My Tiger Mom & Me

My name is Raji Ramanathan of Fremont, CA. I am a freshman at UC Berkeley, studying Integrative Biology. Personally, I love the sciences field and I cherish writing. I hope to combine the two to become a medical journalist in the future. All that I've received and been praised for, I pay it forward to my mother. She has taught me everything and shown me that every mistake leads to a solution, eventually. I owe everything to my very stern yet loving mother, Bama. My many talents and leadership abilities would not have grown without my mother's drilling. I cherish singing, writing, photographing, learning, talking and doing almost anything. I have been recognized by many different organizations, including Bentley University, Discover, Nestle, Nordstrom, TIME Magazine, and many local groups for my leadership, community service and excellent academics. I have given more than 3,500 hours of service to my local community, and I have also founded an organization called the Pencil Project. I love what I do, and I do what I love because of the lessons my mother has taught me. She's strict but she's taught me how to succeed on my journey to selfhood. Victor Em is an undergraduate junior studying Management Science Engineering at Stanford University. His parents are from Cambodia, but he was born and raised in San Diego. He enjoys reading literature on psychology, philosophy, culture, social interaction, fitness and nutrition. In his free time, he engages in helping his friends and family with their goals and cultivate their passions. He is a member of Lambda Phi Epsilon on campus and strongly believes that by intersecting positive psychology, community building and leadership development that he can improve the livelihood of those around him. My name is Scott Chia Thao and I'm a rising junior at Stanford University. I am originally from Sanger, California, a small town in the Central Valley, in the vicinity of Fresno. I am the oldest of six and proudly define myself as Hmong, a Christian and a Farmer (or at least having worked on the family farm). Justin Yee is an aspiring interaction designer at Stanford University, where he studies innovative ways to make lasting changes to American education. His family - composed of a loving mother, father, and older brother with intellectual disabilities - has been the greatest inspiration for his dream to change the world for the better. His relationship with his mother is particularly interesting and complicated, but as the story explains, it is also life-changing. He hopes that you enjoy his interpretation of it! Ernie Hsiung is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Asian American group weblog 8Asians.com. He began his amateur writing career writing columns for Asian American web magazine IIStix and transitioned to the blogging world via his personal weblog Little Yellow Different, where he received polite acknowledgement from such magazines as Entertainment Weekly, Genre and the Advocate. During the day he is a Freelance Front-End Developer and currently splits his time between San Francisco and a long-distance relationship in Miami, Florida. Angela Tung is a writer in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Bellingham Review, CNN Living, The Frisky, Dark Sky Magazine, Matador Life, The New York Press and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor to The Nervous Breakdown, an online magazine featuring the work of published and emerging authors from around the world, and is a writer and content curator at Wordnik.com, an online word source and meaning discovery engine. Her latest book, Black Fish: Memoir of a Bad Luck Girl, chronicles the failed marriage between a Chinese woman and Korean man, both American-born but still bound by old world traditions. Black Fish was short-listed for Graywolf Press' Nonfiction Prize. Visit her at angelatung.com. Shirley Peng is an attorney at Legal Aid of Nebraska. She was born and raised in Southern California. She received her B.A. from UCLA in psychology and Asian languages and her J.D. from Chapman Law. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her husband.