Unit 1 Paper Tigers 2 A Rose for Emily 3 What Is News? 4 Nettles 5 At War with the Planet 6 The Museum 7 How to Get the Poor off Our Conscience 8 Housewifely Arts 9 The One Against the Many 10 Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream 11 Beauty 12 Notes on the English Character
Recommended Reading 1 Commencement Address at Harvard University 2 The Death of a Pig 3 Don't Eat Fortune's Cookie 4 The Accidental Universe 5 The Hot Gates
精彩书摘
《现代大学英语(精读6 第2版)》: Earlier this year, the publication of Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother incited a collective airing out of many varieties of race-based hysteria. But absent from the millions of words written in response to the book was any serious consideration of whether Asian Americans were in fact taking over this country. If it is true that they are collectively dominating in elite high schools and universities, is it also true that Asian Americans are dominating in the real world? My strong suspiaon was that this was not so, and that the reasons would not be hard to find. If we are a collective juggernaut that inspires such awe and fear, why does it seem that so many Asians are so readily perceived to be, as I myself have felt, the products of a timid culture, easily pushed around by more assertiye people, and thus basically invisible? A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a young man named Jefferson Mao, who after attending Stuyvesant High School had recently graduated from the University of Chicago. He wanted my advice about "being an Asian writer." This is how he described himself: "I got good grades and I love literature and I want to be a writer and an intellectual; at the same time, I'm the first person in my family to go to college, my parents don't speak English very well, and we don't own the apartment in Flushing that we live in. I mean, I'm proud of my parents and my neighborhood and what I perceive to be my artistic potential or whatever, but sometimes I feel like I'm jumping the gun a generation or two too early." One bright, cold Sunday afternoon, I ride the 7 train to its last stop in Flushing, where the storefront signs are all written in Chinese and the sidewalks are a slow-moving river of impassive faces. Mao is waiting for me at the entrance of the Main Street subway station, and together we walk to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant. Mao has a round face, with eyes behind rectangular wire-frame glasses. Since graduating, he has been living with his parents, who emigrated from China when Mao was eight years old. His mother is a manicurist; his father is a physical therapist's aide. Lately, Mao has been making the familiar hour- and-a-half ride from Flushing to downtown Manhattan to tutor a white Stuyvesant freshman. Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: the top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuvvesant are accepted. There are no set- asides for the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage "diversity" or any nebulous concept of "well-roundedness" or "character." Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school. This year, 569 Asian Americans scored high enough to earn a slot at Stuyvesant, along with 179 whites, 13 Hispanics, and 12 blacks. Such dramatic overrepresentation, and what it may be read to imply about the intelligence of different groups of New Yorkers, has a way of making people uneasy. But intrinsic intelligence, of course, is precisely what Asians don't believe in. They believe-and have proved-that the constant practice of test taking will improve the scores of whoever commits to it. All throughout Flushing, as well as in Bayside, one can find "cram schools," or storefront academies, that drill students in test preparation after school, on weekends, and during summer break. "Learning math is not about learning math," an instructor at one called Ivy Prep was quoted in The New York Times as saying, "It's about weightlifting. You are pumping the iron of math." Mao puts it more specifically: "You learn quite simply to nail any standardized test you take." ……