>>91769860The Asian = smart stereotype really comes from their parents. The "education is foremost" mindset (which is weaker in the Japanese than in other East Asians, by the way) is amplified by what their parents think their children must achieve as a payoff from the enormous ordeal of having come to a far away land to toil at menial jobs for decades. Asians that used to come to the West are essentially a product of a selection for the hard worker trait.
East Asians don't really integrate in the West in the strict sense of the word, I noticed. They usually don't intermarry, and large parts of the diaspora consist of very status-driven people.
It's not easy to be an Asian American as it is, because their families rarely let them become a bona fide "banana" (yellow outside, white inside), they'll still inevitably have to exist in this exported Confucian culture on the family side. If you're Asian American who just doesn't want to be career/status-driven and wanna chill, it's doubly more difficult: your family will pressure you to achieve and other people will have the stereotypical expectation of you being the smart Asian dude.
So, just like in Asia itself, being mediocre often means falling in between the cracks, you're not afforded the choice of a pedestrian existence.
