COVER STORY : SILENT MINORITY : The Plight of Asian American Students : Torn by Pressure From Their Families and Peers, They Often Are Alienated, Overlooked and Misunderstood.

AFTER A LOCAL NEWSPAPER published a list of Korean American valedictorians and other students heading to Ivy League schools, Sang Je’s father cut out the picture of one of his son’s Harvard-bound classmates and tacked it up on the wall.

Although Je--now a freshman at UC Berkeley--is hardly an academic slouch, he knew it was his father’s way of telling him he should have done better.

“I used to cry about it,” the 18-year-old Temple City High graduate said. “But I just learned to live with it. All Korean kids do. The night that the list runs in the Korean newspapers, you know a lot of Korean kids are crying their eyes out because their parents are giving them a hard time for not being on the list.”

Coping with relentless parental pressure is just one of the issues confronting many Asian American teen-agers, whose problems are often misunderstood or simply overlooked by their non-Asian classmates and teachers.

Asian students are a minority among minorities at most Los Angeles schools. Outnumbered by blacks and Latinos at most urban campuses and by white students at suburban and private schools, they struggle to distinguish themselves at a time when issues of race and identity increasingly divide students.

“Asians learn to function in life playing the second fiddle,” said Chi K. Mui, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Asian Pacific American Education Commission, a group that advises the school board on Asian American issues. “They’re lonely, but they become stoic. They just learn to live with their problems.”

Although stereotyped as “model students” who have little trouble breezing through honors classes and getting into top colleges, Asian students often are burdened with unique family and social problems that few non-Asian teachers and students understand. For one thing, many Asian youths are pressured by their peers to date and socialize, while their parents expect them to conform to traditional Asian values and devote their time to their studies.

It’s also common for Asian students--particularly recent immigrants--to be picked on and called derogatory names such as geek and fob , for “fresh off the boat.” This, coupled with parental academic expectations, can make schooling a lonely experience indeed.

“People have real stereotypes of Asian American kids as being Westinghouse scholars or National Merit finalists, when in fact that’s not always the case,” said Kenyon Chan, director of the Asian American Studies Department at Cal State Northridge. “There’s a misconception that Asian kids don’t need any help, so they often get ignored.”

After coming to the Los Angeles area from Vietnam in 1985, Dat Nguyen attended a mostly Latino elementary school in El Monte. Although other students at the school also spoke English as a second language, Nguyen was among the campus’s only Vietnamese- and Cantonese-speaking students. “I didn’t have a lot of friends,” said the 17-year-old recent Rosemead High graduate. “I would get picked on.”

Junior high proved to be no easier for Nguyen, who learned English but still found it difficult to make friends. Although he formed friendships with various Asian students during high school, Nguyen said that fitting in was always something he and other Asian teen-agers struggled with.

“Even though there were a lot of Asians at Rosemead High, they were pretty quiet and stayed on the sidelines,” he said. “They don’t have a voice and don’t really get involved in things like sports or cheerleading. They do good in school, but they don’t have a chance to speak out.”

When Je arrived from Korea as a fifth-grader, he said he was constantly teased for not speaking English well, for wearing knee-high socks and for having a “rice bowl” haircut.

“Other kids used to call me gook and chink ,” he said. “A lot of Asian kids can relate to that.”

Le Truong, a sophomore at Los Angeles High, also experienced discrimination while growing up in El Sereno with few other Asian students.

“When I was little, other kids picked on me and called me names,” she said. “Some Asian kids at my school were thrown into the trash can even though they didn’t do anything.”

When it came time to attend high school, Truong first enrolled at her neighborhood school, Garfield High, which is predominantly Latino. But after a week, she withdrew.

“I hated it,” she said. “People weren’t nice to me. I felt really ugly there.”

Of the roughly 640,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, only 5%, or 31,700, are Asian. Among the 30,600 teachers, support personnel and administrators, just over 7% are Asian, according to 1993 district figures.

Because of those relatively small numbers, Asian students’ problems are often regarded as less important than other students’, the youths said. As a result, many Asian students internalize their problems and choose not to discuss them with their non-Asian teachers and classmates.

Immediately after the 1992 riots, a group of Korean students at Crenshaw High were afraid to return, fearing they might be attacked by other students on campus, said Brad Pilon, a counselor at the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Newcomers Center, which recently moved from Crenshaw High to Belmont High.

But instead of relying on school administrators to resolve any potential conflicts, the students only talked among themselves.

“The Korean students refused to talk to me because they had seen me talking to black students,” said Pilon, who is white. “They saw it as ‘us-versus-them’ and regarded administrators as a threat. They feel they can only let their hair down with each other.”

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Nearly every one of the more than two dozen Asian students interviewed for this story agreed that most Asian students tend to hang out together. While some recent immigrants tend to feel most comfortable with students from the same countries, it’s common for Asian students of all different backgrounds to befriend one another, the students said.

“Asian kids hang out together because they feel more comfortable with each other,” Je said. “We all have to deal with the same family pressures and cultural values, so we don’t have to do a lot of explaining.”

Although some Asian teen-agers form friendships with students of other races, Je said most of his close friends are Taiwanese. “My Asian friends would tease me if I started hanging out with white kids,” he said.

However, rifts do exist among Asian students, the largest between recent immigrants and those born or raised in the United States.

Carol Chung, a Larchmont Village resident who attends Notre Dame Academy in Westwood, constantly juggles her time between her recent-immigrant friends from Korea and her Korean American friends because of the tensions between the two groups.

“It’s really caused me problems because my Americanized Korean friends and my recent immigrant friends don’t get along,” said Chung, who arrived from Korea when she was 5 and considers herself part of the “1.5 generation.” “My second-generation and 1.5-generation friends call the Korean immigrant kids fobs and nerds, and my Korean immigrant friends look down on Korean Americans because they feel they’ve lost their Korean culture.”

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Ken Zhang, a recent Chinese immigrant attending Crenshaw High, said divisions exist because many Asian American students don’t want to associate with newcomers.

“The Chinese students who were born here are more Americanized,” he said. “They make fun of us, and they don’t speak Chinese. It’s easier for them, though, because they speak English.”

Despite those differences and regardless of whether they were born here or recently arrived, most Asian teen-agers are united in their experiences with parental pressure.

“If I come home with an A-minus, my mom will say, ‘How come you couldn’t get an A?’ ” said Julia Kim, a second-generation Korean American sophomore at Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood. “She’s always comparing me to other Koreans at school or to my sister.”

Dung Ly, a recent graduate of Van Nuys High School who arrived from Vietnam in 1983, remembered the time she told her parents she was getting a B. “My parents said, ‘Why do you get a B?’ My dad said I was stupid when I got a B.”

As a result, Ly and other Asian teens spend much of their time studying, constantly fretting about how they’ll fare on their next report card.

“Most first-generation Korean parents are like, ‘My son has to go to Harvard,’ ” said Soung Ae Kim, a Korean American parent and president of the Valley Korean Parents Assn. “The kids get very depressed and resentful because their parents don’t seem to appreciate their hard work.”

But while Asian parents scrutinize their children’s report cards, many Asian teen-agers said they don’t talk to their parents about anything beyond their grades. This is particularly evident among immigrant students, whose parents speak little English and are unfamiliar with the American school system or values.

“They just don’t understand,” Julia Kim said. “They’re traditional Korean parents, so they’re really strict. They don’t let me go out or do anything. So I just keep everything to myself.”

Mui, who immigrated from Hong Kong when he was 10 and now has two children at Castelar Elementary School in Chinatown, said immigrant parents often pay little attention to their children’s problems because they’re so busy themselves trying to make ends meet.

“My parents had to work all the time, so they weren’t able to give me any guidance or direction,” he said. “Parents are only thinking about putting food on the table and paying the rent. . . . The problem is that when parents don’t get involved in their children’s schooling, it separates them from their kids. There’s minimal bonding between parents and kids.”

Being forbidden to socialize is another source of contention.

“A lot of Chinese parents don’t let their kids go out, date or even talk on the phone because that’s not what teen-agers do in China,” said Jian Hua Mei, a Chinese American teacher at the Newcomers Center. “But it’s a struggle for kids, because dating is important to teen-agers here.”

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Kit Ying Li, a 16-year-old Hong Kong native attending Crenshaw High, said girls particularly have a hard time because Asian parents expect them to stay home until they get married.

“I had a fight with my mother last night because I asked her if I could go out with my friends,” she said. “She just said, ‘No.’ Maybe she’ll let me go on a field trip, but she won’t let me go to a camp or a dance. She just expects me to stay home and study.”

Although some students said they obey their parents and stay home, others rebel by sneaking out of the house or lying to their parents about their whereabouts.

One 15-year-old girl said she has a boyfriend, but she hasn’t told her parents because they would forbid her to see him. “My parents are still living the old way,” she said. “It’s really annoying.”

In recent years, an increasing number of Asian youths have been lured into gangs, a trend some gang experts believe may be an act of defiance against the pressures at school and at home.

“A lot of newer immigrant kids settle in barrios, where there is heavy gang involvement,” said Ernest Takemoto, a deputy probation officer for Los Angeles County’s Asian Gang Unit. “They go to school and being of a smaller stature, they get picked on. They feel a lot more protected if they’re in a gang. The gang becomes their family.”

Takemoto said the “model minority” stereotype of Asian students also helps to fuel some of their frustration.

“There’s always been a stereotype that Asians are model students, but some of them aren’t so intelligent and rebel,” Takemoto said. “Either you’re a top student or you’re not. And if you’re in the middle or the low end, there’s a problem.”