College Admissions Fiction and the Asian American Teen Imaginary

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From The Los Angeles Review of Books:

“GUYS ARE LIKE school admissions,” Claire Wang’s mom tells Claire in Parachutes, a new YA novel by Kelly Yang. “Get in first. Then worry if you like them back.” The analogy is cheeky yet revealing: colleges and boyfriends function on a model of scarcity, and thus attainment is far more important than agency. Parachutes traces this logic with a critical eye, as conflicts arise not only out of relational drama, a staple driver of YA fiction, but also out of the stresses surrounding elite college admissions.

Parachutes follows the relationship between Claire, who moves from Shanghai to Los Angeles, and Dani De La Cruz, a Filipina girl who is Claire’s host sister and a scholarship student at her prep school. The book is named after “parachute kids” like Claire, who are flown in from China in order to get a better education. Ironically, Claire is not very interested in playing the college admissions game, but Dani is resolute about getting into Yale, which she believes will lift her and her mother out of the working class.

Another recent YA release, Ed Lin’s David Tung Can’t Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets Into an Ivy League College, is “college admissions fiction” at its most blatant, beginning on the first page:

I was ranked eighth out of a class of 240. If I could end the year in sixth or seventh place, that would be a major win. […] My school is a public institution based in a landlocked town in northern New Jersey known for receiving 20-25 Ivy League college admissions offers every year. […] We’re the only school on the East Coast where about 80% of the students are Asian American, nearly all Chinese, and many with immigrant parents.

Unsurprisingly, the primary tension in the novel involves David’s attempts to square his nascent romantic relationships with the all-encompassing demand to build a perfect admissions portfolio. And, like Dani in Parachutes, David is a working-class outsider enveloped in a cluster of affluence.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books