Deconstructing the classic East Asian nerd

In my previous post, we discussed the portrayal of East Asian men in Western media and the perception by some that they have been sometimes portrayed as asexual compared to their white, black and Latino counterparts. Today I want to talk about why East Asian men seem to fulfill certain nerdy stereotypes in real life because East Asian men are generally far more nerdy than their white, black and Latino counterparts. This is simply a fact, it is not a racist stereotype. It may be a somewhat controversial statement to make but allow me to speak as an East Asian guy who grew up pretty much as a stereotypical Singaporean nerd and I wish to share my perspective on this experience.

The origins of the East Asian nerd comes directly from our culture - quite specifically, the emphasis on academic excellence. It was quite a culture shock for me when I moved to England and saw the very relaxed attitude white people took towards education: if a kid failed maths, the parents would probably give him a hug, encourage him and tell him not too feel too bad about it. "Darling, it's just a maths test, it is not that important, okay? I'm sure if you try harder next time your scores will definitely improve, yeah? Mummy loves you so much, come and give mummy a hug." Whereas your typical East Asian mother will go absolutely apeshit if her son dares to come home with anything less than an A for a maths test and beat the crap out of him for daring to dishonour the family by doing this badly in maths.

This obsession with doing well in our studies goes beyond a respect for education - in our culture, doing well in your studies is a sign of good character. It shows that the student has had the self-discipline to sit down and revise, forgoing other more pleasurable activities like going to the movies, indulging in social media and playing sports. So it wasn't enough to simply produce the straight As, oh no, you were expected to go through the ritual of spending hours in solitude with your books, as if it was some kind of solemn Buddhist meditation-prayer ritual that will purify your soul, making you a better person, just like the Buddhist monk in saffron robes who spends hours meditating in the temple.

Hence anything that is perceived to get in the way of this important ritual of studying is deemed to be harmful, sinful and immoral: take for example an interest in fashion. It feels totally normal in the West for teenage girls to take an interest in fashion: the market for female teenage fashion in the West is absolutely huge. We're talking about everything from clothes to shoes to accessories to make up - teenage girls in the West are happy to spend a lot of money to look good and this is considered totally normal. Is this the case in somewhere like Singapore? Hardly.

Sun Xu - your classic Asian nerd

Now I have this memory of when I was about 11 and my sister was 15 - she had gone over to her friend's house to study and they were messing around, applying make up on each other. She had managed to wash most of it off her face but my mother spotted some eye shadow and totally went apeshit on my sister as if she had done something so horribly immoral. My mother wanted my sister to remain plain, in fact she wanted my sister to be downright ugly, so she would not attract the attention of the boys and have a boyfriend, which would then distract her from her studies. This was because my mother wanted my sister to focus on her studies without being distracted by falling in love and getting a boyfriend. Hence putting on make up, a simple act to improve her appearance, was deemed as a grave act of immorality and vanity. My mother's epic over-the-top Singlish outburst ("you only 15 leh, you so hiaow for what? You wear make up for who see? You want to look like Geylang prostitute izit? Aiyoh, you liddat get pregnant then how? Your future finish already!") to my sister playing with make up for a few minutes took both my sister and I by shock as we didn't think it was such a big deal, like putting on eye shadow or mascara makes you pregnant? Yeah right.

The fact is my sister wasn't ugly - she is in fact rather attractive IMHO. Even without any make up, she could easily attract the attention of the guys as she walks down the street. However, my mother's reaction is pretty typical in East Asian culture: it wasn't enough that my sister produced excellent results at school (oh my sister was a straight-A student I assure you), my mother demanded that she fit all the expectations of what a proper, well-behaved Chinese daughter and such a perfect Chinese daughter is in fact an unattractive geek who does not wear make-up. Such is our culture - there is almost an irrational fear of people trying to make themselves attractive. My sister and I had a hard time being caught between two cultures, as we had painfully traditional parents but we didn't share our parent's cultural identity at all, being extremely Westernized. That is part of the reason why I don't get along with my parents.

East Asian parents demand academic excellence.

So East Asian kids are very used to our parents nagging at us: study hard, get straight As, go to the best university (preferably on a scholarship), become a doctor/lawyer/banker, earn a lot of money, get the promotion before your colleagues, become a millionaire - we are pushed incredibly hard by our parents to achieve a lot and the results speak for themselves. I will be looking at the statistics from the 2011 UK census - though the situation is pretty similar if you were to look at other Western countries with a significant Chinese minority population like USA, Canada and Australia.

According to the 2011 census in the UK, the Chinese are most likely to have degree qualifications at 43% whilst for white British people, that figures falls dramatically to 26% and for those with Caribbean origin, that figure stands at just 18%.  I expected a big gap but these statistics took me by surprise! Even other ethnic groups are painfully jealous of the academic achievements of the Chinese, allow me to quote a report by the Black Training & Enterprise Group:

London Chinatown: we are the model ethnic minority in the UK

Chinese communities place an exceptionally high value on educational attainment and believe that this is a prerequisite for greater social mobility later on in life. According to the 2001 census, 30 percent of the British Chinese post-16 population are full time students compared to a UK average of 8 percent. This drive for educational attainment also seems to negate the effects of deprivation. The national average for pupils in 2009 who were eligible for free school meals (FSM) and achieved 5+ A*-C GCSE grades including English and Mathematics stands at 26.6 percent. This means that an alarming 3 in 4 pupils are failing to reach the national benchmark that include the curriculum's core subjects. Despite facing the similar disadvantage, it is astonishing that British Chinese pupils who are entitled to FSM achieved 70.8 percent in the same category.

Not only are the Chinese way ahead in terms of their education achievements, we also earn substantially more than other ethnic groups and get better jobs as well. Just 14 per cent of white men are in professional jobs, compared with 27 per cent of Chinese and 25 per cent of Indian men, this is hardly surprising if your average Chinese person in the UK is far more educated than your average British citizen (of any other ethnicity). You have your pushy Asian Tiger Mums to thank for this - whilst the other teenagers in the West are out socializing and having fun, the East Asian teenagers are at home, revising for their exams because mummy said it was more important to study than to hang out with your friends. There is a price to pay, a sacrifice to be made if you want to get a good degree and a great job and your classic Asian Tiger Mums do understand that trade off: 一分耕耘, 一分收穫 (you will reap what you sow).

Chinese kids study far harder than their Western counterparts.

So whilst you East Asian readers would be rubbing your hands in glee and gleaming with pride right now at these statistics, you also have to understand that part of the reason why Chinese people in the West have managed to achieve this much is because of the "nerd formula": ignore all things that can distract you from your studies and work bloody hard for those straight As. Chinese people are not somehow smarter or better than white or black people - oh no, we manage to achieve more because of our culture which makes us work so much harder than anyone else. Our culture is our advantage, but it is does leave us quite nerdy as a side effect after having missed out on an active social life as a student and as a consequence. Many East Asian nerds lack the basic social skills that many of their counterparts in the West have. This is because whilst their Western counterparts were busy making friends and having a social life, your East Asian nerds were so busy studying they had no time even try to form meaningful friendships.

Is the situation getting any better? No, I say it is getting worse because of technology. Back in my day, your typical nerd at school would hide his face away in a book when sitting on his own in the canteen. Reading was an alternative to eating on your own - the latter meant that you had no friends, but if you were busy reading, you have no time for idle small talk as you're so busy studying something important. Nowadays, your nerds have their phones which becomes their crutch in any social situation - they instantly whip it out, even at meal times and their eyes are glued to the screen. It gives them a perfect excuse not to have to talk to anyone or interact with another human being. Thus the social skills of these nerds have become far worse in the last 10 to 15 years because of the mobile phone.

So let's apply this to a real life situation. A nerd goes to university and you place him in a brand new social situation where he doesn't know anyone at all. Now old fashioned folks like me would go around, chatting to anyone and everyone, introducing myself and trying to make new friends. Whereas the nerd would reach for his phone and suddenly, he is no longer alone - he is connected to the internet (as long as he can get a reliable signal or good wifi) and there's plenty online to keep him occupied as he goes through university without really having to make any real friends. And when you have very few or no friends, you don't have anyone to disapprove of how badly you dress or how creepy you come across - no, you're in a world of your own. No wonder they say nerds lack social skills.

Let's talk about a real life nerd: PRC scholar Sun Xu who became public enemy no. 1 in Singapore back in 2012. Now undoubtedly, this guy is extremely intelligent, that is why he had a scholarship to NUS. Yet as we look at his appearance, it is evident that he is a nerdy geek: oh come on, just look at those chunky plastic glasses and that haircut. Did anyone tell him how awful that image is? No, clearly his friends are either fellow nerds who are equally clueless or he has no friends - or maybe he is just so obsessed with scoring straight As that he simply doesn't give a damn how geeky he looks, that's not his priority. (And to be fair, his parents are far away in China.) However, the acid test came when he made the remark "there are more dogs than humans in Singapore" on his Chinese blog.

He initially refused to apologize for this comment but was forced to later offer a grovelling apology after a huge public backlash. This shows that regardless of how brilliant he may have been academically, Sun Xu lacked the very basic social skills to realize the consequences of his actions. This indicates that he is a nerd who has lacked social interaction with his peers to have cultivated the habit of "think before you act - how will others react to my actions?" If the majority of your interactions are virtual and impersonal rather than in person, then that leaves a gaping hole in your social skills and here's the bad news: there is a whole generation of socially inept nerds in Singapore who are as clueless as Sun Xu because of their addiction to their mobile phones. Oh dear.

It is a double whammy: when traditional Chinese values + iPhone 6 = a generation of super geeky nerds. Thus if you are spending all your waking hours studying very hard (or working very hard later on in your adult life), then you literally have no time to care about things like how you dress, how you present yourself, how you talk to people, how others perceive the way you dress or talk - oh no, all those things become relatively unimportant in the relentless pursuit of academic excellence or more productivity in the office. So you get the nerdy geek who dresses badly, has poor social skills but straight As. And you know what? Some people in our culture actually like that kind of nerdy behaviour: my mother (a retired teacher) would certainly praise a student like that who is not "hiaow" (vain) and knows his priorities. Many bosses would gladly employ someone like that who is so dedicated to his work and not easily distracted. It is not all bad being a nerd in the real world - it really depends on what is valued within your culture.

Napoleon Dynamite: the ultimate geek

Are all East Asian people nerds then? No of course not, I remember my JC days in Singapore (senior high school for the rest of you not from Singapore, for 17-18 years old) when we had no shortage of nerds in my school. And then of course, there were the cool kids as well who were fashionable and attractive - there was a table at the canteen where only the cool kids would sit at and the rest of the nerds would never dream of sitting down at that table. However, the cool kids were also very good at their studies like the nerds and more to the point, they would rarely ever pick on anyone for being nerdy as being nerdy was the norm in Singapore. It was socially acceptable to be a nerd as long as you had good grades. Yup, such is our culture.

This was a far cry from my time at university in the UK when I met a mix of nerds and fashionable students - in the British context however, it was far less acceptable to be a nerd and they were ostracized (and at times bullied) despite being brilliant at their studies. I suppose at university, one is thinking about the world beyond the next exam: what job do we want to do after we graduate, what kind of company do we want to work for, what kind of romantic relationship  do I want to have, what kind of working adult do I want to be. That puts a very different perspective on one's image when you are thinking about your adult life. It was a tall order - not only did you have to be academically brilliant university, you were also expected to be fashionable and attractive and those who weren't paid a price for being nerdy.

As for me, I stopped being a nerd at the age of about 19 but I was oh so terribly geeky and nerdy until then. I was doing my national service (NS) then and suddenly, I was able to get off the hamster wheel of endlessly chasing the next A in the next test or exam at school whilst training for the next gymnastics competition. In the first year of my NS, I was just consumed by trying to adjust to the new environment but by my second year, I was a lot more relaxed. I felt more at home in the army, I was competent at my job in my unit and I had to also learn to get along with the people I had to work with, like that wasn't even a choice at all, I simply had to. That was also when I realized, hey, I can start taking interests in things like fashion and beauty, I don't have to be a nerd anymore. The first thing I did was get contact lenses and perhaps this is a reflection of just how very shallow I am, but it made a remarkable change in my mindset when I saw myself in the mirror for the first time without those chunky, nerdy glasses. It was like, OMFG, I am actually not totally ugly, I've just been incredibly nerdy all this time. Who would have known?

My parents didn't quite know how to react to this new found vanity on my part. I didn't have to study in the army, there was no big exam to focus on - university seemed a very long way away and I was spending so much time in camp anyway, so they didn't really have a say in my new found vanity. I suppose I didn't flaunt it in their faces either, but I had become pretty desperate to become as attractive as possible - and that started my interest in dressing well. So you see, many people would assume that I had only become this vain and obsessed with fashion after I had moved to the West and that somehow my vanity was a Western infection; but actually the it was simply being able to hit the pause button during my NS that allowed me to stop being so focused on my studies and reflecting on other things.

Whadaya know, I stopped being a nerd in NS.

Thus the East Asian nerd isn't a myth invented by racist white people: they exist in real life and they are everywhere. Trust me, I was one such East Asian nerd and boy was I nerdy in my teenage years. But you have to understand the mindset of the nerd, the East Asian nerd is not nerdy because he is clueless about fashion and too stupid to figure out how to be one of the cool kids! Rather, it is a cultural choice to focus on one's studies and work which explains this nerdy image. Your East Asian nerd has totally inherited his parents' cultural values and is more interested in improving his grades than figuring out how to bed as as many hot chicks as possible.

The fact is many East Asian nerds are perfectly happy being geeky and nerdy - why should they have a problem with it if it is totally acceptable within their cultural values? They simply have different priorities compared to their counterparts in the West and we should respect that. However, some very Westernized Asian people do have a problem when they see East Asian characters portrayed as geeks and nerds on TV/film, "oh no, this is racist, you're making them come across as asexual compared to their white counterparts." But before you accuse Western media of racism, can you at least acknowledge that most East Asians will have very different cultural values and thus by that token, are different from their Western counterparts? This is not racism per se, but media merely reflecting on the cultural differences between East and West. Can we please sensitively acknowledge this difference, rather than ignore it altogether?

East meets West: a dragon dance in Leicester Square, London

Will this situation ever change? I don't think so, East Asians are pretty proud of their traditions, culture and heritage and I just don't see this changing much - not within my lifetime anyway. So in the meantime, let's just accept that us nerdy East Asians are going to pay a price in our pursuit for academic brilliance and climbing the career ladder. And if you were to put this choice to your average East Asian young person: what would you rather have?

1. Straight As, a scholarship to a top university followed by a great job with a good company (but you will become a nerdy geek in the process as you sacrifice your social life)
2. Average grades, paying your way through a mediocre university followed by a so-so job (but hey, you're going to have a great social life and have loads of casual sex along the way)

I think I know which option the average East Asian young person will choose and remember, that's their choice, not yours and you will just have to accept it and respect it. Stop pretending that it is some white racist conspiracy - this is the road that East Asians have chosen for themselves because of their culture. So there you go, do let me know what you think about this issue - please leave me a comment below, many thanks for reading. #nerdsunited #nerdsrule