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While Jonathan Lee prepared for a trip to the University of Pennsylvania campus during senior prom weekend at Baton Rouge High School, his older brother tried to convince him to stay for the big dance.

“Going to the senior prom is huge,” his older brother told him. “So is going to UPenn,” Jonathan insisted. So while his classmates tucked into tuxes, Lee, ranked sixth in his class, flew North for a brief taste of campus life that awaits him.

When Monica Jeong turned 17 last September, her father acknowledged her minor legal upgrade by proposing they go see an R-rated flick. But Jeong took a pass on the movie date with Dad. “I had a test,” the No. 1 ranked senior at Baton Rouge High recalls, somewhat sheepishly.

Don’t get them wrong. Like most high school students, Jeong and Lee take time for movies, music and the mall. When they’re not studying, that is. The all-out approach to academics has paid off for the two Korean Americans. Both just landed National Beta Club college scholarships, and they currently serve as president and vice president of the school’s local Beta Club.

Jeong is a National Merit finalist and president of the French Club. Lee is editor of the school paper. As Lee heads to UPenn next fall, Jeong will attend Stanford University. And together, they started the Cancer Awareness Club at school.

Gulp—pant. Who could keep up?

Actually, Jeong and Lee have plenty of competition. The two are hooked into a high achieving network of students who, like them, load up on advanced placement classes, score high on school and national exams and clean up on honors and scholarships. And, like them, they represent Baton Rouge’s small but growing Asian community.

Vicky Valsaraj and her award-winning science project.

But is anyone surprised?

Even Asian Americans are well familiar with the stereotype: Asian students are supposed to have serious smarts. In Baton Rouge, as in most other communities, this achievement myth rings true. From LEAP and ACT scores to GPAs, Asian American students have made their way to the top of the academic heap (See charts, page 48 and 55).

Whites, African Americans and other ethnic groups share a slice of the high performance pie, and, to be fair, not all Asians are model students, either. Still, a mere 1,148 Asian kids (2.4% of the total) walk the corridors of Baton Rouge’s public schools. This small-numbered and very broadly defined ethnic group (everyone from Vietnamese to Chinese, Indian, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean and more are considered Asian) has figured out how to earn a lion’s share of the academic honors.

Plenty of experts nationwide have tried to crack the secret to high achievement among Asian American students. But as Baton Rouge pushes to ramp up its academic record, the question seems more basic, more urgent than the latest sociological study. How is it these kids who live next door, who sit one seat over in the classroom and who happen to be of Asian ethnicity have managed to rise so definitively to the top? And how can others follow their lead?

Whose idea of fun is this?

Experts have offered up all sorts of explanations for the phenomenon. Try stable Asian family structures and higher parental education, income levels and expectations.

But experiences like that of Taiwainese immigrant Robert Wu may be the most telling.

All Wu wanted last summer was permission from the school principal to enroll his son, Thomas, in a six-week Algebra 1 high school honors course at LSU. By getting Algebra 1 out of the way, Thomas would be able to jump ahead to geometry in seventh grade.

Students of the Chinese School like Jeffrey Liu get enthusiastic about answering the teacher's questions.

Wu’s older son Steven, now a freshman at Rice University, had done the same thing when he was in middle school, giving him a major math boost for high school and college.

But this time, the principal of Wu’s private school balked at granting permission.

“He didn’t want to sign,” Wu says. “He said, ‘Don’t you have something more fun for Thomas than doing math all summer?’” A year later, that response still rankles and bewilders Wu. “I thought, ‘How do you assume math is no fun for Thomas?’”

As new-age as it sounds, the question of attitude, of a culture’s emotional relationship towards education, may be at work. In Baton Rouge, weekends and summers often mean the end of schoolwork. How many parents walk around saying, “They’ve done so well, they deserve more math!”?

But walk into an LSU summer honors course in advanced math or science, and you’ll find the majority-Asian class energized and enthusiastic, says Janet Sheldon, LSU Continuing Education Youth Programs Manager.

“These kids find it interesting to learn more, rather than sitting around all summer watching reruns,” she says. The students meet other kids who are similarly motivated. They no longer feel like oddballs for their interests.

Wu’s older son, Steven, agrees. “During break and lunch, we got to socialize. Having friends in it made it fun and worth the work.”

Ask Glasgow Middle School math teacher Claudia Allums if her competition math club students enjoy the experience of being what the Mathcounts Program dubs “Mathletes.” Allums’ club is 60% Asian, even though only one in 10 Glasgow students overall are Asian.

“We meet after school to practice. Sometimes, the parents bring a meal. We laugh and have fun,” she says.

For Jonathan Lee, who confesses he genuinely enjoys learning, it doesn’t hurt that at Baton Rouge High he doesn’t have to be a closet academic. “It’s cool to be smart at this school,” he says.

A positive attitude towards learning can take a kid a long way. But all the way? When the work gets hard and schoolmates and friends have long since gone to the movies, what then?

Level 1 teacher Nan Zheng uses flash cards and stuffed animals to keep the attention of the school's youngest students.

Supposed to be smart

For some, there’s no hesitation, no worry that in many circles, “brains” are uncool. Glasgow Middle School eighth grader Viveca “Vicky” Valsaraj doesn’t just acknowledge this stereotype of Asians and academics. She internalizes it, embraces it. She says “This is who I am supposed to be.

“Non-Asian students will say, ‘Let’s go ask the Indian or Chinese or Korean student, they know anything.’ They stereotype us as the smart people. We come from a background where people expect us to do well. Most of us have that fire inside of us,” she says.

For Valsaraj, whose parents both immigrated from India, this expectation means doing more than the teacher requires on research essays and projects. It means pushing it on her science fair entry to nab second overall and claim a first prize from the Society of Women Engineers. It means earning straight As.

Society’s expectations of Asian students could be considered unfair, or counterproductive. Only, they’re not. Vicky Valsaraj’s response is typical in Baton Rouge.

Tabitha Vu, an LSU graduate now age 29 and teaching high school in Ascension Parish, insists the stereotype is neither unfair nor inaccurate. She takes it “as a driving force, an affirmation that I have the ability to do whatever I put my mind to.” After all, she adds, “My entire Vietnamese family was extremely successful coming here during and after the Vietnam War.”

Even though LSU freshman Isaac Woo reached the point as a McKinley High student when he decided to prioritize sports, especially soccer, above academics, he still wants to live up to the ideal Asian students excel. He regularly tells himself, “I should be making all ‘As’ because I’m Asian.” A first generation Korean American, Woo uses a sports analogy to explain: “If your team is the better one, you work harder to live up to the expectation. It always made me strive to become better,” just knowing people expect it.

The pressure cooker

Who expects the most of Asian students? Mom and Dad. From a very early age, many Asian parents push their kids to get ahead in their studies. By the time Isaac Woo entered his Baton Rouge gifted and talented kindergarten, he already had a one-year academic headstart over his non-Asian classmates.

“Mostly when the children are young, the parents push. Once they get to high school, they are already used to this kind of work,” says Pei-Yu Ren, who immigrated to Baton Rouge from China with her husband, LSU professor Jonathan Chen, in 1995. Her daughter, Diwen, now at Texas A&M, graduated from Baton Rouge Magnet High in 2004.

When Diwen was in elementary and middle school, Ren dug up extra work for her. That’s simply the Asian way.

Vicky Valsaraj’s mother, Nisha Valsaraj, who came here from India, also feels her kids need a little extra. Right now, it’s geography for her third grader, Vinay. “I’m making him go through maps and learn one country at a time,” she says.

And 13-year-old Thomas Wu has plenty on his plate.

In addition to the LSU summer math course, an online writing course through Stanford University gives Thomas an extra four to six hours of schoolwork a week. Add to that two hours of Chinese school every weekend, along with tennis and clarinet lessons, and that’s a whole lot of learning.

At what price?

All that pressure to perform can come with a price. Studies point to high depression rates among Asian American women. Asian families constitute between 1% and 2% of Baton Rouge clinical social worker Stanley Mong’s private practice—not many, but in keeping with the Asian population in town. Without fail, he says, all his Asian cases involve parents concerned their kids are not achieving in school.

“They all want to know why their children are not doing better,” Mong says. “They do tend to put pressure, to say, ‘He is not good enough.’ Under-achieving is not very well accepted.”

And the kids? “They tell you they can’t sleep,” Mong reveals. “They’re worried how they’ll do on a test—‘If I don’t do well, my parents will yell at me.’”

But Wu’s older brother, Steven, does not know any Asian friends or colleagues who have folded under pressure. Personally, he relishes in it. “For a long time I would think, ‘Why do I have to be perfect?’ Others got sub-par grades, and their parents didn’t care. But after a while, I expected it of myself,” he says.

Baton Rouge High’s Monica Jeong echoes Wu. Her parents may have pushed in the past, but now she’s the one in the driver’s seat. “You have no idea how many times my friends and I talk about what we might’ve done if we hadn’t cared about grades,” she says. “But we all know if given a second chance, we wouldn’t do it any differently. There’s something inside of us that makes us ambitious.”

A competitive nature

That ambition may be driven by the intense competition within the Asian community.

“All Asian families compare how well the kids do,” Ren says. “There’s a very close competition among the kids.” At Baton Rouge High, Ren would see daughter Diwen compete with Asian classmates over who could take the most advanced placement level courses.

Baton Rouge Magnet High Principal Nan Greer hates to talk in terms of race or culture. “It’s not to say we don’t have Caucasian or African American students who aren’t diligent students. All of our students are successful. But the Asian culture as a whole is very competitive,” she admits. “The Asian students know before any other student what is needed to be valedictorian or salutatorian.”

Nisha Valsaraj explains in her home state of Kerala, India, a 100% literacy rate prevails. “That’s why you have to compete. In India and China, there’s high population. If you want to succeed, you have to do well.”

Try having a conversation with Robert Wu about which Baton Rouge schools have top-tier science clubs and competitive math teams, which schools have the most national merit finalists. Even a diligent parent can feel like a slacker by comparison. But for Wu, this information comes easily. When Chinese parents gather socially, conversation is dominated by talk of academic opportunities for their kids. But the competition can be a problem. “We often compare our kids to others,” Wu admits. “We’ll say, ‘So-and-so’s kid got into Harvard.’ We try to turn our kid into something they are not.”

A matter of survival

But for many Asian kids, there’s one last, powerfully emotional academic motivator that may trump all the others: their parents’ example. The academic diligence of the previous generation in many cases had a high stakes pay-off: admission into the U.S. With this precedent, the power of education becomes indisputable—particularly among first and second-generation immigrants.

“The kids know that if you don’t have a high education, it’s very difficult to get to America. The way to come here is with a high degree,” says Ren.

“For most of us, our education is either a master’s in electrical engineering, a chemical engineer, something like that. We want our children to do the same,” Nisha Valsaraj adds.

Many Asians also have brought a different educational standard from back home—and they don’t feel it’s being matched between the morning and afternoon school bell. According to Robert Wu, in Taiwan, school does not end until 4:45 p.m. An extended summer break is unheard of—students pack in at least 40 more school days every year than they do here.

“Asian families here view education as a ticket to success—the way to survive,” Wu says.

You don’t have to be a Wu, Woo, or Vu to get some mileage out of that message.