In preparation for every new year, my mother does a thorough cleaning and clearing out of the house. She decided to take advantage of my time at home and asked me to purge my room of belongings I don’t want or need anymore. After dumping several garbage bags full of clothes I only wore a couple of times, arts and crafts kits I never used, useless souvenirs from family trips, toys I quickly outgrew, I felt ashamed of how excessive my parents clearly were in indulging me and of how disposable all these luxuries of my childhood have proven to be. I joked to my mom, should I ever have kids, they will own nothing. They will have very active imaginations because they will have imaginary toys. They will exert their creativity by playing with cardboard boxes. If they want trendy new outfits, they will learn to make them themselves. They will dream not of owning the latest video game system, but of a Bosendorfer piano. At this image of my parenting strategy, my own Hardass Asian Mama said, “Your children are going to hate you.”
This was before I read Amy Chua’s article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” which, I was convinced, had to be (poorly executed) satire. Chua maxes out on the Hardass Asian Parent stereotype, declaring that her daughters are not allowed to have playdates, watch TV, or be anything less than the #1 student in their classes. Chua scoffs at “Western” notions of self-esteem, brags about calling her daughter “garbage,” and details a scene in which she forbade her daughter to eat or go to the bathroom until she learned a piano piece perfectly. This, Chua claims, is the key to raising successful children.
Whether or not Chua is being serious, her article is certainly problematic, and many in the blogosphere have leveled their criticism. Angry Asian Man claims that the piece perpetuates the stereotype of Asians as soulless automatons at the same time that it essentializes this so-called “Chinese” parenting as the reason for why Asians are the supposed “model minority.” Hugo Schwyzer offers a more sobering perspective, reminding us that not only are there plenty of Asian American students struggling with poor grades, drug and alcohol problems and learning disabilities, but that Asian Americans (and Chinese American women in particular) are also more likely to commit suicide than white teens.
I echo both of these assertions, and add one more point that I have yet to see any other critic make: Amy Chua should also acknowledge that her daughters, whose parents are both Yale Law School professors, have become “successes” in large part because of their class privilege. Chua’s children benefited not only from hours of tenacious practice and discipline, but also from the fact that Chua had the means to send them to good schools, give them piano lessons, enter them into contests, and take hours out of the day to attend to their studies and practices. A mother struggling to raise a family on a domestic servant’s salary would have a much harder time getting her daughter to Carnegie Hall, no matter how ruthlessly she believed in discipline and hard work.
And perhaps it is because I so see “success” as determined by class privilege that I have conflicted feelings about Chua’s article. Indeed, I am bothered by how it panders to stereotype and how it dismisses the psychological damage her strategies could inflict. But I also see its hard-boiled aspiration for glory as so utterly familiar. I would guess that Chua, a Harvard grad whose parents were Chinese immigrants from the Philippines, grew up with the pressure facing so many children, especially children of immigrants: to make good on your parents’ sacrifices by achieving more than they did. When Chua writes, “Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud,” I can’t help but be reminded of all the times I told myself that I had to achieve more than my father, who himself has two masters degrees. So while I certainly find Chua's cultural essentialism repugnant, I also read her confidence in how she has bred success in her children with, I daresay, a little bit of envy.
My parents couldn’t drill and mold me in Chua’s fashion, even if they wanted to. They were able to give me a comfortable middle-class upbringing, but not without a good deal of struggle. When they first bought the house I grew up in, their income only exceeded their mortgage by $100/month. Photos of my early childhood show an empty house in which our relatives would gather for my birthdays. My grandmother made the uniform I wore to Catholic school. But with hard work and smart planning, my parents gradually gained some sense of upward mobility. (I know they were able to because my dad is highly educated—No doubt that climb would have been harder without the educational capital.) When I was five, my parents started me on piano lessons. When I was eight, my parents started me on Chinese school. If there was ever a school choir concert, field trip, or summer program that required some extra money, they were usually glad to shell out the money. I wouldn’t say that my parents were particularly strict about my studies. I was always expected to get As and to take the most challenging of classes. But I didn’t have a legion of tutors to keep on the grindstone. Either because he couldn’t afford them or because he preferred to instill self-discipline, my dad would often make fun of the more intense Chinese parents and say, “If your kid is stupid, no amount of tutoring is going to help.” I think my parents set a healthy balance of nurturing, disciplining, and indulging me. I always knew they had high expectations for me, and they did their best to create the conditions that would help me meet them, at the same time that they let me watch TV, spoiled me with luxuries, and left me alone. I think my brother and I both turned out as successes because of this balance. Neither one of us is a slouch, neither one of us is an automaton, and we both have healthy relationships with our parents.
Still, precisely because I know that my parents would have gladly given us more opportunities if they could, a part of me wishes they could have been bigger hardasses, so that I could have given them more of a return on their investment. When I was 16, I decided to quit piano lessons, the last two years of which I was truly a slacker student. My parents didn’t put up a fight, and accepted my rationale that I was never going to use the piano professionally and that my first priority needed to be getting into college. (This failure of an Asian kid didn’t get into Stanford, so ended up going to UCLA.) But not a day goes by now that I don’t regret not putting in the 2-3 hours of practice a day that was required to be truly skilled, of taking advantage of the Vienna-trained teacher that my parents hired, of turning my back on 11 years of lessons. While I don’t think I ever would have been good enough to be a concert pianist, I also don’t think that I really knew at the age of 16 what the consequences of my choices would be. I certainly did not anticipate how much I would continue to love playing the piano, how painfully I would wish my fingers could move with more dexterity, how enviously I would eye the musicians lugging their instruments on the subway, and how the bleak job market would make me wish I was qualified to teach piano as a source of income. The piano, as well as all the other things I gave up in my childhood, now represents a big “What if?” that haunts me every day. So though I am disgusted by Chua’s piece, and though I suspect it would really suck to be one of her kids, I also envy the way in which she refuses to give up on her kids’ potential.
Which isn’t to say that my parents gave up on mine. They simply let me devote my energy to paths of success less familiar to them. Who knows? Had I not quit the piano, perhaps I wouldn’t have had the time to join the school play and the debate team. And had I not done these activities, perhaps I wouldn’t have found the confidence to cultivate my opinions and express them. And perhaps had I not done that, I wouldn’t have eventually become an English professor.
So maybe that’s what’s ultimately missing from Chua’s prescription for “success”: It is far too narrow in defining what success is, attributing it to status and competition. Perhaps Chua’s daughters will grow up to be Ivy League-degreed millionaires who developed the next wonder drug or something. I’m pretty sure Chua would see both me and my brother as failures. My parents, however, are very proud of my getting a degree in a language that still falls clumsily off their tongues, and of my brother, a designer, finding a career in the one subject that they never thought to put him through lessons in. Should I have kids one day, I hope that they will surprise me with their life choices, so long as those choices are made with integrity, commitment, and some sense of social consciousness. With my own success, I have afforded them that luxury.
But make no mistake; my kids are damn well going to be taking piano lessons. And Chinese school, too.
