@btresist
Just curious have you worked with a family who spoke almost no English, mostly a Chinese dialect and knew and could speak Mandarin? Did you spend years working with them and come to understand that microcosm of the culture?
What do you know about Chinese culture? I am not talking some guy with decent but flawed English at a donut store. I am talking surrounded by Chinese people who speak next to no English. Is that your experience? Or are you making things up that are commonly believed by people with little contact on a daily basis in a work environment looking from the outside in? Just assuming things?
It is called stereo typing.
I knew the father who dropped out of school in the third grade. He hated school. I knew the wife who had a 10th grade education. I knew the daughter who was helped and went to a decent college. Her parents did not help her at all. They had no English and really did not want to pay for her college. She cut a desperate deal with them. I helped her find the aide she needed financially to go to college. Her family other wise never would have let her go at all. I knew the younger son who wished he never would have had to open a book. He had learning disorders. He was ultra lazy. I knew the crude nature of what the parents said to their kids daily. How the kids hated the business and wanted out of the family. The Chinese restaurants are full of such stories. The workers had much less hope most of the time.
These were not the grounds for getting to college. But in the daughter’s case the teachers worked with her. I remember her problems with some mathematics in high school because she had not maturated enough to do the work. I remember her mother’s cruelty as she said NEVER will she go to college.
That was the second Chinese family I worked with in those days. The first had twin sons who dropped out of high school to cook in the business. The business folded. I never saw them again but I know the family moved back to NYC.
This Chinese work hard is true. The shift academically is true. Just it is not all Chinese that work any harder than anyone else. It is not many that make the shift to academics. It is when the teachers believe something that is barely true that there is support for these kids.
Very few people really end up in Ivy League schools because the number of slots is limited. When Asian Americans are over represented it is not really because Asians this that or the other. It is often that assumption by teachers that makes the difference.
The Chinese daughter in the second restaurant who went to college only did so because school was an escape from her parents and the restaurant. School was a vacation compared to her restaurant life.
Her mother was credited as being an Asian tiger mother. That was nonsense. Her mother really thought the daughter should not have gone to college. She never stopped pounding that home on her daughter.
I knew less about the workers in those restaurants but very few made it a week. Most did not want a job. Calling NYC China town was scraping the bottom of the bucket for an unemployed worker to come cook. A small percentage actually stayed in CT and worked.
I did these two delivery jobs nights after I graduated college. A combined seven years of work. The story of an artist. Just dont tell me how Asian families promote education, tiger mothers and do so much better than anyone else. These families came from Fujian China where the majority of east coast Chinese restaurants get their labor. Fujian is across from Taiwan.
