The WSJ says whites are fleeing Cupertino, a Bay Area city with good public schools and thus an influx of middle class East Asian Americans (MCEAAs).

Monta Vista High School

They’re leaving because of academic competitiveness and cultural discomfort (thanks, Saheli). And it’s very similar to what happened with Jews early last century.

My parents tell me the same is happening in our neighboring town of Saratoga, which was first a white retirement community and then a magnet for Silicon Valley CEOs. Five years ago, all our immediate neighbors were white; today, two families are East Asian and one is desi. When I went to high school, there were only four or five desis in the entire school. Many kids assumed that if you wanted to date, you’d only date one of the three desi girls. I studied captive markets in econ class and lived them outside. Today, I hear the dating ‘study group’ pool has gone from baby-sized to Olympic.

… the town of about 50,000 people now boasts Indian restaurants, tutoring centers and Asian grocers. Parents say Cupertino’s top schools have become more academically intense over the past 10 years. Asian immigrants have surged into the town, granting it a reputation — particularly among recent Chinese and South Asian immigrants — as a Bay Area locale of choice. Cupertino is now 41% Asian, up from 24% in 1998…

It’s not competition that makes white parents uncomfortable, it’s competition with Asian-AmericansSome white Cupertino parents are instead sending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino altogether… Many white parents say they’re leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests. The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian…

Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School’s parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. “This may not sound good,” she confides, “but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class…”

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Top schools in nearby, whiter Palo Alto, which also have very high test scores, also feature heavy course loads, long hours of homework and overly stressed students… But whites don’t seem to be avoiding those institutions, or making the same negative generalizations, Asian families note, suggesting that it’s not academic competition that makes white parents uncomfortable but academic competition with Asian-Americans…

At Cupertino’s top schools, administrators, parents and students say white students end up in the stereotyped role often applied to other minority groups: the underachievers… in advanced-placement chemistry, only a couple of the 32 students are white and the rest are Asian. Some white parents, and even some students, say they suspect teachers don’t take white kids as seriously as Asians.

“Many of my Asian friends were convinced that if you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it…” “White kids are thought of as the dumb kids…” Grades are so high that a ‘B’ average puts a student in the bottom third of a class. [Link]

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p>I think the MCEAA influx is great. More debate, less football. Learning what it’s like to be at a good university. My parents agree, because MCEAAs value education. They’re an absolute boon for cities: smarter kids, better schools, higher tax base. What’s not to like? Too much Xbox and anime?

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p>I love these quotes:

When Matthew, now a student at Notre Dame, finished middle school eight years ago, Ms. Doherty decided to send him to Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Jesuit school that she says has a culture that “values the whole child.” It’s also 55% white and 24% Asian. [Link]

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p>What’s not to like? Too much Xbox and anime?Bellarmine was our archrival in everything because as an expensive, private prep school, it was so well-funded. They had four full-time speech and debate coaches, paid debate research assistants and so on. They sometimes flew to out-of-town tourneys, we piled into an old school bus. They were the Mercedes of high schools and charged as much. I took great pleasure in beating them, just like when Berkeley creams Stanford in the Big Game for the fourth time in a row. So to hear that some parents are paying for Bellarmine because the public schools are too good, oooh, delicious schadenfreude, I’m all verklempt!

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p>The counterarguments in this story are pretty weak:

Monta Vista graduate Mark Seto says he wouldn’t send his kids to his alma mater [Monta Vista High]. “It was a sheltered little world that didn’t bear a whole lot of resemblance to what the rest of the country is like,” says Mr. Seto, a Chinese-American who recently graduated from Yale University. As a result, he says, “college wasn’t an academic adjustment. It was a cultural adjustment…” [Link]

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p>This similar to the argument for diversity in college admissions, and I buy it, but only without severely compromising academics. And unless you grew up in a college town, it’s always a cultural adjustment.

Hung Wei, a Chinese-American living in Cupertino, has become an active campaigner in the community, encouraging Asian parents to be more aware of their children’s emotional development… life in Cupertino and at Monta Vista didn’t prepare [her daughter] for life at New York University. Diana moved there in 2004 and jumped to her death from a Manhattan building two months later. [Link]

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p>I agree with this. East Asian and desi cultures need a reformation, less emphasis on predefined social roles and greater interest in people as individuals. But that’s pretty independent of the ethnic makeup of the city into which you choose to move. Besides, give it a couple more generations, and we’ll be just as slackerly.

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p>‘Well-roundedness’ is how Hah-vad first tried to lock out Jews. The New Yorker reports that the original reason for the Ivy League’s ‘well-roundedness’ admissions criteria was to exclude first Jews and later East Asian Americans. Ideally, they wanted future elites: good-looking jocks who ended up on Wall Street and donated lots of money to their endowment:

It was difficult keeping Jews out because they were academically superior. The solution was to change the definition of meritThe enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also…”

The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea–a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body–was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell–and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton–realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit…

Bender, Karabel tells us, believed that if Harvard continued to suffer on the football field it would contribute to the school’s reputation as a place with “no college spirit, few good fellows, and no vigorous, healthy social life,” not to mention a “surfeit of ‘pansies,’ ‘decadent esthetes’ and ‘precious sophisticates.’ ” Bender concentrated on improving Harvard’s techniques for evaluating “intangibles” and, in particular, its “ability to detect homosexual tendencies and serious psychiatric problems…”

One application–and at this point you can almost hear it going to the bottom of the pile–was notated, “Short with big ears…”

Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience–an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite –and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience. In the nineteen-eighties, when Harvard was accused of enforcing a secret quota on Asian admissions, its defense was that once you adjusted for the preferences given to the children of alumni and for the preferences given to athletes, Asians really weren’t being discriminated against. But you could sense Harvard’s exasperation that the issue was being raised at all. If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears. [Link]

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I envy people who grew up wealthy in their ethnic homeland, their certainty about their place in society. I mean that both of whites in America and desis in India. The new reality in Cupertino:

“Kids who are white feel themselves a distinct minority against a majority culture.” [Link]

Everyone is an immigrant now. Welcome.

Update: Interesting, mid-’90s essay in Slate about how Asian-Americans are the new Jews:

Remember the scene in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint where the newly teen-aged Alex Portnoy goes to a frozen pond in his hometown of Newark to gaze upon gentile girls ice-skating?

So: dusk on the frozen lake of a city park, skating behind the puffy red earmuffs and the fluttering yellow ringlets of a strange shikse teaches me the meaning of the word longing…

For Alex Portnoy, athleticism was something alien. It was part of a total package that included not only the golden shiksas but their brothers (“engaging, good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks”), their fathers (“men with white hair and deep voicesWhites were ‘engaging, good-natured, confident, clean, swift, and powerful halfbacks… men with white hair and deep voices’“), their mothers who never whined or hectored, their curtained, fireplaced houses, their small noses, their lack of constant nagging worry–in short, the normalcy and confidence that go along with belonging, with being on the inside…

Jews know all too well what the alternate form of merit that we didn’t have used to be: a certain ease, refinement, and grace. This may be what has led today’s generation of Jewish parents to athleticize our children. We want them to have what Alex Portnoy longed for: a deeper sort of American comfort and success than SAT scores and music lessons can provide… meritocracy ends on graduation day, and that afterward, Asians start to fall behind because they don’t have quite the right cultural style for getting ahead: too passive, not hail-fellow-well-met enough…

In my many hours standing next to hockey rinks last winter, I sometimes engaged in one of the Jews’ secret vices: Jew-counting. All over the ice were little Cohens, little Levys… What all the hockey-playing Jewish kids in America are not doing, during their hundreds of hours hustling to, on, and from the ice rink, is studying… At the front end of the American meritocratic machine, Asians are replacing Jews as the No. 1 group… as Asians become America’s new Jews, Jews are becoming … Episcopalians.

… academic commitment… is no longer a defining cultural characteristic of the group. What has replaced it is a cultural insider’s sort of academic preoccupation… mainly, college admission. Jews are now successful people who want to move the levers of the system (levers whose location we’re quite familiar with) so as to ensure that our children will be as successful as we are…

Asians are replacing Jews as the No. 1 groupJust at the moment when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have presidents named Rudenstine, Levin, and Shapiro, those institutions are widely suspected of having informal ceilings on Asian admissions, of the kind that were imposed on Jews two generations ago…

Asian achievement is highest in areas like science and classical music, where there is no advantage from familiarity with the culture. This also once was true of Jews (why do you think my grandfather become a doctor?) but isn’t any more. Several years ago, Asian-American groups in California successfully lobbied to keep an essay section out of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. It’s impossible to imagine organized Jewry caring…

Asian-Americans today have two advantages over Jews. They have a lower average income, and so are more motivated. And most back-home Asian cultures rival or surpass Jewish culture in their reverence for study. Therefore Jews are going to have to get used to being No. 2…

The final irony is that golf and tennis are perceived by the Asian-Americans not as aspects of an ethos adapted from the British landowning classes (which is the way Jews used to perceive them), but as stuff that Jews know how to do… The wheel of assimilation turns inexorably: Scratching out an existence is phase one, maniacal studying is phase two, sports is phase three. Watch out for Asian-American hockey players in about 20 years. [Link]