Stepping off the Asian American Achievement Treadmill

The Asian American script for status sets us on a treadmill of achievement. Why do Christians settle for it?

Nov 21, 2025

By Stephen H. Chen, Associate Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College.

Conversations about the Asian American experience often come back around to status. Tug on a thread discussing the model minority myth, discrimination, or family immigration histories; and you’ll find them tied to questions of where we stand in a given hierarchy, how we got there, and where we hope to go.

This is largely why I’ve spent most of the past decade studying social status and its role in Asian American families. As a psychologist, I’m most interested in how we think about status, and in turn, how status shapes our thoughts and behaviors. For example, my collaborators and I have examined how Asian Americans from different socioeconomic backgrounds vary in their parenting behaviors, their views on mental health, and even their endorsement of traditional “Asian” values. We’ve also shown how, as early as elementary school, Asian American kids incorporate race into their understanding of social status, and how biases toward high-status peers can shape their everyday social decisions.

Humans are social creatures, so it’s natural that we’d take our scripts for life from those we see as living well. And when it comes to scripts for social status—what it looks like, how to get it, and how to keep it—the Asian American editions are highlighted, dog-eared, and passed down across generations. The “Asian American Success Frame,” as sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou have called it, provides a cultural script for attaining status that is both highly ambitious and highly specific: a bachelor’s degree from an elite university, graduate school, and a job in medicine, law, science, or engineering. It’s detailed and daunting, but what makes the Asian American Success Frame a particularly difficult script to enact is what it leaves out.

One parent, laid off from her job as a scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, suggested that one way of stepping off the status treadmill was to view everything as a gift from God.

Each semester, I teach students well on their way to achieving the Success Frame. As an exercise in my courses, I ask students to rate their satisfaction with their academic achievement at three points in time: (1) the moment they received their acceptance letter to our school; (2) a month after receiving their acceptance letter, and (3) today, as enrolled undergraduates. I’ve conducted this exercise across multiple class cohorts, and the trajectories across these three points in time consistently slope downward —students become less and less satisfied with their academic achievement over time. I point out the paradox: Their acceptance letter was the first step toward joining the small minority of the world’s population that holds four-year college degrees. Why would they be less satisfied now, when they are closer to achieving that goal?

The answer, of course, is that the goal posts have shifted, and they will continue to do so. My students recognize this. Some describe how they graduated from high school at the top of their class, but are now stuck in the middle of the pack. Others have already set their sights on what comes after college, since getting into a top school was only the first step in a long-term plan. And here’s what’s hidden in the fine print of the Asian American prescription for social status: achieving a highly-ambitious, highly-specific goal will place you temporarily on top of a hedonic peak. But it’s only a matter of time before you notice others around you who are higher and who are still climbing, and you’ll feel compelled to do the same.

One way of understanding the paradox of achievement is to distinguish between socioeconomic status—how much wealth, income, or education an individual actually has—and relative or subjective social status—where that individual perceives themselves to be relative to others in a given social hierarchy. The paradox emerges when these two aspects of social status don’t always line up: people who are actually at the top of the socioeconomic ladder don’t necessarily see themselves as occupying that position, and gains in actual wealth and education don’t always translate into increases in perceived status.

The paradox is especially apparent in an interview with Linda, a Chinese American woman who participated in one of our studies on social status.1 Reflecting on her life prior to immigrating to the United States, Linda rated her subjective social status in China as a 5.5—midway between the 5th and 6th rungs on a 10-point ladder. Her lack of a graduate degree had limited her job prospects, so she applied and was accepted to graduate programs in the U.S., eventually earning her PhD. Despite a marked upward shift in her actual socioeconomic status—she currently works as a research scientist at a prestigious academic institution—Linda perceives her social status in the U.S. as a 5.5: no different from what it was in China. “Although I have an advanced degree, I don’t feel like I belong to the society. As an Asian American, I feel like my voice isn’t heard, politically speaking. I feel like my race is sometimes being erased.”

Linda’s trajectory of subjective social status isn’t unique. Almost all of the 256 other Chinese American immigrant women in that study referenced some form of social mobility—educational, financial, or occupational —as their primary reason for immigrating to the U.S. Yet the majority saw their current subjective social status as being either the same or even lower compared to what it had been in Asia. What’s more, these paradoxical trajectories came at a cost to their mental health: Women who perceived greater downward shifts in subjective social status post-immigration reported more symptoms of depression, even when we factored in their actual levels of income and education. For Linda and others, the goal posts of status had shifted from something concrete and quantifiable—an advanced degree or a significant salary bump—to a sense of belonging and of being seen and heard. And in regard to these more abstract, subjective targets, the conventional Asian American script for status had little to say.

One way of understanding cultural scripts is to look at how they’re passed on. And since many of our earliest and most salient cultural scripts are transmitted in our families, my students and I have spent the last few years listening to Asian American parents and their adolescents as they talk about status. How much money is enough money? What makes a job a good job? And which schools or degrees are good enough?

The Asian American Success Frame certainly makes an appearance in these conversations. One mother discussed graduate school options with her 11-year old (“I guess I’ll get an MD-PhD”), and another 15-year old and her parent recounted how they’d sketched out her medical career (“that one night, we mapped out the whole, like, plan on scrap paper and stuff”). What we hear far more frequently, though, is an alternative cultural script that counters Asian American stereotypes: The parents who, at least in front of our cameras, emphasize to their kids that the best job is one that makes them happy, that they only need enough money to keep them from worrying about it, and that they can certainly pursue a graduate degree —“but only if they want to.” In this way, these Asian American parents, almost all of whom are first-generation immigrants, are raising their children using a different script than the one they used for their own paths to status. Rather than specific occupations and degrees, this script emphasizes ideals of happiness, freedom from worry, and individual choice. In other words, they’ve adapted a cultural script for achievement that’s more American.

It’s more American and, as my students, Linda, and anyone who has tried to pursue a happy, worry-free life can attest, it’s a far more elusive path than the one leading to an MD-PhD. We have countless scripts for socioeconomic success from those who’ve made it, which we can easily transpose from Reddit threads onto our pieces of scrap paper. By contrast, scripts for a life lived off the status grid are harder to come by, and models of true contentment are in short supply.

When hints of these scripts do appear in our interviews, it’s perhaps unsurprising that they’re voiced by individuals who look beyond the material, incorporating a spiritual dimension into their concepts of well-being. One parent, a recent immigrant from Guangzhou who had never completed high school, described the key to contentment as “not being too demanding of yourself, and not putting too much pressure on yourself. [T]he most important thing is not material or material requirement—the most important thing is spiritual satisfaction.”2A cafeteria worker from Taiwan also emphasized spiritual well-being in her conversation with her 17-year old daughter:

“[W]hat I have now is what I’ve accomplished through my own hard work… I don’t have higher hopes for more. I really don’t necessarily want to compare brand name goods with other people or things like that, I think all around, from a spiritual perspective - even though I still have some conflicts with my kids - spiritually… I’m already quite content.”3

Neither of these parents identified with a particular religious or spiritual tradition. Those who did, particularly those who were more religiously committed, articulated a more fleshed-out theology of status. One parent, laid off from her job as a scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, suggested that one way of stepping off the status treadmill was to view everything as a gift from God:

“If you don’t know how to, when you shall stop, you will keep pursuing and you are going to lost (sic) a lot of things during your pursuit. But after I become a Christian, I feel there is another meaning there [… ] because we actually live by God’s mercy. So everything we have is from His grace. [W]e should be happy about what we have and not pursuing, not keep pursuing all those elapsed things.”

Another Christian parent, an engineer, also referenced God’s grace when explaining contentment to his son, and he stressed the importance of gratitude in the face of disappointment. At the same time, he also emphasized the role of individual effort in “making it happen:”

“Yeah, we are Christians so we know [the concept of contentment] pretty well. We think… OK, it’s God’s grace. Everything - is under…you know, you have to work hard to make it happen. But if something is not as you expected, OK, feel grateful, feel grateful. You know. If something bad happens, it could be worse. This is what I learned from it.”

As a social scientist, I’m thrilled to see these variations in my data. By focusing on spiritual indices of flourishing, these parents challenge the stereotype that Asian Americans all follow the same script of success. But as a Christian, and as an Asian American parent with decades on the status treadmill, these responses leave me wanting. Is the assurance that everything is a gift of God’s grace just a balm for disappointment when our kids don’t get into their dream school? Are crowns and treasures in heaven consolation prizes for missed promotions and unrealized wealth on earth? The Sunday School answer is to set our minds on things above; the question is how to do so come Monday morning.

The fear of losing status is eclipsed by the fear of settling for it, and thus missing out on something infinitely better: the opportunity to participate in Christ’s inauguration of the new kingdom.

One place to start is by peeking over the shoulders of people who are imagining otherwise, so to speak, and stealing a glance at their scripts. I think of Angela who, in her interview, reflected less on the benefits of status for her daughter and more on its costs:

“I think I have a personal preference for her not being like, at the very top of the ladder because I have a belief that – you know, it’s a Christian value, a justice-related concern about inequity, and income inequity. I think I generally feel like resources should be shared, and to have such an extreme amount of wealth is… it’s, it’s hard to be that high up on the ladder and still be connected with, and in community with, and caring for those that are having a different life experience.”

I also think of Jonathan Tran’s profile of Redeemer Community Church, a religious community in San Francisco whose members are challenging engines of economic and racial disparities by taking deliberate, downward shifts on the socioeconomic ladder. In doing so, their trajectories of social status slope in the direction opposite to what many of their Asian American parents, and the Asian American parents in my studies, envisioned for their children’s lives in the United States.

But listen to how Tran describes their motivation for doing so, and you’ll hear a different script at work. Here, the fear of losing status is eclipsed by the fear of settling for it, and thus missing out on something infinitely better: the opportunity to participate in Christ’s inauguration of the new kingdom. As Tran puts it, they couldn’t imagine a better life script than to live proximate to that goodness, and believed, ultimately, that their lives would be incomplete without it.

Flipping the scripts of status questions the assumption that more is better, and it considers how even our grandest ambitions for status represent desires that, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, are not too strong, but too weak.4 Our answers to these questions reveal, fundamentally, what we believe to be good; and from there, we can ask whether “we are far too easily pleased.”

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