Pages

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Dissecting the Tiger Mother

I had a conversation with a close Vietnamese friend who admitted one thing which knocked me cold and silent: "I hate my mom."

Mind you, she is 24, not 15. And her mom is that traditional Asian-American parent that Yale law professor Amy Chua wrote so favorably about in her article in the "Washington Post," entitled "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior." The slightly hyperbolic and seemingly article, a snippet from Chua's book, "Hymn of the Tiger Mother," was about the values of Chinese parenting.

Of course, when Chua said Chinese parenting, she should have said Asian instead, because her painful descriptions of her daughters not being allowed to participate in school plays and sleepovers, of her calling them 'garbage,' rang true with parents that I know who, while not Chinese, are definitely traditionally Asian.

I have previously stated that I love my parents. My overbearing, sometimes contradictory, ambitious, optimistic, maddeningly traditionally Asian parents. Yet while I admire their resilience in raising four girls, in a land where both of them spoke stunted English and worked minimum-wage jobs, I also see their flaws. That's one of the amazing things that comes with age and not living at home.

I was not raised as strictly as Chua seems to raise her kids. My parents, while they demanded filial piety and high grades, also let my sisters and I choose our own extracurricular activities. In high school, I was captain of the color guard team in high school while my sister Thao (closest to me in age - 6 years) ruled the debate team.

And they have been wholeheartedly supportive of my decision to become a journalist (imagine my surprise when my mother asks me if I'm going to be a film critic, I had no idea she knew what that was).

But there are times when that strict Asian parenting bubbles to overflow.

Case in point: Thao's wedding. She wanted a destination wedding in Hawaii. My dad responded, loudly, with, "I will disown you." Her wedding ended up being in Orange County and more than half of the guest-list were my parents friends. Mind you, these friends have already came to my older sisters' weddings. As for my sister, let's just say she actively dislikes looking at her wedding pictures.

Yet that is the most extreme example of how overbearing Asian-style parenting can become. It's much like how Amy Chua, in the excerpt, threatens to burn her daughter, Louisa's, stuffed animals until the girl could master a difficult piano piece.

But there is a positive aspect which I agree with Chua on:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up.

I can attest to that and I agree completely. What my parents have taught me, and what I have seen in their lifestyle, is I am not entitled to success, that I have to work hard for it. It's a direct contrast to the American mentality, which, like Mama Rose in the musical "Gypsy," always shouts, "Starting now it's going to be my turn!" That feeling that success is due to you, thinking that any amount of work is enough in order to ensure success.

Asian parenting teaches a mentality where you take nothing for granted and be aware that any fortune that is bestowed onto you is 1) a result of hard work and dedication and 2) can easily be taken away. It's a hard life lesson that is instilled into us at a very early age, and is a helping balm against the disappointments and rejections that come our way.

Furthermore, it is also an attitude which parallels that old Wild West/John Wayne notion of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and earning your keep through gritty hard work. Except for Asian-Americans, such keep is through education, not physical labor.

David Brooks of the "New York Times" wrote in his response that:

Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.

This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from by making them rush home to hit the homework table.


I spent a majority of my teenage years feeling awkward. Though I am not saying this is a problem which primarily plagues Asian Americans. Yet it is a problem that befalls anyone who places more emphasis on personal success over teamwork. It is plight that anyone who places more value and time on books, computers and video games over human interaction.

And it is a hard lesson, made all the harder by the fact that you cannot learn how to interact with other people from a book. Then you eventually come to the realization that your life is only rich because of the people who surrounds you, something I learned as I gradually got older.

But it was a long journey of realization. It came after years upon years of awkwardness and loneliness, and even into adulthood. Up into that point, I felt like I was only defined by how many A's I got or how many jobs I placed onto myself and succeeded in doing. Like all my worth as a person were determined by marks on a piece of paper. It's was an emptiness that lacked any warmth. And until just very recently, I never realized why, because I was never taught to value relationships with people, only to value my intellectual response to a book or a hard math problem.

So in the end, neither side is right or wrong, or good or bad. And I think that is where Amy Chua went wrong in the article. She asserted that the Chinese method, which brought about more A's on the report card and success in music, was better. Of course, she did not state it outright but she did end her article with the assertion that Chinese parenting imbue kids "with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away."

Of course such an overarching, harsh statement would lead to criticism. In fact, it practically invites it (it's also helped her book sales immensely).

But while there have been articles upon articles criticizing Chua and the Chinese "tough love approach." Such criticisms are misguided and are just as polarizing in tone as the original article.

In actuality, both the Eastern and the Western version, has positive and negative repercussions on a child. And as with anything in parenting, its hard to compartmentalize the pros and cons into a value scale. More than that, it's also disrespectful to the children who grew up under any of these parenting styles, who are now being compared to each other like jewels at a pawn shop. 'No, this one's better, no that one's better,' while forgetting that we are all functioning, successful adults and while everyone is not completely scarred, they're not completely wholesome either.

As the poet Philip Larkin once wrote: "They fuck you up, your mom and dad/They may not mean to but they do." Only until you're older do you realize how they did it and how it has affected you. Because while my 24-year-old friend may admit that she hates her mother, I can't help but think, "Who hasn't at one point?"

No comments:

Post a Comment