l*b
发帖数: 4369 | 1 其实整个世界也是这样。中国人拼命勤奋工作少要钱，于是美国蓝领和红脖就越来越难
过日子。
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‘Too Asian’?
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By Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Kohler | November 10th, 2010 | 9:55
am
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A term used in the U.S. to talk about racial imbalance at Ivy league
schools is now being whispered on Canadian campuses.
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When Alexandra and her friend Rachel, both graduates of Toronto’s
Havergal College, an all-girls private school, were deciding which
university to go to, they didn’t even bother considering the University of
Toronto. “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian,”
explains Alexandra, a second-year student who looks like a girl from an
Aritzia billboard. “All the white kids,” she says, “go to Queen’s,
Western and McGill.”
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Alexandra eventually chose the University of Western Ontario. Her
younger brother, now a high school senior deciding where he’d like to go,
will head “either east, west or to McGill”—unusual academic options, but
in keeping with what he wants from his university experience. “East would
suit him because it’s chill, out west he could be a ski bum,” says
Alexandra, who explains her little brother wants to study hard, but is also
looking for a good time—which rules out U of T, a school with an academic
reputation that can be a bit of a killjoy.
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Or, as Alexandra puts it—she asked that her real name not be used in
this article, and broached the topic of race at universities hesitantly—a
“reputation of being Asian.”
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Discussing the role that race plays in the self-selecting communities
that more and more characterize university campuses makes many people
uncomfortable. Still, an “Asian” school has come to mean one that is so
academically focused that some students feel they can no longer compete or
have fun. Indeed, Rachel, Alexandra and her brother belong to a growing
cohort of student that’s eschewing some big-name schools over perceptions
that they’re “too Asian.” It’s a term being used in some U.S. academic
circles to describe a phenomenon that’s become such a cause for concern to
university admissions officers and high school guidance counsellors that
several elite universities to the south have faced scandals in recent years
over limiting Asian applicants and keeping the numbers of white students
artificially high.
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Although university administrators here are loath to discuss the issue
, students talk about it all the time. “Too Asian” is not about racism,
say students like Alexandra: many white students simply believe that
competing with Asians—both Asian Canadians and international students—
requires a sacrifice of time and freedom they’re not willing to make. They
complain that they can’t compete for spots in the best schools and can’t
party as much as they’d like (too bad for them, most will say). Asian kids,
meanwhile, say they are resented for taking the spots of white kids. “At
graduation a Canadian—i.e. ‘white’—mother told me that I’m the reason
her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the immigrants in the
country are taking up university spots,” says Frankie Mao, a 22-year-old
arts student at the University of British Columbia. “I knew it was wrong,
being generalized in this category,” says Mao, “but f–k, I worked hard
for it.”
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That Asian students work harder is a fact born out by hard data. They
tend to be strivers, high achievers and single-minded in their approach to
university. Stephen Hsu, a physics prof at the University of Oregon who has
written about the often subtle forms of discrimination faced by Asian-
American university applicants, describes them as doing “disproportionately
well—they tend to have high SAT scores, good grades in high school, and a
lot of them really want to go to top universities.” In Canada, say Canadian
high school guidance counsellors, that means the top-tier post-secondary
institutions with international profiles specializing in math, science and
business: U of T, UBC and the University of Waterloo. White students, by
contrast, are more likely to choose universities and build their school
lives around social interaction, athletics and self-actualization—and, yes,
alcohol. When the two styles collide, the result is separation rather than
integration.
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The dilemma is this: Canadian institutions operate as pure
meritocracies when it comes to admissions, and admirably so. Privately,
however, many in the education community worry that universities risk
becoming too skewed one way, changing campus life—a debate that’s been
more or less out in the open in the U.S. for years but remains muted here.
And that puts Canadian universities in a quandary. If they openly address
the issue of race they expose themselves to criticisms that they are
profiling and committing an injustice. If they don’t, Canada’s
universities, far from the cultural mosaics they’re supposed to be—oases
of dialogue, mutual understanding and diversity—risk becoming places of
many solitudes, deserts of non-communication. It’s a tough question to have
to think about.
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Asian-Canadian students are far more likely to talk about and assert
their ethnic identities than white students. “I’m Asian,” going back to
Confucius, of social mobility based on merit.” Demographics contribute to
the high degree of academic success among Asian- Canadian students. “Our
highly selective immigration process means that we get many highly educated
parents, so they have similar aspirations for their children,” says Robert
Sweet, a retired Lakehead University education prof who has studied the
parenting styles of immigrants as they relate to education. Sweet’s latest
study, “Post-high school pathways of immigrant youth,” released last month
, found that more than 70 per cent of students in the Toronto District
School Board who immigrated from East Asia went on to university, compared
to 52 per cent of Europeans, the next highest group, and 12 per cent of
Caribbean, the lowest. This is in contrast to English-speaking Toronto
students born in Canada—of which just 42 per cent confirmed admission to
university.
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Diane Bondy, a recently retired Ottawa area guidance counsellor, notes
that by the end of her 20-year career, competition among some Asian parents
had reached a fever pitch. “Asian parents do their homework and the
students are going to U of T or they’re going to Queen’s,” says Bondy,
who points out that “Asians get more support from their parents financially
and academically.” She also observed that the focus on academics was often
to the exclusion of social interaction. “The kids were getting 98 per cent
but they didn’t have other skills,” she says. “Their parents would come
in and write in the resumé letters that they were in clubs. But the kids
weren’t able to do anything in those clubs because they were academically
focused.” says 21-year-old Susie Su, a third-year student at UBC’s Sauder
School of Business. “I do have traditional Asian parents. I feel the
pressure of finding a good job and raising a good family.” That pressure
helps shape more than just the way Su handles study and school assignments;
it shapes the way she interacts with her colleagues. “If I feel like it’s
going to be an event where it’s all white people, I probably wouldn’t want
to go,” she says. “There’s a lot of just drinking. It’s not that I don
’t like white people. But you tend to hang out with people of the same race
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Catherine Costigan, a psychology assistant prof at the University of
Victoria, says it’s unsurprising that Asian students are segregated from “
mainstream” campus life. She cites studies that show Chinese youth are
bullied more than their non-Asian peers. As a so-called “model minority,”
they are more frequently targeted because of being “too smart” and “
teachers’ pets.” To counter peer ostracism and resentment, Costigan says
Chinese students reaffirm their ethnicity.
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The value of education has been drilled into Asian students by their
parents, likely for cultural and socio-economic reasons. “It’s often
described that Asians are the new Jews,” says Jon Reider, director of
college counselling at San Francisco University High School and a former
Stanford University admissions officer. “That in the face of discrimination
, what you do is you study. And there’s a long tradition in Chinese culture
, for example, going back to Confucius, of social mobility based on merit.”
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Students can carry that narrow scope into university, where they risk
alienating their more fun-loving peers. The division is perhaps most extreme
at Waterloo, where students have dubbed the MC and DC buildings—the
Mathematics & Computer Building and the William G. Davis Computer Research
Centre, respectively—“mainland China” and “downtown China,” and where
some students told Maclean’s they can go for days without speaking English.
Writes one Waterloo mathematics graduate on an online forum: “I once had a
tutorial session for the whole class where the TA got frustrated with
speaking English and started giving the answer in Mandarin. A lot of the
class understood his answer.”
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“My dad said if you don’t go into engineering, I won’t pay your
tuition,” says Jason Yin, a Taiwanese software engineering student at
Waterloo. “They are very traditional. They believe school is about work,
studying, go home and studying some more.” Hard-studying Waterloo lends
itself particularly to those goals. “We had a problem getting students out
of their bedrooms,” says Nikki Best, a former residence don who sits on
Waterloo’s student government, who explains they “didn’t want to get
behind in their grades because of coming out to social events.” [Nikki Best
said her quote was taken out of context, she was referring to students in
general not just Asian students]
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That’s not to say Asian students form any sort of monolithic presence
on Canadian campuses. “The mainland China group tends to stick together,”
says Anthony Wong, 19, a Waterloo software engineering student. “We can
talk to them,” says Jonathan Ing, also 19 and in Waterloo’s software
engineering program, “but we don’t mingle.” Complains Waterloo student
Simon Wang, a Chinese national who is frustrated by the segregation at
Waterloo: “Why bother to come to Canada and pay five times as much to speak
Chinese?” Meanwhile, Calgarian Joyce Chau identifies as “completely
whitewashed,” a “banana”: “I look Asian but I’m white in all other
respects.” Chau, a 19-year-old UBC business student, lived in residence her
first year, where she met the majority of her (white) friends. “It’s
harder to integrate into a group with Asians—you may or may not get
introduced,” says Chau, who accepts the segregation as just “part of the
university experience.”
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Such balkanization is reflected in official student organizations:
there is little Asian representation on student government, campus
newspapers or college radio stations. At UBC, where the student body is
roughly 40 per cent Asian, not one Asian sits on the student executive. Same
goes for Waterloo. Asian students do, however, participate in organizations
beyond the university mainstream, and long-standing cultural clubs function
as a sort of ad hoc government. “After you graduate you won’t care about
student government, but you’ll care about your club,” says Stan He,
president of the Dragon Seed Connection, an on-campus Chinese club with over
300 members. (His business cards feature both dragon and robot motifs.) The
Dragon Seed offers its members social functions, tutoring help, volunteer
opportunities, poker and mah-jong tournaments, and special holiday parties—
including at Halloween and Christmas. It even has an exclusive partnership
with Solid Entertainment, a promotions and events-planning company that
sponsors massive fundraising events and gives Dragon Seed exclusive selling
rights on campus. He says that the dozen or so Asian clubs at UBC serve well
over 4,000 students and cater to the whole spectrum of cultural
identification— from “whitewashed” to “Honger,” a once pejorative term
now adopted by students with Hong Kong backgrounds. The Dragon Seed lies
somewhere in between—“We’re the middle ground,” He says. “We have
international students, but we all speak English.”
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Or take the Chinese Varsity Club. With upwards of 500 members, it’s
the largest student social club at UBC. The executives say they’ve captured
a niche market: Chinese commuter students from the outlying Richmond,
Burnaby and North Vancouver communities who hope to find a social network at
the big school. “Students from high school already hear about us from
older brothers and sisters,” says Peter Yang, the 21-year-old accounting
student who is the club’s VP external. “You want to break out of the cycle
of studying and being lonely,” says Brian Cheung, its president.
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The impact of high admissions rates for Asian students has been an
issue for years in the U.S., where high school guidance counsellors have
come to accept that it’s just more difficult to sell their Asian applicants
to elite colleges. In 2006, at its annual meeting, the National Association
for College Admission Counseling explored the issue in an expert panel
discussion called “Too Asian?” One panellist, Rachel Cederberg—an Asian-
American then working as an admissions official at Colorado College—
described fellow admissions officers complaining of “yet another Asian
student who wants to major in math and science and who plays the violin.” A
Boston Globe article early this year asked, “Do colleges redline Asian-
Americans?” and concluded there’s likely an “Asian ceiling” at elite U.S
. universities. After California passed Proposition 209 in 1996 forbidding
affirmative action in the state’s public dealings, Asians soared to 40 per
cent of the population at public universities, even though they make up just
13 per cent of state residents. And U.S. studies suggest Ivy League schools
have taken the issue of Asian academic prowess so seriously that they’ve
operated with secret quotas for decades to maintain their WASP credentials.
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In his 2009 book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, Princeton
University sociologist Thomas Espenshade surveyed 10 elite U.S. universities
and found that Asian applicants needed an extra 140 points on their SAT
scores to be on equal footing with white applicants. Scandals over such
unfair admissions practices have surfaced in recent years at Stanford,
Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and elsewhere.
Hsu, the Oregon physicist, draws a comparison between Asian-Americans and
Jewish students who began arriving at the Ivy League in the first half of
the last century. “You can find well-documented internal discussions at
places like Harvard and Yale and Princeton about why we shouldn’t admit
these people, they’re working so hard and they’re so obviously ambitious,
but we want to keep our WASP [white anglo-saxon protestant] pedigree here.”
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To quell the influx of Jewish students, Ivy League schools abandoned
their meritocratic admissions processes in favour of one that focused on the
details of an applicant’s private life—questions about race, religion,
even about the maiden name of an applicant’s mother. Schools also began
looking at such intangibles as character, personality and leadership
potential. Canadian universities, apart from highly competitive professional
programs and faculties, don’t quiz applicants the same way, and rely
entirely on transcripts. Likely that is a good thing. And yet, that
meritocratic process results, especially in Canada’s elite university
programs, in a concentration of Asian students.
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The upshot is that race is defining Canadian university campuses in a
way it did not 25 years ago. Diversity has enriched these schools, but it
has also put them at risk of being increasingly fractured along ethnic lines
. It’s a superficial form of multiculturalism that is expressed in the main
through segregated, self-selecting, discrete communities. It would behoove
the leadership of our universities to recognize these issues and take them
seriously. And yet, that’s exactly what’s not happening. Indeed,
discussions with Canada’s top university presidents reveal for the most
part that they are in a state of denial.
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“This is a non-issue,” wrote U of T president David Naylor in an
email. “We’ve never had a student complain about this. In fact, this is a
false stereotype, as we know that Asian students are fully engaged in
extracurricular activities. So the whole concept is false.”
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As Cheryl Misak, the U of T’s VP and provost, puts it: “We have a
properly diverse mix, with no particular group extra prominent—we’re the
rainbow nation and we’ve got every sort of student and everyone is on merit
.” Waterloo president Feridun Hamdullahpur echoes a similar sentiment. “
There is a great tendency in our society to learn more about other nations
and other cultures,” he says. “Universities are the hotbed of these kind
of activities. If you want to see more economic and political diversity, I
think they star.”
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These positions arguably represent a missed opportunity. Universities
have the potential of establishing real cultural change. It makes sense that
the head of the Canadian university with perhaps the highest number of
Asian students is the most candid and the most concerned. Indeed, Stephen
Toope has, since his arrival in 2006 as UBC president, made the issue
central to his agenda—including outreach and newspaper op-ed pieces touting
the importance of making the university campus a meeting place not only of
diversity but also of dialogue.
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Among Canadian universities, UBC is one of the few institutions that
publishes the ethnic makeup of its student body. Toope says that the
university’s Asian student population is not “widely out of whack with the
community,” although the stats tell a slightly different story. According
to a 2009 UBC report on direct undergraduate entrants, 43 per cent of its
students self-identify as ethnically Chinese, Korean or Japanese, as
compared to 38 per cent who self-identify as white. Although Vancouver is a
richly diverse city, according to data from the 2006 census, just 21.5 per
cent of its residents identify as a Chinese, Korean or Japanese visible
minority.
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Toope says drawing the various communities present on Canadian
campuses into a common medium can be challenging. “Across Canada it isn’t
always the case that you’re seeing as much engagement from the new
communities as perhaps we should,” he says. Toope uses the experience of
Turkish immigrants in Germany as a cautionary tale—“there are groups that
never find a way to participate in the broader community.” Such
circumstances persist precisely because the issue of race is not attacked
head on. “I don’t want to pretend that just because you have people from
different backgrounds they’re going to interact—they’re not,” Toope says
. “We have to actually create mechanisms, programs and opportunities for
people to interact. A university is one of the places that has the greatest
capacity to work through demographic change.”
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Toope points us in the right direction. It’s unfair to change the
meritocratic entry system, so all universities can do—all they should do—
is encourage groups to mingle. Though it’s true that universities—U of T
and Waterloo included—do have diversity programs and policies for students,
newer, fresher ways are needed to help pry the ethnic ghettos open so
everyone hangs out together. Or at least they have the chance to. The white
kids may not find it’s too Asian after all. Alexandra, who chose to go to
Western for the party scene, found she “hated being away from home” and
moved back to Toronto. In retrospect, she didn’t like the vibe. “Some
people just want to drink 23 hours a day.” Alexandra says she still has
friends at Western who live in an “all-blond house” and are “stick thin.
” Rachel, Alexandra’s friend, says Western suits them—“they work hard,
get good grades, then slap on their clubbing clothes.” But it didn’t suit
Alexandra. She now studies at U of T. | d******g
发帖数: 6966 | 2 很正常...白猪就是这个样子。。虚伪到极致。。。尼哥猪喜欢当面捅你一刀。。白猪
最喜欢背后捅你...白猪在哪里都是一个德性 | xt
发帖数: 17532 | 3 原件在这里：
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/11/10/too-asian/
看插图：
看读者评论里面有伪装成中国人的鬼子：
Xinxiang Li, calgary |
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