

Loud. Arrogant. Rebellious. Asian. - PStamatiou
http://www.jasonshen.com/2011/loud-arrogant-rebellious-asian/

======
joebadmo
It bothers me that as a generation, we are rejecting our parents way to play
the game, when instead we should be rejecting the game.

Humility and willingness to work hard without complaint are the most valuable
things my parents gave me.

Definition of success in terms of material wealth, academic prestige, and
public recognition were the most damaging.

Our parents' generation sacrificed so much for us and emphasized these things
so that we wouldn't know the poverty that they did. Maybe they didn't realize
how well they would succeed and that in doing so they would leave us
impoverished in much more deeply profound ways: intellectually, emotionally,
and spiritually. I can't blame them, but our generation's discourse needs to
be about more than worldly success. It needs to shift from tactics to
strategy.

Our parents gave us what they could; we need to give our children more.

~~~
jasonshen
Thanks for your comment joebadmo. I share your sentiments about our parents -
they sacrificed so much so that we could have a good life here in America. My
problem is that the many of things they taught us do not produce the results
that we - this generation - are looking for (or perhaps more kindly, are
necessary but not sufficient).

I want adventure in my life, an uncapped career trajectory and yes, I would
like to have money. But other people might want other things too - like the
writers and poets featured in the Paper Tigers article.

The important thing is recognizing what you really truly want and not letting
other people's expectations stop you from going after those things.

~~~
joebadmo
My point is that the conversation still seems mostly to be about how to get
the things we think we want. I want to talk about what we should want.

This passage in the article stood out to me:

 _Things that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs
and have parents who are culturally assimilated.? I pressed him for specifics,
and he mentioned that he had visited his white girlfriend’s parents’ house the
past Christmas, where the family had "sat around cooking together and playing
Scrabble." This ordinary vision of suburban-American domesticity lingered with
Mao: Here, at last, was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge--
about social norms and propriety--had been transmitted. There was no cram
school that taught these lessons._

What's beautiful about this "ordinary vision" is that it's a portrait of
domestic tranquility and love, simple and unpretentious, not that it's some
sort of cultural transmission conduit; and it's totallly perverse to even
frame it that way.

Another:

 _One succinct evocation of the situation appeared in the comments section of
a website called Yellowworld: "If you’re East Asian, you need to attend a top-
tier university to land a good high-paying gig. Even if you land that good
high-paying gig, the white guy with the pedigree from a mediocre state
university will somehow move ahead of you in the ranks simply because he’s
white."_

The second, conditional sentence is the one that seems to get all the
attention, but I've always felt that it's the first one, the premise, that
deserves criticism. The article makes a head-fake toward it, but then lets it
slide. This is the real problem with our culture: not that we aren't getting
enough of the highest-paying or highest-status jobs, enough wealth, enough
exposure, or enough recognition. The problem is that that's all we care about.

The tragic truth about putting everything into breaking through the "bamboo
ceiling," I suspect, is that it doesn't actually look any different on the
other side of it.

None of this is to say that wealth, exposure, or recognition are inherently
bad or wrong. 1 Timothy 6:10 says "Love of money is the root of all evil." Not
money; love of it. It's our _preoccupation_ with wealth, exposure, and
recognition, our search for these to the exclusion of all else that leaves us
with nothing truly substantial inside.

Yes, the author briefly mentions artistic pursuits in passing, but it's still
in the framework of external measures of success. What's the takeaway?

 _And though the debate she sparked about Asian-American life has been of
questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance,
willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat
people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop
doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to
stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to
dare to be interesting._

"[Be] interesting," he says. Interesting to whom?

I have a different message: Be interested.

Yesterday's xkcd explicates it better than I can: <http://xkcd.com/896/>

~~~
jasonshen
I agree that people don't spend enough thinking about what they _ought_ to
want and are overly programmed by consumer culture and advertising.

I include myself in this group.

I used to be more thoughtful about it, and even wrote a series on "finding
yourself" - <http://www.jasonshen.com/2006/finding-yourself-in-7-days/> as
well as a manifesto on creating your own life philosophy:
<http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/48.05.SuccessPhilosophy>

Thanks for reminding us about what really matters.

------
triviatise
The whinyness and narcissism of these guys completely astounds me. Boo hoo I
went to stanford but I don't get to date hot girls. Or FU Im so angry because
my parents suck and look I date hot girls.

Here is some advice - everyone's parents suck in one way or another and you
were lucky you werent born in Africa where 30,000 babies die every single day.

True happiness comes from within. Not from achievements and not from material
possessions.

~~~
jasonshen
If you're astounded that people who have been given much want more, you
haven't been following the trend of CEO pay or the activity on Wall Street or
history of human conquest. It is part of human nature to always be wanting
more.

Leaving the snarkiness aside, you make a great point. It is always worth
thinking about how lucky you are and how much worse things could have turned
out.

There wasn't a place for me to note my appreciation for what I've been given
in the article, but know that it exists. My statement about getting after what
you want still stands.

~~~
triviatise
My point is that you want the wrong things and when you get them you still
wont be happy.

------
hristov
"Error Establishing Database Connection"

Way to fight racial stereotypes dude. My prejudiced view of asians as people
that know how to build websites has totally been challenged.

~~~
jasonshen
Hahaha - thank you. Glad to help.

------
elbrodeur
What always strikes me when reading articles/entries like this or the Paper
Tigers article itself is how opaque the unique difficulties people in
subcultures or minority cultures face. Not only that they exist, but why they
exist: Usually, the issue is so nuanced as to be seemingly unalterable.

Take, for example, incarceration rates and the likelihood of incarceration by
race. At face value it's absurd that being born a black male means you are
more likely to go to jail than a white male born at the same exact instant.
It's just as absurd that other minority populations are seemingly systemically
disallowed from positions of executive authority in businesses.

Obviously the reasons for these difference are incredibly difficult to parse
and weight; how do you go about correcting this aberration?

I guess learning things like this make me frustrated and confused.

~~~
joebadmo
I think it's hard to talk about because it's often systemic, invisible, and
cultural simultaenously. Even when it becomes visible, it's easy for one side
to blame the culture and the other side to blame the system, when both are
probably to blame, and there's a symbiosis between the two.

------
juiceandjuice
You're kind of like an asian Charlie Sheen.

------
mannicken
"Yes, it is about attracting those women whose hair is the color of the midday
sun and eyes are the color of the ocean, and it is about having sex with them.
"

No-no-no. That's the wrong attitude.

I think the key is this -- women are animals, just like men, with slightly
different genitals. And they should be treated like men, not put on a higher
pedestal.

I'm sorry, girls, but if you think that just because you have a vagina you're
somehow better than the rest of the world -- you are wrong. The worst possible
legal thing you can do to a man is not have sex with him. And if you think
having sex with you is the best and indescribable pleasure one can have -- you
are wrong. Sex is not as fun as it sounds, it's a physical workout, it gets
tiring, there's sweat and weird noises and everything. It's overrated. Get
over it, not everyone is dreaming of you everyday of their life and you are
not the fantastically beautiful cute cuddly thing you'd like to think you are.

You wanted equal rights, have fun.

Now, this is a question you want to ask yourself "Would I treat her
differently if she had a penis?" If you say yes, you are biased and you need
deep introspection into yourself and your life-values.

I'm tired of all this miserable bullshit where people take things like color
of the skin, or genitalia, or height, or whatever into account to justify
their own laziness, incompetence, mental illnesses and whatever personal
problems they have.

~~~
elbrodeur
You missed the central point of the statement:

 _This is what he prefers, what he stands for, and what he is selling: the
courage to pursue anyone you want, and the skills to make the person you
desire desire you back._

It's not wrong at all to put what you want on a pedestal. It seems pretty
obvious to me that when you desire something it's because you value it.

~~~
Psyonic
Not wrong, just backwards and ineffective. It's often when you stop caring
that the object of your desire arrives at your door.

------
bostonguy
As a first generation of Chinese immigrant, I personally experienced bamboo
ceiling in a government agency. While I am still not very comfortable and
skillful to raise my voice at my workplace, I totally agree that young Asian
generation should raise your voice and demand what you deserve in a
meritocratic society. Go ahead, be a real Asian tiger!

------
mbubb
This made me chuckle:

    
    
        [warning, this post contains graphic language]
    

Kind of undercuts what goes after. Good piece though.

~~~
jasonshen
My first post with a lot of swearing... You gotta start somewhere, right?

------
jasonshen
Apologies about the site being down intermittently - I'm leaving my webhost
(Bluehost) as the uptime has been atrocious as of late.

------
ztan
site seems to be down, cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.jasonshen.com/2011/loud-
arrogant-rebellious-asian/)

------
Sindrome
Why are Asians to race oriented?

~~~
joebadmo
Why can't non-Asians form sentences and why do they generalize so much?

------
georgieporgie
This all seems really shallow and superficial. "Money!" "Women!" "Pushups!"
"Fuck yeah!"

I don't like loud douchebags of any race. I'm not saying you're a douchebag,
but what you wrote here says to me that strive to be one.

