New Asian Girl on Gossip Girl vs Asian Girls at my Alma Mater

Racialicious has a post about a new character on the CW show, Gossip Girl. I have to admit that I DO NOT watch the show, but I DO know schools like the one on the show. And people like that too. I WENT to a snotty school! I admit it! (but the Mean Girls do kind of mellow out as they mature…if they mature….the kids at these schools are a lot more snobby and spoiled today then they were 10 years ago).

Anyway, the new girl is Asian and is pretty much a walking stereotype: violin lugging, SAT-studying, etc. Interesting that the post says she had (at one time) a boyfriend, because most nerdy Asian girls I knew growing up DID NOT HAVE BOYFRIENDS (they weren’t total bookworms either. Most played a musical instrument and were members of an ensemble and participated in athletics too (usually badminton)). No, that was for the bad girls. You know, helicopter kids – the kids who live with a grandparent or a university-aged sibling while the parents are working in the old country. And you know what happens when you’re 15 years old and the only adult in the house is 20! Let the booze flow and the party begin. These are also girls who never hung out with people who didn’t speak Cantonese (the overwhelming majority of Asian students at my high school were from Hong Kong) and started wearing make-up long before everyone else did. Even the white Mean Girls wore less make-up than the Asian Mean Girls (though the hair dyeing rate was about the same). They were also more likely to be interested in high-end brands (the white girls didn’t catch on until after I graduated). In high school, I was actually CRITICIZED at one point because I came back from Hong Kong wearing “only” a typical “mall brand” and not something DESIGNER. Like, who cares? It fit, it looked great (at least to my 15 year old self) and it wasn’t made up of very crappy material. It wasn’t even all that cheap, either! Why, because it isn’t oh, I don’t know, Prada (or whoever was “in” back in the mid 90s…..I wasn’t fashionista back then), it’s no good? (I was actually out shopping a few months ago and overheard a Cantonese speaking woman saying something about never buying Tory Burch because it’s “not a well-known brand” and therefore not worth the money. WTF? Was she living in a cave? The Reva ballet flat was pretty much an IT shoe last year!) I’m not saying that most of the Asian students at this school were Mean Girls/Bad Girls, but they certainly stood out (back then, anyway)!

***I want to add that the Gossip Girl books is apparently on the reading list (or at least WAS a couple of years ago) of at least one Toronto area private school.  What are they trying to do, compare IRL cases with fiction?***

Province to Collect Data on Kids

In an article published in the Toronto Star’s Parent Central  site today, Ontario is apparently going to be collecting race data on elementary and high school students (the Toronto District School Board is already doing this), likely to close gaps between education standards.  According to the article, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Jamaican, Somali and aboriginal students are the most likely to drop out of school.  Is this a good idea?  Would collecting ethnicity (and it’s more ethnicity than race) information really better inform educators?  What about class?  In Toronto, at least, Vietnamese, Portuguese, etc are more likely to be from lower-income neighbourhoods.  Would it be more or less sensitive to track by the first three characters of one’s postal code?  Or would that only work in more urban areas (more people=more postal codes.  The City of Toronto, for example, has M__ ___ all to itself, while the first character in the surrounding Toronto suburbs is an L)?  In Toronto, even the first two characters can tell a lot.  M4 usually means that the schools in your area are excellent and that the high schools have a 90+% university matriculation rate. 

Also, why would collecting race help?  Do kids from different ethnicities really learn differently (I know that different cultures have different teaching philosophies, but it isn’t really the same thing – immigrant kids from China still excel when they come here)?  Why are Vietnamese kids dropping out at such a high rate, while students of other Asian cultures not?  Or is it parental influence?  Should they do a study on the amount of education the parents have?  Chances are, you’ll find that kids with parents who have at least a bachelor’s degree aren’t likely to drop out.

What do you think?