Asians go to school, but few people can reach the top of the pyramid in the workplace. They stand up to the stereotype of "hard work" and are suppressed by their white colleagues and become invisible.
By Wealey Yang, this article is from New York Magazine.
Invisible Asian students
Sometimes, I would throw a glance at my shadow in a glass window and be amazed at what I saw. Pitch-black hair, slanted eyes, flattened like pancakes, yellow with greenish skin, resembling the indifferent expression of a reptile.
I tried to convince myself that this face was as beautiful as any other face. But when I think about it, I think this face is very strange. It's my face, and I can't deny that.
But what does this face have to do with me?
Sometimes, I suspect that what this face of mine shows in the eyes of other Americans is an invisible man who is difficult to identify among a bunch of faces similar to his; a man who stands conspicuously but has no personality in the crowd; an idol who seems to be highly admired by American culture but is actually despised and exploited.
A few months ago, I received an email from a young man, Jefferson Maw. He first attended Stevieson High School and most recently graduated from the University of Chicago. Now he knows better what he had to do in his freshman year of high school: "It's enough to have half the effort to study, but to be more successful in other areas." ”
Steyvesant is one of the most competitive public high schools in the United States, and admissions are based entirely on test scores. Here's the result: Asians, who make up just 12.6 percent of New York's population, make up 72 percent of the school.
About halfway through Steviesen's reading, a vague sense of displeasure began to erode Mao's heart. He has always felt like he's part of "a bunch of nameless, faceless Asian kids" who are "like part of the decorations of a room."
He was always content to immerse himself in hard work and strive toward the common goal of Stuyvesant students: Harvard.
But around the beginning of his graduating year, he began to wonder if the path to academic success was the only and best path.
He explained while eating rice noodles: "You must not be able to help but feel that there are other roads, it's like a group of us are pressed to the head and fighting each other, while the Midwestern children can do much less homework, and they can play bands in the garage or something — if they have a good intellect and work hard at school..."
"Since I am, there are still generations away"
A few weeks after we met, Mao asked me to get in touch with daniel Chu, a close friend of his at Stuyveson.
Zhu graduated from Williams College last year, and his poetry also won an award in a creative writing competition. He took a portion of his $18,000 prize money to travel to China, but now he's back in Brooklyn's Chinatown to live with his parents.
Zhu remembers his first semester in Williams, when his junior counselor would pull him aside from time to time and ask, "Think everything is okay?" Have you encountered any annoyances? ”
He replied: "I'm still adapting to this place, I'm not completely happy, but I'm not completely depressed either." ”
At that time, his new white friends would often say, "Zhu, sometimes it's hard to see what you're thinking." ”
Although Zhu has a good-looking face, it is not a mistake to position his behavior as conservative. His voice was soft, there was no tonal fluctuation, and his facial expression rarely changed. He blamed it all on the family atmosphere.
"If you grew up in a Chinese family, you wouldn't talk much," he said. You'll shut up and listen to what your parents tell you to do. ”
At Stuyvesant, he's in a completely Asian circle, and who you make friends with is determined by which subway line you take. But when he got to Williams, Zhu slowly became aware of something strange: White people walking around New England were always smiling.
He's determined to start smiling more, "It's a skill I have to practice by actively, like when you make a deal in business, you give money to the other person——— and then you smile." ”
In addition, his father, as an IT manager, "was the best programmer in the office, but his English was not very good, and his promotion would never be his share." So, I want to be someone who's particularly good at something so that my social flaws won't matter anymore. Zhu told me.
Zhu is an intelligent, hard-working young man born in the United States with an impeccable diploma. He's confident in winning the respect of the world in his own right, but he doubts he'll ever feel the kind of ease he sees in Williams' white classmates, "That kind of ease, I feel like I'm still generations away." ”
Workplace Ceiling: Asian = Coolie?
In the 1990s, when James Hun was an electrical engineering student at Berkeley, he went to IBM for a one
Series of interviews. An elderly Asian-American researcher looked at Hong's resume, stood up without a word, walked to close the office door, and said:
"Our generation has done everything in our power to leave our home country and come to this country for graduate school because we want to create better conditions for you kids."
The truth is, if you get the job, you'll have the same ceiling as our generation. They only did when I was an Asian PhD and never did management material.
You will get a job, but you will not accept it. Your generation must go further than we do, or all our efforts will be in vain. ”
The researcher is talking about the so-called "bamboo ceiling," which maintains the pyramid-like racial structure of a major American company. Among them, many Asians are at the bottom of the pyramid, a few are at the middle, and almost no one is at the top and controls leadership.
It's part of a bitter undercurrent in Asian-American life, where Asian-American students at elite universities find themselves familiar with the elite-led system that comes to an abrupt end after graduation.
If 15 to 20 percent of every Ivy League school graduating class is Asian, and if the Ivy League school is an incubator for American social leaders, the inference that Asians will be a corresponding percentage of corporate leadership should be justified.
However, the statistics reflect a completely different reality: Asians make up about 5 percent of the U.S. population, but only 0.3 percent of corporate executives, less than 1 percent of boards, and about 2 percent of college presidents. Among fortune 500 companies, there are only 9 Asian CEOs.
In some special industries where Asians are concentrated, the situation is generally similar.
One-third of Silicon Valley's software engineers are Asian, yet only 6 percent of the 25 largest companies in San Francisco Bay are Asian and only 10 percent of the company's managers are Asian.
According to a 2005 survey, 21.5 percent of scientists on tenure at the National Institutes of Health were Asian, but only 4.7 percent of laboratory or branch directors were Asian.
A succinct exclamation in the comments section of a website called Hello World summed up the phenomenon: "If you're of East Asian descent, you need to go to a top university to get a high-paying job." But even if you get a well-paid job, that white guy whose whole family is a regular state university graduate might unknowingly climb over you just because he's white. ”
The dark nature of part of the bamboo ceiling is that it does not appear to be caused by blatant racial discrimination. This imbalance in data is more likely to be caused by unconscious bias. For example, no one would say with certainty that tall men are inherently better leaders.
However, this may only be blamed on the traditional Asian-American upbringing.
To assert that any Asian-American is not good at creative thinking or willing to take risks is clearly a racist view. But if a group that has always focused on rote memorization and crammed indoctrination in education is unlikely to produce many people who tend to challenge those in power or break with traditional ways of doing things, this is just an observation of a cultural phenomenon.
1 Sach Takayasu
Sach Takayasu was one of the fastest-rising members of IBM's New York marketing department. But about 7 years ago, she felt her promotion slow down: "I overstepped my job and worked for a long time, but no amount of effort like this would help me move up." It was then that she attended a seminar organized by an organization called Asia-Pacific American Leadership Education.
2 Takayasu
Takayasu took part in a one-week course training in 2006. One of the initial exercises was when the group instructors asked everyone to make a list of Asian-American values they identified with. The students' responses included: Honoring the Ancestors, Honoring Parents, and Exercising Self-Denial.
The instructor then asked the students to list the qualities of their leaders and then prompted them to notice that the two tables rarely intersected.
3 Tim Wu
Tim Wu, a law professor and author, grew up in Canada with a white mother and a Taiwanese father, which gave him an interesting insight into how whites and Asians view each other.
"Asian employees are always moving to the hardest parts of the job," he said. In contrast, the white lawyers I met were always good at portraying themselves as superior, above the coolies. White people have a very important intuition — to give the impression that they're only going to do the work that really matters. This arrogance is something that Asians have not been instilled in.
Shortly after moving to New York, I was told that to be successful, you have to understand what kind of rules you're going to break. If you break the wrong rules, you're done. Therefore, the simplest thing is to follow all the rules. But then you trap yourself at the bottom. The real trick is to understand which rules aren't made for you.
It's a rule-by-rules-breaking game—not mentioned in the rulebook, but passed down from generation to generation in an intrinsic cultural consciousness—and this is perhaps the best explanation I've ever heard about how bamboo ceilings work well in reality.
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