There and Back Again

Jo: While listening to an episode of the Asian Not Asian podcast titled ‘Falling off the Rainbow Road’, I was struck by an analogy used to describe the way the children of Asian immigrants are raised. Loosely paraphrasing, there is apparently a playbook for how their childhood is supposed to go: piano or violin lessons, tennis lessons, maths tuition, volunteering (enough to go on the high-school transcript), and then onto an ‘acceptable’ degree such as medicine, law or engineering. And so these kids are on what feels like the rainbow road in Mario Kart, suspended in space while they try to follow this playbook, but there’s no safety net if they fall off the edge.