Miniter believes success and happiness can be achieved by marrying the best wishes of the first generation with the education and drive of the second.

“The Asian Americans who are successful in America are those who take what is good in Asian culture—a sense of personal and familial responsibility, and combine it with what is good in American culture—the freedom to create your own destiny,” says Miniter.

How do Students Juggle Pressures?
On the other end of the spectrum of this debate is Duc Hoang, 22, double-majoring in biology and psychology at the University of California in San Diego. He is also an active member of the Vietnamese Student Association (VSA). He hopes to attend pharmacy school and graduate with the title of “doctor,” following what he calls “the Vietnamese trend here.” The Vietnamese culture and traditions, Hoang said, actually influenced and pushed him to the career path that he is on.

“I am a product of cultural pressures,” Hoang said. “I am very close to my family and I have to fulfill my role as a son to help my family achieve financial freedom.”

Although Hoang admits to yielding to cultural pressures, he contends that stereotypes and the typical pressures to follow a narrowly defined path did not affect him while growing up. On the contrary, he tries to avoid getting caught up in being typecast a certain way.

“Stereotypes did not influence my decision,” Hoang said. “In fact, I try to stay away from stereotypes, such as ‘all Asians major in biology,’ to avoid competition as much as possible, but I just happened to be swirled right in.”

In contrast to Hoang’s bow to a product of cultural pressures, a fellow VSA peer and UCSD student, Andrew Vu Anh Nguyen, 21, believes he is anything but a product of any cultural force. Nguyen has his prospects in the realm of law, which he also believes, “is a profession blessed by Asians.” His career goal is to be the mayor of San Jose, Calif. his hometown.

Though the profession of law and politics may be well received in the Asian community, Nguyen faces a different kind of cross cultural pressure at school. Nguyen said his history major is dominated mostly by Caucasians, while in a math or a science class, the opposite is true. This makes for an assumption made by other groups that presume Nguyen is actually a model of the Asian stereotype, as Hoang mentioned before, that “all Asians major in biology,” rather than an individual who could also be pursuing a liberal arts major.

“People automatically assume I’m taking an upper division history course for general education as opposed to a major,” Nguyen said. “By ending up where I am, I find the criticism waiting for me.”

Nguyen feels that his peers whose career decisions have been fundamentally affected and influenced by their parents is damaging, especially if they really are uninterested in the field they are studying. On the other hand, he has met many people “who say they’re doing their major for their parents, but they’re content with it and have nothing to complain [about].”

Another VSA colleague at UCSD, Frank Vuong, 27, an ethnic studies major, initially fell prey to the cultural pressures of certain professions admired by Vietnamese Americans, but realized he was actually a rebel of those cultural expectations. He said he had been “conditioned to pursue the typical professions of doctors, lawyers and engineers that I naturally pointed my education toward those goals.” After nine years as an undergraduate, Vuong finally discovered his ethic studies interests and decided to follow those instead, and looks forward to graduating in 2007.

“Vietnamese Americans tend to revere professions such as doctors, pharmacists, engineers and recently lawyers because these professions tend to make a lot of money,” Vuong said. “This is understandable because the Vietnamese who made it to the U.S. had to suffer much from the fall-out of the Viet Nam War and they want to further their own survival and excel in the U.S. social stratum.”

However compensatory this attitude is, Vuong sees a negative aspect to the cultural pressures to succeed financially.

“The problem with this mindset is that while they struggle to get ahead in the system, they are victims of the system,” Vuong said. “They tend to perpetuate whatever stereotypes that they have been given and they do not think outside the box, and to change the system to their benefit.”

Vuong admits the cultural pressures stem from even deeper traditional roots, like Confucian values that teach people to not question authority.

“For those who go against the cultural pressure and the stereotypes, it is a double obstacle,” Vuong said. “Pressure from the family to succeed and pressure from the system makes it doubly difficult for many people.”

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