Negative consequence of positive stereotype

 

I think it was about 3 years ago, dueing my high school years, in reading time I hid my phone on the calculator cover and watched Youtube video with an earphone hidden underneath my jacket. I remember I was really into Ted talk videos on that time and I saw a Youtube video called ‘Asian Doesn’t Start with A+’ by Olivia Lai. Her Ted talk speech really made me think about what I’m doing right now. I used to do NCEA at that time and the result is set in E for Excellent, M for Merit and A for Achieved. I wasn’t one of the students who’s really sad because I got M, I was one of the students who were really happy because I passed with A. At that time this made me think how I got into this situation. Before I was satisfied with A, I never understand why I was so unmotivated and feel the satisfaction even if I got a good grade with subjects like math and science. Even though I didn’t like them, I always thought that these subjects have to be my best subject. When I see myself back then, I never realize how people around me thinking that it’s normal to have an Asian student to have perfect grade and good at playing musical instruments (I used to play violin). In addition, having a teacher who always expect you to have much higher grades than other students felt normal to to me as well. But I always wondered why my math teacher gets so mad when Asian students fails than other students from different ethnicity fails. Good with math, science and playing musical instruments were always number 1 thing for me when I was in middle and high school. But it was these mindsets that made me hate myself when I’ve made tiny mistake in my exam. When I look back at myself, I always think that I should’ve stopped worrying about these things and do something that I wanted to do. I know a lot of Asian mates who’s competitive but always stressing themselves out for perfect result and getting depressed for decent result. It’s sad that this also has an effect from the parents pressuring their kids as well.

 

Asian students stereotyped as smart students rather than hard working students, this gives deep pressure to get high grades. These misrepresented positive stereotypes of Asian people are smart, plays at least violin or piano or good at drawings only gives more pressures to those who aren’t. Personally, for me, after going through a bad grades streak from math and science, I manage to change to go art pathways, the one thing I’m really good at and started to focus more on art. But I can’t imagine the depression and struggles if I didn’t have that skill. Coming from the background of competitive society and teachers expecting you to have the perfect results, this makes people to forget about their mental health and gives mindset of getting high result is the most important thing in life.