Can You Help Me with My Homework?

The email message came with the word "HELP" in caps in the subject line. "Dear Mr. Lam," it says, "My name is Dao and I am having difficulties with my essay in my English class. I am reading one of your short stories for class assignment called 'Grandma's Tales'‚ It is a really good story but I can't seem to find the REAL theme of the story. Can you please help me?"

It is not the first time that a student from some college or another writes to ask me for help with his or her homework. They couldn't come up with the answers to the assigned questions, and this being the information age, they go on line directly to the author.

What is particular in my case is that, overwhelmingly, they are Asian students. I suppose being one myself, and an immigrant to boot, they figure it somehow fitting that, given the stress they are under, I should help them.

Indeed, one can almost sense a palpable desperation in their emails. HELP is one of the common subject titles and "Assistance Needed" is another. And my all-time favorite: "A favor for a fellow Vietnamese immigrant."

While it flatters me to know that some of my work is being taught in college, and that I have done my share in confounding the mind of college students, it never fails to astound me what some of these young people would do to avoid thinking. They'd rather risk being chastised by the writer than go through what they surely hate to do on their own: using their noggin to think critically.

Kishore Mabuhani, a career diplomat from Singapore, recently wrote a book called "Can Asians Think?" The title is misleading of course, since Kishore Mabuhani, for one, can and does think brilliantly but he did point out that, as a habit, Asians tend to fall into complacency and conformity. While more and more are winning prestigious literary and artistic awards, the vast majority are rushing toward economic success without a moment to reflect.

It doesn't help, of course, that self-expression is largely discouraged across the continent of Asia. Indeed, the language of argumentation is often frowned upon in a region where harmony is emphasized over individualism, and where, with the exception of a handful of countries, democracy does not exist.

To do well in the sciences and to memorize the classics have been traditionally good enough to make you a more-than-competent professional. Think too hard about an issue, especially ideological ones, who knows, you might turn into a nonconformist, a radical or, god forbid, a dissident -- and therefore a danger to the status quo.

Now I can almost hear the cynical reader say, "Ha, that's what's happening here too; the lack of critical thinking is widespread, considering the state of American public education." And he has a point. But to compare the system with Asia, there is something that is fundamentally different: America still values the maverick, the inventor, the loudmouth class clown, the individual with a vision. And American kids growing up saying I -- as in "I disagree" -- without having a second thought.

It is not so easy for an Asian kid in a Confucian family household to say something like that. As a frequent judge of high school writing contests, I find it curious that in many Asian American entries the writer, who otherwise has perfect command of English, could not use the first-person narrative, the I. It gets stuck in the throat, somehow, and does not come off easily on the written page, and he or she often resorts to "one" instead of "I", even when addressing a topic as close to home as family.

I myself remember those dull tropical afternoons in Saigon where I recited poetry classics in front of an old geezer of a literature teacher who smoked. If I always cried at poetry recital it was for good reasons. Each time I forgot a word his ruler would land deftly on my open palm. And that, I might add, was the bulk of my Vietnamese literature education -- from which I rebelled and yet, to the astonishment of my parents, became an American writer.