Asian teens openly joke, lament and mostly endure the intense academic pressure from their families — the expectation of perfection, and the drive to keep up with the Zhangs and Kumars.
Now, propelled by clusters of teen suicides and evidence of student distress, many of their parents are confronting and examining those cultural differences.
In Palo Alto, school and community leaders have convened sensitive conversations to address parenting, expectations and a traditionally taboo topic — mental illness.
Four of the last nine Palo Alto youths to kill themselves were Asian.
“Of course we worry. Why is this happening in our area?” said Ann Xu, who runs the Chinese-Language Parent Network at Gunn High in Palo Alto. “That’s a really complicated issue.”
A growing dialogue within Asian communities is playing out in many of the Bay Area’s high-performing school districts, but the challenge of easing student pressure is also raising tensions and even a backlash from parents and highly motivated students — who worry reforms might dumb down learning.
California’s Asian teen suicide rate has fluctuated over the years, but through 2013 — the latest figures available — generally remained below the rate of white teens. Educators and doctors, however, say the signs of stress are disturbing: College-bound students show high levels of depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior such as cutting, eating disorders and suicide ideation. In addition to Palo Alto, Asian youths in recent years have killed themselves in San Jose, Fremont and in Contra Costa County. It’s been a call to action.
Monta Vista High in Cupertino offers parenting classes in Mandarin. The Chinese Parents’ Club in Palo Alto has hosted talks by parents whose children have died by suicide. Mills High in Millbrae offers forums put on by the Chinese Health Initiative. In Sunnyvale and Cupertino, parent Sharlene Liu is campaigning for five high schools to start later in the morning.
Last month, more than 150 parents gathered at a Palo Alto middle school to watch a series of skits as part of a forum aimed at getting Asian parents to see their expectations in a different light and to hone parenting skills. In one, organizer and psychiatrist Rona Hu played a Chinese mother greeting her daughter’s white boyfriend by asking his SAT score — and noting it was lower than her daughter’s.
“Mom,” the daughter protests, “you asked me to get the highest SAT score in the school. I did. And you want me to date someone who scored higher than that? That’s not even possible.”
The skits, written and performed by Stanford psychiatrists and residents drawing on their own experiences, left many in the audience chuckling and nodding their heads. The successful show is heading to other communities with a heavy Asian presence.
Hu, the organizer, understands the forces of history and culture — and how hard it is to alter them. The mother of a middle-schooler, she wanted her daughter to grow up differently from her own upbringing. But, she said, “When I became a mother, some neuron switched, and every time I opened my mouth, my mother came out.”
The challenge, mental health experts say, is to preserve high parental expectations but temper them with reality — the recognition that getting into a Harvard or a Stanford is partly like a lottery and not a measure of worth — and concern for their children’s well-being.
But not every effort at ethnic outreach or stress-reduction strikes the right chord. In some cases, even with the best intentions, they’ve been counterproductive fiascoes.
Early this year, a proposal to push back Saratoga High’s start time by nearly an hour, to 8:40 a.m., ran into furious opposition, especially from Asian parents. The idea was to coordinate times with the district’s other school, Los Gatos High, and to give students a chance to get more sleep — a benefit that some researchers tout as the single most effective tool to improve student health.
The plan, the product of monthslong research by a 28-member committee, was enthusiastically backed by many teachers and counselors, alarmed at rising stress disorders they see among students.
But the proposals were never publicly debated. And the committee itself, while intended to be broad-based, lacked Asian-American parents — even though Saratoga High is about three-fifths Asian. Criticism spread by social media saw the plan as an attack on academic rigor, in part by shaving five minutes from each class period.
Many Asian parents feared the plan would tamper with Saratoga High’s success. Parent Becky Wu saw the proposal through the lens of test scores, which are higher at Saratoga than Los Gatos. “If the goal is to have the same schedule at both schools,” she asked, “why ask Saratoga to match Los Gatos’ and not the other way around?”
“There was no outreach,” board President Cynthia Chang said. She and trustee Katherine Tseng opposed three white board members and instead sided with critics. Teachers felt berated and insulted, Superintendent Bob Mistele backed down and Saratoga will get a compromise 8:15 a.m. start time.
Afterward, two Saratoga High seniors, Alice He and Giulia Cuomo, wrote a passionate open letter in support of the abandoned schedule and lamenting the recriminations. “We feel this is tearing our community apart,” He said.
The resulting anger and mistrust still linger.
Despite that episode, educators point out that parental camps are more often divided less by ethnicity than by newer arrivals vs. established families.
In Fremont, former schools trustee Ivy Wu has worked to temper unrealistic expectations that she believes are harming students.
“I’m trying to tell parents, ‘Don’t look at your kids as a project. Help them develop their potential, but don’t insist on your terms,’ ” she said. “Your kids don’t have to go to an Ivy League school.”
After her daughter sank into depression in college, Wu underwent a wrenching self-examination, chronicling her evolution in thinking in a book, “Coming Out of Cage: Journey of a Tiger Mom.”
Jennifer Apy, a Fremont mother of three, re-examined her priorities after watching the documentary chronicling the college-prep frenzy, “Race to Nowhere.”
“It really opened my eyes, being an Asian parent and someone who was brought up in the ‘you need to have straight A’s or else,’ ” she said. “It made me think more about what my children are thinking and feeling.”
Contact Sharon Noguchi at 408-271-3775. Follow her at Twitter.com/noguchionk12.
Resources for parents
Asian parenting workshop: Psychiatrists from Stanford University will present vignettes on Asian parenting at 7 p.m. April 20 at Mills High School, 400 Murchison Dr., Millbrae. The workshop is free open to public and will have Mandarin and Cantonese interpretation.
