By: Enya Chi During the summer of 2019, I went to a 3-weeks summer camp at Stanford University. It is there that I realized how fortunate I was to be living in America and getting an elite American education. The story unfolds like this: During camp, I met many people from Chinese public high schools where I was exposed to the backwardness and restrictions of the Chinese educational system. One of my friends is from Chengdu, Sichuan, China, a relatively poor province in mainland China. As she described the Chinese public schools in which students are brainwashed every day by Chinese communist/Marxist ideals, and how their curriculum forces a very…

By: Erika Wang Kept in a cardboard box in the attic, filled to the brim with colorful drawings and old report cards, is all of the work from the beginning of my school career. It’s contents are frequently emptied to indulge in nostalgia or revisit old memories. However, there is one piece that is never touched, dust still collecting on the ripped edges of the paper, on the outline of its face. A face I still find difficult to look at. It happened in the early years of my childhood when my teacher—a young woman in her 20’s— assigned all of us young and curious students a project we were…

By: Ammaarah Zayna The Good Wife   The good Asian wife is born to be subservient. A mother by nature, she lives her life vicariously through her children, who are academically gifted and charismatic of course. She is pretty – either naturally or by force. Calm and collected; she does not talk back because she knows her place. She maintains the family name at all costs because there is nothing worse in life than gossip. There is always food on the table. The house is always clean. She has one husband whom she loves wholeheartedly. She is happy even when she is unhappy.  The word divorce is not known to…

By: Srilekha Cherukuvada When I first began researching for this article, I noticed a couple things about the statistics. In charts with age 18 or older Asian Americans, most Asian Americans felt significantly better than non-Hispanic White Americans. There was a smaller trend in people who reported that they had felt worthless or useless. There was a smaller number of people that reported feeling depressed or received prescription medicines for mental illnesses.   “Reported” does not mean that they were all truthful. That’s the sad truth about mental health research. You never know for sure if the person was being honest. Were they dramatizing their temporary sadness or were they…

By: Srilekha Cherukuvada       When he was 16, my grandfather pedaled his beat-up Hero bicycle six miles every day to deliver lunch to his father and his brother, who worked the rice fields outside a small village in Southeastern India. While his father and brother ate curried rice and lamb and such, my grandfather dreamed of greater things than working the rice fields. He dreamed of being a doctor, of helping and healing.   The dream never came true. There were too many obstacles, too many landmines, too few opportunities for him in a country that had, for at least 4,000 years, worked overtime to oppress him and others like him.…

By: Anishi Patel For those who are unfamiliar, California’s Silicon Valley is a premier technological hub, and boasts an essential and thriving immigrant community, of which I am a part. We bring Boba tea (so much that the official Cupertino Snapchat geofilter includes a boba cup cartoon), love our Teslas (the Tesla factory tour is virtually a rite of passage), and, as a consequence of our upbringings, raise academic standards throughout the Bay Area.   I am the daughter of two Indian-American immigrants who travelled to the U.S. for a better college education and became engineers and business owners. It’s not a unique story for a Bay Area family: 23%…