Thoughts — Who Gets to Be Nerdy?

Scrolling through my Moments feed, I suddenly felt like writing another essay. This time, I want to talk about stereotypes and race.

We all know the stereotype: Chinese people study for twelve hours every day, sprint toward the exam that defines the next stage of their lives, and then compensate with a burst of spending or travel. It is an interesting phenomenon. The long hours are not entirely imaginary, but is it right to reduce Chinese people to the fact that they study?

After a year in Ireland, working as well as studying, I have met people of different ages, backgrounds, and temperaments. So let us make a comparison. Do Irish people dislike studying? I do not think so. My classmates hardly ever miss a lecture; their attendance is better than that of many international students. I have seen their notes, too. They make a serious effort to capture their own thinking about a subject. I do not think they are any less committed to learning than Chinese students are.

Yet every time I open social media, I encounter the same claims: "Chinese people are obsessed with studying" and "Chinese people are all mathematicians." I am not going to analyse here how different languages may affect the way mathematics is learned. I want to stay with the first claim. Is the image of the studious Chinese person that circulates online really accurate?

Countless memes show a Chinese person in glasses striking an outrageously nerdy pose. We know what these images do: they exaggerate the nerdiness associated with Chinese and East Asian people. The effect cuts both ways. The label "nerdy" often implies a lack of humour, and that is one of the qualities this stereotype assigns to East Asians. At the same time, in the job market, this image can combine with the perseverance of people who have moved from poorer circumstances into developed societies, making Chinese workers especially valued in certain roles.

Where there are people, there is exploitation, and greater population density often intensifies it. It is therefore unsurprising that populists in Europe also make use of this stereotype. Among the lower social classes, that hostility tends to appear in two forms: ideological and physical. Ideologically, some insist that even though Chinese and Asian people spend longer in education, what they produce still cannot compare with the work of white people. Physically, the image of Asians as passive nerds becomes an excuse for street-level discrimination and harassment.

I do not want to take that argument any further here. But if Europe genuinely wants to address the challenges it associates with immigration, it is wrong for the learning habits of local people to be obscured by stereotypes about Asians. No ethnic group is born possessing wisdom and skills passed down intact from the previous generation. Knowledge and ability require repeated study, reflection, and practice.

Against this backdrop, does this label really belong to Chinese people, or have Chinese people been made to carry a label that belongs to an entire generation of young people?

When a family chooses to have children, any family with a reasonable understanding of society, regardless of nationality or race, hopes to give them a good environment in which to grow and an excellent education. This is even more visible in the age of AI. As AI lowers barriers to entry almost without limit, professional work increasingly depends on the upper limits of a person's understanding in a specialised field. You need to engage with AI at the frontier of knowledge, judge whether its answers are correct, and work out how they can be improved.

That demands more intensive learning and growth. It has nothing to do with ethnicity and everything to do with the individual. Labels certainly divide people into categories, but it is absurd when a stereotype erases an individual's effort.

You can hate Asians. You can attach the word "nerdy" to countless Asian faces. But before making those claims, you should recognise that the people in their twenties who help keep society running are all carrying knowledge forward and exploring its boundaries. That should not be treated as something belonging only to Chinese people. Every young person deserves to have their nerdiness, curiosity, and desire to learn recognised.