Sticking together: Is there self-segregation at Yale?

BY JUSTIN CHEN

When my mom came up to visit during Parent's Weekend last October, she brought a close family friend with her. I think I did a good job playing the attentive host, escorting them to various Tercentennial events around campus and pointing out important landmarks such as Woolsey Hall, Sterling Memorial Library, and one of my roommates who happened to be home at the time.

EUGENE WONG/YH

It was only weeks later that my mom revealed to me that her friend had taken her aside and asked incredulously, "Are all of Justin's roommates... Oriental?"

The answer, if you are curious, is no. My room is proud to boast one token white male whom I like to call "The Oppressor." He acts as an overseer for us three Asians, who cultivate the rice paddy in our common room.

All joking aside, the previous incident reminded me of the ever-troubling issue of self-segregation. An article this spring in the Harvard Crimson's weekend magazine sparked a minor national controversy with its blistering attack on the propensity of Asians to self-segregate and conform to a veritable laundry list of unfortunate stereotypes. And a response editorial that appeared as a joke in the April Fool's edition of the Yale Daily News stirred up additional anger in minority communities here at Yale for its reference to Asian females as "sluts" and its facetious claim that Asian self-segregation "makes taking advantage of this whole Asian female sex-fiend trait that much easier" [YDN 4/1/01].

The result of those two articles was a massive outcry against both writers and their associated publications by a motley coalition of student cultural groups around the Ivy League. And the articles probably did deserve a certain degree of negative attention for their rather unapologetically polemical tones and deployment of a number of crude stereotypes. At the same time, though, the articles did serve to bring public attention to some very real issues that every college student will experience firsthand and cannot simply be swept under the rug as products of unreasoned prejudice. Indeed, the two articles forced me to consider my own thoughts on being Asian at a traditionally Caucasian university.

Honestly, I consider myself about as whitewashed as they come. Before coming to Yale, I spent my entire life in a Virginia suburb of D.C., watching Cal Ripken, Jr. hit home runs and attending Boy Scout camp just like any other kid. Though my parents often speak to me in Chinese, I always respond in English, a situation all too common in Asian American families. I like burgers and fries, my clothes are from the Gap and J. Crew, and I veg out to MTV with no regrets.

But when I arrived at Yale, I was just one of thousands of new faces. Much to my dismay, I found myself desperately clutching each additional "friend" I made like a human life-preserver in the sea of pre-frosh that threatened to drown me. Without the guidance of any Yale-sponsored activities to break down the barriers that inevitably accompany kids just out of high school, the teeming throng descended into a juvenile clique mentality—I watched as the familiar groups of athletes and "cool" kids slowly began to coalesce. These cliques formed not out of any mean-spirited desire to exclude others, but simply because no one was quite sure how to deal with a massive influx of new peers, except to revert as if on cue to those ridiculously superficial classification systems developed to perfection in middle and high school—looks, clothes, and attitude, among others.

And, much as I hate to admit it, I found it easiest during the Opening Days to approach and meet other Asians. This might seem astonishing coming from someone who never considered himself anything but American for his entire life. But if you think about it, a lost and lonely freshman will instinctively seek out people with whom he shares a common background, cultural or otherwise, and with whom he can therefore converse comfortably. If this is "self-segregation," then we are all guilty of constantly self-segregating—at parties and all other social situations. Had a group of Yalies carrying violins been walking around during the opening days, I would almost certainly have gone up to them as well, not out of a desire to spend my four years at Yale with other violinists, but simply because of the comfort of an automatically established connection.

Nor is this meant to suggest that all the people I chose to meet during the Opening Days were Asian—in fact, the first person I clung to was my Caucasian suitemate because we could commiserate about our less-than-dazzling senior-double-turned-freshman-quad. But in general, and I wish this weren't the case, it really was easiest for me to approach and meet other Asians.

Now that we've had a couple of years to settle in, there are still some people that choose to associate only with others of a particular ethnicity, but I am not one of them. I like to think that since those almost ludicrously confused Opening Days, the friends I've made and kept are the ones I truly value, not for their ability to discuss Coco Lee and Chinese food, but for their substance as fellow intellectuals and human beings. Some of my current friends are Asian, many not, but I prefer not to think in those terms, as I hope you won't. It irks me when someone feels the need to point out that our dinner group on a particular night is mostly Asian, because now that I've had two years to get to know people beyond the purely superficial, I'm confident that any seeming pattern in the ethnic composition of my friends is entirely coincidental.

And if a student who makes a good-faith effort to see beyond color finds that he relates best to those of a similar cultural heritage? Who are we to condemn him as narrow-minded or even racist? Why should every lunch group be a United Colors of Benetton ad? Much as I dislike the thought of "Asian mafias" and self-segregation, I find the effort to establish a false diversity even more dangerous.

In the end, it doesn't matter if the acquaintances you meet in the first week of school are disappointingly superficial. What's important is that the friends you ultimately make are genuine, regardless of skin color.

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