Getting over a well-worn stereotype

I used to be pretty good at chess. I never won any significant individual trophies, but I once forced a stalemate against the favorite from a rival magnet elementary school, tipping the scales in our team's favor by one half of a point to win the tournament. My teammates instantly hoisted me onto their shoulders and chanted my name, and at the pep rally in our honor we emptied a keg of ice-cold Gatorade onto our coach.

I'm pretty sure that's how it happened.

In any case, let's fast-forward to last spring, to a day which found me sitting in front of a chessboard for the first time in 14 years. My adversary was a Chinese fourth-grade boy named Barnes. I was hired to tutor him in English, but that day he was schooling me in chess. In the first 10 minutes alone I lost half of my army to sheer carelessness but even when I got serious, reclaiming my territory was a sweaty and mentally taxing slog. Apparently playing chess is not quite like riding a bike; if you don't use it, you lose it.

Forty-five minutes of tortuous deliberation and second-guessing passed. Barnes's mother began calling him to dinner. Exploiting his distraction, I quickly sealed the victory with the capture of his king's last defender. Barnes was nonchalant; I was ecstatic. In fact, if my legs hadn't been half asleep from 45 minutes of sitting cross-legged on the floor, I probably would have clicked my heels in the air when I stood up. "Yeah!" I thought to myself as I waved goodbye to Barnes. "I still got it!"

My ego was checked, however, when I tried to recount this victory over Skype to one of my friends.

"Wait, how old is this kid again?" asked my friend.

"Maybe 10 years old."

"So he's just a kid?"

"He's not just a kid; he's a." I stopped when I realized what was about to come out of my mouth. He's not just a kid; he's a Chinese kid.

To be sure, most of my post-victory euphoria was simply relief that I hadn't completely lost my chess to the corrosive sands of time, but I couldn't deny that a significant part of the fist-pumping gaiety in which I allowed myself to indulge was rooted in a stereotype common across suburban America, namely, that all Asian children are geniuses.

If you've seen as many online videos as I have, you may have seen the 3-year-old Chinese girl who can solve a Rubik's cube in 114 seconds. Or, the 10-year-old Japanese guitarist shred Ozzy Osbourne to pieces on the Ellen show. Or, the 5-year-old blind Korean girl who can play any song on the piano after listening to the tune just once.

And if you too grew up in a school district where the Asian-American students, though few, were just enough to fill out the top rungs of the honor roll, orchestra and math Olympic teams, then videos like these only reinforce the misguided hypothesis that "there must be something in the water over there".

Old stereotypes die hard. Even after moving to China and teaching hundreds of children representing all levels of knowledge, diligence and intelligence, somehow I still had the idea buried deep within my subconscious that any given Chinese 10-year-old must be a pint-sized Kasparov. I'm sure Barnes is extremely talented in something, but whatever it is, it probably has more to do with his own dedication than whether or not he eats with chopsticks.