The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [167]
The Chinese immigrant community soon considered excellence in school not as a lofty standard, but as a minimum expectation. Franklin Ng, a professor of anthropology at California State University, revealed the intensity of parental ambition for their children when he published an inside joke circulating in the Taiwanese American immigrant community:
HOW TO BE A PERFECT TAIWANESE KID (from the first generational perspective)
Score 1600 on the SAT.
Play the violin or piano on the level of a concert performer.
Apply to and be accepted by 27 colleges.
Have three hobbies: studying, studying, and studying.
Go to a prestigious Ivy League university and win enough scholarships to pay for it.
Love classical music and detest talking on the phone.
Become a Westinghouse, Presidential, and eventually Rhodes scholar.
Aspire to be a brain surgeon.
Marry a Taiwanese-American doctor and have perfect, successful children (grandkids for ahma and ahba!)
Love to hear stories about your parents’ childhood ... especially the one about walking seven miles to school without shoes.
HOW TO BE A PERFECT TAIWANESE PARENT (from the second generational perspective)
Don’t “ai-yoh” loudly at your kid’s dress habits.
Don’t blatantly hint about the merits of Hah-phoo (Harvard), Yale-uh (Yale), Stan-phoo (Stanford), and Emeh-I-tee (MIT).
Don’t reveal all the intimate details of your kid’s life to the entire Taiwanese community ...
Don’t give your child a bowl haircut or your daughter two acres of bangs ...
By the 1980s, the media began to report the educational triumphs of ABCs, profiling those who won National Merit Scholarships and the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. In 1982, Newsweek ran a favorable article under the headline “Model Minority.” Sociologist William Peterson had invented the term in 1966 to describe Japanese Americans, but the media soon borrowed the phrase to describe other Asian Americans, including the Chinese. Other stories soon appeared in the popular press to celebrate Chinese achievement. In 1986, both the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and the NBC Nightly News praised the academic prominence of the Chinese and Asian American community. “Why are Asian Americans doing so exceptionally well?” Mike Wallace of CBS’s 60 Minutes asked in 1987. “They must be doing something right. Let’s bottle it.”
Chinese American enrollment at top universities soared. MIT soon gained the nickname of “Made in Taiwan,” UCLA of “University of Caucasians Lost in Asians,” UCI (the University of California at Irvine) of “University of Chinese Immigrants.” In certain academic departments where ethnic Chinese students were concentrated (such as math, science, and engineering), the elevators were called the “Orient Express.” Engineering became synonymous with Chinese. At Stanford, when a professor scolded a Caucasian engineering student for not scoring higher on his tests, the student responded, “What do you think I am, Chinese?” Rumor had it that certain white engineering majors at Berkeley would drop a class if they counted too many heads of glossy black hair in the auditorium. Some ABCs even started wearing buttons on campus announcing, “I am NOT a Chinese American electrical engineer.”
Even the ABCs themselves were intimidated, and often overwhelmed, by the large numbers of Chinese American students on college campuses. Phoebe Eng, the daughter of a Taiwanese American and an American-born Chinese of Cantonese heritage, grew up in Westbury, a suburb near New York. When she attended college in California, she was shocked: “I had never been around so many Asian faces, so much black hair,” she wrote in her book Warrior Lessons. “Berkeley seemed like China to me. It took me a full