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Naw. I've had enough suicidal thoughts myself to angst about and last me a long while, though not all of them due to prestigewhoring.
However, I am at a loss of what the core of this argument is. That parents pressure kids to get into top universities? Sure, that's a given. That it's wrong? Naw -- what sort of parent doesn't want their kid to succeed. That kids are shamed? In my experience (aka longtime interaction in the Chinese circle), it's the kids who do that to themselves, with little help from their parents.
My advice for such kids is to not isolate themselves and start considering themselves as individuals rather than representatives of a certain culture. What anyone else does or accomplishes is irrelevant.
Or that's my mindframe anyway.
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Fair points.
Reading a post from the other thread "Asians and College Prestige", a non-Asian talks about how people having high expectations of Asians can be beneficial to Asians themselves.
I remember posting something like this similar on a Black Interest forum. The topic had to do with why Blacks aren't as successful as Asians. A Black PhD in engineering basically put Asians on a pedestal and said how East Asians are great in everything and so perfect and never have any problems in life. I noted that Asians may be superficially successful, but that we often have high rates of mental illnesses, depression, suicide attempts, shame, etc.
The Black PhD lashed out at me and said that if you're worried about your mental health as a result of pushing yourself to overachieve, you have some serious issues. The Black PhD says that he had to worry about poverty, having enough food on the table, and living with relatives who were drug users and couldn't give a damn about his education. He says that he WISHES had had parents who would push him to overachieve.
The Black PhD says that we Asians should be lucky that society and our family demands so much of us. He says he does not sympathize with us if we have mental problems associated with feeling the pressure to succeed like other Asians -- especially after what the Black PhD went through to get a PhD. He said that I had some "friggin' nerve" to "allege" that Asians are suffering from mental health problems because we are pressured to live up to the model minority overachiever.