“I remember talking to a few other kids, a couple of my best friends specifically, who went through similar experiences. Like, I was led to believe that it was common when I went to school here. As a teacher here, have you encountered a lot of kids who were abused?”
I expect Mr. Dries to spend some time digesting the question, but he looks at a space somewhere to the left of me and launches directly into an answer. “I had one girl. I knew her dad was beating her up, so I reported him to CPS (Child Protective Services). She was this tiny Vietnamese girl, and her dad was barely bigger than her. This tiny man, beating his tiny daughter. So she got put in a group home, where a bunch of drug-addicted girls stole her shit and bullied her.” His voice gets flat. “That made things better.”
Then he leans back in his chair and his eyes find mine. “But no. Look. The faces of my AP kids are the same every year. I have one white kid in my three AP Bio classes. And he’s super white! He’s from Finland! I get maybe two Indians and Middle Easterners. Once I had three; that was a banner year. And in my sixteen years of teaching AP Bio, I’ve had three or four Black kids. But Asians? They’re unlimited. They’re asymptotically approaching infinity. To casual observers, they have the perfect life. They have everything the poor kids don’t. They’re sitting there with $1,000 iPhones. Typing into their MacBooks. But my kids are overly stressed. They’re overwhelmed, taking four AP classes every quarter so their moms can go to their tennis clubs and say, ‘Oh, we got into Berkeley and Harvard!’ So my kids are often up all night.”
“But why?” I ask.
“The motivation is tiger moms!” he says, with utmost confidence. “The stress of not meeting their elders’ expectations in a culture where they have to please their elders is real.”
I look down at my notebook as I write furiously, trying to keep my expression neutral. This logic seems to have a Panda Express kind of simplicity to it—the hollow smell of an exoticized half-truth.
I did not think much about race growing up. But in the intervening years, I’ve realized there was something strange about the ratio of students of color to white teachers.
In the 1960s, the only Asians at Piedmont Hills were the children of Japanese farm workers who harvested flowers and citrus and cherries. In the early ’70s, the first large wave of Vietnamese refugees arrived. This wave was composed of elites—high-powered doctors and politicians who had the economic means to escape. At first, the PHHS community loved the new Vietnamese students because they came with expensive educations and intellectual parents. They had astounding test scores and brought academic standards way up. Then in the ’80s, the boat people arrived, poor and desperate refugees who escaped with the clothes on their backs and spent time in camps in Malaysia and the Philippines. About 880,000 Vietnamese refugees were resettled in the United States between 1975 and 1997,[4] many of them at Camp Pendleton in California. More than 180,000 Vietnamese people now live in San Jose—the biggest Vietnamese population in any city outside Vietnam.
In the ’90s, a massive population of Chinese and South Asian immigrants bearing H-1B work visas arrived to take jobs as engineers in blossoming Silicon Valley. By 1998, a third of all scientists and engineers in the area had come from somewhere else. Around this time there was also a shortage of teachers and nurses in America, and so came the wave of Filipinos who emigrated to help care for our young and infirm.
Altogether, Asians made up more than half of our school. About 30 percent of students were Latinx, and a small minority of Black and white students filled out the pack. But most of our teachers were white. In the fifth grade, when we were learning about the Pilgrims, we celebrated Colonial Day by dressing as American colonists and writing with feathers and ink. In hindsight, it seems very odd that the teachers could look out beamingly onto a classroom full of Asian and Latinx faces dressed as European colonizers in lace bonnets and vests and not see a problem. There was a different lesson that could have been taught about forced assimilation—about Native American boarding schools, “Kill the Indian, and save the man,” Chinese men in San Francisco who were forced to cut their queues. But instead, they taught us to cross-stitch.
Surely, I think, the racial divide might blind white teachers like Mr. Dries to our plight—immigrants can be very good at blending into the scenery. Then again, Mr. Dries is the teacher I would have gone to if I were the kind of girl who went to teachers for help. Regardless of race or background, Mr. Dries has always come off as someone who would give a shit. Who would figure it out, overcome obstacles of misunderstanding, and knock down doors to save you. So the fact that only one child in more than sixteen years of teaching had come to him with this struggle seems…strange. Wrong, even.
But of course, it’s only strange if the school existed as I remembered it—as a breeding ground for immigrant intergenerational trauma. It’s not so strange if his version is reality, if he teaches at a competitive school where parents merely have the pushy, helicopter-hovering, model-minority anxiety that comes with wanting to maintain one’s privilege.
“This isn’t like other schools in the district,” Mr. Dries says. “Those kids are in gangs, they’re homeless; in every class you’ve got some girl being sexually abused by someone at home. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to teach there. These kids, they’re coming from a different background.”
I talk to multiple teachers who all agree with Mr. Dries. They show me photos on their walls of students who went on to be radiologists and pediatricians. Yes, there was that one genius kid who got into MIT, struggled to find a job, then returned to PHHS in the middle of the night, tied weights on himself, and slipped under the swimming pool cover. The freshman swim team found his body early the next morning. One teacher says he had a student who was suicidal because, in her own words, “I just can’t make my essay sparkle.” He repeats this disbelievingly. “I can’t make my essay sparkle!” He says that this confession caused him to stay awake at night. He talked to his wife about it; he couldn’t sleep. It felt beyond his scope as a teacher. What could he possibly do to counter a problem like that? But that’s one person here, another there. Anomalies.