When it comes to parenting, the Chinese seem to produce children who display academic excellence, musical mastery, and professional success — or so the stereotype goes.”
I’m sure the Tiger Mother herself did not expect the torrent of fury unleashed by her January 8 essay in the Wall Street Journal titled “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” published a couple of days in advance of her book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.”
Amy Chua’s brutally honest account of her strict, immigrant-valued parenting style triggered a tidal wave of outrage and even prompted some death threats against the Yale law school professor-turned-parenting author.
What sparked the outcry? “A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids,” Chua begins in the excerpt. “They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too.”
She describes an extreme parenting style that included forcing her then 7-year-old daughter to practice the piano for hours, withholding water and bathroom breaks until she mastered the passage. She describes the screaming, hair-tearing explosion that would happen if a Chinese child got a B and explains that Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe their child can get them. She lists some of the things her two daughters, now teenagers, were never allowed to do:
1. Attend a sleepover
2. Have a playdate
3. Be in a school play
4. Complain about not being in a school play
5. Watch TV or play computer games
6. Choose their own extracurricular activities
7. Get any grade less than an A
8. Not be the number 1 student in every subject expect gym and drama
9. Play any instrument other than the piano or violin
10. Not play the piano or violin
I first learned of the article from my writer friend Janet S.Wong, who said “you can substitute ‘Korean’ for ‘Chinese.’” Janet lives in Hopewell with her husband and son, a high school senior. The daughter of an immigrant Chinese father and an immigrant Korean mother, Janet is something of an Asian superachiever herself, having graduated summa cum laude from UCLA and then from Yale Law School. After practicing corporate law in Hollywood, she decided to follow her heart and make a dramatic career change. Today, she is the highly acclaimed author of children’s books and poems and has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey show and the Hallmark Channel. (www.janetwong.com)
Like all parents Janet and I often question the way we’re raising our kids. But both of us have vestiges of the Tiger Mother growling within and that means we carry the added insecurity of the cultural baggage that comes with FOP — Fresh Off the Plane — values.
Hey, Janet, we need to write a different version of this article, I said, and call it “The Tiger Mother — Evolved.” Janet’s choice would read: “The Schizophrenic Asian Mother: Congratulating Yourself on Being Enlightened, While Scolding Yourself that You’re Just Doing a Halfway Job.”
The article did force two distinct pieces of my own life to flash in front of me: my life as the assimilated immigrant parent of three westernized, half-Caucasian children, and my life as the immigrant child of immigrant parents.
On Chua’s first point: Attending a sleepover. I can count on one hand how many sleepovers I was allowed to attend as a child. As for how many sleepovers I had myself? None. Conversely, in our family, as the youngest of three children, Will was having friends sleep over starting at the age of three. He considers it a rip-off if he doesn’t have a sleepover every so often. I acknowledge sleepovers can be disruptive to, well, sleep, but many consider them a rite of American childhood, and I agree.
Point 2: Not be allowed to have a playdate? My kids have grown up with playdates since most of their friends have lived in far away neighborhoods. I don’t know if Chua means that her kids aren’t allowed to play with other kids, period, in light of all the work and practice that needs to be done. But all work and no play makes kids dull and frankly, these days, contributes to the obesity epidemic.
Points 9 and 10: I still don’t understand why Asian parents want their children to play only the piano and violin, but I can attest to the fact that I was only allowed to play those instruments and my brother was allowed variation with the cello. It was my heart’s desire to play the flute, but my parents wouldn’t let me. When I asked my mother recently, as an adult, why not, she explained that she and my dad worried that I would become light-headed from blowing air, could have fallen down, knocked my head, and gotten hurt. I am still not convinced that I believe this explanation but it is the only one I’ve been given.
Backtracking to Point 3: Not being allowed to be in a school play. When I was a freshman in high school, unbeknownst to my parents, I put my ballet lessons to good use and tried out as a dancer in “Can-Can,” and I made it. My parents were furious. Why are you wasting valuable time you could use to study just to play such a small role?
They did not understand how cool I felt to belong to a new group of friends that included the popular girls and the football jocks. They did not understand how much fun it was to rehearse and then hang out afterwards. Their fears were not realized. My grades didn’t fall. I didn’t become a delinquent. But I made lots of new friends. My parents came for one performance but not with much enthusiasm. It was my first and last high school play.
Conversely, when Molly won the lead role in a Shakespeare play last spring, our entire family flew out to California to see her. Will is playing the role of Mr. Bucket in Community Middle School’s production of Willy Wonka and you can bet we will be sitting front and center to watch.
Point 7: Get any grade less than an A. My parents expected straight As. If I came home with a 98 or 99 on a test, they were more likely to ask why didn’t you get 100, what did you get wrong? If Will comes home with a 98 or 99, I am ecstatic. I’ll still ask what he got wrong, just to make sure he understands all the material, but not because I’m upset that the grade is less than perfect. I remember having a perfect report card in second grade all the way until the last marking period, when I received a B in penmanship. I was so scared about disappointing my parents that I lied and told them we never received the report card. Of course they found it hidden in the back of my desk and I was punished. When I “failed” my eye test in fourth grade, I was terrified to tell my parents. I had never failed any kind of test before.
One of Chua’s children, her elder Tiger Daughter, responded to the furor over her mother’s parenting choices, defending her super-strict style in an article in the New York Post. “No outsider can know what our family is really like,” writes 18-year-old Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld. “They don’t hear us cracking up over each other’s jokes. They don’t see us eating our hamburgers with fried rice. They don’t know how much fun we have.”
Parenting doesn’t come with an instruction manual. But no matter where we are from, what our culture dictates, we want to raise the best children we can. While there are no hard and fast rules, parenting should be about raising our kids with love and encouragement, not disparagement or punishment. I know the Tiger Mother has good reasons for her rules, and her kids seem to be turning out OK. But for all that accomplishment, are they happy? It might depend on what yardstick they are using to measure it.
Brossman wrote a feature-length article on stereotypes associated with Asian achievement levels in the May 14, 2004, edition of the WW-P News. A link to that article is posted on the News’ website, www.wwpinfo.com.
