Traces of the Asian tutoring industry have emerged in the United States after each wave of immigration from countries like China and South Korea, says Pyong Gap Min, a sociology professor at Queens College in the City University of New York. They began in the 1960s, Min says, after the repeal of longstanding exclusionary immigration laws — but it was in the 1980s that cities like New York first saw a notable presence of supplemental educational centers, following a swell of migration from China, Korea and South Asia. Min considers the test-prep centers of Flushing offshoots of their origin countries’ rigorous “cram schools,” called bǔ xí bān in China and hagwon in South Korea. This rigor is seen as necessary to keep up with national test-based systems like China’s, where a single exam determines university placement. “It’s Confucian to emphasize your children’s education,” Min says. “You go to China, Korea and Taiwan, there’s after-school programs that they transplanted here.”

The preparation certainly pays off; Asian students from varying backgrounds are now a majority in New York’s most competitive public schools. Stuyvesant is three-quarters Asian, and Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech’s shares are over 60 percent. This has come with its share of controversy; a federal complaint, filed by a coalition of advocacy groups in 2012, argued that the high-stakes, single-exam admissions process has a discriminatory impact on black and Latino children (who may find fewer resources and opportunities to prepare for it), and should consider a wider set of factors, like previous grades, interviews or teacher recommendations. (The Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights announced that it would open an investigation, though the current status of that investigation is unclear. Only the New York State Legislature — not New York City itself — can change the admissions policy for the schools.)

But David Lee — a Brooklyn Technical High School class of 1978 alumnus — argues that students at the three most competitive specialized schools are not necessarily economically privileged: About 40 to 60 percent of them qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Lee is a leader of Coalition Edu, a group that defends the test-based admissions policy, joining a chorus of former students who say cultural values and an exceptional work ethic have pushed Asians of all income groups to excel in the specialized high school system.

Jennifer Lee, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, says such perceptions of Asian exceptionalism percolate in both liberal and conservative circles, with conservatives using Asian success as a main point in arguing against affirmative-action policies. But that shouldn’t suggest, she says, that other minorities don’t value hard work or education. She argues in “The Asian American Achievement Paradox,” her 2015 book with Min Zhou, that much of Asian-Americans’ educational attainment actually stems from a hyperselective immigration policy: A 2015 census report found that a majority of Chinese immigrants have college degrees, a distinction matched by fewer than one-third of Americans as a whole and only 16 percent of the population in China itself.

The fortunes of educated Asian immigrants become what’s known as “ethnic capital,” a stock of knowledge and resources that can trickle down — through networks ranging from test-prep centers to religious institutions to ordinary family and social connections in immigrant enclaves — and benefit less established families as well. According to David Lee, demand for supplemental classes is higher for Asian immigrant families that are not as wealthy: “They’re hungrier,” he says. “They need to have this as a steppingstone.” And since they’re often utterly unfamiliar with the American college-admissions process, having obtained degrees overseas or not at all, test-prep schools can be an essential tool. “So working-class families sacrifice what they have,” he says.

Join Wang still remembers the pressure of the city test in eighth grade, which had everyone competing for admission to Stuyvesant. He felt nervous during the beginning and the end of the exam and believes he was too careless in the middle. Rushing through without checking his work is, he says, “a pretty big problem for me.” Early the next year, when scores were revealed, his middle-school Spanish class became a flurry of children opening letters and discovering their test scores. Wang read “551” on his own letter — just a few points short, he’d later learn, of a score that could have won him a place at Stuyvesant. He was able to hold his tears back until a classmate noticed his downcast face and offered a hug. He politely declined. That’s when the sobs came. “It was kind of like anarchy,” he recalls. “They made sure to give it to us the last class in case this happened.”

The conversation with his parents that night seemed anticlimactic in comparison. “I got into Bronx Science,” he said, as if confessing to a small disobedience. “Oh, it’s not the end of the world,” his dad responded. But Wang couldn’t help feeling disappointed. “You know, they’re my parents,” he says. “I don’t want to make them sad or anything.”