Another way the nouveau riche Chinese disturbed their neighbors was their children’s success in school classrooms. In an increasingly class-conscious America, Chinese academic ability would create another source of anxiety.

By the 1980s, ethnic Chinese children no longer had to struggle for educational opportunities. Generations of civil rights activists had ended the system of segregated schools, and federally funded public schools and public libraries made education more accessible to even the most impoverished Chinese immigrant families. At the same time, America saw the rise of a Chinese professional class, who comprised not only the descendants of earlier Chinese Americans but also new émigrés with education and status. The children of these groups grew up in privileged settings such as white suburbs or university towns. Their parents were professors, scientists, engineers, or doctors, not laundry or restaurant workers who needed their children to help out with the family business. These parents spared no expense in sending them to the best schools, where they could devote their full energy to academic achievement.

Large numbers of Chinese American students were now attending elite private preparatory schools, such as Phillips Exeter, Groton, and Deerfield, or top academic programs in competitive public programs, like the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School in New York, or Lowell High School in San Francisco—all of which served as fast-track conduits to the best universities in America. Many spent their summers in gifted children’s programs run by universities like Stanford and Johns Hopkins. By the 1980s, they were routinely entering prestigious Ivy League schools and winning national competitions, like the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (now called the Intel Science Talent Search), in disproportionate numbers.

The Chinese immigrant community soon considered excellence in school not as a lofty standard, but as a minimum expectation.

(Chang 326-327)