There’s been no shortage of Asian-American news as of late.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter referred to us as “Mandarins” last week, inciting furor online. This past winter, Chinese American groups rose up in a sea of protests seeking to reduce or eliminate punishment for Peter Liang, an Asian-American cop convicted of manslaughter in February regarding the killing of Akai Gurley, an unarmed black man. In addition, the second Asian American centered television show ever, Fresh off the Boat, was partly through its second season run. Despite all that, at UCLA, I’d heard or read nary a response to the Liang trial in particular from any of my friends, both those involved in culturally and ethnically oriented organizations or otherwise. Liang has since been sentenced to 800 hours of community service and five years probation – and no jail time.

To the 2013 UCLA admissions committee, my 17-year-old self seemed destined for integration into the social justice space that is the Community Programs Office. In my application essay, I wrote about how I hated calling myself American. I recounted my yearslong placement into additional elementary school English as a Second Language classes, even when English was my native tongue. In short, I wrote about how it means to be the “other” in U.S. society.

I often feel like my casual musings about the model minority myth or other happenings both online and on campus fall on deaf ears.

Despite mellowing considerably from exoticized, “other”-tinged angst since college applications senior year of high school, the word “American” still felt clumsy on my lips while studying abroad in Europe over this past summer. Local men off the Cote d’Azur in France catcalled, “Ni hao, ni hao.” A man on the bus asked me and another Asian female friend if Hong Kong was in China or Japan. Ah, to be a perpetual foreigner, even abroad.

In reality, however, the admissions committee missed their mark. I committed to the pre-medical track instead. Although the social justice and pre-professional pathways are not mutually exclusive in theory, in reality, they often are. The rigors of the lower division life science prerequisites turned my life into sequential rounds of drinking scalding hot Kerckhoff coffee and staring sadly at textbook pages on Friday nights. Even in the writing of this article, interviews and other research were put on the backburner while I studied over 20 hours a week for the MCAT this past winter.

In my own experience, both the international Asian and Asian-American students have tended away from being "woke," or aware of sociopolitical issues, both pertaining to racial or ethnic issues and other aspects of identity and class. I often feel like my casual musings about the model minority myth or other happenings both online and on campus fall on deaf ears. In fact, while writing my University of California application essay in high school, other Asian students were those who most strongly objected to my identification of myself as a person of color.

At UCLA, the situation hasn’t seemed to fare much better. “I didn’t know you were an activist, Kelly,” remarked one acquaintance over Facebook. The conversation about organic chemistry had taken a detour into my outlook on the privileged experiences of many Asian-American students who grew up in primarily middle class Asian communities and attended Asian-majority high schools. I wouldn’t call myself that, but to this person in particular, even voicing innocent incredulousness at the sheer level of sheltered privilege some of these students had constituted “activism.”

Why don’t Asian Americans on campus care about politics?