<p>Amy Chua, from her name, is not Chinese. I’d like to know how to write Chua in Chinese because I cannot think of a single character that’s pronounced Chua. I would also ask that others stop refering to herself as Chinese. She is 100% American, that happens to have yellow skin. There is a huge difference between Asians and Asian Americans. I am pure 100% Chinese, born and grew up in China, with Chinese citizenship. I have only seen such ridiculous parenting methods from overseas Chinese in general and Americanized Chinese specifically. I suspect this is due to Chinese immigrants being forced to work extremely hard, and they take it out on their children.</p>
<p>For background: My grandfathers were teacher in a rural high school and an accountant, grandmothers were a housewife and a factory worker, father is a PhD holding engineer (PhD Materials Science and Engineering), mother is a nurse.</p>
<p>I know I shouldn’t be posting here, since I’m not a parent, but Amy Chua has caught my eye over the last few weeks and I just want to say one thing to the parents on here: we, your children, appreciate the fact that you let us have this freedom. </p>
<p>I played violin for eight years. I hated it. My mom let me stop because, contrary to Chua’s belief, being good at it didn’t make me enjoy it. I sing, and I LOVE singing, so I’m happy. I’m so grateful that my parents let me be happy doing something I love instead of being miserable because there’s “something” to playing the violin (actually, my mom told me that she hates the violin. She only let me play it because I expressed interest, and I only expressed interest because my older cousin was a violinist and told me that I should be one, too). </p>
<p>Ok, I’m done. Sorry for the teenaged interruption. Carry on!</p>
<p>She may be of Han Chinese stock, but her parents don’t speak Mandarin - they speak a southern Chinese dialect called Hokkienese (may be closely related to Taiwanese). She romanized her last name the way it’s pronounced in Hokkienese.</p>
<p>Chinese parenting: “Son/ Daughter, you can be anything you want, as long as its an engineer or doctor”</p>
<p>My chinese friends in high school are absolutely miserable. Their parents dont let them go outside on school days, watch TV, play video games, or even text. I asked one of my asian friends if they wanted to hang out over Christmas break but his parents were making him prep for the SAT lol. Chinese american kids have no childhood, most of them spend hours doing math problems and piano lessons (from what I’ve heard). </p>
<p>Chinese parents have unrealistic expectations for their children. One of my chinese friends’ parents expect him to go to Princeton or MIT even though he has a mere 3.7 GPA… I find that there are too many chinese students applying to our top universities just because their parents are pushing them so hard, not that they actually want to go there.</p>
<p>Speaking only from my personal experience, if you give your child a range of experiences and a lot of choices, they will choose and pursue the ones they have a passion for. I think its okay to make generalized requirements for your children, like “you must choose a fine art, athletic activity and some community service,” and then support them as much as you can in their choices. I also think its okay for them to change their choices along the way, and to “push” when they are seemingly in a rut like we all get sometimes. Raising 3 kids this way, what I’ve noticed is that around 8th or 9th grade they hone in on what it is they really want to do. ymmv</p>
<p>However, only rich parents can afford that. Why only immigrants push their kids to be doctors or lawyers, Jews generations ago and newly arrived Asians now? Given tens of millions in the bank (aka security) I wonder any parents would push their kids to become anything other than allowing them 100% freedom.</p>
<p>As for your comments that you only see this among overseas Chinese/Americanized Chinese, I’m not so sure about that. Maybe in the current college/high school aged generation of kids as there is a movement away from such parenting…but certainly not among the Mainland Chinese undergrad/grad students in my generation(Those who were undergrads from the late 1980’s-2000). </p>
<p>If anything, there was a greater obsession with their kids to test well on the gaokao so they can make it into topflight Chinese universities…especially the tippy-top Tsinghua(Qinghua) and Peking(Bei-da) Universities. </p>
<p>Heck, many of the Chinese grad students from this generation and some of their parents/Profs I’ve met who attended top Chinese schools for undergrad had nothing but disdain/contempt for Chinese students who were sent to the US for undergrad…even ones who attended Ivies. They viewed them as sons/daughters of rich families who used their money to “purchase prestige” because their gaokao performance would have precluded them from the top 2 tiers of domestic universities…or any universities altogether. In that generation, the proper path was to do undergrad at topflight Chinese undergrad like Bei-da/Tsinghua, then come to the US for grad school at elite US universities like Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Columbia, etc. However, there has been a seismic shift away from such attitudes over the last decade among younger Chinese academics and grad students. </p>
<p>So…while it is IMO a somewhat outdated stereotype, it still has some truth to it…and was applicable to both overseas/Americanized Chinese and to those from China, ROC(Taiwan), and Hong Kong. It is also quite understandable considering how most in those societies do judge/treat you according to where you attended college/grad school. I experienced this firsthand when I was in China in the '90s. </p>
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<p>Sounds like the parents in your area are much more narrowminded than those of my high school classmates. When I was in high school in the early-mid '90s in NYC, the parents also allowed for pharmacist, computer programmer, lawyer, professor, and finance/ibanking/business. </p>
<p>Incidentally, while my father had extremely high academic expectations like the stereotype, he strongly disagreed with parents who forced their kids into pre-professional career paths as he felt it wasn’t only damaging long-term, but also missed the entire point of a college education. </p>
<p>In fact, he supported me 100% when my aunt complained about my smart-ass retort about her paying for med school/malpractice suits when she tried to force a medical doctor career down my throat. :D</p>
<p>I found all of this fascinating, especially the truthfulness and motives of Ms Chua.</p>
<p>Was she purposely exaggerating when she wrote the book, hoping the sensationalism would make her more money? Or was she being honest in the book, clueless as to how cruel her behaviour would sound to many people?</p>
<p>I haven’t read the book, but I don’t buy her explanation that it was written tongue-in-cheek.</p>
<p>For years I thought/worried about my actions as a non-Chinese parent, wondered if I have sometimes pushed to hard or not hard enough. I think I’ve done both, at different times.</p>
<p>I believe there are brief, crucial times to push kids academically, even if they resist. (As when D refused to learn her multiplication facts- we battled but it was non-negatiable). But other than that I have just done light ongoing monitoring of time management in my kids, asking to make sure they finished their homework, etc. They picked all of their own instruments & activites. S is a drummer :-)</p>
<p>I hear what you are saying…we have the ‘luxury’ of freedom. I do think though it may take generations to lighten up after your family has roots in a developing part of the world. Even my second generation Indian relatives are all very wealthy living in the US…and want their kids to be doctors (but will accept engineering and more recently, finance). Likewise, where we live, the HK, Korean and Mainland Chinese immigrants are much more wealthy than the local folks- they immigrated under the business class, requiring an investment of half a million. They live in the best neighborhoods, own the most expensive homes, drive best cars, and often dad still works offshore or has a significant business here and abroad. Philanthropists to the city often belong to this immigrant group. YET they seem no less into pushing their kids in particular pursuits, and tend toward wanting their kids to go into just a few lucrative and prestigious occupations.</p>
<p>“I think we already knew from the Russians (via the Olympics) that it is possible to take a somewhat random child and turn them into a protege through years and years of forcing them to work and practice at a given skill.”</p>
<p>Nononono.</p>
<p>They choose the children based on specifics of the child’s flexibility, body type, and all kinds of things. They canvassed the gyms and they had indicators for the body type and personality type that would make a good gymnast.</p>
<p>I was asked repeatedly in Russia and the former USSR if I hadn’t been chosen for gymnastics as a child. I said no, I wanted to but we had no money. They said, “With your body (petite, with long limbs and muscular), you could have chosen any gym in this country and they would have taken you for at least a year.”</p>
<p>I guess freedom is in the eye of the beholder. I would have loved to do that as a child. You just can’t generalize. I know a lot–a LOT–of athletes that mourn the end of the USSR. None from the Baltics or Bosnia, of course, and not suggesting that it was truly a worker’s paradise, but it’s absurd to suggest that they just grabbed people at random and then forced them into sports to make them Olympic athletes. It never worked that way, ever.</p>
<p>@SlitheyTove–I loved that Bad Mommy article. She’s funny.</p>
<p>Bosnia was not part of the USSR; it was part of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had its own problems and reasons for breakup, which was particularly violent in Bosnia.</p>
<p>The social pressure and conformity and pressure for status is really amazing, isn’t it? Yes, heaven forbid we meet people and judge them on who they actually are.</p>
<p>I am surprised nobody pulled in the 20th century stereotypes of immigrant striving: the Jewish Mother and the Catholic Mother. </p>
<p>Speaking as a Catholic mother, Amy’s methods seem crude and one-dimensional. Of course the Catholic church stresses the education of the “whole person” so in addition to academics and mastering an instrument (although all we want is good enough to play at Easter Vigil); drama (or speech/debate) and athletics are mandatory for the average Catholic school student. And we don’t verbally abuse…our methods are more subtle. We use Guilt. The Jewish/Catholic/African American mother armada in the first part of the 20th century was what created the Greatest Generation. Not only did those women insist on the grades and individual achievement Amy writes about, they expected those achievements while the kid was serving his/her community–Scouts, scrap metal drives, CYO,Masons, African-American fraternal organizations and other community organizations that flourished between 1930 and 1970.</p>
<p>Looking at the comments on the Ayelet Waldman, I see that the meme is exploding. Someone’s done a “Why Irish Mothers Are Superior” article. I’m sure that there are others. :)</p>
<p>I’m also struck by how people aren’t getting Waldman’s humor. There are comments like “It’s fortunate that Mrs. Waldman has the sort of children that she wants – ones that don’t inconvenience her.” :rolleyes: Which makes me think that maybe I’m not getting Chua’s joke.</p>
<p>it ain’t joke if you see her rubber dress with red tubey trim and that akimbo stance with croocked smile with serious dental (maybe lots more than teeth) job.
plus
that background shiny effect.
WSJ just have to prove they got turf over NYT, so they too, sure needed facelift.</p>
<p>After reading the article linked by the OP (though not the whole book) Im starting to think more and more that much of what she writes is either exaggerated or just downright false. My first problem, is I can’t think of any reasons she has for writing this book. If she wanted to create a controversy about why Chinese values are superior to American ones, their are a lot of topics that would have created more of a controversy and ones in which she has more expertise (i.e. Lots of Chinese cities are very safe because of long prison sentences/high execution rates or should we reduce labor rights to boost our economy?). Also, actions speak louder than words and none of Mrs. Chua’s actions beyond her book suggest a parenting style similar to what she writes. First of all, law is not a very highly respected field in China (compared to math/science fields) and also most Chinese mothers quit their jobs to focus only on their children. Furthermore, almost all Chinese mothers she describes only marry Chinese men. Finally, Chua is writing this when she can’t prove anything about the effectiveness of her parenting as her kids are still kids. However, Chua does have good writing skills and this book was probably easy to write, and get published and she probably got lots of $$$ so I guess I commend her on that, but thats the exact reason Im buying the book. </p>
<p>Note: Im not saying Chua’s parenting style doesn’t exists, and I don’t like to profile people, but Chua’s actions beyond her book don’t seem consistent with her perceived “values.”</p>
<p>Not true at all! My kids had swimming lessons, gymnastics, dance, piano, violin, flute. I am a median-income earner (roughly $45K or so annually) and was paying for many of my d’s lessons at a time when I was also carrying a lot of consumer debt. The swimming, violin & piano were once-a-week, half hour lessons – not all that expensive. Piano & gymnastics were taken at local community centers. Flute was offered via the middle school. </p>
<p>I’ll admit that my kids quite most of the lessons after a brief time. My d. enjoyed the swimming and took lessons every summer for several years – and became seriously involved with dance, so studio fees ran up. But everything else was a matter of $50 here, $50 there – not too much of a strain on the budget. My rationale was always, “we’ll try the cheap lessons at the community center first and see how it goes.” I figured that if the kid was any good at something, the talent would emerge during the initial bout of lessons, and we could factor that in before seeking out a more expensive studio or teacher.</p>
<p>A “range of experiences” and “choices” would be expensive if we were hell bent on finding the best teacher, or signing the kid up for a rigid schedule of lessons, with the idea that our kid had to be “best”. But when we are letting our kids experiment, we’re taking a more relaxed approach. In fact, I was generally asking for exemptions from the dance and gymnastics studios for my d. – if they wanted 4 classes a week, I’d talk them into accepting 3 – if they insisted that my d. be enrolled in at least 2 separate classes, I’d tell them I only had time for 1. Saved money and kept my kid’s schedule from being too overburdened, what with all her different activities. </p>
<p>Of course my kid never became very good at any of the stuff she dropped early on – but the point was, she had the opportunity to explore her interests. If she had an innate talent in any particular thing, I think it would have shown up pretty quickly over the course of the lessons, because then she would progress faster than the other students. If she was strongly drawn to an activity, that would show up in her enthusiasm and eagerness to go to class. I usually had a “rule” that if I signed up for a series of lessons paid in advance (usually by the month or a 5-6 week session), then my d. had to complete that series before quitting. That was my “I already paid for this so I want my money’s worth” rule. But even that wasn’t enforced against strong resistance – I mean, I figured if my kid hated something badly enough to whine and cry about going to lessons, there probably was a reason.</p>