My initial reaction to “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” was anger. After several days, the emotion turned to disheartened. And as I write this response, I open up the possibility for the activist, the psychologist, and the healer in me to be heard.
As an activist, the first thing that came to my mind was how the model minority myth was being elevated yet again. In my perspective, the article minimized, yet again, our humanity and tried to “Orientalize” us. I could hear that inquisitive, wholesome American voice again saying, “What are those Chinese people doing over there that makes them so successful?” It reminded me back in the day when Asian kids would win the Westinghouse science prize and everyone, including my parents, marveled at the genius of young Asian Americans. I was angry. Angry that the decades of work by many brothers and sisters who work extremely hard to debunk the model minority myth, was set back again. The full humanity of Asian Americans, including the struggles and problems faced in our community, was again dismissed.
The psychologist in me wanted to respond by sharing how strict, authoritarian parenting impacts children’s psyche. It may appear to be effective in terms of outputting a certain level of “success”, but we must also examine what side-effects are associated with that level of output. Psychologists including myself, who work with Asian American young people, often hear of the difficulties Asian American students experience in trying to live up to their parents’ impossible standards, their desire to please their parents and select a profession that their parents approve of, the struggle of creating their own identity and exploring other possibilities, and often, their depression for not being able to please themselves nor their parents in the end. Others have already commented on the high suicide rates among Asian American teens and young adults.
But alas, the healer in me hoped that if anything, this article would open up discussion for us to talk about parenting children in a way that helps them to blossom and become their highest potential. I think this is the real question. Regardless of culture or background, we parents want our children to be happy and successful. Sometimes however, we get side-tracked about what it is that really helps our children to be successful and revert to doing the only thing we know how to do, whether or not that works. Let’s start talking as parents about what helps our children become their full potential. Let’s be willing to put aside our egos and talk about our struggles and heal our own wounds so that we do not have to repeat the same mistakes from our past. Let’s re-evaluate what “success” means and find that well-being encompasses physical, emotional, financial, personal and relational well-being.
So, if I were to write a book about parenting, I would have a heart-to-heart with parents and children. I would ask parents to talk about what their aspirations are for themselves and their children, what are the fears that keep them up at night, and what do they struggle with inside themselves. I would talk with children, young and adult about what they enjoy most about their parents, what it is that they want to learn most from them, and what they wish they could say but don’t.
The human element is that we are all healing and struggling along together in this life. Why write more books that divide and separate us from ourselves and each other. Let’s find a way to come together and connect.
Amy Lam, Ph.D.is a former research direction and is a member of the California Young Women’s Collaborative and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum.
I am Chinese, and I am a mother, but I am not a tiger mother. I wanted to be a good mother, a wish that is surely shared by mothers of all races. In my quest to be one, I read parenting books. I sought advice from parenting experts. I talked to other parents.
Everyone had something to say to me about parenting, the Asian way to parent, the Western way to parent, the right way to parent, the better way to parent, the best way to parent, the only way to parent.
It has been more than two decades since I read my first book on parenting. And now looking back, I see that I had the best teacher in my daughter. From the minute she was born, she was telling me how I could be the right mother for her…the best mother for her…
And I learned…by listening to her…by watching her…and by knowing her…
http://www.thegoodchinesemother.wordpress.com
Good to hear a voice of reason ,rather than ego. And I believe at its core, that’s what this is all about – tiger mothers, grizzly mamas, mother hens… which animal is best? It wasn’t invited, but I will tell you what I most enjoyed about my parents: Their utter devotion to each other and unconditional love for us. Their discipline was balanced with tenderness.
By the standards of the day, they were quite strict and were deeply committed to seeing their children educated, particularly my father, who was a self-made man. Though we didn’t understand the depth and scope of the shelter they provided us until much later, we most certainly knew we were loved. Yours, truly, is an excellent voice for the community.
My daughter sees that Chinese kids are getting ahead of the white kids in school, and she works hard to keep up with them. I help her with math and science especially. I’m glad that the Chinese kids are making the white kids stop being such slackers and realize that racial competition is a fact of life.
I want the white kids to be the “model majority” once again! Hail YT!
“Let’s re-evaluate what “success” means and find that well-being encompasses physical, emotional, financial, personal and relational well-being.” Well said, Ms. Lam.
This sums it up. Amy Chua has done an excellent job raising her children according to her definition of success. This does not provide for any other parent on earth (of any ethnicity) direction as to how they should parent. Why? Because every individual parent on earth will have his and her own definition of success. Thanks for the article.
Jeronimus,
Glad to hear that your daughter is working hard. There is nothing wrong with competition, but sometimes, instead of being as good as everybody else in the same thing, it would be better to be very good in something totally different.
For example, in a room full of excellent pianists and violinists, will the good drummer not stand out, and be special?
The world would be a boring place if we were all good at the same thing.
Just my two cents.
http://www.thegoodchinesemother.wordpress.com
Jeronimus, I think this did happen in the neighborhood I grew up in. After my family sent 7 kids to MIT and Stanford, more kids went to colleges like that. It’s not just Asians kids carrying out violin cases or cranking out wunderkinder, the competition in my still-predominantly white neighborhood is stiff from parents of all backgrounds, including African immigrants whose daughter kept stepping up to collect awards at the usual ceremonies. There’s a proper place for lots of different parenting styles. Chua made a characiture of the Asian sterotype and turned it up to 13 in her book when she probably only actually inflicted an 11 on her daughters.
Still it’s amazing the planet is outraged by this woman when almost nobody hears about the anti-Asian beatings in South Philadelphia where everyone from the parents up to the district superintendent seems to think their idea of success for African American minority kids is to beat the crap out of the model minority and get away with it, and their idea of improving schools is to drive Asians out instead of integrating MORE students like that. How many tiger parents are going to even consider moving to Philadelphia now?
Posted January 29, 2011 at 4:28 AM
My daughter sees that Chinese kids are getting ahead of the white kids in school, and she works hard to keep up with them. I help her with math and science especially. I’m glad that the Chinese kids are making the white kids stop being such slackers and realize that racial competition is a fact of life.
I want the white kids to be the “model majority” once again! Hail YT!
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.