Dave Lu

Suddenly, a young American tried to provoke and attack a Chinese man in New York. The Chinese man stepped back, not seeking a fight—but the American mistook restraint for fear. In the end, the man from the East taught him a harsh lesson he won’t repeat.

You seem like a good faith debater, so let me ask a simple question. Do you think an increasingly Asian elite will have no cultural effects? Or do you think there will be cultural effects, they’ll just be mostly good? Many Americans assume either that Asians assimilate well so we don’t need to worry about anything changing, or that Asians are great and we could frankly benefit from becoming a little more like them. I think both of those positions are honorable but reflect a lack of knowledge of the facts. What I don’t like is people who just say how dare you question this really consequential and rapid demographic change. This is a democracy, we get to talk about this stuff. My position, since you asked me to be clear about it, is that if America’s elite becomes over 40% Asian (as Harvard’s freshman class is), we will come to resemble China and India in various ways. I like both countries but I wouldn’t want to live there or raise my children there. Some of those changes will be bad. If you want to know specifically which changes, I’ve talked about some of them previously—grind culture, cheating. There are others but I don’t want to belabor the point.

You seem like a good faith debater, so let me ask a simple question. Do you think an increasingly Asian elite will have no cultural effects? Or do you think there will be cultural effects, they’ll just be mostly good? Many Americans assume either that Asians assimilate well so we don’t need to worry about anything changing, or that Asians are great and we could frankly benefit from becoming a little more like them. I think both of those positions are honorable but reflect a lack of knowledge of the facts. What I don’t like is people who just say how dare you question this really consequential and rapid demographic change. This is a democracy, we get to talk about this stuff. My position, since you asked me to be clear about it, is that if America’s elite becomes over 40% Asian (as Harvard’s freshman class is), we will come to resemble China and India in various ways. I like both countries but I wouldn’t want to live there or raise my children there. Some of those changes will be bad. If you want to know specifically which changes, I’ve talked about some of them previously—grind culture, cheating. There are others but I don’t want to belabor the point.

I may have been too harsh on San Francisco in terms of its beauty. This is pretty sweet.

My kids are Asian American. They play the piano but I presume it does nothing for their college apps. A bazillion people play the piano, it isn't differentiating. I made my kids take piano lessons to learn at an early age that doing new things is hard and frustrating, but if they work hard and practice a lot, it gets easier and then it's fun for life. It's a life lesson, not a grinding thing. They could have learned this by doing lots of other things too, but I also love music and that I can play anything by ear, and I wanted them to have that too. I make my kids care a lot about their grades, because I want them to care about anything they spend their time doing and to learn to try their absolute best at anything they do. It doesn't matter to me if their grades suck as long as they put in real effort. That's not grinding, that's just a life lesson about giving a shit about what you spend your time on. My daughter loves to sing and dance now, odds are it's not a career for her but she tries her absolute best and I know where she got that from. People think Asian parents just care about the outcome of getting into college or landing some white collar career. Maybe it's true for other Asian parents, I don't know. For me I want them to grind on the things they care about because learning the process of grinding will make them better at whatever they end up wanting to do , whatever it is. I don't want to raise a bunch of whiners who don't put in the work and then expect participation trophies. Odds are so stacked against my kids getting into a top school anyway, especially for my son who likes stem stuff. I tell him he should just go to community college or even skip college and just learn whatever he needs to learn using books/internet/AI and finding a grunt job in the industry to get experience. Truth is there is a possibility all the jobs as we know it won't even exist because of AI, so really I think people are giving way too much a shit about something that might not even matter in the future. I primarily want my kids to go to a good college just so they can find smart lifelong friends. Mainly I want them to find things in life that they would do for free, and figure out a way to turn those things into their career. Really the truly scarce resource is time not money. I don't want them to find ways to make money I want them to find ways to happily spend their time. My kids are creative, don't know what these people are talking about when they say my kids get good grades so they must just be robots that memorize shit and don't really understand things well enough to be creative at anything. I myself had a 4.6 in high school, took 8 or 9 Apps that I got 5s on, had high SAT scores, went to Berkeley where I got an award as the top overall engineering graduate. Six years later Entertainment Weekly had me on a list of the top 100 most creative people in entertainment. Am I that creative? Probably not, but anyone making the statement Asians aren't creative can tell me what publication called them creative. All this "Asians are xyz" shit is really tiresome... and for the record my kids don't cheat they sometimes get lousy scores, and then I spend a lot of time and effort trying to help them. I try very hard to instill in them that they should never lie and that cheating is just cheating themselves because the grades don't matter but not learning things does. I'm honest with people, I try to be nice, I help people whenever I can We volunteer to help people, and my kids will not start a bogus club or nonprofit. These are my values. They don't sound to me like all the weird shit I've seen posted, making presumptions about us because we are of Asian descent. If you don't like how I raise my kids and don't want your kids near mine, that is your right and absolutely fine. Do what you want, but stop thinking you know shit about me, and for the love of God, stop whining. ✌️

The point is not to belittle anyone. It’s a policy choice whether or not to continue inviting millions of Asian immigrants to settle in America. We don’t have to do that if we decide the negative consequences outweigh the positive. We debate the cultural effects of low-skilled immigration all the time. High-skilled immigration’s cultural effects are much greater because they shape the elite. So let’s discuss those, too.

Asians can’t innovate but NVDA and EVs/robotics in China. Indian CEOs can’t build better product and stock price can be gamed? Steve Ballmer did nothing for Microsoft and Satya made all the right moves. Stop using your racism to cope.

Asian immigrants are often openly contemptuous of American education norms—like that Vivek tweet—because they think the only reason someone would opt out of grind culture is because they’re lazy and stupid. Actually, American education is traditionally quite demanding, it just tells you to find your passion first and then push yourself to the limit of your talents, as opposed to indiscriminately maximizing test scores and then picking a high-status career. Personally I think our way yields better results, but grind culture is absolutely going to kill it off soon if immigration continues.

Asian immigrants are often openly contemptuous of American education norms—like that Vivek tweet—because they think the only reason someone would opt out of grind culture is because they’re lazy and stupid. Actually, American education is traditionally quite demanding, it just tells you to find your passion first and then push yourself to the limit of your talents, as opposed to indiscriminately maximizing test scores and then picking a high-status career. Personally I think our way yields better results, but grind culture is absolutely going to kill it off soon if immigration continues.