“Do Your Own Homework”: Asian Students Should

Learn to Think for Themselves

andrew lam

The e-mail messages come every few months, like clockwork. “Dear
Mr. Lam,” one would read, “My name is Dao and I am having difficul-
ties with my essay in English class. We are reading one of your short
stories, called ‘Grandma’s Tales.’ It’s a good story, but I can’t seem to
find the real theme. Can you please help me?”
Some of my essays and short stories are now taught in colleges and
high schools. This being the Information Age, when almost anything
can be located online, a few students who can’t come up with answers
to their assigned questions go directly to the source—in this case, the
author.
What is particular in my case is that, overwhelmingly, these are
Asian students. I suppose that because I am Asian—and an immigrant—
the students assume I’ll understand their stress. It would be hard not
to. There is an almost palpable sense of desperation in their e-mails.
If the subject line isn’t “HELP,” it might be “Assistance Needed.” Or
my all-time favorite: “A favor for a fellow Vietnamese immigrant.”
Though I’m flattered, I’m also bothered that these young people are
so eager to avoid thinking for themselves. They’d rather expose their
unwillingness to think critically to the writer than risk actually using
their noggins.
Kishore Mahbubani, a career diplomat from Singapore, is the
author of “Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East
and West.” The book’s title is misleading, because the author, an Asian,
can and does think brilliantly. But Mahbubani points out that, in
general, Asians tend to fall into complacency and conformity. Although
more and more are winning prestigious literary and artistic awards, the

Andrew Lam is a writer and an editor with New America Media, and the author of
Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. His short story collection, Birds of
Paradise, will be published in 2009. This essay was drawn from the New American Media
site at http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=af0202447
01c755252a4fc771283cd26. It is reprinted with permission of the author.
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vast majority rush toward economic success without taking a moment
to reflect.
It doesn’t help that self-expression is largely discouraged across Asia.
The language of criticism and analysis is often frowned upon in a region
where harmony is emphasized over individualism, and where, with the
exception of a handful of countries, strong democratic traditions do not
exist. To do well in the sciences and to memorize the classics have been
viewed as enough to make you a more-than-competent professional.
Think too hard about an issue, especially an ideological one, and who
knows? You might turn into a nonconformist, a radical—even, God
forbid, a dissident, and therefore a danger to the status quo.
Is this a uniquely Asian problem? Of course not. But America
still values the maverick, the inventor, the loudmouth class clown,
the individual with a vision. American kids grow up saying “I”—as in
“I disagree”—without a second thought.
But even in America, it is not so easy for an Asian kid in a Confucian
family household to say something like that. As a frequent judge of
writing contests for high school students, I find it curious that many
Asian-American entrants, even those with a perfect command of
English, don’t use the first- person narrative. The word “I” doesn’t
appear on the page, leaving writers to struggle with the awkward “one,”
even when addressing issues within their own families.
I remember dull afternoons in Saigon when I had to recite poetry
classics in front of a wizened literature teacher. If I always cried at poetry
recital, it was for good reason. Each time I forgot a word, the teacher’s
ruler would land with a “thwap” on my open palm. That class typified
literature education in Vietnam, but I got my revenge: I became an
American writer.
It is a generalization, but Asia is by and large a continent where
the ego is suppressed. The self exists in the context of families and
clans. It is submerged in the service of shared values and ritualized
language.
When you take into account that two out of three Asians in America
were born overseas, it’s no wonder that even the most diligent Asian
students feel more comfortable in science classes than in English litera-
ture, where raising your hand to offer opinions is not only encouraged
but counts toward the final grade.
Which explains Dao’s problem. There is something endearingly
oblivious about her e-mail and the others I’ve received. She wanted a
clear-cut answer. She wanted to know the short story’s Real Theme,
something she assumed that I knew, and that she couldn’t possibly
264 “do your own homework”
tease out herself. If I would only hand it over, she would get that
much-coveted “A.”
But I didn’t have a theme in mind when I wrote that tongue-in-
cheek story about a Vietnamese grandmother who died, came back to
life and went to a party with her grandson. A few years ago I suggested
a possible theme to another student, but his teacher didn’t like it one bit.
So here is what I wrote to Dao: “I’m sorry, but I am out of the
homework-abetting business. It may not occur to you that there might
be more than one theme to any story, and that, more often than not,
there are no wrong answers in literature—only well-argued proposi-
tions. If I were you, I’d go and sit under a tree and read the story aloud
to a smart friend. He’ll probably have a better answer than I do. And
when you figure out what it is, I hope you don’t mind e-mailing a note
to tell me.”