feeling for my crazy Asian American brother...
don't I know the immigrant trials and tribulations story? The feelings of total humiliation? I remember being rejected by Yale Comp LIt's Ph.D. program...couldn't speak about it for years. Just felt a kind of seething rage and resentment...I was accepted by CUNY's Ph.D. program in French. I couldn't apply to grad school again, the risk of rejection was too great.
I still have lingering feelings of --"I wasn't good enough for that Ph.D. program" that are exacerbated by colleagues' asking "Why did you go to CUNY after Yale?"
Umm...because I only applied to two graduate schools and I couldn't risk another rejection -- psychologically I was too fragile...up until that point, I had done everything right...I was walking a tightrope of symbolic legimitization...Perhaps Cho shot everyone up at Virginia Tech because it wasn't Princeton, where his sister had gone to college...THAT'S how much it means for immigrant parents to have that Ivy League monikor behind which to hide...
I still have lingering feelings of --"I wasn't good enough for that Ph.D. program" that are exacerbated by colleagues' asking "Why did you go to CUNY after Yale?"
Umm...because I only applied to two graduate schools and I couldn't risk another rejection -- psychologically I was too fragile...up until that point, I had done everything right...I was walking a tightrope of symbolic legimitization...Perhaps Cho shot everyone up at Virginia Tech because it wasn't Princeton, where his sister had gone to college...THAT'S how much it means for immigrant parents to have that Ivy League monikor behind which to hide...
2 Comments:
This is a powerful and provocative thought. If we accept its logic, and try to play it out to its conclusions, I’m not sure quite where it would take us. Deep into the heart of the credentialing beast that has become education, I would guess. Nevertheless, if I were a VTU graduate, I would feel pretty wounded by what you are saying here.
I'm not dissing VTU. I am criticizing the craze for credentialism...which is enough to make anyone crazy, although not muderers...to be "hurt" by my comments would be to misread them. I think VTU and the public universities where i teach and taught are fantastic institutions, but to the ranking and hierarchy conscious...that's another matter. This kid was disturbed, very disturbed, the black sheep of a working class Korean American family...I think of mental illness as system based, family system based.
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