From NYC to Harvard: The War on Asian Success

I'm a second generation Asian American (parents immigrated from China), but I have mixed feelings about the obsessive culture around academics. Of course it's good to succeed in school, but being so narrowly focused can produce unbalanced individuals. Back in high school, I felt like a machine whose sole purpose was to work myself to death by achieving higher and higher. I came home with a 2390 SAT score and my mom asked why it wasn't a 2400. There were times where I was planning to just kill myself to escape from it all, which is a common sentiment in the nation's top high schools.

In the end, all that pressure wasn't worth it at all. I burned out hard and suffered for it. Now I'm trying to find the right balance in my life, which has meant rejecting some parts of my upbringing and becoming more of what I want personally.