Chinese Daughters and Amy Chua
Until this week, Amy Chua was best known as a Yale law professor, but now she stands, with arms crossed confidently, at the center of a raging online battle between detractors and defenders of the parenting approach she proclaims in her essay, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” It is a manifesto that, as my colleague Blake Eskin puts it, “makes a case for parenting with the kind of overwhelming force Colin Powell deployed against Saddam Hussein.”
While the comments on her piece continue to mount—“refreshingly honest” versus “wrong and disturbing”—I sought out some of the voices that are drowned out: those of Chinese and Chinese-American offspring.
Three expert witnesses, each with a different combination of Chinese and American experience: Tze-cheng Chun, a second-generation Chinese-American, is artistic director of the Tze Chun Dance Company in New York. Lu Han was born in Beijing, graduated from New York University, and is a now a researcher and translator in China. Qi Zhai, who was born in the Chinese city of Harbin and educated at Stanford, is a writer and editor in Beijing. Listen to them, not me, but for those without time to read to the end, the takeaway is this: Amy Chua may be playing up the drama, but the outlines are unmistakably familiar. The results? Well, that’s more complicated.
Tze-cheng Chun tells me,
Yes—Chinese mothers are superior in that they equip their children with the skills needed to succeed in their careers and as members of society. However, a different, and more difficult, task for a Chinese mother is to convey their best intentions and love while doing so…. Chinese parents usually succeed in producing hard-working academically strong children; however, the second level of success—being able to create a loving and communicative family dynamic—is not always attained…. Some Chinese children feel as many Western parents feel, that the Chinese parenting method is harsh and lacks compassion. Many just quietly obey their parents because they dread the wrath they’d incur otherwise. They simply do as they are told. Or, they rebel. Growing up outside of Boston, I knew many Chinese-American children who were hard-working students, and some who were the total opposite: unmotivated and defiant kids who stayed out late and got into trouble. Chinese people are traditionally not very open about their feelings, and many children I grew up with took their parent’s inability to communicate as a sign that they did not, in fact, know what was best….
My mother was by no means a “typical” Chinese parent. She rarely scolded us and let me give up piano at age seven. She encouraged my brother and I to pursue all our interests (including a school play or two) and supported us to the best of her ability while never pressuring us. She made it clear that no matter how much she wanted us to succeed, it did not matter unless we wanted to succeed ourselves. Giving us this responsibility for our own lives drove us to work harder. She taught us that our futures were ours to make, not hers, but whatever we chose to pursue she would be there to support us. My mother patiently explained everything to my brother and me, from how the world works to why we should work hard. She never asked us to just follow orders. She never dictated a chore or demanded more from us than what we could give. She always looked for creative solutions and pushed us to ask our own questions. My brother is now a filmmaker and I am a choreographer, two professions that are, as my grandmother constantly reminds us, a Chinese parent’s worst nightmare.
In Beijing, Lu Han writes,
Thinking that you have the world in your control, and telling your kids that, can be a very dangerous thing to do because there are all these things in life that will be out of your reach. Having said that, I do have to agree with what Amy said, “Chinese parents assume strength, not fragility,” and it is generally a good practice. I think that assuming the best of your kids essentially makes them confident, because, no matter how strict your parents are toward you, deep down you know that it’s because they think you are psychologically strong enough to handle it, and excellent enough to accomplish whatever the task is. This faith stays with you no matter how little praise you get from your parents, or how harshly they yell at you. However, there are definitely tragic examples, too, in which kids grow up receiving this kind of education and still turn out to be “losers” or “parent haters.” There is an online chat group on Douban called “Fumu Jie Huohai” [“The Scourge of Studious Parents”], in which group members, mostly those born in the eighties, blame their parents for their own unhappiness or emotional trauma….
This issue has become extremely prominent as most urban families have been able to have only one child for the past twenty or thirty years, so the parents have such high hopes for them that it creates an intense pressure. It’s not only about being strict and spending more time on academic studies. What Amy, and millions of other Chinese parents are doing, is to make daily and even major life decisions for their children…. I think this is an even bigger problem with Chinese education—when you take away the ability to choose, you are basically taking away the ability to be responsible for your own choice and action.
Last, but certainly not least, Qi Zhai writes:
I was not allowed to get anything but an A. I remember so vividly a big fight with my father one year … I had come home with a B+ on my report card (for math) and my father demanded an explanation…. I said, “Dad, American parents would be so happy about a B+, or even a C, on a report card!” To this kind of complaint, my parents’ usual reply was “Then go find yourself some American parents.” Another common type of parental retort is, “American parents also let their daughters get pregnant in high school and watch their sons join rock bands….
I did extracurricular activities that my parents didn’t choose. I was in high school plays, I ran track and field, I did debate, I played volleyball. These were mixed experiences. For activities that my parents deemed respectable and worthwhile, like debate, they proudly showed up at events and told all their friends about my accomplishments. For sports and drama, they picked me up and dropped me off at all the practice times, but never bothered to attend games or performances. After sweaty practice sessions, at dinner time, my mother would always say, “Why are you wasting your time on this? You’re so tired, you shouldn’t work so hard for them.” It hurt me that she didn’t support my hard work and it was a conflicting message from what my coach was screaming on the field everyday, “I want you to run so hard that you vomit.”
I had sleepovers and was allowed to go out, but very selectively, with kids my parents knew whose parents they were comfortable with. Generally, with Chinese and Korean families, my parents didn’t worry so much. But I can’t recall ever spending the night at a Caucasian student’s house, except for a volleyball-team sleepover. I never quite attended a real party until graduation night, when I wandered around aimlessly watching the cool kids get drunk and high. I don’t feel I missed out on the teen-age pregnancies (common at my private high school in the Philippines) and drunken accidents (an American diplomat’s son died, among several other incidents), but I do feel that I needed more time to adjust socially once I was in America. To fit into American society, dinner parties, cocktails and other alcohol-infused events are a necessity. It took me longer to learn the basics of what you’re supposed to do, which arguably has an impact on how well you can network for a job, etc., in Western society….
Despite above objections to Amy Chua’s parenting style, I generally agree with her conclusions. American parents do “coddle” their children a bit too much. But there’s no other way. American adults are coddled, too—therapists, feelings, all that stuff—so to not coddle your children would be socially unacceptable. And Chinese parents do feel inextricably tied to their children for life, demanding everything of them but also giving everything to them. Like Amy’s story about staying up the night, the biggest gift my parents gave me is learning the value of education. I could feel it in everything they did, that education was the most important thing for the three of us. I had a science project in middle school that I couldn’t finish on time (because it was about nutrition and calories—not the kind of thing Chinese kids know a lot about and my parents were no help). My mother stayed up the whole night, cutting me apple slices and bringing other snacks, just watching me do the work so I wouldn’t feel alone….
When I have my own children, I will mimic my parents’ devotion to education. But what I will do differently is allow more room for creativity. Pragmatism and fear were the driving forces for my parents’ choices with me—fear of unemployment, war, disaster. I hope the luxury of choice will be the driving force when I become a parent. Nothing would make me happier than if my children could say, “Mom, I want to be an artist” without fearing for their income or success. I want to give my children what I’m still working on building for myself as an adult—confidence in knowing that no matter what choices you make, as long as you’re passionate about it, you will be successful.
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