So you’re a 17 year old high school student, your GPA is 4.0, you’ve scored 2150 out of a possible 2400 on the SAT (something you call “pretty low”), and you’re filling out your application to Harvard.  You get to the section where you have to check off your race.  Your father is of Norwegian ancestry, and your mother immigrated from Taiwan.  Your name is Lanya Olmstead.

What box do you check?

“I didn’t want to put Asian down,” explained Olmstead, “because my mom told me there’s discrimination against Asians in the application process.”

Olmstead checked “white.”

Could this be a case of reverse affirmative action?  Of Asians being punished just because they’re doing too damn well?

Many Asian Americans are convinced that it’s harder for them to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges.  Asians make up approximately 6% of the U.S. population, but here in my neck of the woods, for example, at UC Berkeley, Asians make up 43% of the student body.  Whites are the next highest group, at 32%.

Could there be a backlash against the 43%?

Olmstead, by the way, got into Harvard.  The freshman is also a member of HAPA, the Half Asian People’s Association.

Still, her advice to high school seniors of mixed descent: “check whatever race is not Asian.”

Those who believe there is a bias say that Asian applicants are judged against other high achieving Asians, rather than against all applicants, which suggests there is a quota in place for Asians.  Now I’m too lazy to look up the law on this, but I would think that in this day and age, any quota system would have to occur on a wink-wink-star-chamber-old-boys-network unspoken – and definitely unwritten – basis.

Which is entirely possible – I’m the type who believes in most semi-plausible conspiracies.

Amalia Halikias was born to a Greek father and Chinese mother.  Like Olmstead, she also checked “white” on her college applications.  “I didn’t want to be written off as one of the 1.4 billion Asians that were applying,” she said.  And even though her mother places a high value on embracing and preserving her Chinese heritage, she was “extremely encouraging” of her daughter’s decision to check “white” on the application.

Halikias is currently a freshman at Yale.

For Jodi Balfe, who was born in Korea to a Korean mother and white father, and who immigrated to the states when she was three, checking the “white” box was not an option.  Even though her high school counselor, teachers and friends advised her to do it, Balfe “felt very uncomfortable with the idea of trying to hide half of my ethnic background.  It’s been a major influence on how I developed as a person.  It felt like selling out, like selling too much of my soul.”

Balfe, like Olmstead, also got into Harvard.

Halikias sees no sell out here. “If you know you’re going to be discriminated against,” she says, “it’s absolutely justifiable to not check the Asian box.”

The decisions made by these three driven young women beg the question, what does it really mean to call yourself Asian?

And getting down to brass tacks: if you were multi-racial, and your last name didn’t give away your Asian heritage, what box would you check?