Brown Yellow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsHYIGgnlx4

The link is to a video made by some students from my high school graduating class. I attended a San Francisco public high school with an admission requirement based on middle school GPA and the state-administered STAR test. Consequently, a majority of our school was Asian, mostly Chinese, including myself. Whites comprised most of the rest of the student body, and blacks and Hispanics formed a microscopic minority. Although the stereotypes portrayed are obviously exaggerated for comical effect, the video does hint at something real at our school. To get into our school is hard enough. To succeed at our school is even harder. It requires a way of life that involves "AP Calculus-BC ... AP Chinese" (not AP Karate, regretfully). Our school, like our city and the Bay Area in general, definitely is a contact zone. And if contact zones involve a dominant and a submissive culture, the "AP way of life," strongly associated with and practiced by Asians at our school, was the key to a big name institution of higher learning and, presumably, success.