Even though this post is flattering to the APA community, it promotes some harmful myths in lumping all APA’s together into one homogenous group. Many of the APA kids that you see at Harvard and MIT came from privileged, professional families to begin with, something that helps that Ivy league push. There are many others who still live in immigrant ghettos (think Laotian refugees in Fresno or the Hmong in Wisconsin or garment workers in NYC’s Chinatown) who don’t have the same economic opportunities to pursue these goals, and the “model minority” myth hurts them because people don’t understand why they’re not far as ahead as the others.

In my experience I have found immigrants from India and China to be smartest of all the Asians. Very intellectual. They, however, are the ones that lack most in terms of “soft-skills”. In that category, I have found Koreans and Taiwanese to be the best amongst the Asians.

I think it’s cool that they promised to be nice to the in-laws. I find it interesting how you say that Asian-Americans aren’t the “right kind of minority.” I live in Christchurch, New Zealand, and my city has a large percentage (perhaps 20%) of Asians in an otherwise entirely European population. (Most New Zealand cities would have a lot of native Maori, but Christchurch is an exception for whatever reason.) I think Asians are probably the most discriminated-against ethnic minority also here in NZ, because we perceive them as having selfishly come into our country and made a general nuisance of themselves on our roads and in our universities etc. I don’t think that’s very fair, and even to the extent that it is fair, we don’t really have a right to discriminate on that basis, because it’s certainly a much lesser reflection of the way we Europeans invaded the New Zealand Maori 170 years ago and thoughtlessly (though perhaps not consciously) destroyed their culture. But then, they were hardly a unified and peaceful culture before we were on the scene; they were invading each other’s land and destroying each other many years before that. I think it’s just human nature.

Bud, don’t know what you’re smoking, but the phenomenon of Asians entering enmasse into the Ivies is a relatively recent occurrence starting in the late 80’s. These are the children of the wave of Asian immigrants that started in the 70’s. Only now are we are seeing large numbers of them exit the top professional and graduate schools and enter their professional prime.

Wow. It’s like you’ve never spent any time in the company of asian people before. These comments would have been interesting and/or insightful 30 years ago.