A letter to the admission office at Harvard


To the admission office at Harvard, 

The low marks intentionally put down for our “intangible characteristics” by admission officers indeed tear my heart. To prove one’s difference from the “normal”, stereotyped Asian Americans to get into the school is a striking, yet absurd prerequisite for our student community. Commenting on us “being similar to each”, the school board overdetermines the portraits of Asian American kids entering high-level education today and fails to acknowledge the individual merits each Asian student possesses, as if such generality does not exist in other groups. 

What makes this a controversial law case, and the one that receives great apathy and strong denial from the school, is the fact that the accusations from the students show the affirmative action to be harmful, not to the already privileged white class, but to other minorities in the States. It is upset to find the school, among other high-level education institutions, does not understand the varying values Asian American families and the dominating White middle-class American families hold. For us, success in education determines economic and social mobility, while for white families, the virtue of invisibility already recognizes their privileges in access to higher institutions and their value in education a desirable one. 

Not only does the unfair treatment towards Asian American children perpetuate the stereotype of them being “average geniuses” who were not “clubbable”, but it also demonstrates how the white narrative continues to dominate racial and cultural conversations.

We shall all acknowledge that affirmative action is not the ever end in racial discrimination in the United States, for it has an impact on those rejected, as well as those embraced. It isn’t a pleasant thing to live with the sense that your achievements aren’t quite real— and that everyone secretly knows it. It’s corrosive to live in the clutch of someone else’s lie.

One among the Asian student community

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