1/26/2011: She’s HUGE. She’s bigger than Spike “Malcolm X Hat” Lee. She’s bigger than Nancy Kwan. She’s generated more hate comments on blogs than Sara Palin and Michelle Malkin combined. She’s the best known Asian woman since Imelda Marcos, Madam Chiang and the Dowager Empress (I’m trying to think of more notorious Asian women, help me out here). She gets more coverage on NPR, CBS news, Slate, Huffington Post than Taylor Swift. Certainly bigger than Amy Tan or Ron Takaki. When do we see the T-shirts, one-page-per-day calendars, stick pens and “Tiger Mother” logo music stands? She’s the living version of Minh Souphanousinphone of King of the Hill who tries to live the Asian American dream while she’s stuck in a redneck suburb surrounded by disfunctional caucasians. For better or more likely worse, she’s the closest thing to popular hit personality the Asian Americans have, so we might as well circle the wagons and line up to protect her before we get a real anti-Asian backlash from all those people who don’t quite get her joke. I’m waiting for Saturday Night Live to do her story, or have her as host.
She made Colbert:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Amy Chua | ||||
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CBS news
1/13/2011: My thoughts today, only a few of the many internet replies seem to be timid defences and weak admiration. The ones that stand in a sea of “OMG, she’s not kdding” are “she may well be nuts”, “f**k you Amy Chua for making ASians look like monsters”, “is it too late to call Child Protective Services”, “when taken to that extreme, it’s child abuse”, Jewish mother “how could you marry such a heartless shicksa”. Kind of ironic she’s the same law professor who we heard about warning about the worldwide persecution of the “Market dominant minority” (go ahead and google that and see who turns up) after her relatives in the Phillipines who gave out real diamonds as birthday party favors (OK, I stretched a bit) were murdered by their ungrateful servants who lived in cardboard shacks. As if this new log on the “Why I hate Asians / hate to be an Asian” fire is going to help the popularity of the Model Minority.
Sheesh, if she think she’s going to marry her daughters off to a prince, what prince is going to dare ask them out after they google the prospective mother in law from hell? He’s going find Madam Chiang Dowager Empress who used Chinese Music Practice Torture as boot camp training for the College Board Long March whose motto may well be an Al Queda-esque “We value Ivy League diplomas more than you love a happy life”. This woman could clearly bring U.S. Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. R. Lee Ermey of recent Geico commerical fame to tears if he were unfortunate enough to have her as his mother. Man I’d love to see that Death Match. Maybe we’ll see Chua as a Geico spokesman someday.
I think Asian Americans can ultimately thank Amy Chua for bringing the nightmare of “Crazy Asian Mother sees B+” out of the shadows of the ethnic inside Youtube joke and “Sorry I can’t, my parents are Asian” facebook group into a feature-length book. Malcolm X was best remembered for scaring the hell out of white folks, but what most people miss is his condemnation of the “predatory” culture of crime and irresponsibility that had taken over African Americans. Similarly Asians perhaps suffer from the opposite sickness of placing the false god of material success above basic happiness and getting along with others in the face of ethnic cleansing in places like South Philadelphia High School where the restless masses are taught to believe success lies in using “any means neccesary” against “The Man”, or in this case the “China Man”. It’s about time Asians Americans noticed, stopped just joking about it and decide “My God, we need to stop treating our kids this way”
Former Penguin books intern Maryann Yin of Galleycat notes “Yale Law professor Amy Chau published her parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal released an excerpt with the title: ‘Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.’ Chau’s excerpt has already generated 2,507 comments as of this writing, several reaction posts on the internet, and an invitation to appear on The Today Show.”
Excerpts: “Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do: attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama, play any instrument other than the piano or violin, not play the piano or violin.”
As my own two Chinese parents produced seven children, all of whom went to either MIT or Stanford or both by the end of the 1980s, and concertmasters at both schools without any one of us jumping off either MIT’s green building or the Hoover tower, we looked this over with mixed awe (Carnegie hall at 14?) and horror (Man we thought we had the Asian parents from h-e-double-L). At least we did cub scouts. Of my generation’s children, we’ll be lucky if we get a couple of kids out of the dozen plus grandkids into a Stanford or better school, I’m the only one that still plays violin with three boys that play violin, cello, viola, and drum, guitar, bass, or keyboard for christian contemporary church worship. Chua makes the rest of us that haven’t landed a six-figure book deal, a professorship at Yale, or kids who have performed at Carnegie Hall looks like Americanized slackers.
My view is that while some Americans will take notes, and the upper classes have always played this game, what makes Asians different that EVERY child can be best if they work / are pushed hard enough, most Americans will be so horrified they’ll be glad they don’t play this game. They’ll just get the heck out of the way and let the Asian parents sumo wrestle with their kids over spots at UCLA and Berkeley while they happily send their kids to UC Riverside, Santa Cruz, San Jose State, or wherever their test scores / abilities put them.
More updates later, in the meantime, add comments on what you think of Chua’s accomplishments. I get dinged with accusations of being an “Asian supremacist” for pointing out when our poor disadvantaged minority gets better grades and test scores, and she has the nerve to not ask “whether” but definitely state “why” Asian mothers are superior. If you ask me, every culture is screwed up in its own way, and you just have to pick your poison.
I would certainly consider Condoleeza Rice to have been the product of African American “Asian parents”, and she would certainly be a worthy benchmark for any such parent. My opinion given the wunderkind competition I see around my moderately upscale neighborhood is that parents of all races took at hint in the 1980s when all the headlines were about the “model minority” and they got the idea that they could play that game too. In the 70s it seemed if you were Asian, you had it made. Now the biggest problem is competition from the kids of the OTHER Asian parents, like the kid who got perfect ACT scores, he name came up every 90 seconds in the award announcements, violinist Benji Bae who was on Radio Disney and was DISAPPOINTED to only get into Julliard, and the family where the only thing you can see from the front door is wall-to-wall math trophies. You know who these people are in your neighborhood. Even in my church I shuddered when somebody lauded us as having “perfect children” and I thought to myself, “perfect is only relative” .
Here’s my parody Crazy Asian American Dad which touches the same topic. I absolutely swear it’s 98 percent true.
Taiwan CGI news weighs in their opinion. Western mom in a frying pan / rolling pin duel vs Chinese mom. Playing violin while dancing on hot coals in a cage???
Video by Next Media Animation“NMA’s animations are produced (in Taiwan) by a dedicated staff that numbers in the hundreds. From script to final production, a video can be created in just three hours. They produce 11 minutes of animation every day.” (Never mind anti-ship ballistic missles, this is the really good Chinese stuff)
Other news:
Wall Street Journal: Shoes for Asian women
MIT electrical engineering computer science graduate has written conservative columns on politics, race / culture, science and education since the 70s in MIT The Tech and various publications in including New Republic and National Review. 
OK readers tell us your own Asian (or non-Asian) parenting horror stories, and your praise (or or pans) for Chua’s exotic Oriental parenting techniques.
ASIAN PEOPLE FTW
ed – FTW today commonly stands for “For the Win”. It is an expression of enthusiasm. “FTW” is the same as saying “this is the best” or “this item will make a big difference, I recommend using it”. Examples would include: “anti-lock braking, ftw!”, “spellchecker, ftw!”, and “low-carb diets, ftw!”
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Chua
Battle Hymn of the Tiger MotherChua, who is ethnically Chinese but whose parents emigrated from the Philippines, published her third book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in 2010.[2][3] The book is a memoir in which Chua explains her views on parenting, specifically as it relates to her claims of being a typical Chinese parent. In an earlier interview, Chua has claimed that even though her children speak Chinese, they are “raised Jewish”.[4]
[edit] Wall Street Journal preview and controversyAn article in The Wall Street Journal on January 8, 2011 contained excerpts from her book, in which Chua detailed her views on parenting as a “Chinese Mother”.[5] Some of the things Chua mentions are that she regularly insults her children, that they were not allowed to watch TV or play computer games, not be “#1″ in every subject except gym and drama, and that they were not allowed to not play violin or piano. Chua’s claim is that this is the typical behavior of a Chinese mother living in the United States, and that such tactics are necessary in order for one’s children to not grow up to be complacent.
This piece proved controversial, with many reactions from blogs, such as “I thought it was some kind of satirical joke at first,”[6] as well as more notable news sites, such as Maureen Corrigan of NPR stating that “Amy Chua may well be nuts.”[7] According to Slate, almost a century earlier, Boris Sidis made a similar claim to excellent parenting, which his family eventually regretted.[8] The slate article also mentions that in coda to her book, when asked for input, her daughter Lulu asserts “I’m sure it’s all about you anyway”. Her other daughter, Sophia, suggests “It’s not possible for you to tell the complete truth… You’ve left out so many facts. But that means no one can really understand.”[9] The Washington Post, while not as critical, did suggest that “ending a parenting story when one child is only 15 seems premature.”[10] MSNBC stated that the article ‘”reads alternately like a how-to guide, a satire or a lament.”[11] MSNBC’s critical response goes on to state that “The article sounds so incredible to Western readers – and many Asian ones, too – that many people thought the whole thing was satire… [but] aspects of her essay resonated profoundly with many people, especially Chinese Americans – not necessarily in a good way”, citing interviews with Chinese people who explain “‘When I think about my teenage years, all I can remember is constant fear, fear that she would find out I had a crush on a boy, fear that I would fail in a test, fear that she would find out I had lied to her.’” Chua, in response to questions about her book, admitted to SFGate that she is a workaholic who “is…not good at enjoying life.”[12]
Taiwanese political CGI animators Next Media Animation[13] responded with a CGI animation entitled “Western mom Vs. Chinese mom: Who is better?”[14][15] The animation sums up some of the content of the article as well as the controversy, and ends with an assertion that Chua does not care if her children grow up damaged, as long as it boosts sales of her book.
Read her article a few minutes ago and was horrified at the extreme and abusive lengths she’s gone to, all in the name of her children achieving better academic success. It sounds like she has destroyed their lives.
I do not believe her story is representative of most Chinese mothers; sure, the general idea of using both positive and negative feedback (something Western culture has come to fear and doubt, in terms of its utility as a motivating factor and as a hazard to emotional development) and forcefully pushing your children to achieve is a common theme, but this has got to be the most extreme and unhealthy degree.
I hope her children turned out okay, although personally would not be surprised if they were emotionally and socially underdeveloped.
Note: Apparently the article was taken from a book she wrote, and both exaggerates her stance and doesn’t refer to events later on that caused her to soften her bullying somewhat. Still though, ouch!
Amy Chua is a bonsaist. She cuts it here, and nips it there. Her trees/children will never grow to their full potential.
Geez! she scares the daylights out of me! My 5 siblings are college educated. The difference was that she encouraged us and we went.
Those girls look Chinese to you? Thought not. That’s one reason Chua feels entitled to perpetuate this awful stereotype of crazy Chinese moms and their clever automaton offspring. This woman is just offensive.
Words of wisdom from the bell curve guy: http://blog.american.com/?p=25336
Happy Childhoods Aren’t All They’re Cracked Up to Be
By Charles Murray
January 21, 2011, 9:07 am Nick, regarding that list, all I can say is, thank God for legal immigration.
The Amy Chua furor over parenting has led me to reflect on the concept of a happy, well-adjusted childhood. Okay, so we don’t want our children to be miserable. I’ll grant that much. But think back on the formative experiences of your own childhood—the things that taught you lessons that have been most valuable to you as an adult. Some of them may be examples set by your parents that you have tried to live up to, which is great. But even in those cases, I doubt that the lesson you learned was that “I vow to be as undemanding of my children as my parents were of me.” Aside from deciding to emulate good examples, I submit that most of the learning experiences of childhood involve difficulties, unhappinesses, and struggles, and most of the moments that stand out as gratifying are ones in which someone you respected recognized that you had accomplished something in the face of difficulties.
I’m also trying to think of anyone who has accomplished anything great in life who had a happy childhood. Can’t.
She’s on Joy Behar,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/video/item/amy-chua-talks-parenting-on-joy-behar
NPR, Kiro FM Seattle
Also cover of Time magazine, and cover mention on British Economist magazine.
If Asian Americans needed a world wide celebrity, did it have to be HER??
This is very, very big.
Please report the first smart t-shirt or youtube tribute.
I think for better or worse, we’re going to have to “circle the wagons” to defend her and make sure this doesn’t result in some sort of backlash against “Asian” parenting globally.
Time cover story
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2043313,00.html
The economist
http://www.economist.com/node/17959516?story_id=17959516&CFID=154297570&CFTOKEN=21004191
NPR interview
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/14/132940238/A-Memoir-Of-A-Tiger-Mothers-Quest-For-Perfection
66 comments so far on good chinese mother blog
http://thegoodchinesemother.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/challenging-chua/
Pastor at my church (Asian dad) takes the side of not making kids jump over flaming hoops, not vexing your children. Obviously not a “real” tiger dad, his little girl is walking and talking but not playing violin yet. Tiger parents / kids are an interesting trick for the top 5-10% to give American elites a run for their money, but America’s real strength is in its 50th percentile average moms, dads, workers who go to church that make the USA an economic, military and moral superpower. It is the development level of the average american who likely own their own home, car, completed 12 years of a secondary education with either pre-college or vocational training and a decent chance of completing at least a couple of years of college that completely blows away the average peasant in China. The average Asian American enjoys a few statistical socio-economic advantages over the average American and their kids to push up the top end of the scale. However what gets lost in the Tiger controversy is that it’s the parents of the Great American Middle that raise their kids to pursue ANY field and ANY ambition that makes America truly great. Indeed, in my opinion the great “outcome” and “standards based” education reform efforts that are among the most destructive government initiatives appear to be based around the idea of government as Asian parent demanding nothing less than total devotion to increasing test scores as soldiers in a worldwide academic arms race. That is absolutely not what childhood and education should be about.
Heartless? You know I can’t find the original jewish mother quote, but CBS news used it, and this Asian Week piece seems to be the highest rated piece that first used the term.
Chinese vs Western Mothers: Q&A with Amy Chua – TIME Healthland
Jan 11, 2011 · Chinese vs Western Mothers: Q&A with Amy Chua … to marginally less authoritarian drillmistress has led to people calling heartless …
healthland.time.com/2011/01/11/chinese-vs-western-mothers-q-a-with-amy-chua · Cached pageAmy Chua Tiger Mom Author On Harsh Parenting – News…1 day ago
wrote “Tiger … Since her book came out she has been called “heartless” and a variety of other …
healthland.time.com/2011/01/11/chinese-vs-western-mothers-q-a-with-amy-chua/?xid=yahoo… · Cached page”Tiger Mother” Author Defends Harsh Parenting
Jan 21, 2011 · Amy Chua’s book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” typecasts … lit up the blogosphere, calling her a “lunatic” and “heartless”. Death threats? “I’ve had a few,” Chua said
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/01/21/eveningnews/main7270289.shtml · Cached page
Response to Amy Chua’s “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior”
Jan 13, 2011 · On January 8, Yale professor and writer Amy Chua published an article entitled … extreme, it’s child abuse”, Jewish mother “how could you marry such a heartless …
>>>>www.asianweek.com/2011/01/13/response-to-amy-chuas-why-chinese-mothers-are-superior · Cached page<<<<
I’m a caucasian male with a Chinese wife (23 years happy and counting) and have seen many different variations in parenting due to my mother in law being from a family of 15 brothers and sisters. In some cases, the method worked to get into selected colleges; however, in MOST “tiger mom” situations, it went horribly bad, with the children barely speaking to the parents years after leaving the “den.” One example that really sticks is our cousin (um, let’s call her “Liz”), who actually played Carnegie Hall as a violinist, only to freak out half way through college, practically cover her body in tattoos, and change her name to keep the family from ever finding her. How’s that for extreme?
My wife is pretty westernized – often laughingly putting herself down for her lack of reaching “Asian standards” – so she isn’t super hard on our son. Ironically, he’s doing very well without us having to beat on him constantly, but we’re not pushing for Harvard or Julliard, either. I guess he’ll just have to settle for happy, whether or not he becomes a doctor, DJ, or dullard.
Just read the book, and here is my report.
The Tiger Mother Club
I am Chinese, and I am a mother. Now, that makes me a Chinese mother, right?
The local chapter of the Tiger Mother Club was looking for more Chinese members, and since I was new in town, and was eager to make new friends, I sent in my application.
And they turned me down! Apparently I was not qualified. I found that baffling since I am a Chinese mother.
Reading Chua’s book explained everything. It was all about the piano.
Despite years of lessons, my beloved daughter has no hopes of playing Chopin in Carnegie Hall. She can barely read music notes, and her repertoire is limited to The Carpenters.
Oh well, it is a good thing I like Karen and Richard.
http://www.thegoodchinesemother.wordpress.com
FYI… update, she’s now backpedaling. On Colbert:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/372156/january-25-2011/amy-chua?xrs=share_copy
Another white guy who excoriates Chua for saying it’s a Chinese thing. Check out the documentary about pushy white tiger parents.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2011/01/a_postmortem_on_the_tiger_mom_brouhaha–its_all_about_her.html
Of course, at the same time, the hysterical documentary Race to Nowhere- http://www.racetonowhere.com/ -one more entry in the familiar corpus of “our kids are overworked” agitprop–informs us that too much homework and too many demands are crushing our children’s spirit.
my response
As a matter of fact,Chua has grasped one of the scariest Asian stereotypes that Asian parents and kids have been complaining about for decades. My view is that she somehow made a caricature of her own Asian upbringing and decided that her American take on it would be to turn it up to 13 like when Jimi Hendrix turned up his electic guitar, with predictable ill effects.
I think the real toxic thing are the tiger teachers and administrators who are aping Asian parents in No Child Left Behind. This “Give me Excellence or Give Me Death” scorched earth policy puts all American kids on a sacrificial Long March so that they can proudly show off their higher test scores and “increased student learning” crap.
When Americans see what Asians put up with in the name of high achievement and how many Asians are realizing like Malcolm X highlighted ills of the African American community that “My god, we have to stop treating our kids like this”, we can avoid the current stampede of other American parents into that extreme where the Asians are retreating from.
Kids need to be encouraged, nagged and to be dealt with strictly and with discipline at times, to be sure.
But try or wish as one might, you cannot ever get back your childhood. Riding your bicycle at 9:30 PM on that longest day in June and then catching a jar full of fireflies, spending snows days sledding, building snow forts and oddly-shaped snowmen, sleeping over (but mostly talking and laughing about the opposite sex) and if, you’re lucky enough, feeling wonderfully sick to your stomach and tingly all over during that first teenage romance.
I think good parents can foster an environment where these once-in-a-lifetime experiences can happen as well as serious application to academics, music, sports, and other activities. I’m not saying it’s easy, and a child may get off track now and then, but it can be done.
When those 18 years are up, they are over forever. There are no do-overs of childhood; to use another cliche, you cannot go home again. The best you can hope for is that you want to go home again.
If you want to be a pianist in a world-famous orchestra, or an Olympic ice skater, you almost certainly have to give up a good part of your childhood. And for the vast majority of kids, getting into an Ivy League school requires straight A’s in hard classes and really good SAT scores. The cost in time, and maybe in peace of mind and soul, can be quite high, though.
Rosebud?
The American approach is perhaps wisest. While if not all, some absurdly high percentage of Asians insist their kids aim for #1++ and call #3 or #4 failure, Americans let their kids find out if they are a 13, 26, 88, or maybe a #1 and be the best #13 if that’s what they are, and be happy about it instead an ethnic group where the other 99% are bitter about failure instead of being happy about whereever they ended up. Similarly, while Asians will only buy Honda and Toyota and fixate on top 10 colleges, Americans will pretty much drive or buy anything, and go to any college they can afford.
The worst thing that can happen about a failed Asian parenting episode is not your kid jumping off a building, it’s getting a gun and shooting classmates like at Virgnia Tech when his parents wondered why he was “only” at VTech instead of Princeton like his sister. It’s doubtful Seung-Hui Cho mastered the mysterious American customs of how to properly relate to and approach American girls/women with the Asian parenting approach, and was withdrawn even by Korean standards, let alone the American standard which is based on intense peer-networking .
Asians are outraged if their kids don’t get into Berkeley because they think anything less is a failure. Black and Hispanics demand spots in Berkeley because it is their civil right. Whites basically decided if it’s hard to get into Berkeley, then Riverside or Santa Cruz is fine. University California policy of letting any minority even remotely qualified for any campus into UCLA and Berkeley rather than integrated turned the “flagships” into predominantly minority campuses between the Asians and affirmative action groups, essentially driving most of the whites elsewher, and likewise sending a message to Asians who didn’t get in to turn UC Irvine into the predominantly Asian UC campus. Nice job multiculturalists.
so much violins!lol
And She went from playing Violins to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjqZLucs0t4
#ViolinFail
I believe in teaching independence to my children. By having independence the child will gain maturity , confidence and open his or her creativity.
Why is the art of music required to endure the ill-informed antics of such inartistic imbeciles as Amy Chua? Her lust for fame as an old-fashioned stage mother of either a famous violinist (yet another mechanical Sarah Chang?) or a famous pianist (yet another mechanical Lang Lang?) shines through what she perceives as devotion to the cultivation of the cultural sensitivities of her two unfortunate daughters.
Daughter Lulu at age 7 is unable to play compound rhythms from Jacques Ibert with both hands coordinated? Leonard Bernstein couldn’t conduct this at age 50! And he isn’t the only musician of achievement with this-or-that shortcoming. We all have our closets with doors that are not always fully opened.
And why all this Chinese obsession unthinkingly dumped on violin and piano? What do the parents with such insistence know of violin and piano repertoire? Further, what do they know of the great body of literature for flute? For French horn? For organ? For trumpet? Usually, nothing!
For pressure-driven (not professionally-driven!) parents like Amy Chua their children, with few exceptions, will remain little more than mechanical sidebars to the core of classical music as it’s practiced by musicians with a humanistic foundation.
Professor Chua better be socking away a hefty psychoreserve fund in preparation for the care and feeding of her two little lambs once it becomes clear to them both just how empty and ill-defined with pseudo-thorough grounding their emphasis has been on so-called achievement.
Read more about this widespread, continuing problem in Forbidden Childhood (N.Y., 1957) by Ruth Slenczynska.
______________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.
Yeah whatever.
Americans do this too. Washington state developed a new music standard for 5th graders. Write a song with sheet music representing your favorite zoo animal. Then sing this music, by sight, from sheet music, without aid of an instrument. Cripes, half of music majors don’t have to do this to get a performance degree. The education standards are even worse as government wants to be like Asian parents.
I divide my year annually between New York and Shanghai. One of my common visitations in the latter city is to the area in and around The Shanghai Conservatory of Music. About four years back the school built a large new building on Fenyang Lu. Along the street side is a lower level with a string of music stores stocked with new instruments. In four of those stores I counted, literally, one trumpet, one horn, one trombone, no tuba, two flutes, one clarinet, one oboe, no bassoon, a handful of strings (but no string bass), and two-hundred pianos! The single trombone (my instrument) looked and felt like it had been made in an industrial arts school as a class project. I asked one of the clerks how many trombone students were
then enrolled in the Conservatory. “Five,” he replied. I told him it would be impossible for any serious student of that instrument to plan advancement playing such useless metal and asked what brand of instruments are taught upstairs. All the trombones were imported by the school, only as needed, from Yamaha in Japan. But, why the sea of pianos?
Most parents do not want their children spending, i.e., wasting, their time on any instrument for which a student can not enter a contest and win prizes. Prizes mean medals and certificates, which Mommy and Daddy can display as their own achievements by extension. It is the major conservatories in China (Shanghai, Beijing, Shenyang, and Wuhan) which are responsible for continuing to nurture this false status, while, visually at least, giving the external impression that China is a major cultural locus of Western classical music. Anyone who has heard the wind sections of a major symphony orchestra in China will hear just how major the cultural locus is in China for those instruments. Naïve morons; school and parent alike!
For the serious student having neither interest nor ability to become a graduate of Harvard Medical School, this phony sequence of contest successes may lead to Juilliard in New York or Curtis in Philadelphia. “If a clown like Lang Lang can make it, then so can my little angel. Who is, of course, the most adept keyboard wizard to blossom since Lawrence Welk or Rachmaninoff.” Stage mothers: Away with them!
All of this clap-trap nonsense has no relationship whatsoever to two very important issues: music or Asian American. It is, with the rarest of exceptions, largely Oriental in the homeland. Atavistic immigrants from those eastern cultures or those descended directly therefrom – like the ever-psychobashing Kommandant Amy Chua – have some untested, sentimental notion that music opens doors and ensures careers in whatever direction the unmusical music student chooses; which the student is free to choose, so long as it isn’t music. (Try to figure out that one. “You are free to study physics or mathematics, so long as you don’t attempt to make a career of them.”)
For the past forty years during my own studies in medicine and music in New York I have been wedded to and worked closely with and around nurses, physicians, surgeons, and medical technicians active in all the standard disciplines. Those persons have come from all modern regions of the world. And, yes, some of my coworkers have come from the beloved Harvard Medical School. But, I can write with authority, the number of those professional persons who have had any direct contact at any times in their lives with piano or violin is insignificantly small.
No one has ever wasted time typing me as a wimp. Nevertheless, with an Amy Chua of my own only thinly masking a contempt while ostensibly trying to encourage me before the age of ten by classing me as “garbage, “lazy,” “useless,” and a host of other niceties (a savage, a juvenile delinquent, boring, common, low, completely ordinary, a barbarian) all the while forbidding me to sit on a toilet until I can play triplets in one hand against duolets in the other mechanistically en duo with a metronome might have (likely would have) set me up both for advanced training to climb The Texas Tower and chronic constipation.
___________________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.
No matter where you stand on the Tiger Mother syndrome, few could argue with evidene and conviction that American parenting is working. In fact, if parenting doesn’t improve the long term health of our Country does not have a good prognosis. Our offspring, as a group, cannot compete globally. Few parents spend enough quality time with there children to encourage good habits or to work or study hard. There is much to blame and many of us are guilty.
In the WSJ, 4 Feb 2012, there is another perspective that is eye opening. The perspective is limited to raising our children to teaching our kids good manners (what’s wrong with this?), parents being the boss (what’s wrong with this?), give children boundaries (what’s wrong with this?), educate them rather than disciplining them (if it works, why not?), tell them “No” when it is necessary and mean it (wish we had the guts), allow them 1 snack a day (fewer fat kids and an educational lesson in planning), and all this teaches the young ‘uns that they must be able to delay gratification (this is really important, IMO).
So here’s the article:
• WSJ, FEBRUARY 4, 2012
•
Why French Parents Are Superior
While Americans fret over modern parenthood, the French are raising happy, well-behaved children without all the anxiety. Pamela Druckerman on the Gallic secrets for avoiding tantrums, teaching patience and saying ‘non’ with authority.
When my daughter was 18 months old, my husband and I decided to take her on a little summer holiday. We picked a coastal town that’s a few hours by train from Paris, where we were living (I’m American, he’s British), and booked a hotel room with a crib. Bean, as we call her, was our only child at this point, so forgive us for thinking: How hard could it be?
We ate breakfast at the hotel, but we had to eat lunch and dinner at the little seafood restaurants around the old port. We quickly discovered that having two restaurant meals a day with a toddler deserved to be its own circle of hell.
Bean would take a brief interest in the food, but within a few minutes she was spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then she demanded to be sprung from her high chair so she could dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks.
Our strategy was to finish the meal quickly. We ordered while being seated, then begged the server to rush out some bread and bring us our appetizers and main courses at the same time. While my husband took a few bites of fish, I made sure that Bean didn’t get kicked by a waiter or lost at sea. Then we switched. We left enormous, apologetic tips to compensate for the arc of torn napkins and calamari around our table.
After a few more harrowing restaurant visits, I started noticing that the French families around us didn’t look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.
Though by that time I’d lived in France for a few years, I couldn’t explain this. And once I started thinking about French parenting, I realized it wasn’t just mealtime that was different. I suddenly had lots of questions. Why was it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I’d clocked at French playgrounds, I’d never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn’t my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn’t their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had?
parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids’ spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves.
By the end of our ruined beach holiday, I decided to figure out what French parents were doing differently. Why didn’t French children throw food? And why weren’t their parents shouting? Could I change my wiring and get the same results with my own offspring?
Driven partly by maternal desperation, I have spent the last several years investigating French parenting. And now, with Bean 6 years old and twins who are 3, I can tell you this: The French aren’t perfect, but they have some parenting secrets that really do work.
I first realized I was on to something when I discovered a 2009 study, led by economists at Princeton, comparing the child-care experiences of similarly situated mothers in Columbus, Ohio, and Rennes, France. The researchers found that American moms considered it more than twice as unpleasant to deal with their kids. In a different study by the same economists, working mothers in Texas said that even housework was more pleasant than child care.
Rest assured, I certainly don’t suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I’m not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don’t want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.
But for all its problems, France is the perfect foil for the current problems in American parenting. Middle-class French parents (I didn’t follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.
Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. “For me, the evenings are for the parents,” one Parisian mother told me. “My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it’s adult time.” French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.
I’m hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. This problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter parenting, and my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. Nobody seems to like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all parents themselves.
Of course, the French have all kinds of public services that help to make having kids more appealing and less stressful. Parents don’t have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.
But these public services don’t explain all of the differences. The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. “Ah, you mean how do we educate them?” they asked. “Discipline,” I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas “educating” (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.
One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don’t pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)
One Saturday I visited Delphine Porcher, a pretty labor lawyer in her mid-30s who lives with her family in the suburbs east of Paris. When I arrived, her husband was working on his laptop in the living room, while 1-year-old Aubane napped nearby. Pauline, their 3-year-old, was sitting at the kitchen table, completely absorbed in the task of plopping cupcake batter into little wrappers. She somehow resisted the temptation to eat the batter.
Delphine said that she never set out specifically to teach her kids patience. But her family’s daily rituals are an ongoing apprenticeship in how to delay gratification. Delphine said that she sometimes bought Pauline candy. (Bonbons are on display in most bakeries.) But Pauline wasn’t allowed to eat the candy until that day’s snack, even if it meant waiting many hours.
When Pauline tried to interrupt our conversation, Delphine said, “Just wait two minutes, my little one. I’m in the middle of talking.” It was both very polite and very firm. I was struck both by how sweetly Delphine said it and by how certain she seemed that Pauline would obey her. Delphine was also teaching her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. “The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself,” she said of her son, Aubane.
It’s a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In a 2004 study on the parenting beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the American moms said that encouraging one’s child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.
Later, I emailed Walter Mischel, the world’s leading expert on how children learn to delay gratification. As it happened, Mr. Mischel, 80 years old and a professor of psychology at Columbia University, was in Paris, staying at his longtime girlfriend’s apartment. He agreed to meet me for coffee.
Mr. Mischel is most famous for devising the “marshmallow test” in the late 1960s when he was at Stanford. In it, an experimenter leads a 4- or 5-year-old into a room where there is a marshmallow on a table. The experimenter tells the child he’s going to leave the room for a little while, and that if the child doesn’t eat the marshmallow until he comes back, he’ll be rewarded with two marshmallows. If he eats the marshmallow, he’ll get only that one.
Most kids could only wait about 30 seconds. Only one in three resisted for the full 15 minutes that the experimenter was away. The trick, the researchers found, was that the good delayers were able to distract themselves.
Following up in the mid-1980s, Mr. Mischel and his colleagues found that the good delayers were better at concentrating and reasoning, and didn’t “tend to go to pieces under stress,” as their report said.
Could it be that teaching children how to delay gratification—as middle-class French parents do—actually makes them calmer and more resilient? Might this partly explain why middle-class American kids, who are in general more used to getting what they want right away, so often fall apart under stress?
Mr. Mischel, who is originally from Vienna, hasn’t performed the marshmallow test on French children. But as a longtime observer of France, he said that he was struck by the difference between French and American kids. In the U.S., he said, “certainly the impression one has is that self-control has gotten increasingly difficult for kids.”
American parents want their kids to be patient, of course. We encourage our kids to share, to wait their turn, to set the table and to practice the piano. But patience isn’t a skill that we hone quite as assiduously as French parents do. We tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don’t.
French parents and caregivers find it hard to believe that we are so laissez-faire about this crucial ability. When I mentioned the topic at a dinner party in Paris, my French host launched into a story about the year he lived in Southern California.
He and his wife had befriended an American couple and decided to spend a weekend away with them in Santa Barbara. It was the first time they’d met each other’s kids, who ranged in age from about 7 to 15. Years later, they still remember how the American kids frequently interrupted the adults in midsentence. And there were no fixed mealtimes; the American kids just went to the refrigerator and took food whenever they wanted. To the French couple, it seemed like the American kids were in charge.
“What struck us, and bothered us, was that the parents never said ‘no,’ ” the husband said. The children did “n’importe quoi,” his wife added.
After a while, it struck me that most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase “n’importe quoi,” meaning “whatever” or “anything they like.” It suggests that the American kids don’t have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It’s the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits about certain things—that’s the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce these. But inside thecadre, French parents entrust their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy.
Authority is one of the most impressive parts of French parenting—and perhaps the toughest one to master. Many French parents I meet have an easy, calm authority with their children that I can only envy. Their kids actually listen to them. French children aren’t constantly dashing off, talking back, or engaging in prolonged negotiations.
One Sunday morning at the park, my neighbor Frédérique witnessed me trying to cope with my son Leo, who was then 2 years old. Leo did everything quickly, and when I went to the park with him, I was in constant motion, too. He seemed to regard the gates around play areas as merely an invitation to exit.
Frédérique had recently adopted a beautiful redheaded 3-year-old from a Russian orphanage. At the time of our outing, she had been a mother for all of three months. Yet just by virtue of being French, she already had a whole different vision of authority than I did—what was possible and pas possible.
Frédérique and I were sitting at the perimeter of the sandbox, trying to talk. But Leo kept dashing outside the gate surrounding the sandbox. Each time, I got up to chase him, scold him, and drag him back while he screamed. At first, Frédérique watched this little ritual in silence. Then, without any condescension, she said that if I was running after Leo all the time, we wouldn’t be able to indulge in the small pleasure of sitting and chatting for a few minutes.
“That’s true,” I said. “But what can I do?” Frédérique said I should be sterner with Leo. In my mind, spending the afternoon chasing Leo was inevitable. In her mind, it was pas possible.
I pointed out that I’d been scolding Leo for the last 20 minutes. Frédérique smiled. She said that I needed to make my “no” stronger and to really believe in it. The next time Leo tried to run outside the gate, I said “no” more sharply than usual. He left anyway. I followed and dragged him back. “You see?” I said. “It’s not possible.”
Frédérique smiled again and told me not to shout but rather to speak with more conviction. I was scared that I would terrify him. “Don’t worry,” Frederique said, urging me on.
Leo didn’t listen the next time either. But I gradually felt my “nos” coming from a more convincing place. They weren’t louder, but they were more self-assured. By the fourth try, when I was finally brimming with conviction, Leo approached the gate but—miraculously—didn’t open it. He looked back and eyed me warily. I widened my eyes and tried to look disapproving.
After about 10 minutes, Leo stopped trying to leave altogether. He seemed to forget about the gate and just played in the sandbox with the other kids. Soon Frédérique and I were chatting, with our legs stretched out in front of us. I was shocked that Leo suddenly viewed me as an authority figure.
“See that,” Frédérique said, not gloating. “It was your tone of voice.” She pointed out that Leo didn’t appear to be traumatized. For the moment—and possibly for the first time ever—he actually seemed like a French child.
—Adapted from “Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting,” to be published by the Penguin Press.
Here’s another odd take, if you wonder what white nationalists make of the alleged weaknesses and strong points of Asians and their culture vs other minorities. Mr. ostrovletania seems to think Asians aren’t quite as smart as Jews and Asians also fall for idea that you’re really assimilated until you’re just as liberal as the Jews are.
http://ostrovletania.blogspot.com/2012/01/neo-fascist-review-of-amy-chuas-battle.html
If anyone, especially a CA or Asian, wants to get really mad, read the Ostrovletania treatise. It is uber racist and very anti Chinese/Asian. He even attacks Iris Chang, who wasn’t invited to the inquisition. The treatise is also excessively long winded. Talk about beating a dead horse to death.
no matter what, you are stuck in Cimmerian anyway! just go to yale or harvard so mark zuckerberg can make good use you people. you have no place in asia proper either. a billion people and still can not copy it right, damn! even if there is a place for you, you just gonna open whole bunch of sweat shops. yeah, tell your tiger mom, isohel and elysian fileds didn’t exist. last thing, mao myrmidons just risen to 80 million.
Continuing to follow the saga of what may be one of the more outrageous examples – and there are similar examples aplenty! – of the child abuses of Amy Chua, I think it timely and prudent to provide a healthy, humane counterpoint by way of a much different kind of example of adult guidance to a young stranger. To wit:
ADVICE TO A YOUNG PERSON INTERESTED IN A CAREER IN THE LAW
In May 1954, M. Paul Claussen, Jr, a 12-year-old boy living in Alexandria, Virginia, sent a letter to Mr Justice Felix Frankfurter in which he wrote that he was interested in “going into the law as a career” and requested advice as to “some ways to start preparing myself while still in junior high school.” This is the reply he received:
My Dear Paul:
No one can be a truly competent lawyer unless he is a cultivated man. If I were you I would forget about any technical preparation for the law. The best way to prepare for the law is to be a well-read person. Thus alone can one acquire the capacity to use the English language on paper and in speech and with the habits of clear thinking which only a truly liberal education can give. No less important for a lawyer is the cultivation of the imaginative faculties by reading poetry, seeing great paintings, in the original or in easily available reproductions, and listening to great music. Stock your mind with the deposit of much good reading, and widen and deepen your feelings by experiencing vicariously as much as possible the wonderful mysteries of the universe, and forget about your future career.
With good wishes,
Sincerely yours,
[signed] Felix Frankfurter
From THE LAW AS LITERATURE, ed. by Ephraim London, Simon and Schuster, 1960.
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I knew that a Paul Claussen had been a major figure (1972-2007) in the Office of the Historian of The United States Department of State in Washington, with an abiding interest in The Great Seal of The United States. http://diplomacy.state.gov/documents/organization/101044.pdf
An obituary of Dr Claussen is on page 47 in http://2001-2009.state.gov/documents/organization/86414.pdf
and http://www.thefreelibrary.com/M.+Paul+Claussen,+history‘s+friend%3A+office+of+the+historian+suffers+a…-a0167843232
So, wishing to determine whether or not the elder Claussen was, indeed, the boy writing to Justice Frankfurter in 1954 I wrote to his former colleague at State. The reply received today follows.
—– Original Message —–
From: PA History Mailbox
To: ‘Andre M. Smith’
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2012 10:11 AM
Subject: RE: Chris Morrison
Dear Mr. Smith,
Copied below is the response I received from one of Paul Claussen’s long-time colleagues here in the Office of the Historian.
Yes it is. The young Paul wanted to be a lawyer and so decided to write Felix Frankfurter and ask for his advice. Frankfurter evidently was taken with his letter and wrote back at length…Frankfurter of course kept a copy and the text of the letter has been published in collections of Frankfurter’s writings.
Please contact us of you have any additional questions.
Best regards,
Chris
Christopher A. Morrison, Ph.D.
Historian, Policy Studies Division
U.S. Department of State
Office of the Historian (PA/HO)
_________________________________
Dr Claussen did follow the advice of Justice Frankfurter. And he came out of that advice none the worse for it. The world is much bigger, richer, more tolerant, and more laden with opportunities than the blinkered view of Amy Chua would have her daughters and fellow fear-laden mothers without Ivy League tenure believe.
For a very well-balanced alternative to the mania – and it is nothing less – to which the many Chuas of the world subscribe, read the refreshingly informed reports on http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2009-12-04§ion=3&id=2, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/28/china, and http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/16/liberalarts
________________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.
I believe some useful purpose will be served by offering here, what the lawyers might like to call, but will seldom welcome, a healthy second opinion; a collective opinion that will demonstrate in abbreviated form the absolute folly of any attempt to teach music to children in the manner advocated by Amy Chua and her supporters.
These titles, with a few accompanying comments, should be read only as an introduction to a vast, interesting subject. There is one observation one can make about them all, and many more on this same subject, if needed to prove the point: Their attempt at an inherent humane understanding. I shall let the individual writers speak for themselves. To wit:
C. C. Liu [fellow at the Centre of Asian Studies, The University of Hong Kong]: A Critical History of New Music in China, Columbia University Press, 2010.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese culture had fallen into a stasis, and intellectuals began to go abroad for new ideas. What emerged was an exciting musical genre that C. C. Liu terms “new music. With no direct ties to traditional Chinese music, “new music” reflects the compositional techniques and musical idioms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European styles. Liu traces the genesis and development of “new music” throughout the twentieth century, deftly examining the social and political forces that shaped “new music” and its uses by political activists and the government. http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-962-996-360-6/a-critical-history-of-new-music-in-china
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Brahmstedt’s China travels bring recognition: TTU [Tennessee Technical University] trumpet professor “Outstanding foreigner.” http://www.tntech.edu/pressreleases/brahmstedts-china-travels-bring-recognition-ttu-trumpet-professor-qoutstanding-foreignerq/
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Music Education in China: A look at primary school music education in China reveals numerous recent developments in general music, band and string programs, and private lessons. Music Educators Journal May 1997 83:28-52, doi:10.2307/3399021. Full Text (PDF)
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Howard Brahmstedt and Patricia Brahmstedt: Music education in China. Music Educators Journal 83(6):28-30, 52. May 1997.
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Joseph Kahn and Daniel J. Wakin: Classical music looks toward China with hope. The New York Time, 3 April 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/arts/music/03class1.htm?pagewanted=all
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Ho Wai-Ching: A comparative study of music education in Shanghai and Taipei: Westernization and nationalization. A Journal of Comparative and International Education 34:2, 2004.
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Yuri Ishii and Mari Shiobara: Teachers’ role in the transition and transmission of culture. Journal of Education for Teaching 34(4):245-9, November 2008.
There are some common trends, which indicate that certain values are now shared among music education policies of many Asian countries. These are an emphasis on the purpose of education as the development of children’s total human quality rather than mere transmission of skills and knowledge by rote learning, the encouragement of a learner-centered approach, the introduction of authentic assessment, the integration of existing subjects, and the assertion of cultural specificity.
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Chee-Hoo Lim: An historical perspective on the Chinese Americans in American music education. Research in Music Education May 2009 vol. 27 no. 2 27-37.
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Howard Brahmstedt: Trumpet playing in China. P. 29. International Trumpet Guild Journal, February 1993.
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Richard Curt Kraus: Pianos and politics in China. Middle-class ambitions and the struggle over Western music. Oxford University Press. New York, 1989.
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From Shanghai Conservatory to Temple University
Yiyue Zhang holds both Bachelors and Masters in Music Education from Shanghai Conservatory of Music in China. Currently, she is pursuing a Master’s degree in Music Education at Temple University. Ms. Zhang is from a family of music. She first learned Chinese classic dance from her father at the age of 3. She then started to learn accordion at the age of 5 and piano at the age of 6. During the close to 20 years of piano training and education, she has also been learning saxophone, cello, vocal music and percussion instrument of Chinese ethnic nationalities. In addition to piano solo, Ms. Zhang has rich experiences as a piano accompanist for vocal and chorus performances. When she served as the accompanist for the female choir of Shanghai Conservatory in 2006, they participated in the Fourth World Chorus Competition and won the gold medal for female choir, silver medal for contemporary music and another silver medal for theological music. Before came the United States, Ms. Zhang taught general music at Shanghai Hongqiao Middle School and Shanghai North Fujian Rd. Primary School as her internship in 2006. From 2006 to 2008, she taught piano and music class in Shanghai Tong-de-meng Kindergarten while held Chinese Teacher Qualification Certificate. Ms. Zhang is currently the piano accompanist of Chinese Musical Voices located at Cherry Hill, NJ as well as the assistant conductor of Guanghua Chorus located at Blue Bell, PA. While holding Early Childhood Music Master Certification (Level 1) from The Gordon Institute for Music Learning, she is also actively engaged in the educational and cultural activities with the networks of local Chinese schools in the Philadelphia area. http://www.temple.edu/boyer/music/programs/musiced/MusicEducationGraduateAssistants.htm
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Li Ying-ling: Essential study on the function of children’s music education.
Music education is beneficial in the comprehensive development of children’s healthy personality, helpful to enlighten the children’s creative thinking, helpful to educate the regulation senses of children, helpful to develop the children’s language and good emotion. It has certain social effect and realistic meaning for the growth of children. Every teacher should pay attention to the functional character of children music education, consciously meet the demands for music education of the children nowadays, strengthen the socialization function of music education, promote socialization proceeding of children. Music Department of Kunming University. Journal of Kunming University 2:2009.
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André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.
Amy Chua has never lived in China. Her understanding of its culture, that is, the culture as it’s truly lived by the indigenous people in their dailyness, then must be that of the tourist. Here perhaps is one view of a China she may or may not have seen.
http://bbs.tiexue.net/post_5057209_1.html [Each of the four pictures can be enlarged for clearer viewings.] In what likely is Nanning, the capitol of Guang Xi region, the boy was caught stealing money to pursue his addiction in Internet gaming. (This is a common problem in China, especially among adolescent boys. http://playnoevil.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1076-China-continues-focus-on-Internet-Addiction-Reading-the-Tea-Leaves.html) As punishment his father has publicly stripped off the boy’s clothes, lathered him with some unstated brown caking (which I shall discretely hope is mere mud), bound his hands behind his back, and then pulled him on his back and buttocks by one foot for disgrace through a very-public area of the city.
On contemporary corporal punishment in China:
A third of them [child respondents] said corporal punishment negatively affected their personalities, causing them to become introverted and depressed.
Legal experts cited by the paper said China should ban corporal punishment in its marriage laws to protect children from physical and psychological harm and to protect the rights of minors.
They blamed the common occurrence of corporal punishment in China on the traditional belief that children were a part of their parents, not individuals. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-12/07/content_397964.htm
The routine beatings allegedly given to child gymnasts in China are no different to the corporal punishment that was once part of daily life in English public schools, according to the head of the Olympic movement.
Mr Rogge said he believed that if physical punishment is being used to train young athletes in China, then it is likely to be confined to sports such as gymnastics and swimming, where the age of competitors is much younger than in the other Olympic sports. What is not known is how widespread the practice is. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1504716/Chinas-abuse-of-its-athletes-is-no-different-to-Britains-public-schools-says-Olympics-chief.html
“It was a pretty disturbing experience. I was really shocked by some of what was going on. I know it is gymnastics and that sport has to start its athletes young, but I have to say I was really shocked. I think it’s a brutal programme. They said this is what they needed to do to make them hard.
“I do think those kids are being abused. The relationship between coach and child and parent and child is very different here. But I think it goes beyond the pale. It goes beyond what is normal behaviour. It was really chilling.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/2368416/Olympics-Pinsent-upset-at-Chinese-abuse.html
Anyone who thinks the Chinese are a race of genteel pacifists who, collectively, design their lives to awaken every morning wiser than they went to bed the night before is a candidate for some serious awakening of his own. As a whole person Amy Chua is a type; she is not an aberration.
Now, for one question I have not seen asked anywhere. . . Does Professor Chua play a music instrument? If so, let’s hear some of it. If not, from what sources has she gathered her standards about music technique and style and how they might be taught to a very young child who has shown no particular affinity for any instrument? Can she play any music from what she has demanded from either of her two daughters? Can she play simultaneously triptlets in the left hand and duolets in the right? Can she perform, even modestly, http://www.alfred.com/samplepages/00-16734_01~02.pdf, the composition she has demanded her post-toddler daughter play with assurance?
There can be no doubt that Professor Chua likes violence, so long as it’s not directed at her, the core definition of a bully. She has said recently that there are parts of the world in which some of her parenting techniques might be considered child abuse. I do wish she could be persuaded to name (1) which some of those parts of the world are, (2) just which parenting techniques she is referring to, and (3) why she believes those same techinques should not be defined as child abuse in her home state of Connecticut.
How did such a reprehensible woman obtain a position so high up on the feeding chain with so little prior experience in law education?
HUSBAND, faculty of Yale Law School since 1990 : Jed Rubenfeld
WIFE, faculty of Yale Law School since 2001 : Amy Chua
As the lawyers may put it, Let the evidence speak for itself. The Tiger Mom has made it on her own claws.
One last question: Who prevents Professor Chua from sitting on a toilet or eating a meal when, at any given moment, she is vexed beyond her capacity to complete an academic assignment or any other professional obligation within the proper time allocated for its completion?
_______________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.
For all my focus on this subject I think the following text, written from the trenches on the other side of The Pacific, should be required reading everywhere else; perhaps even over there.
Cordially,
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.
__________________________
Chinese Mom: American ‘Tiger Mother’ clueless about real Chinese parenting
The “Chinese” parenting style advocated by Asian-American author Amy Chua is no longer popular among Chinese mothers
By Helen He 20 January, 2011
http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/life/helen-he-dont-demonize-chinese-mothers-545975
As a post-1980s mother, I, like many other young moms in China, often seek parenting advice from various channels and never miss reading the latest popular books on parenting.
Recently, a book titled “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” written by Yale university professor Amy Chua on the parenting experience of a Chinese mother, stirred up a controversy in the West after an excerpt from the book was printed in the Wall Street Journal.
I’m a born-and-bred Shanghainese mother, not that proficient in English, so I wasn’t able to read Amy Chua’s entire work. But I did have friends translate a book excerpt printed in the Wall Street Journal for me.
The author claims that mothers, by being strict and narrowminded and focusing only on results, are able to nurture child geniuses.
This is clearly a utilitarian take on parenting and I was deeply astounded that Chua lauds this as a forte of Chinese mothers.
I only want to say: Please don’t demonize Chinese mothers.
Amy Chua’s claims are misleading because Chinese-American women cannot be said to represent mothers in mainland China, and thus are unable to objectively elaborate on the parenting attitudes and experiences of Chinese mothers.
Amy Chua does not speak for all of us
Environment has a big influence over a person’s values, and the role of a mother is not something that every woman takes to immediately.
The Chinese parenting method Chua champions has no claims to authenticity.Every mother gradually devises her own parenting method, which is often shaped by her own experience growing up, as well as the environment around her.
According to reports, Amy Chua is a Filipino of Chinese descent.
Her parents emigrated to America and underwent an intense struggle to set their roots in a foreign land, which inevitably led them to adopt a more utilitarian outlook in raising their children: “We struggled to get you this new citizenship status, the best way to repay us as our children is to succeed in life.”
Amy Chua brings up Confucius in her article to explain why Chinese parents feel that their children are indebted to them for life. But, she probably doesn’t know that there is another fundamental saying in the Confucian school of thought that “ethics matter more than results, harmony more than competition.”
Simply put, one should not be overly aggressive in trying to outdo others nor adopt a mindset that every investment should get due returns.
Confucius also believed that education should be something tailored according to an individual’s talents and capabilities, rather than a force-fed regime.
In other words, the parenting that Amy Chua received while growing up already deviates from Chinese traditions, and despite her attempts to follow in the footsteps of her parents, the Chinese parenting method she champions has no claims to authenticity.
This strict parenting style, if blindly — or even vengefully — repeated among successive generations, will only be a prolonged tragedy.
The parenting styles of post-1980s mothers
The bulk of parents in China today comprise children born in the 1970s and 1980s. I will raise two examples to illustrate how Amy Chua’s perception of Chinese parenting methods differs from current practices in modern China.
Kaixin001, China’s Facebook that’s popular among the post-1980s generation in China, recently held two online polls.
One was titled “If you had a girl, what would you teach her?” while the other was “What would you do if you discovered your teenage son was in love?” Each had a total of 97,470 and 28,915 respondents, respectively.
a.. More on CNNGo: Another ‘Tiger Mother’ rebuttal from across the ocean
In the first poll, piano and karate came out on top with 55 percent and 54 percent of the total votes. In third place was the response “How to deal with men,” which shows that young parents are also concerned about their child’s interpersonal skills and EQ.
In the second poll, there were more than 15 different response options, but only 366 netizens (less than one percent of respondents) chose the most extreme option of sharply reprimanding the child.
The reason why books such as “Fu Lei’s Letters Home” and “Education of Love,” as well as more recent titles such as “A Good Mother Is Better than a Good Teacher” and “An Average Student at Home,” are so well-received among Chinese parents is because they reflect a parenting mindset premised on mutual respect and communication between parent and child — an attitude that’s fast becoming the norm in China.
The parenting method that Amy Chua encourages, one of forcing a child to discover his talents through disciplined and repeated practice, is contrary to the upbringing that many young Chinese mothers have received.
The parent-child relationship depicted in “Growing Pains,” an American television series popular in China in the 1980s, is something that is finding favor with many mothers of my generation.
When I was in university, the way the Seaver family openly communicated with each other was something I could identify with.
This strict parenting style, if blindly — or even vengefully — repeated among successive generations, will only produce a prolonged tragedy.Along with the opening up of China, my parents’ generation had also opened up to other methods of parenting. They no longer held on to a “spare the rod and spoil the child” mindset, but instead saw their children as equals and hoped to build friendships with them.
Nurturing healthy individuals rather than child prodigies who have no fun
The desire for one’s child to be a straight-A student or a musical genius seems simple and naive to most Chinese mothers.
A survey of 1,285 mothers of children up to six years old conducted by Babytree, China’s largest parenting website, found that health, happiness, self-confidence and kindness were the four most important traits that mothers hoped their children would have.
About 77 percent of mothers did not expect their children to have particular talents and 65 percent of mothers said they would encourage children to pursue their hobbies, even if it was not an interest shared by the mother.
The most important wish among mothers was for their children to have a happy, stress-free life.
The point I wish to emphasize is this: a child is a gift, but the right to control him is not a given.
The child that we nurture may subtly be influenced by our thoughts and values while under our care, but this does not mean that we should forcefully deprive them the independence to discover and grasp other opportunities that the world offers.
Taiwanese author Lung Ying-tai wrote in her book “Seeing Off” that the role of a parent is merely to stand by one’s child and watch his back as he gradually ventures afar.
This very appropriately describes the mindset of many young parents in China today.
To raise a child is to give him the freedom to build a life of his own, rather than to force him to become a replica of your own successes or as compensation to make up for your regrets. As such, the right to decide what is good or bad for a child is not entirely up to the parents — the child should have a say, too.
If life really is a race, instead of encouraging your child to tirelessly try to outdo others and come in first, why not let him run at an enjoyable pace so he can admire the sights along the way?
I dare say that most Chinese mothers, especially those belonging to the post-1980s generation, do silently but lovingly encouraging their children to make the most of life in exactly this manner — a mindset contrary to that advocated by Amy Chua.
Article translated by Debbie Yong. See the original Chinese version here.
http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/life/helen-he-dont-demonize-chinese-mothers-545975
Some words penned in response to the thoughts of a student writing elsewhere . . .
I would not normally lock horns and try to best a junior in high school; I’m hoping you do not read my words here as such, for they are meant for you only as a provocation to further thought to your ideas well-presented.
You’ve written that you “used to get frustrated when I had to practice violin and I really didn’t want to . . .” Do I read correctly that you no longer “get frustrated?” If so, that’s a remarkable advancement. As a musician myself I want to ask you, Why do you practice violin and not another instrument of your choosing less frustrating, for examples, flute, harpsichord, tuba, or tabla. There is a vast – and I do mean vast! – repertoire for each of those, and many other, instruments that could challenge you unendingly for the remainder of your life. Instead of spending hours at your chosen instrument (whichever it may be) in the drudgery of isolated practice, why not spend more of your time in practice with music ensembles of various kinds. This can yield a discipline and advancement of a uniquely different kind. If you are studying formally with a violin teacher I’m quite sure he will confirm the well-founded idea that, as a performer, playing an instrument is one kind of challenge but playing an instrument WITH PEOPLE is significantly more so. A musician in isolation is a musician limited. And herein lays one, only one, of the transparent contradictions of the way Professor Chua has taught her two daughters to approach their instruments; opportunistically solely for unartistic purposes.
A fundamental flaw in the approach to music of Amy Chua – an amusical hack with no known talent for an art of any kind! – is that she has decided it’s perfectly acceptable to pervert one of the greater of the fine arts for use in ulterior purposes. In the example of the Chua family, so-so slogging through masterpieces of music was used to impress others when applying for admission to university. (Would Professor Chua dare to advocate this openly with religion, physics, good grammar, or issues of national interest?) The whole idea that her elder daughter, Sophia, played a debut recital in Carnegie Hall is an early example of the pervasive blight of résumé bloat on which social climbers like Amy Chua have advanced themselves; a blight to which the Chua daughters were introduced early by two parents who know well how to tweak the system to gain unearned personal advantage.
Carnegie Hall, http://www.carnegiehall.org/history/, includes three auditoria in its building: Stern Auditorium http://www.carnegiehall.org/information/stern-auditorium-perelman-stage/, Zankel Hall http://www.gotickets.com/venues/ny/zankel_hall_at_carnegie_hall.php, and Weill Recital Hall http://www.carnegiehall.org/Information/Weill-Recital-Hall/. It was in Weill that Sophia performed as only one among a cattle-call string of young pianists that day. Do you doubt what I write here? Compare the architectural design,
http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV-AB160_chau_i_G_20110107132345.jpg, behind Sophia with that of the architectural design at the rear of the stage in http://www.carnegiehall.org/information/stern-auditorium-perelman-stage/. Having been a performer, myself, in both Stern and Weill over many years you have my assurance that Sophia performed her piece in Weill. Debut recital in Carnegie Hall! Indeed!
You have written about your parents that they are “less extreme than Chua I’ll admit, but a lot of her memoir is satire and exaggeration.” Don’t be deceived by quick-change artist Professor Chua. She has spent more than one year trying to convince readers of her text that she is some kind of nouveau belles-lettrist who did no more than exercise a writer’s license to engage her readers. In truth she meant what she wrote until her hypocritical posturing as an authentic Chinese mother — born in Illinois to a Filipino father, neither speaks Chinese nor writes Chinese script — came back to haunt her with a ferocity that caused this self-styled Tiger Mother to recoil into improvised doublespeak. Amy Chua is a complete fake!
All young musicians should be given only two music instrument choices to pursue in life, Violin or Piano. All else is useless waste. Any adult giving such advice is one woefully ill-informed. As a bass trombonist, my instrument has been my first class ticket from person-to-person, school-to-school, city-to-city, studio-to-studio, and stage-to-stage. With the kinds of preparations the Chua daughters were given will they ever perform, as I have, with Richard Tucker, Birgit Nilsson, Roberta Peters, Herbert von Karajan, Leopold Stokowski, and the two-thirds of The New York Philharmonic who were my schoolmates for five years in Juilliard? Forget it!
Mercifully, I was never besieged with a Tiger Mother or Tiger Anything to motivate me. Yes, I too sometimes was bored with scales and chords. Yes, sometimes my imagined future seemed an unattainable fantasy. Yes, I did sometimes fall flat on my face in public performance (as did my teachers before me and also their teachers before them). Life went on and continues to do so.
You’ve written that “At this point (as a Junior in high school) about 35% of the pressure to do well comes from my parents and the other 65% is complete self-motivation.” From the subtlety of your writing I suspect you’re cutting yourself short with that 65%. You appear to be much more highly motivated than your objective perspective about yourself can show you at this early time.
The violin? I advise you to seriously reëvaluate what you believe is your relationship to any instrument of your choice; if, indeed, the violin has been your choice and not that of someone else. If the violin has been your choice, stay with it through all the coming stormy weather of doubt and seeming incompetence. If it is not, drop it in preference to another more to your liking and its fitness for your physicality. (If it’s the tuba, tell your parents that someone other than I recommended it!)
Good Luck!
Cordially,
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.