by Allison Lee
If you were born and raised in Malaysia (or, to generalize, any Southeast Asian country), the title of this article comes as no stranger to you. You’ve either uttered the phrase to a younger person, overheard a conversation that applied the phrase, or you’ve simply been at the receiving end of the four seemingly harmless yet dream-crushing words.
“Why you no doctor?” is the way our elder generation expresses their disdain for when a student ceremoniously announces their decision to pursue a subject that lies outside of STEM. There are many variations of this ambiguous question, such as “You really sure you want to study humanities ah?”, “Creative writing can earn money meh?”, “Eh, so-and-so’s kid got a scholarship to study medicine at Harvard you know?”. No matter how the question is formatted, the existing letters seem to dance around dangerously, taunting the person to whom the question is being asked, lowering their worth for not sticking to the supposedly profiting and prestigious selection of STEM subjects.
As someone who studied science in high school, I have had the question thwarted at me for as many times as our country has undergone lockdown in the past year, which is to say, a lot. I knew science wasn’t up my alley the moment I was handed my graduation certificate. I looked back at nights spent memorizing chemical color changes, hours wasted on writing explanatory essays about mitosis, and brain cells squandered on calculating the pressure exerted on Ahmad’s submarine carrying a hundred watermelons, and ran in the opposite direction.
Of course, that is an exaggeration. I’ve always been fascinated by politics and economics and knew it was an ocean of knowledge I’d want to baptize myself in as compared to biology, chemistry, or physics. Yet, upon my long overdue decision, I was met with:
“You’re going into WHAT field?”
“Were you not in the science stream?”
“But you did okay in science!”
“Are you sure you can handle the switch to humanities?”
“Look at all your friends in medicine and engineering! Why wouldn’t you do the same?”
It saddens me to say that what one might imagine is a compliment toward science skills is in actuality a display of a loss of confidence in the student for venturing outside of chartered territories. Even though the elder generation would say “let the children pursue what they’re interested in” during Chinese New Year conversations, they are still attracted to the notion of hanging their kids’ Bachelor of Science diploma on their walls of fame. I find the elder generation’s obsession with STEM to be particularly intriguing, and it has become a recurring joke among Malaysians, if not the entire Southeast Asia, so let’s get to the bottom of this phenomenon.
First and foremost, I believe parents push their children into studying STEM subjects because of how lucrative the field has grown to become over the past two decades.
Simply by glancing at this table of mid-career median salaries ten years into the field obtained from Visual Capitalist, we see that nine out of the top ten paying degrees fall under the STEM umbrella.
It goes without saying that our elderly wish for us to fare well when we leave the family nest, and working a high-paying job is a huge contributing factor towards ‘faring well.’ Moreover, the practice of providing for your parents is commonplace in Asian countries, and with the incremental rise in living costs, the responsibility isn’t waning anytime soon.
Going on a tangent, aside from the Malaysian obsession with STEM, we also have an obsession with catapulting our kids overseas for chance at a better education and brighter future. I will not attempt to negate or devalue the efforts our parents put into gathering a college fund, but most parents believe that since they are investing so much into their child’s future, they want, in return, a guarantee that their child will graduate with a worry-free life—which is to say the kid wouldn’t have to vex about not getting a job. I cannot say that I fully grasp or understand the mindset of parents for I am currently a mere university student with no dollar to my name, but I can see where they’re coming from. After all, which parent does not want the best for their kids?
Most of our parents have lived through financial turmoil and recessionary periods and had to learn their way of upward mobility. Pair that with their experience in the workforce, and there is no denying that they understand the value of a dollar more than we do. They know all the blood, sweat, and tears that go into earning every cent; more than anything, they have been drilled with the notion that education is the way out of poverty, and they would be correct. However, we often let slip our minds that not everybody pursues tertiary education for higher pay; some of us truly enjoy the subject we have chosen, and couldn’t care less how many zeros are on the monthly cheque.
For reasons of filial piety and the pressure to be successful, many students end up pursuing a degree that would satisfy their parents over one that would satisfy their personal thirst for a particular field. In fact, I have friends who intend to major in their interest but have to double in another ‘practical’ subject to appease their parents. Is this trade-off truly worth it? I suppose the answer to this question differs from person to person.
Second of all is the Asian competitiveness, better known as ‘kia-su’ (怕输) in Malaysia. STEM subjects are comparatively more objective than the arts. There is only ever one correct response that goes on the answer sheet. This, then, has become a measure of scholastic success for many students, beginning as early as in the middle grade. Government schools in Malaysia classify their students according to grades rather than having a mix of intellects and talents. The high achievers are therefore stuck together in one class, compelled to compete and compare grades with one another until burnout becomes a matter of when and not if.
While you are in STEM, it’s not too difficult to gauge where you stand amongst your peers—just look at the percentage score written in red. In arts, where the essence of the subjects is to be subjective and to inject personal opinions and arguments, the tables are turned. There are no fixed means of comparison. If you are overly situated to the objectivity of STEM subjects, it might not be a small feat converting over to arts and humanities where everything is up for debate instead of having a satisfactory numerical answer.
The traditional mindset that ‘success is measured by what you study and the grades you obtain’ reduces us as a cluster of people to a monolithic group and feeds into the stereotypes painted for us, which brings me to my third point:
The fact of the matter is that we tend to—whether accidentally or purposefully—internalize the stereotypes about us. Asians are good at math. Asian not Bsian. These are just a few of the many backhanded compliments hurled toward our community. The assumption that Asians are good at math is not a damaging one, but if we step into these stereotypical shoes, we will end up trying to live up to the expectations set by the West when there is no need for it at all.
The East is known for its workaholic 9-to-5 culture, whereas the West accepts work with more leisurely hands. Being branded as ‘overachievers’ triggers a certain burden to fall on our shoulders and whether or not we care enough to attend to those burdens is a whole other matter.
All of these factors and more coalesce into a dilemma for the child: Do they abide by their parents’ expectations and graduate into the workforce’s desk job, or do they defy the wishes of their elders and enter the veiled world of arts and humanities?
So as not to make this seem like a Southeast Asian-centric problem, we are also witnessing similar patterns arising in the West, where kids are ushered into the study of science rather than, say, anthropology or music appreciation. There are even talks of defunding art and humanities colleges and channeling those funds into STEM research and development programs. In a world dominated and advanced by fluctuating economies and exponential growth of technology, there is strong competition between countries in terms of STEM. After all, whoever houses the most cutting-edge technology would automatically be working their way up on international ladders.
Since the world is, unfortunately, a power-hungry system, it comes as no surprise that institutions and influential individuals are trying to advocate for the study of STEM. So, where does that leave us with the arts and humanities?
To belittle the arts and humanities is to shed off a good part of our history. It is ignorance. It is a refusal to learn from the past. Art imitates life in more ways than imaginable, and it is through beauty and suffering that the best works of art are produced. If we do not appreciate or value these beauties and sufferings, we are invalidating two key aspects that make us human. Should we forsake the arts altogether, we would then be reduced to androids.
Many of our elders would argue that venturing into film, photography, music, drama, or art is a complete waste of time. They would argue that arts have been commodified; that our quality of life would improve with science instead of the arts.
Firstly, to all my fellow creatives and art-pursuers, if you have a feverish love for what you’re doing, it is never a waste of time. Second of all, to the people who truly think that diving deeper into the study of arts is equivalent to burning time and money, think about all the time you’ve spent watching Netflix to take a break, all the songs that have carried you through your best and worst moments, all the poems that have articulated thoughts you could not put into words, and all the museum paintings in gilded frames that hold our history and myths. Where would you be without them?
As for the importance of humanities, I’ll take a page out of my book to explain. My major is Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE); pretentious as it may sound, bear with me.
Philosophy goes beyond comprehending what dead old men in tunics have said centuries ago. It prompts us to be honest with ourselves and the world whose oxygen we take in. Between the self, the other, and the world, the self is no doubt the hardest to decipher and sometimes even the hardest to love. It is the study that seeks out fundamental truths and helps us come to terms with the fact that not every question can or has to be answered.
Economics, contrary to popular belief, is not the study of how we spend money. To be accurate, economics magnifies how we make daily choices. Sure, we’re going to spend a boatload of time looking at production, distribution, and consumption, but we’re also going to beg the question: How do we interact with items of value, and how do we justify that interaction?
Requiring the least introduction is politics: the study of governance, relations, power, and making agreements. It is the nitty-gritty that most elderlies would advise we stay away from, as I have been told numerous times.
Throughout my primary education, I did not find myself asking questions about the human anatomy or centrifugal forces; instead, I wondered why we prefer some products over the other even if they are similar in function, why we all have different decisions in the trolley problem, why sexism and racism and the gender pay gap still exist, and most importantly, how I could find the answers to these questions.
Humanities and arts do not run on deadpan formulas. They are made possible because everybody has a different response written on the answer sheet. Each field answers questions that the other cannot; they work as wheels turning in opposite directions so that we never stray far from our values. If science is pushing us to the edge, then ethics bring us back; if medicine is defying our nature, then the arts remind us that everything good must come to an end.
A monologue extract from Dead Poets Society sings: “We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for”.
This defenestration and devaluing of arts and humanities will only prove to be damaging in the coming years. Technology creates the future. Art reminisces the past. Humanities keep us in check. A marriage between science and art, fused with humanities, is what sustains our ‘now’s.
So, the next time someone asks you “Why you no doctor?”, just say:
“I am becoming a doctor—society’s doctor.”