people might call “successful” professions. This leads to the Model Minority stereotype, with the implications that Asian Americans do not face discrimination and that other racial minorities too can overcome and be doctors and lawyers and engineers. 

The Model Minority stereotype is bullshit, and deserves to be slammed. But I have seen a curious streak among many Asian Americans: in the process rebelling against the Model Minority, they also rebel against the importance of academics and the idea of “success” in assessing career paths. Asian parents care too much about schools, they say. The hard work of rote-learning and test-prepping produce uncreative automatons. The focus on being a doctorlawyer is a sign of vulgar materialism that chases after prestige. When Yale Law School professor Amy Chua spoke of "tiger parenting," she faced a firestorm of criticism, much of it from Asian Americans who saw tiger parenting as a backward attitude of their parents' generation that finally gained a name by which it can be reviled.

Typical is the attitude shown by attorney Ryan Park in his recent op-ed for the New York Times. Park tut-tuts at Chua’s tiger parenting as “fanatical parenting choices,” saying the second generation Asian Americans are “largely abandoning traditional Asian parenting styles in favor of a modern, Western approach focused on developing open and warm relationships with our children.” The second generation parents, according to Park, “are striving to cultivate individuality and autonomy in our children in a way that we feel was missing from our own childhoods.” Park then concludes: “I aim to raise children who are happy, confident and kind—and not necessarily as driven, dutiful and successful as the model Asian child. If that means the next generation will have fewer virtuoso violinists and neurosurgeons, well, I still embrace the decline.” 

My eyes gently roll. 

(More after the jump.)

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com

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Here’s another story about my immigrant life. I graduated from college and went to a fancy law school in the East Coast. I earned good grades in law school, which landed me a job at a fancy law firm before I even graduated. This was in 2006, when very smart people were saying the economic boom might last forever. My classmates were optimistic and arrogant, and so was I. We all had six-figure jobs right out of law school, and the law firms were so desperate for manpower that there was no way we would lose our jobs. Standard partnership track at a big law firm took eight years, but some junior lawyers were demanding partnership after five. In other words, people were drunk. 

The cold water came in 2008, as Lehman Brothers fell. The New York banks were wiped out, and with them the New York law firms. Massive law firms with a thousand lawyers would turn into dust overnight. Even the surviving law firms faced hard times. The cafeteria of my fancy law firm switched its free ketchup packets from Heinz to Hunt’s, apparently because a top ten law firm with a thousand lawyers placed around the world could no longer afford to give out the top of line condiments. 

Young lawyers—my classmates—were losing their jobs. But not at the same rate. Asian American associate attorneys, especially Asian American women, were the first to go. They used to get sterling reviews: diligent, hard-working attorneys who put in the extra time. Once the economy turned, the law firms scheduled a new mid-year review, in which the same qualities that were positive six months ago were turned into a negative: passive attorneys who did not display enough initiative and leadership. Then the law firms would announce “performance-based” layoffs, to avoid giving off the impression that they were in financial trouble. Majority of my Asian American classmates lost their jobs; many of them were never able to return to the legal profession. I was also on the chopping block, until a partner stepped in to save my neck because he was impressed with my ability to work for days without sleep. If it was not for him, my legal career would have ended after a year and a half since I graduated from law school. 

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When you’re a Korean American attending a fancy law school, you tend to keep tabs on other Korean Americans who also attend fancy law schools—which is why I know of Ryan Park. He has amassed credentials that few mortals could ever reach: top of the class at Harvard Law School and Fulbright Scholarship; stints at the State Department, Justice Department and the Department of Defense; judicial clerkship at the Southern District of New York, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If the legal field were the NBA, Park would have been the blue chip prospect who led Duke University to the NCAA championship, then was drafted No. 1 overall, to be the Rookie of the Year and an All-Star. These credentials allow Park to take a break from his legal career after his Supreme Court clerkship to be a stay-at-home father, only to join an elite law firm at a later date. 

Which is why Park’s lamentation about his father’s strict education triggers a reflexive eye roll. Suuure—if you’re the top of the class at Harvard Law School, hit the three most important departments of the federal government and had clerkships with all three levels of the court, I’m sure you could stand to be a little less successful. But for everyone else? My law school was not as fancy as Harvard, but it was pretty darn fancy. That did not stop my Asian American classmates from losing their jobs faster than others did, nor did it save me from narrowly escaping the chopping block. If you’re an Asian American, the only way for you to be mostly insulated from this society’s latent racism is to be indisputably talented. Merely being very good is not enough; the separation between you and the rest of the world must be so overwhelming that you elevate yourself beyond the racism-infected system. 

Asian American parents push their children academically because they hope against hope that their children would hit that escape velocity from the system. Dr. Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, likes to recount a story about his first time back home from college. In the car ride from the airport, the young college student told his father: “I think I’m going to major in philosophy.” His father slowly pulled over the car and told him: “When you finish your residency, you can study anything you want. You’re a Chinaman, and you are not going to make it in this world if you study philosophy.” There is a tragic quality to this, because no Asian American, no matter how excellent, fully escapes racism. The fact that a Chinese American William Lee was at one point the managing partner of WilmerHale, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world, did not shield him from a random racist harassing and stalking him at a gas station, telling him “Why don’t you go back to your own country.” Yet the parents press on, hoping their children would be the at least a step removed from the unfairness of this world. 

Younger Asian Americans rebel against that, for it is the lot of the children to rebel against their parents. The rebellion often comes in their youth, before they bear the full force of this society’s racism. The rebellion often comes from those indisputably talented Asian Americans who scorn their God-given gifts because they blithely assume everyone else has those gifts. They so badly want the freedom not to be successful that they scoff at the idea of success itself. They just want to be happy. They desire to be an individual, as if this society would ever treat them as one. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates saw the same desire in Michael Jackson, a fellow African American who managed to hit escape velocity through his musical talent. Jackson sought for “liberation from the dictates of that we[,]” which led to a twisted kind of freedom: “a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you give even more[.]” Coates found such freedom destructive: “I wonder how different his life might have been if Michael Jackson knew how much his truly black face was tied to all of our black faces, if he knew that when he destroyed himself, he was destroying part of us, too. I wonder if his life would have been different, would have been longer.” 

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My early days in the United States were some of the unhappiest moments of my life. I saw my parents living in anger toward themselves and to each other. They screamed and yelled at each other almost every night; several times I had to step in between them because I genuinely feared they might kill each other. Not understanding anything the teachers said at school induced despair. The idea that I would have to take the SATs 18 months after coming to the United States seemed absurd. I thought about running away all the time, about going back to Korea, to be freed from all this misery. I’m not sure if I would choose to go through that again, if it were possible to go back in time to choose. 

But I do know that, despite the difficult path we walked, no one in our family regrets coming to America. The knowledge that my parents denied themselves to give me an opportunity was branded into my heart, motivating me to study harder than ever before. Yes, that involved a ton of rote learning—how else do you think one learns an entirely new language at age 16? But contrary to the relentless claims about the harms of rote learning, my faculties for critical thought seem to have survived just fine. I am told that “successful” people like lawyers are often insecure and anxious, and my early days as a lawyer were certainly anxiety-inducing. Even now, I do go through career-related moments of insecurity and anxiety, sometimes for days and weeks. But I do not find them to be good reasons why I should have chosen a different career, much less a different path of life. I am glad I did not run away, shrink from challenge or give up on the idea of being successful in this country. 

The greatest lie of the modern society is we are individuals who must pursue our own, individualized version of happiness. In truth, happiness is overrated, and so is individuality. The logical consequence of prioritizing individual happiness over all else is to take painkillers until you die. There is no unhappiness when you’re high. No pain, no bad thoughts, just take another one if it wears off. It lets you forget all about what others did to put you where you are, and it lets you leave this world without even realizing you’re dead. So of course, that’s how Michael Jackson left this world. 

Or you can elect to live, and walk through all the frustration, challenges and despair that come along—the entire point of tiger parenting, which teaches children to persevere over difficulties. No, you don’t have to be a doctorlawyer; it’s ok to cast aside the old, stodgy ideas of what counts as a success. But you do need to be successful, in that you become the best version of yourself. This inevitably involves self-abnegation, because being better always entails sacrifice. Being a more capable person allows you to serve others better. Denying yourself easy pleasures leads to deeper, more profound ones. Submerging your own desire puts your mind in the right place to serve others, at a place one might call empathy. And yes, being the best version of yourself does tend to come with financial rewards, with which you can see and interact with the world at a level that would not be otherwise available. That's hardly a bad thing.

This is not a "happy" life, for unhappiness inevitably visits this life. There is nothing "individual" about it: the underlying formula is same for everyone, though the individual manifestation may be different. However clumsily it may be expressed, this is the type of life that every parent wants his or her children to have. It is the life that makes you better than you would have been while standing alone in the world, atomized and alienated. It is the life that recognizes your life’s interconnection with others’, your predecessors’ contribution for your existence today, and your duty to your family, your children, the people in your life. It may not be a happy life, but it is a fulfilled life. 

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com