I assert that Asian parents' obsessive emphasis on grades, test scores, and college rankings originate from their upbringing in a poor, oppressive, and politically-unstable third-world society.
The author never made this claim. In fact, the author writes:
"Your parents grew up 30 to 40 years ago in a poor third-world country. I don't care whether they came from China, Korea, Vietnam, or any other Asian country --- chances are that they grew up much poorer than the parents of your middle-class (probably white) American friends."
Well, for a few years in the early 80s they would have looked a bit more like a poor cousin of Mexico than a peer to an Ireland or Italy, and they would have been a military dictatorship, but I am sympathetic to the general point.
Yes, Mexico is a pretty good description based on the folks I've talked to that have been stationed in Korea in that time period. Hosting the Olympics (1988) apparently really brought some positive change, at least to Seoul. It surprised a lot of people, seeing open sewers and the like before and coming back some twenty years later to see all the changes.
sorry, i don't want to fan any flames here (again, i don't think this article is HN-worthy at all), but there are lots of small poor countries in southeast asia with oppressive, politically-unstable regimes around the time when lots of refugees and other people seeking political asylum were granted admission into the US back in the 1970's and 1980's
Were there similar phenomena during earlier waves of immigration?
For example, the majority of my ancestors immigrated to America from Prussia in the mid to late 1800s. In general, they were professionals or businessmen, a tendency which has survived through the generations to me. I've always been encouraged in my intellectual and business pursuits, though not to the exclusion of more frivolous activities. Perhaps the German work ethic was/is in play?
I'm pretty sure American culture used to be this way about a hundred years ago, given the little research I've done. I also have some personal experience. My paternal grandfather believes that you can't get a white collar job without a GPA of 3.5 or higher. (I don't think he knows the A in GPA means Average) My maternal grandmother told me grades used to meant a lot more back when she was younger.
To be simplistic:
Grading in an organized public school system is fairly new to the world. Everyone thought it was the greatest thing ever and used it as the ultimate measuring stick.
In America (forgive me for ignoring Europe, etc.) people have realized that grades are far from a perfect measurement. Because of this, changes has been made in many companies to find new measures to grade people by. I believe this is because American culture has always had some disrespect for authority in it. (It varies from decade to decade) It is cultural acceptable to challenge old ideas of thinking even if you aren't in charge. (Culturally acceptable doesn't mean you won't get your ass in a sling)
Asian cultural is very different. It is family centric and puts great focus on respect. Old age is respected in a way it never was in America. Once you get stuck with some bad or marginal ideas they tend to stick around for awhile.
The only similar ethnic group I can think of is Jewish immigrants. An abnormally high percentage of people with Jewish heritage are academics and white collar professionals (for example, look at Jewish physicists).
He has described symptoms well, but his explanations only make sense if you ignore other immigrant groups. Latin American immigrants come from similar range of poor, politically unstable backgrounds, yet their children aren't being driven to academic excellence by their parents. In fact, instead of outperforming the white American natives, they substantially underperform them. Why the difference?
Let me give an answer: it appears to be genetics. Why else are the very different experiences of mainland Chinese, Chinese Hong Kongers, Chinese people from Taiwan, Chinese people from Singapore, Chinese people from Indonesian and Malaysia resulting in only minor differences in average outcomes in the USA?
For many Asian-Americans, starting a company is just not something they would want to deal with. Not because they don't have the talent and vision to start a company, but because the added stress of having to deal with overbearing parents is not worth it. Starting a company is hard enough as it is.
Given the other articles I've seen on hacker news I don't really see this as out of place. Granted I'm new to the site but I seen articles similar to this one posted.
Stuff posted to hacker news isn't about hacking just stuff that would be interesting to hackers.
Asia is not China and China is not Asia.