Most people believe in the Asian stereotype in which all Asians get good grades and will obtain a highly respected occupation such as a doctor or lawyer. Now, I am not arguing with this idea because most of the Asians I know are very intelligent. Although there is a downside to this, people expect more from you than a normal student. They look at you and have higher expectations. I specifically remember one Mother’s Day at my church, my friend gave a speech about this stereotype in front of the church congregation. He was talking about how Asian parents push their kids too hard and have set standards too high for them to achieve. “From an Asian parent view of a report card is that, A is for average, B is bad, and anything under a B is death.” Many people laughed, thinking to themselves how this is often true.

Moving to United States from Malaysia was a different experience for me. At first, being around a different race of people was intimidating. My family found a church with a Chinese congregation in the area where I grew up in. My parents thought this was a good idea for me since I was adapting to the environment around me and needed to meet new people. It turned out that most of these people were very smart. However, a few years later, my parents started making comparisons of me to other children at church. It is common to compare children’s academic level in the Chinese culture. Unlike other parents, mine are not as strict, so they do not expect more out of me than normal students.

As I grew older, competition became more important to me because I developed a sense of a need to achieve and compete with others. In Junior High, I had a B in one of my classes and my parents went crazy when I showed them my report card. This infuriated me because I put a lot of effort into my work at school. I told my parents that night that “Sometimes all I want to hear from you is that ‘it’s alright if you aren’t always perfect.” Luckily, my parents were more understanding than other Asian parents after I told them this. Even though I knew my parents were going to be more lenient towards my grades, I still maintained the desire to strive for straight A’s in order to make them happy.
Sometimes when I am with my school friends, they like to slack off. I realized how much they influence my personality and my focus on academics. After that, I began to become closer to my Asian friends at church. We always stressed over grades, so we agreed to relieve each other’s problems by telling one another “No one is perfect” and “Stop stressing out, grades are not everything”. Besides, we can only learn from our mistakes. Also, we would look up verses from the Bible to remind us to ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’ (Mark 12:30).

The letter on a report card is just a letter. We stress too much about it because it has a hand in deciding what our future will be and how successful we will be. Instead, we should listen to the bible and for it states that we should ‘Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding’ (Proverbs 3:5).