parenting, East and West

I saw that Instapundit had linked to this WSJ article, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," by Amy Chua. I just finished reading the piece, and was left wondering to what extent it was tongue-in-cheek. There are passages in there that don't sound completely serious. Take this example:

Here's a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. Lulu was about 7, still playing two instruments, and working on a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.

Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.

"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.

"You can't make me."

"Oh yes, I can."

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful.

That last part in particular-- "which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her"-- can be read either as the honest claim of a Chinese mother or as the sly, sophisticated commentary of a Chinese-American mother fully aware of how her mostly non-Chinese readership will view the situation: "'Just motivating her'-- riiiight."

At the same time, much of Chua's article rings true with my own experience, though I'd have to say that my mother never drove me to be absolutely perfect, nor did she ever attempt to steer me in a particular direction (stereotypically, a Korean parent would want their child to be a doctor, lawyer, or prominent businessman). I did have to suffer through the whole "getting a B is a tragedy" nonsense, but having been born with a truckload of stubbornness and my own sense of right and wrong, I could often figure out when to take Mom's ranting to heart and when I could resist it or conveniently ignore it.

Chua's article lists one parenting stereotype after another. Many are familiar to me; I heard the Korean versions of them while growing up, and have even grown to agree with many of them. In particular, I resonated with this:

I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.

I think that, for all our self-empowerment rhetoric, we Americans often do tend to heap blame on others, or on "the system," rather than on ourselves. We also tend to over-value talent and under-value effort-- a matter that Chua addresses in her article when she talks about the urgent need not to allow children to give up on an activity. A lack of talent can be compensated for through long, arduous effort: that's a long-standing Asian conviction. But Chua is fair enough to report the other side of the coin:

Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique—perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet—had I considered that possibility?

"You just don't believe in her," I accused.

"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."

"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."

"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.

I think one of the virtues of Western culture is the stress on individual differences, the acknowledgement that kids aren't shaped by cookie cutters. Great effort can indeed compensate for lack of innate talent or skill, but the mantra of effort-above-all can also lead to a mind-numbing, conformist mentality that hones specific skills at the expense of lateral development, i.e., the development of one's creative faculties. We see the real-world consequences: Asian mastery of math hasn't led to global dominance in engineering innovation, for example; most of those innovations still come from the West.

The flip-side, though, is that Westerners will too often fall back on individuality as an excuse for non-achievement. "She just isn't cut out for that" is a common excuse I've heard in the US. Shrugging and giving up are all too common here.

Chua's article is fascinating on several levels, and I recommend that you take a few minutes and give it a read. True: it doesn't really say anything new if you're already familiar with East/West discussions. Still, it's another note in the ongoing, spirited, cacophonous back-and-forth about Eastern and Western values, and has already provoked plenty of online discussion: there are over 1200 comments to the piece as of this writing. But still... I'm bothered by my inability to figure out the extent to which Chua, who has lived in the States since she was a baby, is being tongue-in-cheek.


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