I was feeling like an underachieving Asian this morning and found a review of a book about overachieving Asian girls.
I wonder if I would have read this book as a teenager - probably even though I wasn’t an overachiever. I wasn’t retarded but I just was very disturbed and angst ridden, and not a straight A student. I think the word “potential” was used a lot but so was “lazy” (I just didn’t like devoting 2-3 hours of my day to practising music and going to lessons with my drunk piano teacher and chain smoking violin teacher) and “agressive” (I told a teacher to back off). I really don’t know why the math teacher thought I could do better at maths. I seriously was trying my best. I just can’t get my head around really abstract concepts that you find in calculus. Just didn’t make sense to me and seemed to have no real life application. By non-Asian standards I was probably a good student. I ended up in 97 percentile in the end of high school exams - but this feat was nothing special because I suppose I was being judged by Asian standards and quite a few people I knew were crammed down the 98.9-100 percentile corner.
I just wasn’t really motivated to do very much after high school because I felt everytime I made an effort it just wasn’t good enough. Not by my parents so much but by all these mentors who had great hopes for me. My drunk piano teacher forbade me from taking another piano exam after I came back with a B+ instead of an A in my seventh grade. I just became so afraid of failure and my sense of worth was based on my performance.
I sort of gave up trying at around 16 and just skipped school a lot to watch movies, read the books and magazines I enjoyed reading in the library, walked around town, observed people. I just gave up and never really tried too hard again until - well now. I suppose I’m trying hard to make the most of what I have because I have a child now and I’m more pragmatic. I just need to be able to provide for my baby and be a positive role model. I need to be ok with who I am so I can be the best mommy for X.

I just read Paula Yoo’s blog entry about her book: Good Enough. I have to read it.

There’s also an anthology coming out about “Growing up Asian Australian”. That should be an interesting read.