The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [169]
The media started to interview Chinese Americans who believed they had been unfairly treated by Berkeley. In 1987, Berkeley rejected Yat-Pang Au, the son of Hong Kong émigrés and a star student at Gunderson High School in San Jose, California. A straight-A student, Au had been the valedictorian of his class, won prizes for ten extracurricular activities, earned letters in cross-country and track, served as a justice on the school’s Supreme Court, and even operated a Junior Achievement company. When Au received the rejection letter in the mail, he read it over and over, “because I thought maybe I had misunderstood or that it wasn’t addressed to me,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I had my mind and heart set on Berkeley. I’d thought about Berkeley for years; I’d worked hard in high school to get into Berkeley. I couldn’t believe I’d been turned down.”
Stunned to learn that ten other students with lower grades and test scores had been admitted, Au went to the press and publicly complained about the situation. When the Bay Area media reported the story, the Au family’s house was vandalized, and Au’s terrified mother ended up buying a gun and taking shooting lessons. For two years, Au attended De Anza, a local community college, before finally enrolling at Berkeley.
In 1989, NBC Nightly News interviewed Hong Kim, an A student of Taiwanese heritage. He had been rejected by Berkeley, while two of his black friends with lower grades were accepted. “I don’t hold it against them, they’re my friends,” he told NBC. “I want to tell them I still love them, but ... I think I’m more qualified.”
The public furor in the Chinese American community triggered federal investigations and policy changes. In the wake of the controversy, the Justice and Education departments began to probe allegations that Chinese and other Asian American applicants were victims of racism. Federal officials eventually exonerated Harvard and Berkeley but found UCLA guilty of bias.51
The discrimination even extended to the high school level. In 1983, prestigious Lowell High School in San Francisco adopted different admissions standards for different ethnic groups, with the harshest ones reserved for Chinese Americans. To settle a lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the San Francisco school district agreed to increase the number of black and Hispanic students in the city’s top public schools. The settlement mandated that at least four ethnic groups had to be represented at each school and that no more than 40 to 45 percent of the enrollment could be dominated by one single ethnicity. To enforce this racial cap, Lowell required Chinese American applicants to outperform Caucasians and all other ethnic groups in order to be accepted. The minimum test score for admission to Lowell was 62 (originally 66) for ethnic Chinese applicants, 59 for Caucasians, 58 for other Asian Americans, and 56 for Hispanics and African Americans.52
Some activists depicted the fight over racial quota systems as a struggle for limited slots between Asian Americans and other minority groups, such as blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. But in reality, asserted Henry Der, head of Chinese for Affirmative Action, “Asian applicants are competing with white applicants.” The “legacy” programs for children of Ivy League alumni, the “old-boy networks” that maintained places in elite universities for the children of the East Coast establishment, Der said, were a form of affirmative action for Caucasians. Noting that two-thirds of all Asian Americans opposed the system of affirmative action, Der told A magazine, “Most Asian immigrant families would ask for meritocratic standards. These families don’t understand that selection has never been based on meritocratic standards.”
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