WP1 Revised: Between Perfectionism and Acculturation: an Asian International Student’s Experience
Even though the adjustment to a college environment can be challenging for any student, coming from a marginalized identity can create further stressors and barriers in American higher education. As an Asian international student adjusting to the American university, I oftentimes felt surprising about painful awareness of my very different cultural identity. From language barriers, to changing cultural values, to overt and hidden racism, my experience correlates strongly with the pressures Asian students face in America. The two main factors that have determined the educational and social stress I have experienced, and these match with issues that many Asian students face upon entry into the American school system, are perfectionism and acculturation.
Throughout my education, I have found myself pulled between the expectations of academic and professional perfection bequeathed by my Chinese family and the desire to belong and be accepted by my American peers. This conflict has been exacerbated by the experience of institutional and interpersonal racism. To understand the experience of an Asian cultural identity in American education, it is essential to examine the violent confrontation between internal and external expectations of perfectionism and acculturation at the University of Southern California.
The cultural value placed on academic perfectionism that I internalized growing up in China has determined the high expectations that have been placed on me and that I have placed on myself. Spending my formative years in a family, in which failure was not an option, taught me to pursue educational achievement above all else. Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother advocates for a mode of parenting that instills relentless ambition in children. Chua, who demands the highest-quality musical performance from her daughter, explains that “every day you don’t practice you’re getting worse” (Chua 54). Though Chua’s high expectations seemed extreme to many American readers, I recognized my own experiences in them. My parents have always urged me to achieve perfect scores in classes and exams and to excel in extracurriculars. The high standards my family held me to contribute to my strong track record of achievement.
Growing up, I was expected to come home with nothing but the best grades, especially as my intention to study abroad became apparent. My global aspirations exacerbated this pressure because I was taught that only the best Chinese students make it out to American Universities. My feelings of obligation to not disappoint my family were consistent with sociological research observations that “international students arriving from Asian social contexts are likely to have been brought up in a culture that emphasizes collectivism and obligation to family and community”, factors, which lead to “remarkably high standards of achievement and substantial pressure to excel” (Nilsson et al. 149). Consequently, upon graduation in China, I found myself fully committed to the principles of academic perfection that had been instilled in me and strongly motivated to prove myself worthy of my family’s sacrifices and admiration as I entered the American educational system.
The pressure to succeed that I imposed on myself became even higher as I faced a range of cultural and linguistic obstacles in the American university environment. Nisson et al.’s research into this phenomenon showed that Asian international students were a lot more likely than their White American counterparts to develop “problematic perfectionism” (149). This strain of perfectionism characterized by “higher F-MPS subscale scores […] for Doubts About Actions, Concern Over Mistakes, and Parental Expectations” (149). I found myself experiencing all of the above, but I did not always have the language to precisely describe my experience or determine what was causing my distress. I doubted the language I would use to answer questions in class, I obsessed over errors on exams, and I often wondered what my parents would think of my performance, sometimes choosing to hide my scores from them. I felt like a tuning fork constantly vibrating at too high a frequency in its attempts to match the pitch of its surroundings.
Although I experienced a lot of anxiety because of the language barrier and cultural differences in educational expectations, I did not necessarily see my perfectionism as a problem. My relationship to achievement has been kind of bitter, but sometimes sweet, too. On one hand, my high expectations created a lot of pressure that sometimes undermined my mental health. I lost sleep worrying and would sometimes leave situations that induced the feeling of rising panic in me. On the other hand, my perfectionism had led me to academic excellence. I found few things more satisfying that being praised by my teachers and my parents’ approval. Each opportunity for achievement launched a new cycle of high risk or high reward. I was stuck between my past and my present, attempting to parse out the environmental influences from my own culpability in my struggle to adjust.
Consequently, I found myself in emotional distress and often grappled with how to communicate my values in order to receive a meaningful or comforting response from my colleagues in the American setting. I was very anxious, but also inspired to spend every waking moment working hard to catch up on what I saw as a cultural and academic gap between my peers and me. However, my efforts were not necessarily paying off. For example, teachers in humanities courses would ask me to take a stronger stance on issues and defend my own opinion rather than offer a compelling summary of others’ research. American peers would sometimes fail to understand my set of references or appreciate my distinct contributions and just gloss over my ideas in group projects. These events confounded me at first, but as I grew more in tune with American culture and values, I began to realize that these behaviors were culturally determined.
The biggest differences between my culture and my university’s culture arose from distinct cultural values: Chinese collectivism and American individualism/exceptionalism. My peers’ and teachers’ expectations largely centered on individualist values like self-expression, self-interest, and standing out. By comparison, my education in China had focused on research and accuracy over independent conjecture. My thoughts in class frequently isolated me because they were focused on the greater good, self-negation, and support of group initiatives. My pursuit of academic perfectionism led to confusing results because it uncovered an unexpected reality: that American liberal arts education relied on different values than Chinese education and often prioritized cultural belonging over “right” answers.
Until facing the cannon of primarily white and Western works that were taught at my university, I had not realized that I was a minority in my set of cultural and academic references. Toni Morrisson’s “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” highlights Whiteness as the air students breathe in American institutions of higher learning. Morrison explains that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by… the presence of… African Americans in the United States”; the same sentiment is true for Asian and Asian American experiences (Morrisson). Just as whiteness has historically dominated American literature, it has also dominated the university landscape. The institutional structure, educational values, course content, and social hierarchies that determine success prioritize whiteness in a subterranean but undeniable manner. As an Asian international student, I found myself struggling to adjust to an institution and system that was not originally established to accommodate students like me, and that valued my intelligence in theory but denied my contributions in practice. I had a hard time connecting with instructors and peers, and sometimes even understanding the material in class. I felt trapped in a net of foreign associations that I couldn’t even begin to resolve on my own.
In an effort to improve, I visited the international student center to get help on areas of my social and academic experience, in which I needed to grow. On a subconscious level, I arrived at the building looking for advice on how to acculturate. I was prepared to make sacrifices in order to find belonging and academic success. Of course, the support I received there privileged assimilation into Western thoughts and behaviors. The suggestions revolved around the idea that I needed to radically reshape my way of approaching my education and my environment. I was encouraged to stifle my impulses and immerse myself in Whiteness and Western culture. There was never an attempt on the institution’s part to shift to accommodate me. This was not an equal exchange. The message was clear: I needed to change myself to fit in with them.
Paradoxically, I found the answer to my struggles through critical race theory, in a class taught at this same university. As I immersed myself in ideas of intersectionality and decolonization, I had to face the difficult, and yet liberating fact that nothing was necessarily wrong with me. I did not need to “fix” myself, or to abandon my values or aspects of my identity I valued in order to please my superiors. Instead, I came into the awareness that I had entered a system that privileged White supremacy and Eurocentrism in subtle ways and was trying to indoctrinate me into its own priorities. However, I was still committed to extracting value from my education. As a result, I decided to take what was useful from the tips on acculturation in the classroom and focus on finding mentors and collaborators who had cultural awareness and could appreciate my experiences and identity in their own right.
My racial and cultural identity and the need for acculturation also impacted my social standing and connections, which greatly influenced my mental health, wellbeing, and ability to focus on my work. Initially, I struggled to find a consistent friend group because the majority white students at the university often treated me like the other. Though I did not experience obvious racism on a daily basis, I was often subjected to passing derogatory comments that hurt my self-esteem and made me uncomfortable in my learning environment. I felt deeply alone: unable to explain my pain to the classmates who were inflicting it, and yet recalcitrant to share my struggles with other international peers for fear that they may also not understand what I was going through.
I turned to books and articles to measure the extent of my troubles against other people’s. Lorraine Brown’s “Encounters With Racism and the International Student Experience” showed me that my experience of being ostracized was far from uncommon. In her research, she concludes, “Out of a survey of 153 international postgraduate students, 49 had experienced some form of abuse” (1012). Discovering that other international students were subjected to similar harmful treatment made me feel less alone, but also made me realize that racism and cultural prejudice are systemic issues with deep roots in American education. The feeling that no matter what I did to improve my linguistic and social skills, I would always be treated like an outsider by ignorant peers was both deeply painful and surprisingly liberating.
Even though I still struggle with this reality, I find dignity and pride in knowing that I can continue moving forward without letting negative and misguided comments affect me as much. I understand that ignorance is the product of a system just as much as it is a personal choice. Finding a small but diverse group of friends who accepted and supported me increased my confidence and feeling of belonging. Facing social adversity and racism in my educational environment rekindled my commitment to perfectionism positively. The difficulties motivated me to achieve bigger and better things to prove my critics wrong.
Finding a new position along the spectrum of perfectionism and acculturation as an Asian international student has set who I am today. While some of these experiences have caused pain and hardship, I know that they have helped to make me a stronger person with a more solid sense of self, influenced but not determined by my parents’ expectations and my desire to belong at an American University. Though it can be easy to feel discouraged, I trust that my experiences will help me face the rest of my life with greater certainty and strength. I am proud of who I am and what I have managed to accomplish despite the various trials that I have faced throughout my educational experience.
Works Cited
Brown, Lorraine. “Encounters with Racism and the International Student Experience.” Studies in
Higher Education, vol. 38, no. 7, 2013, pp. 1004–1019., doi:10.1080/03075079.2011.614940.
Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.
Morrison, Toni. “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.” American
Literature, vol. 65, no. 1, 1993, doi:10.2307/2928119.
Nilsson, J. E., Butler, J., Shouse, S., & Joshi, C. (2008). The Relationships Among Perfectionism, Acculturation, and Stress in Asian International Students. Journal of College Counseling, 11(2), 147–158. doi:10.1002/j.2161–1882.2008.tb00031.x
