"At school," says Mike, "I'm a lot more interested in listening to what the teacher says and being the good student, rather than the class clown or interacting with other kids in the class. If being outgoing, shouting, or acting out in class is gonna affect the education I receive, it's better if I go for education."
Mike relates this view matter-of-factly, but he seems to know how unusual it is by American standards. His attitude comes from his parents, he explains. "If I have a choice between doing something for myself, like going out with my friends, or staying home and studying, I think of my parents. That gives me the strength to keep studying. My father tells me that his job is computer programming, and my job is to study."
Mike's mother taught the same lesson by example. A former math teacher who worked as a maid when the family immigrated to North America, she memorized English vocabulary words while washing dishes. She is very quiet, says Mike, and very resolute. "It's really Chinese to pursue your own education like that. My mother has the kind of strength that not everyone can see."
By all indications, Mike has made his parents proud. His e-mail username is "A-student," and he's just won a coveted spot in Stanford University's freshman class. He's the kind of thoughtful, dedicated student that any community would be proud to call its own. And yet, according to an article called "The New White Flight" that ran in the Wall Street Journal just six months previously, white families are leaving Cupertino in droves, precisely because of kids like Mike. They are fleeing the sky-high test scores and awe-inspiring study habits of many Asian-American students. The article said that white parents feared that their kids couldn't keep up academically. It quoted a student from a local high school: "If you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it."
But the article didn't explore what lay behind this stellar academic performance. I was curious whether the town's scholarly bent reflected a culture insulated from the worst excesses of the Extrovert Ideal—and if so, what that would feel like. I decided to visit and find out.
At first blush, Cupertino seems like the embodiment of the American Dream. Many first- and second-generation Asian immigrants live here and work at the local high-tech office parks. Apple Computer's headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop is in town. Google's Mountain View headquarters is just down the road. Meticulously maintained cars glide along the boulevards; the few pedestrians are crisply dressed in bright colors and cheerful whites. Unprepossessing ranch houses are pricey, but buyers think the cost is worth it to get their kids into the town's famed public school system, with its ranks of Ivy-bound kids. Of the 615 students in the graduating class of 2010 at Cupertino's Monta Vista High School (77 percent of whom are Asian-American, according to the school's website, some of which is accessible in Chinese), 53 were National Merit Scholarship semifinalists. The average combined score of Monta Vista students who took the SAT in 2009 was 1916 out of 2400, 27 percent higher than the nationwide average.
Respected kids at Monta Vista High School are not necessarily athletic or vivacious, according to the students I meet here. Rather, they're studious and sometimes quiet. "Being smart is actually admired, even if you're weird," a Korean-American high school sophomore named Chris tells me. Chris describes the experience of his friend, whose family left to spend two years in a Tennessee town where few Asian-Americans lived. The friend enjoyed it, but suffered culture shock. In Tennessee "there were insanely smart people, but they were always by themselves. Here, the really smart people usually have a lot of friends, because they can help people out with their work."
The library is to Cupertino what the mall or soccer field is to other towns: an unofficial center of village life. High school kids cheerfully refer to studying as "going nerding." Football and cheerleading aren't particularly respected activities. "Our football team sucks," Chris says good-naturedly. Though the team's recent stats are more impressive than Chris suggests, having a lousy football team seems to hold symbolic significance for him. "You couldn't really even tell they're football players," he explains. "They don't wear their jackets and travel in big groups. When one of my friends graduated, they played a video and my friend was like, 'I can't believe they're showing football players and cheerleaders in this video.' That's not what drives this town."
