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<p>Thanks oldfort, that was going to be my next post.</p>
<p>Today my son told me over the phone that an older Jewish neighbor said to him, “Your mother must have been tough; Chinese mothers are like Jewish mothers, my mother was really tough on me and my father was scared of her.”</p>
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<p>Not sure that’s necessarily true speaking as a Chinese-American with near-native fluency in Mandarin. Depends on the context of the way the words are spoken and the personality of the parent concerned. </p>
<p>My father not only said he would toss out some favorite childhood toys I received that recent Christmas for not starting my homework quickly enough in 5th grade, he actually did it…lock stock and barrel. A reason why when I read Chua’s threats to burn her child’s toys…I thought it was very possible she could have meant it…</p>
<p>It is one reason why my relations with him was rocky well into my late-twenties.</p>
<p>Disagreeing with someone doesn’t necessarily mean one dislikes him or her. Similarly, disagreeing with some aspect of someone’s culture or belief system doesn’t make one a racist. Furthermore, a construct that works well in one society doesn’t always fit as nicely in another. That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with the construct in its original context or at all. Finally, making a generalization about a people group is not always a horrible racist evil. If generalizations about people groups can’t ever be made, then there are a lot of anthropologists out there who are delusional, because they think there’s such a thing as culture. No one ever said culture is 100% unified.</p>
<p>I haven’t read the book, but while I thought that the article was meant to be humorous, I didn’t take it that Chua was lying or exaggerating to the point of total inaccuracy. In my experience, the part about the school play was completely on target. Fun is a perfectly valid reason to do things in American culture, but not so much among the Chinese people I know. That’s not to say they don’t engage in or enjoy fun activities, but simply that in their minds having fun is not adequate justification for spending hours and hours on something.</p>
<p>Ate at PF Chang’s once and thought the food was too bland. Loved the atmosphere, though.</p>
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<p>I’d say that this is more the perception…often quite accurate in most Chinese/Chinese-Americans…and most Americans/people in general IME that they do not have hours and hours of time to spend having fun…regardless of how “fun” is in the eye of the beholder. </p>
<p>Then again, I have known plenty of people…including Chinese/Chinese-Americans who feel the opposite…myself included. I also have plenty of Chinese-born friends who do likewise.</p>
<p>As for the talk of PF Changs…I am too used to eating good Chinese food at home and in NYC’s 3+ Chinatowns. Is it worth the prices they change…even with a $10 gift card?</p>
<p>The (London) Times followed up yesterdays three page excerpt with a two page interview today with Amy Chua, again amply illustrated with photos. I don’t think I can link to it as The Times has gone behind a paywall but Im going to quote from it. The interviewer (who is horrified by her subject in much the same way as most posters here) describes her assignment: Im here to talk to her about her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which chronicles her attempts to raise her children the Chinese way in the United States and to explain why she eventually had to abandon the project, which was founded on a series of rules…</p>
<p>Thats the irony: she had to abandon the project. This is what she calls her Great Retreat. </p>
<p>This is the first Chua-related article Ive read in which she specifically mentions college. Sophia, 18, has just applied for college on the East Coast. While other parents were hiring tutors to write application essays and visiting 30 different institutions, Chua took a back seat. I felt that my work had been done a lot earlier, she says. I just said to Sophia, its your responsibility pick your schools and write your own essay. I have taught you all I have to teach you. </p>
<p>An earlier poster raised the very interesting question as to how Chua would handle children with learning differences. She believes (her method) works with children of all abilities and uses her sister Cindy, who has Downs syndrome, as an example. Cindy, 38, was raised to excel and became an accomplished piano player and won two medals for swimming in the Special Olympics.</p>
<p>Finally, Lulu is interviewed for the article. Shes doing just fine. Realising that she risked losing her daughter, Chua finally backed off and agreed a year ago that she could no longer micromanage her daughters lives. She calls it her Great Retreat. Lulu promptly gave up violin lessons and took up tennis.</p>
<p>There’s an article here that gives more detail as to the Amy/Lulu battle and ultimate outcome:
[Memoir</a> Tells of Strict Chinese Parenting in US - ABC News](<a href=“http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=12578860&page=1]Memoir”>http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=12578860&page=1)</p>
<p>Samuck – I appreciate your efforts to present a different (and more positive) take from the London Times articles – but we really can’t know how the girls are faring on the inside – and they themselves might not know. That is – they may find they run into problems down the line, in college, in relationships, in the workplace. But my guess is that there is a lot of frustration under the surface, especially with the older daughter (as apparently the younger one was able to successfully rebel at age 13).</p>
<p>Again, despite Chua’s characterization, I don’t see this as an issue of “Chinese” parenting – I see it as an issue of a domineering and abusive parent who is unable to cope with imperfection, and was unable to recognize at the outset that her children were separate and unique individuals. There is nothing “Chinese” about many of the rules she set – such as rejecting any musical instrument other than violin or piano. (My guess is those were the two instruments Chua herself had studied, and she was just so much of a control-freak she didn’t want her kids branching out into any area where she didn’t consider herself an expert.)</p>
<p>I’m not really trying to present Chua in a more positive light. I am trying to say that it is a somewhat limited approach to judge a book on the basis of a few excerpts/quotes and I have only offered the Times’ quotes as examples presumably offsetting the WSJ article. </p>
<p>Re wanting the girls to stick with instruments/areas the mother was already comfortable with : "The deal Jed and I struck when we got married was that our children would speak Mandarin and be raised Jewish. I dont speak Mandarin my native dialect is Hokkien Chinese and Jed is not religious in the least, but the arrangement somehow worked. I hired a Chinese nanny to speak Mandarin constantly to Sophia, and we celebrated our first Hanukkah when she was two months old. "</p>
<p>Believe me, I am uncomfortable with the whole reductive ‘Chinese mother/Asian mother’ term and aghast at some of the stereotyping displayed here. Chua herself explains: "Im using the term Chinese mother loosely. I recently met a super-successful white guy, and after comparing notes we decided that his working-class father had definitely been a Chinese mother. I know Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers. "</p>
<p>I guess I am displaying what Chua calls “squeamishness about cultural stereotypes,” but I repeat, I am not happy she uses the Chinese mother term. Dragon Mother? Tiger Mother? That’s OK- that’s the sort of humour that is very evident in The Times articles</p>
<p>Back to Lulu - actually, she rebelled at age 3. One of the funniest scenes has to do with Chua outmaneuvred by her toddler daughter and reduced dto desperately cajoling/bribing her, worried that a neighbour is going to call social services. Of course you are right that we don’t know how the girls will ‘turn out in the end’ but they both appear to be displaying robust personalities.</p>
<p>You might be interested in reading this discussion –>
[Parenting:</a> Is Amy Chua right when she explains “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” in an op/ed in the Wall Street Journal? - Quora](<a href=“http://www.quora.com/Parenting/Is-Amy-Chua-right-when-she-explains-Why-Chinese-Mothers-Are-Superior-in-an-op-ed-in-the-Wall-Street-Journal]Parenting:”>http://www.quora.com/Parenting/Is-Amy-Chua-right-when-she-explains-Why-Chinese-Mothers-Are-Superior-in-an-op-ed-in-the-Wall-Street-Journal)</p>
<p>(Responses to the question, I was interested in hearing the viewpoints of those who’ve had a mother with the characteristics that Amy Chua advocates. Did you think you benefited from it, were hurt by it or experienced a mix of the two?) </p>
<p>-Particularly the top article, by Christine Lu – but the other responses are worth a read as well.</p>
<p>Lulu prompyly quit violin and took up tennis?</p>
<p>A true rebel would have taken up basketball. Tennis is violin in sport.</p>
<p>The funniest thing I’ve read is a blog comment (by an Asian poster):</p>
<p>“I find it highly ironic that Chua married a Jewish White guy and then lectures him on raising successful children.”</p>
<p>See: [Amy</a> Chua: Chinese Conceit, Chinese Ignorance, and the $24,000 question | bigWOWO](<a href=“Loading...”>Loading...)</p>
<p>“Raised Jewish” by a husband who is not religious and a mother who is not Jewish (so the kids are not Jewish either) …</p>
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<p>It could the prestige, violin and piano being ivies of instruments. In trying to climb up the social ladder, one goes after prestige? If playing sports, it has to be tennis or golf.</p>
<p>Calmom, thanks for that link which includes an email from Chua in which she writes: "… I don’t believe that there is only one good way of raising children. The actual book is more nuanced, and much of it is about my decision to retreat from the "strict Chinese immigrant " model. " I 'll try to remember to look for the book in the library when it’s published here in February. Until then, I can’t pronounce judgement on a book I haven’t read.</p>
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<p>If they’re Reform Jewish, it’s just fine.</p>
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<p>Yet funnily enough, I bet that Bill Gates’ kids, or Mark Zuckerberg’s eventual kids, won’t be forced into playing the violin or piano, and they’ll be plenty far up the social ladder!</p>
<p>And “trying too hard” – as in making your choices precisely because you want to fit in with a certain crowd – is the absolute antithesis of prestige!</p>
<p>Anyone remember the Preppy Handbook? (the original) The point was that old-line WASPs deliberately affected a casual, not-to-worry, slide-through life attitude – they were secure enough they didn’t have to care!</p>
<p>Re: children with learning differences: in our home, a modified, Americanized Chinese mother approach is working extremely well with our D. I’d rate her disabilities as multiple and moderate–severe enough to have been evident in toddlerhood, to have made her eligible for pre-school special education services, and to have placed her in a self-contained setting for the early primary grades until I insisted on mainstreaming against the advice of the Child Study Team.</p>
<p>When she was little, I floundered and mostly followed the lead of the school. But I became more and more frustrated with her slow progress. So in third grade, I explained to my D that she was behind where she needed to be academically and would have to work very, very hard to catch up. I told her that now she was going to be in regular classes, and that some things would be hard for her, but that she’d have to practice and study until she learned them anyway. We told her we know she can handle this with our help, and whatever she couldn’t handle we’d keep working at until she could. She embraced that idea and has been an inspiration to us ever since. She is highly scheduled and works long hours. There were times when she would whine and cry and give up, and I admit to being a little harsh. I told her that her mom and dad wouldn’t always be alive to help her and that’s why she HAS to learn things like counting money to take care of herself so people wouldn’t rob her. We put forth high expectations (normal performance from a spec. ed kid), but the goals were fewer and more focused than we’d have set for a typical child. </p>
<p>She is currently outperforming typical children in school work, her instrument, and her sport. Recently she has even begun to set goals for herself. She told us she kept asking the band director what she has to do to move up from third music part to the first part. At first the lady put her off, told her she already had too many people playing the first part, but finally had to tell her a few things she could work on and that’s what D has been practicing in her free time. If she didn’t have to spend so much more time on schoolwork than other kids, I have no doubt she’d achieve first chair. She still might.</p>
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I thought this was funny, too, since around here, tennis is a stereotypically Asian sport. In fact, the other day I was talking to one of my daughter’s friends, who is in some ways being raised the Asian way. She was complaining about all the hours of violin, orchestra, etc. I said, “With all that music, how do you find time for tennis?” “I don’t play tennis,” she replied, “I play ping pong.”</p>
<p>There is a 12 year old Chinese girl who lives down the street from me. She is good friends with my D12 at school. However they never get together outside of school because between, Chinese school, tutoring, studying, dance, and music, the child has no time just to hang out with friends. Oh and if she did have time, her parents do not allow her to have playdates anyway.</p>
<p>BTW, the way D12 tells it, the father is the one in charge of everything; the mother just goes along.</p>
<p>My kids went to CTD (=midwestern version of CTY) with many Asian kids and one of the common themes was that many of them were in science, math or computer classes when they had wanted to take literature, writing or political science but their parents hadn’t let them. As someone who let her kids take whatever courses interested them (that seemed to be the whole point of such a program … explore your interests), that seemed unfortunate to me.</p>
<p>I can see how my son has moved from interest area A to interest area B over the years, and how letting it happened naturally really let a passion bloom. I shudder to think if I had tried to force or keep him in interest area A.</p>