Stress Among High School High-Achievers: Filmmaker Debbie Lum on "Try Harder!"

Everybody in the San Francisco Bay Area knows about Lowell High School. Founded in 1856 and the alma mater of Broadway star Carol Channing, scientist Dian Fossey, and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Lowell is among California’s highest-ranked public high schools. Up until 2020, eighth graders seeking admission to this academic magnet school needed near-perfect grades and high scores on either the California-administered standardized test or the Lowell entrance exam.

When I was admitted to Lowell as an eighth grader, I was ecstatic. It felt like a major achievement. In the end, however, I chose to attend a very different kind of school. My boarding school is just as selective as Lowell (the acceptance rate is in the single digits) but it has less than 250 students — tiny compared to Lowell, which has nearly 3,000. The demographics are different, too. While my school is predominantly white and wealthy (I’m part of a small cohort of Latino students on scholarship), Lowell is 59% Asian and has many first and second generation immigrant students.

I first heard about the documentary “Try Harder!” from one of my many friends at Lowell. When I finally watched “Try Harder!” – which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in early 2021 – I was struck not by the differences between Lowell and my high school, but by the similarities. Just like my fellow seniors, the Lowell 12th graders followed by filmmaker Debbie Lum’s crew are immensely and immeasurably stressed. And what started out as a film documenting a slice of Asian American life in San Francisco quickly turned into a call to action to improve student mental health and adopt a more balanced approach to college admissions. (You can watch “Try Harder!” today on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube, Spectrum, Redbox, and Vudu and learn about the film’s impact campaign here.)

Debbie Lum is an award-winning documentary filmmaker based in San Francisco. Debbie and I spoke about “Try Harder!”, her background, her takeaways from visiting Lowell High School, and the stress around college admissions on the day after I submitted the last of my own college applications. You can read the interview below.

When and why did you decide to pursue documentary film as a career? Did you have any other career aspirations earlier in your life?

I always wanted to make films, but originally I thought I would make fiction. I didn't even know what a documentary was. The first film I ever worked on was called "The Joy Luck Club." (It was released in 1993, but only really gained wide recognition recently through "Crazy Rich Asians", the only other major fictional film with an all-Asian-American cast.) Through "The Joy Luck Club", I met a filmmaker named Spencer Nakasako who became my role model and eventually my mentor. He’s the one who really changed my views and ideas about my filmmaking and my goals. I turned to documentaries because I realized that I wanted to tell a story about the Asian American community — about my community — and, at that time, it was near to impossible to do it in a fictional setting. That's how I started with documentary filmmaking.

How do you pick the subject matter for your documentaries? Do you have a mission or focus in considering topics or a goal you are trying to achieve through your films?

I've actually always told films about the Asian American experience -- they are all the films I've ever worked on. There's an old adage that says “you write what you know,” and I know something about those stories. They're true to my life. They’re my stories. Ultimately, that's always been my fixation: to look for stories that are both specific and universal at the same time.

A lot of documentary filmmakers use their art to highlight issues that they feel need to be addressed or changed. But your team went a step further to actually be that change through your Impact Campaign. What is the goal of the Impact Campaign? What cause do you spearhead? What has the public response to the campaign been?

First off, the reception has been amazing. In terms of the Impact Campaign, I strongly feel that the intersection of mental health and race is an important area that our nation and world needs to examine. So, the mission of our impact campaign is to center students at the heart of college admissions through promoting mental health and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work. We’ve been taking the film to community groups like schools, parent groups, universities, and tutoring centers and we’ll have in-depth discussions about the things that our story dives deep into, namely the way that identity gets caught up in brand name and achievement and about how that's a very narrow definition of success. Today, most people look at high school as this giant failure. Ian Wang, one of the students in our film, says that in this drive for success, nobody considers happiness. And he’s not alone: We hear the voices of so many kids who are telling us that high school is just a chore.

The data shows that high-achieving high school students -- who, by the way, are going to be our future leaders of the world -- have three times the amount of anxiety as the average teenager. High-achieving high schoolers have officially been named an at-risk group for anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues like substance abuse. These issues might not necessarily show up when you're a senior in high school, or when you are getting into college, but they will -- they will show up eventually and they have lasting repercussions. To me, that's been the moral of “Try Harder!”.

Another big goal of the Impact Campaign is to raise the visibility of Asian Pacific Islander (API) stories in general. It’s a concept very core to me as a filmmaker and to my storytelling. Asian American folks have lived in the shadows of our American history even though we've been in America for three-hundred years. We are part of the whole, but we are completely invisible at the same time. For example, there are tons of movies and TV shows about doctors, but you rarely see a doctor who's Asian (except for Sandra Oh, of course.) It’s misleading, false, and unreal -- when you call up the phone for your stomach ache, your doctor is probably going to be Asian. Representation can be a tool of oppression. We need to have a conversation about educational achievement that includes Asian American students, because, today, they’re a dominant group.

What surprised you the most about Lowell High School? What did you expect before filming and how was that different from what you actually encountered?

Going into the filming process, I had heard all the stereotypes of Lowell being a really competitive place where kids are really stressed out. And that’s true — but I found that there's also a real sense of comradery. Lowell is like a bootcamp; students go through it together and once they’ve gotten through it they're part of an extensive, inclusive family of fellow alums.

Interestingly, the people who graduate from Lowell High School end up having much more of an impression from high school than they do from their college. I know Lowell graduates who went on to Harvard, for example, and they still talk about Lowell. They don’t talk about Harvard.

Working on this film made me realize the level of work that a student has to go through today. I was completely blown away, especially since that's not a quality necessarily specific to Lowell -- students everywhere are required to put in so many more academic hours than they’ve ever had to before. I would go as far as to say that many high school students are sort of professional students. It's like a job. I was taken aback by the college process today. You can read the headlines and statistics online and learn that when I was applying to college, for example, 50% of students would be accepted. Today, everybody is going to face at least one rejection. To actually witness the impact of that on a teenager -- to see them go through rejection -- is really brutal. Nobody comes out unscathed.

Have you stayed in touch with the subjects of your film? Where are they now? What have they told you about the experience of their senior year being captured on film? What do they wish their younger selves had known back then?

The students have all tagged along on our film release journey and they participate in our panel discussions. When one of our featured students, Alvan, saw the film for the first time, he said he wished he could go back in time and give that high school version of himself a big hug and tell him it would all be okay. And, in the end, it was all okay -- most of our students have now graduated from college (except for Shea, who’s now a senior in college). For example, Ian is a teacher now. After Emory, he joined Teach for America in the Atlanta area and is teaching at a high school very different from Lowell – It’s a low-income, predominantly African-American school where the kids are worrying about just graduating, not about going off to college.

Would you ever consider sending your own children to Lowell?

The Lowell High School that I filmed had an entrance exam (in the past few years since filming, Lowell has gone through a major upheaval and is in the process of a lot of changes). If my kids could get into Lowell then, sure, I would send them there if that was what they wanted. But I wouldn't ever force my kids to go to Lowell.

Have your views on college admissions changed since making the film? What will you tell your kids about college admissions when the time comes?

I would stress that finding the right school is about finding the right fit more than anything else. That applies to finding the right high school as much as it applies to finding a college. Another of the focuses of our Impact Campaign is the idea of fit over ranking. I spoke to a college coach once and asked about parents, students, and this idea of “fit,” and they just laughed in my face. They told me that nobody thinks about fit anymore — and that's dangerous.

What did you study in college? How did it prepare you for a career in documentary film?

My major was actually Religious Studies. Specifically, my major was East Asian Philosophy. Although my college is known for its film program (which was in its earlier stages when I attended), the major seemed very distant from actual filmmaking. To me, it felt as if the coursework was more about film theory than it was about filmmaking. I could take classes in the department if I wanted to, of course, but I never majored in it.

If you could travel back in time, what advice would you give your 17-year old self? Is that the same advice you would give me now?

I don't really like to give teenagers advice. I feel like high school students get way too much advice. But I will say this: Ultimately, you just have to make your own decisions. You need to have confidence in your own decisions. That can be very hard when you're only 17 (which comes from a fear of failure, so you also need to know that it’s okay to fail). But again – no 17-year-old wants to hear that.

Stills from the production of "Try Harder!". Courtesy of Debbie Lum.