A reader sends me a link to this piece that’s getting a fair amount of discussion this week: Why Chinese Mothers are Superior. I read it twice, convinced on the first read that it was satire, but on the second, coming to the depressing conclusion that it was anything but. Amy Chua, a professor at Yale, celebrates the relentless inculcation of perfectionism, pushing back against the growing public concern about the damage that the relentless pursuit of the unattainable is doing to our children (particularly our daughters.) Indeed, Chua’s piece is so outrageous, so Swiftian in its defense of the indefensible, that part of me still suspects it’s particularly well-veiled satire.
Chua writes that we (presumably middle and upper-middle class “white” parents of the sort who make up many of her fellow Ivy League faculty) are far too concerned with our children’s self-esteem, and focused too little on what actually gives kids esteem, which is mastery of something. That’s the sort of thing that sounds good when you first read it, but becomes horrifying upon reflection — and upon comparison of Chua’s gleeful celebration of Chinese success with the reality I work with every damn day in my classes.
Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn’t get them, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because the child didn’t work hard enough. That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)
About one-third of the students at Pasadena City College — a public two-year, open-admission institution — are of Asian ancestry. The plurality, if not the outright majority of those East Asian students are of Chinese ancestry. Some are immigrants themselves, many are children of immigrants, but few are more than second-generation Americans. They came from across the Chinese world and its diaspora (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, as well as the mainland itself.) Most are Mandarin-speakers.
Many of them, particularly in my Humanities and Gender Studies classes, tell me that their mothers were much like Amy Chua. Many were shamed, some were beaten, almost all were made to feel inadequate. Many, particularly from the more affluent areas of the San Gabriel Valley like San Marino, were expected to get straight As and be accepted into prestigious four-year universities. A great many didn’t, and most (despite what Chua claims) got Bs, and more than a few had high school transcripts littered with Cs. Chua peddles (one hopes, how one hopes, with tongue in cheek) the myth of the model minority, the myth in which average grades, depression, drug and alcohol problems, eating disorders and significant learning disabilities simply don’t happen to Chinese children. In her world, Chinese children don’t get rejected from Berkeley and Stanford and Princeton. But I have Chinese-American students who were not only rejected from those schools, they didn’t have the grades to get into Cal State Los Angeles.
Many of these Chinese-American students are at PCC for financial reasons, but the notion that all or even most could have gone to Berkeley if only there’d been a bit more money is also very much a myth. Many of these students were pushed and tutored and browbeaten (and beaten for real), and still couldn’t make the grades. Some marinate at home, they tell me, in the hostile simmer of their parents’ disappointment. A lucky few have parents who have adopted a more tender and compassionate model, encouraging effort rather than insisting rigidly on a perfect outcome. They are a small minority. Far more are shell-shocked, numb from years and years of the very abuse that Chua celebrates. (I not only know this through my students, but from my first wife, who was born to a Chinese mother and a Filipino father. I saw the success — but also the haunting damage — up close.)
The Yale professor may have daughters who play instruments beautifully and got near-perfect scores on their SATS. I had a student in 2008, the daughter of immigrants who owned a dry cleaners, who tried to kill herself by drinking cleaning products when her transfer application was rejected by UCLA. I’ve heard many other stories of suicide and suicide attempts. If we’re gonna get anecdotal, no ethnic group in the multicultural melting pot that is PCC has had as many self-reported incidents of self-harm per capita as have my East Asian students. That’s based on more than 18 years of community college teaching and mentoring, including five years as advisor to the overwhelmingly Asian honor students’ society, but it’s also based on the reality that Chinese-Americans 15-24 are much more likely to kill themselves than are white teens, a statistic that’s remained depressingly consistent since the 1980s. None of my Chinese students have taken their lives while my students, but I hear more stories of attempts — and the deaths of friends and siblings — than I do from any other ethnic group.
Chua’s assumption — that the pressure cooker of perfectionism will cause short-term pain but long-term success — simply isn’t borne out by the evidence. Let her come and meet my queer Chinese-American students who’ve been hit and humiliated and disowned. Let her come and meet my Chinese-American students with dyslexia who’ve been called stupid so often the light has faded from their eyes. Let her come and meet my Chinese-American students who are overweight, including the young woman whose mother only lets her eat cabbage and water at home and rifles through her room, looking for the sweets she’s convinced her daughter is hiding. I’m not for a minute suggesting that Chinese-American parents have a monopoly on the cruel inculcation of perfectionism; that is, as even Chua admits, a multi-ethnic phenomenon. But to assume, as she does with staggering myopia, that a little adolescent suffering invariably leads to long-term success, simply isn’t backed by the evidence.
Chua knows this, of course. She knows that Chinese-American children don’t all go to Yale or its equivalent. Many have parents who pushed them relentlessly, but for any number of excellent reasons, the straight As did not appear. There are more Chinese and Chinese-American students in community colleges than in the Ivy League, and I’d venture that since I started teaching here in 1993, I’ve taught at least 4000 of them, probably more than she has or even ever will. But she knows, surely, about the higher rate of suicide as well as suicidal ideation and depression — and she probably knows those rates are particularly high among Chinese-American young women. If she does know — and if this isn’t Swiftian satire — then she’s guilty of celebrating not only a falsehood, but a lethal one. Chua deserves not mere polite disagreement, but repudiation and scorn for perpetuating an ideal that is directly and unmistakably linked to suffering and self-harm. I’ve seen too much suffering in my years of teaching and mentoring — and been too convinced of the cause by unmistakable evidence — to let a fear of being labeled culturally insensitive blind me from my obligation to say three words to Chua: Shame. On. You.
Fortunately, the repudiation is coming from many quarters, including some wonderful and important bloggers like Angry Asian Man.
May it continue to come.
My biggest problem with Chua is this: if Chinese parents* push for perfection because they believe their children can achieve it, then what does it mean when they don’t? If Chinese parents* truly believe it’s a “don’t” and not a “can’t,” then that lack of achievement translates into failure on the parent’s side. I know this from experience. My mom would compare my standardized test scores with my peer’s scores loudly, over the phone with my peer’s mom. I got the better scores, but that didn’t stop my mom from praising the other child for her obedience and willingness to spend hours at prep classes and violin classes. The rules of “fat talk”–praise others, call yourself a loser– apply here, except Chinese parents* will do that with their kids.
Second problem. Chua says that her kids don’t have self-esteem issues because she taught them to be good at things. And while teaching kids not to quit at hard work is a good virtue, it’s the self-esteem bit that gets me. If something only becomes fun after a kid has gained mastery over it in a way others haven’t–if self-esteem comes at the price of being better than other people and gaining their praise–then that’s not a healthy self-esteem at all. That’s setting up kids for a lifetime of seeking validation from other people.
*Yes, generalization. I am aware that Chinese parents do not parent the same way–my mom is definitely not the same as Chua. Wish Chua would’ve remembered that, too, before she tried to speak for all Chinese parents.
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One of the things that irritated me about Chua’s rather self-congratulatory thesis is the degree to which she assumes that the advantages she, and her daughters, have enjoyed and will enjoy, arises mostly, if not exclusively, from the voluntarism represented by her punishing standards and not, for example, from being the children of celebrated, accomplished, academics who have been able to “write their own tickets” for themselves and their families. It reminds me of the old jab Ann Richards quipped at George W. Bush: “born on third and thought he hit a triple”, or of this recent Atlantic piece highlighting the cultural and attitude gaps between the transnational elites and the rest of us: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/1/
1) modelminority.com is notorious for having a very misogynistic forum; it’s probably not the best site to link to.
2) It’s not clear whether Amy Chua’s daughters are going to inherit this “attitude”; it seems that first generation Americans tend to inherit the culture of America a lot more than the culture of their parents’ countries, unless they were segregated.
3) I got off easy; I was lucky enough to make my programs and then some without breaking a sweat, and I had rather liberalish parents anyway; I remember a family friend not being so lucky. Did I have to get pushed hard? No; I had to push myself hard, as you can’t rely on somebody else pushing you hard in adult life.
4) The lack of recognition of mental disorders in Chinese families is incredibly damaging.
That’s setting up kids for a lifetime of seeking validation from other people.
It’s worse than that, actually; for 99.9% of kids out there, there’s always someone better than you, and in most cases someone who’s much better than you. You quickly learn that reality the moment you step out into college or in the workplace, and it’s actually something that breaks many an ego.
I previewed this book in October and had the same response as many people–was this satire? The more I read, the more it became obvious this woman was dead serious.
I picked up this book thinking it would give me some insight into my relationship with my own mother–which has been strained for a long time. But the insight I gained was that I can forgive my parents for a lot of the past because they were not as educated or as well off as Amy Chua.
For her all of the resources available to her and her education and accomplishments, one would think she’d at least have a better improvement on the classic “Chinese” model of parenting. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
She’s perpetuating the parenting styles she grew up with. And simply being a parent does not make one a good parent, or an expert.
I think this woman just does not care enough about certain huge subsets of people to aknowledge their existance and doesn’t see why anyone would care about them .
1. People whose children are just not that bright.
2. People who themsleves don’t have the amazing resources of time and money that she does.
3. Parents that don’t love their children very much and communicate this emotion effectively.
I think she is clearly talking just about parents of children who are very likely to be bright enough to be able to get straight As (duh this is going to be a small percentage of people) and who are very loving (unfortuantely that’s not everyone either).
I definitely think she still says a lot of objectionable things but I would not be suprised if her children end up just fine because one of the positive things that are clear from her article is that she loves her girls a lot and that they probably know it – that makes up for a lot. And that she does offer positive reinforcement for success. I definitely think her approach isn’t healthy – but neither is it outright abusive in my opinion. I would be shocked if her children continue her parenting into the next generation.
This. Entirely. I could add that it isn’t just an Asian-American problem, or even a recent one–I recall being squawked at and worse because my grades weren’t up to what parents and teachers thought they should be. In retrospect, I do see that I could have done better in some ways, but not in all–I have memory problems, and ADD that won’t respond to drugs. So I really feel bad for the kids Hugo describes.
The whole mess of comparing and competing is part of the problem–Mon-Shane nailed it in the second paragraph. If one can’t see the beauty and wonder of any discipline for itself, but only as something one has to beat others at, that is wrong in so many ways. If one can only enjoy the satisfaction of self-improvement at others’ expense, that’s a recipe for disaster.
I start to think there is not nearly enough emphasis on people helping each other learn instead of competing–a lot of kids [and adults] with learning disabilities could work better this way, and since we all have weak spots, if we just all had each others’ backs instead of stabbing them, we might get something done. I, the original lone-wolf, not-into-people-that-much person, am a bit surprised to find this idea coming into my mind; but even more surprised that normal, social types haven’t gotten it more ferquently, or deeper, or something. But here, some have, and kudos to Hugo and the rest of you for it.
If I believed in hell I would reserve a special corner of it for parents who hassle or hurt their kids based on the kid’s weight or complexion, when there are so many other things more important to work on–studies and becoming a decent person. All talk of love becomes meaningless when there is something like that going on in the house.
Frequently. Oops.
–What can you do for the student whose mother is starving her?
1) Hugo: Great post. I went to junior high and high school in San Marino so I know exactly what you’re talking about and the pressures that come with it.
2) Jay, you wrote, “2) It’s not clear whether Amy Chua’s daughters are going to inherit this “attitudeâ€; it seems that first generation Americans tend to inherit the culture of America a lot more than the culture of their parents’ countries, unless they were segregated.”
It’s worth noting: Amy Chua isn’t first generation. She’s second. Her whole point is that she wanted to raise her daughters the same way her immigrants parents raised her and her siblings.
‘It’s worth noting: Amy Chua isn’t first generation. She’s second. Her whole point is that she wanted to raise her daughters the same way her immigrants parents raised her and her siblings.”
As intelligent as Chua is, she doesn’t see the pattern that immigrant families follow. we have all done it, and we have all adopted what she called “Western” parenting models, and for that matter, lifepath aspirations. She apprently isn’t smart enough to ask why that might be. The simple answer is that we got there before her family did, and we have decided our new way is better. And the same thing will happen in her family. It is inevitable. But then, if she had really been raised Chinese she would know the saying “A family can be rich for three generations.”
Others here and eslewhere have taken issue with her crude generalizing of her method as “Asian” parenting. She specifies that her parents were Hokkien; that means they are not even representative of China. Hokkien, unlike most of the rest of China, has a profoundly commercial culture. They might as well have been the model for the Ferengi on Star Trek. in such a culture you are what you own – money, houses, credentials, accomplishments, successful children…it’s quite dehumanizing. In Fujian (Hokkien) itself it fuels a very risky and sometimes deadly drive to emigrate and make your fortune. And it’s not really very representative of any culture but its own. It’s not surprising that Chua is treating her daughters this way.
Something else that has come up in discussion. People have said this approach may be harsh, but her love for her daughters is unmistakeable. Yeah, pull the other one. This looks a lot more like another kind of love, love for the Family. Children and all other members are subordinated to the good of the family. Thie success brings honor on the fmaily and makes for a good life for the whoe collective. It has always been this way in China and only a few cracks have appeared in this model in the last century. It’s hard to give up, because it is the most resilient model in the world.
Seems reasonable to see this as a possible analog of the father who browbeats his kid in sports for his own self-image. Wonder what Chua would say if she heard that.
Blank stare, most likely.
The WSJ article makes my blood boil. I’m a Chinese-American college student, and many of my friends still in high school at home suffer greatly from the parenting model that Chua lauds herself for adopting. Granted, I can’t speak for all Chinese Americans, but my particular hometown has a very tight-knit community of Chinese-Americans. I personally have had a history of self-harm and depression very much related to conflicts with my parents. Many of my friends have suffered emotional and physical abuse, ranging from being told that by our parents that they don’t love us and want to disown us, to one father who actually broke his daughter’s hand. And that “Hey fatty – lose some weight” thing? Yeah, many of my friends (as well as myself) have suffered from disordered eating – although of course, none of us ever got treatment or help for it. The worst part? Talking to my friends reveals that most of them don’t even recognize that this is abuse, or that they have options and resources.
And you know, when your parents beat you, tell you they wish they never had you for a child, and talk about disowning you because you’re a disappointment – that, “They just love their kids” talk just doesn’t cut it.
Oh, that whole “love” thing–we do this or that because we love you–that’s enough to put anyone off the whole idea of love. Even now, for me, that is a tainted word, one that can never ring true.
Seems to me that if you really cared about something, some animal, or some person, you’d do some real thinking about what would really be best for them, rather than just what you heard or read and didn’t stop to evaluate; rather than whatever crazy thing popped into your head on its own. We all make mistakes, but some of us can learn.
If the only way you can make it in life is to ruin yourself, mutilate yourself, starve yourself, or run yourself into the ground, the system needs to be remade–drastically. And if your parents comply with this and betray you instead of helping you find another way to thrive, they are part of the problem.
‘Seems reasonable to see this as a possible analog of the father who browbeats his kid in sports for his own self-image. Wonder what Chua would say if she heard that.
Blank stare, most likely.”
She wouldn’t be the only one.
Hokkien, unlike most of the rest of China, has a profoundly commercial culture. They might as well have been the model for the Ferengi on Star Trek. in such a culture you are what you own – money, houses, credentials, accomplishments, successful children…it’s quite dehumanizing. In Fujian (Hokkien) itself it fuels a very risky and sometimes deadly drive to emigrate and make your fortune.
This makes sense; Fujian is very mountainous and hard to make a living on, so I think it does drive people to try and move out and forge a living in a better place.
(Both my parents were Fujianese, though there’s a lot of extended family elsewhere; most emigres, and I’m talking about the world, not just Western countries, are Cantonese, Hakka or Fujianese. Taiwan in particular has lots of people with Fujianese ancestry though whether they’ll admit it depends)
I don’t think the culture drives the conditions; I think it’s the opposite, the fact that living in Fujian was so hard produces a culture that tries to drive success.
None of this justifies verbally abusing your kids of course.
I remember you telling us that in many Chinese families, when a girl came home from school she was told to do her homework first and then do her chores, while Mexican girls were usually told to do the chores first and then homework. You said that explained a lot of the achievement gap. But I’m not sure that Chinese girls have it any better than we Latinas, or we any harder. It’s just a different focus.
Well, that sounded like the life of a few of my friends. When I was in 6th grade, one of my friends broke down crying utterly completely after she received a C on a test and just sobbed that her mom would be mad with her. On the other hand, another friend is in depression because her parents her expect her to get straight A’s but also never be better than her younger brother just because she’s a girl. My best friend’s mom would make her write for hours to perfect her handwriting when she was five or six and she told me she sometimes wished she was never was born when she was little, with a completely normal tone of voice.
Maybe it’s sad, I don’t know, but this sort of expectation is completely normal at our high school. The majority of my AP math class is Chinese and the majority of my friends who are Asian are also all A/B students. It’s expected in our social group so much, when someone says, “I failed that test,” I usually ask, “Actual fail, or Asian fail?” That is, F, or a B or C. Yeah, this mindset isn’t changing any time soon.
I sat behind a guy named Wayne Lo in chamber orchestra in high school. Way behind– I played quietly in the back, and he was right up front. A Taiwanese-American child prodigy on the violin, one note played by him could make me well up. I always wanted to somehow reach out to him– he seemed so angry and isolated. I was right about that… The next year, he went to Simon’s Rock of Bard, a prep school associated with Bard College. On December 14, 1992, he took a taxi to nearby Pittsfield, bought a gun, rode back and started shooting. He killed two people and wounded four before his gun jammed. 18 and life. A lot of good his high grades and musical perfection did him! He told me in a letter– he never felt any of that exquisite emotion in the violin music he played. It was purely technical. He lived the life of Chua’s daughters. He bore that kind of pressure, and it made him snap.
Frankly I’d rather raise a happy person.
Amy Chua was probably urged by her publishers to write as outrageously as possible in the WSJ in the interests of driving up publicity and sales, and she seems to have followed their advice to the letter. Your blog posting is remarkable and really deserves a wider audience: you should get in touch with an online site like Salon or MSNBC/Slate about writing a review of her book. Or the LA TIMES, if they still publish book reviews. As one comment on the WSJ site remarked, it’s interesting that Chua seems to have chosen a spouse, who clearly wasn’t raised according tothe same “Chinese” values she extols so highly. One wonders why.
“I don’t think the culture drives the conditions; I think it’s the opposite, the fact that living in Fujian was so hard produces a culture that tries to drive success.”
Oh totally. Totally. And those conditions are not simpley geographic and topograhic, they are historical. Fujian and that whole coast was one of the last areas to be brought into China, and that has had long-lasting effects. The Hakka (Kejia) are northerners who migrated south, but those other two areas really only have one, maybe two of coats of paint on being Chinese. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_peoples
They were gradually brought under Chinese control during the Han period. Note that the Vietnamese only ever partially became Sinified.
But this is true for any feature of any culture. People are not generally free to shape their cultures and which way they want and it sounds annoyingly naive and privileged when people talk as if that’s really an option; cultures evolve to equip people to meet their survival challenges, this is true of patriarchal structures, governmental structures, structures of language – it’s a general principle.
Angiportus:
My wife and I believe that much of the 30% or so of ADD that doesn’t respond to drugs is misdiagnosed Sensory Processing Disorder http://www.sensory-processing-disorder.com/ . Could this be you?
Just wanted to point out that parents who bully their kids in the name of love aren’t a specifically Chinese phenomenon. My German mother-in-law relentlessly bullies my sister-in-law about her eating habits and other perceived failings. M-I-L has constructed an internal narrative in which her bullying is not only justified but virtuous because it shows how much she loves her daughter and that it is saving her daughter from her own worst impulses. S-I-L is an adult and this bullying has gone on since she had medical issues as an adolescent.
When I read the reviews of Chua’s book, I could not help noticing the similarities. Chua is not going to be able to turn off the spigot when her daughters are adults. I suspect her daugters will end up in the same position as my S-I-L.
If Chua kept her kid at the piano denying bathroom breaks then, in my world that kid could have reported her to the Children’s Aid Society and might well have been removed from the home. Sick.
As a Chinese American woman minoring in Gender Studies, I can totally relate to having a mother like Amy Chua.
I came to your blog originally to read up on professor crushes and I am very shocked (and pleased) to see a response to Amy Chua’s editorial, which I found completely appalling yet relevant.
Attempting to be perfect and not making it was (and is) an incredibly painful experience… I can understand why Ms Chua supports the idea of children merely being “an investment,” because she was one herself. Although I have gotten excellent grades in school I have been suffering for years and beating myself up for slipping up (when I got ‘sick’) which prevented me from achieving my goal of being “perfect.” Today I still struggle with this.
I’m German (first-generation immigrant) and grew up with my German grandmother in Germany, and I can attest to what Melusine says: Bullying (foster) parents aren’t necessarily a geographically, or ethnically limited, phenomenon. Rather, the bullying out of a spirit of relentless competition seems to me to come from a deeply ingrained sense of class inadequacy, the “rags to riches” cult in which hard work will lead to success. And what parent doesn’t want her/ or his child to be “successful”?
The problem here is the definition of “success”: Success doesn’t mean raising a well-adjusted, emotionally stable child who creatively shapes the world around her or him and promotes a sense of political and social stability. Success means educational achievement and income potential in order to secure upward mobility.
I had the “Chinese” (foster) mom, only that she was blond, blue-eyed, and German. I remember being slapped to the piano bench and not daring to come home after school when my math grade was below an A- (and even the A- wasn’t good enough). I remember hating having to make music, rarely being able to attend parties other than bible studies with the church youth group (ahem …), going on my first diet at 12 because “hey, Fattie McFatterson, your boobs are getting too big” (yes, at 12) and trying to hide my bitten-off nails so my fingertips wouldn’t be slapped with a ruler. And even today, when I look at myself in the mirror, I hear my late Grandmother’s voice go “tsk tsk tsk” at my waistline.
Which is why I take the very opposite route with Little Miss Kickboxer who just turned 2. You can’t “bully in” any love of learning. You can only model it and encourage imitation, curiosity, and creativity, set up a Montessori-style home environment in which play activities are intellectually productive AND fun, and encourage your child to explore their inner strength and conquer their fears.
Speaking of which, I think I may just blog about this topic myself.
Cat,
” I can understand why Ms Chua supports the idea of children merely being “an investment,†because she was one herself.”
Did you experience this as a kind of objectification?
Charlotte,
“You can only model it and encourage imitation, curiosity, and creativity, ‘
Yes indeed. Little pots have big ears. When my boy was little I swore I would not bully him into being “tough” and I didn’t. But since my whole family is pretty stoic – though with pretty strong expectations that humans are going to be weak, just do your best and enjoy the rest, in the end flesh is dust – he picked that up, and that is just fine.
Anna, indeed.
Charlotte, you nailed this:
The problem here is the definition of “successâ€: Success doesn’t mean raising a well-adjusted, emotionally stable child who creatively shapes the world around her or him and promotes a sense of political and social stability. Success means educational achievement and income potential in order to secure upward mobility.
It’s not cultural blindness to insist that the former definition is superior. It’s universally sound child psychology.
Randomizer–no, though my sensory and emotional parts are different from the norm in some ways, that isn’t a distorder–the problem I have is with cognition and memory–having to have some things presented in just the right way, and not always being able to hold on to them if I did pick them up. I think I’d be a pretty smart person if I was whole.
Hugo, is there some way you can make sure that one young lady gets enough food away from home, the one whose sicko mother only lets her eat cabbage? (I would suggest that being close to a cabbage-fed human being could include results that the mother might not find rewarding.)
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A San Francisco woman responds on quora.com:
“I can tell you that the notion of the “superior Chinese mother” that my mom carried with her also died with my sister on October 28, 2004. If you were to ask my mom today if this style of parenting worked for her, she’ll point to a few boxes of report cards, trophies, piano books, photo albums and Harvard degrees and gladly trade it all to have my sister back.”
http://www.quora.com/Parenting/Is-Amy-Chua-right-when-she-explains-Why-Chinese-Mothers-Are-Superior-in-an-op-ed-in-the-Wall-Street-Journal
Christine Lu, Co-Founder & CEO, Affinity China…
That San Francisco woman really has had the last word on this subject.
Yes, she has. But it needs repeating, as she will not be the last woman to lose a sister to the toxic pursuit of perfectionism.
Jim-
Amy Chua mentions that children owe their parents. This is not an uncommon view for Chinese families, who may have different definitions of a “child”. While others strive for their child’s happiness, these families believe that the younger generation is there to serve the older (filial piety). But this is ancient stuff–not to mention Chinese history and female infanticide.
However today, I do believe a lot of this is relevant to economy and what Charlotte mentioned as ‘income potential to secure upward mobility.’ My parents were immigrants after all and they had to compete with millions in China.
My own mother used to stress to me and my sister that “we owe/are indebted to her for feeding and taking care of us” while my dad always got angry at her for saying things like that. She often mentioned that it would be better to have boys instead of girls. But I don’t think she was *totally* serious as life isn’t as harsh these days so its easier to “put up with girls.” If this was years ago I would probably be dead the second I was born…
Actually I believe Amy Chua like my mother, really loves her daughters, and it is just these cultural and traditional ideas resurfacing. Living situation for my parents was incredibly difficult in the past and those were the standards they lived by to survive. I am just surprised because Amy Chua is second generation; but even I saw “future Amy Chua’s” in the high school classroom who obeyed their mother’s words no matter what (beaten into them probably) as long as they were excelling in every subject and as a result feeling superior to others, even if they were socially awkward or labeled geeks/nerds. Those who make it will certainly perpetuate it.
Cat,
“Amy Chua mentions that children owe their parents. This is not an uncommon view for Chinese families, ”
I grew up with this sense too, mainly from my mom’s family, and it came mainly from my grandmother, whose family had ben aristocrats in France. It reflects the feudal rather than the capitalist value system that posits the ultimate and primal value of the individual. But I think I got some of his on the other, Irish, side too. Anyway. It’s not inherently bad, in fact I think it’s healthy and the basis of a healthy morality, but it has to been reasonable and proportionate.
And Cat, you make a very good point about how these values help people survive. Feudal values are the basis of military culture, and they are maximized for resiliency of the social structure (in that case, of the military formation). The durability of your unit structure and the structure it fits into is a matter of survivla both on the tactical level on a battlefiled and on the operational level in an overseas theater.
The capitalist model, or civil society, is maximized for productivity and creativity. However it is very fragile and crumbles easily. It needs the feudal model running in the background for it to arise in the first place and to persist; it can never exist on its own without the support and protection of the people living the feudal model in the background.
They balance each other. Civil society values moderate the repressiveness of the feudal order and the feudal order moderates the atomization and anomie of civil society.
Jim@3:24 pm – Oh dear, my BS meter just pegged.
Hugo Sawyer – very informative. Thanks for posting this.
It’s worth noting that this was an excerpt of a memoir that was not intended to be an argument about Chinese childrearing superiority (the WSJ editors came up with the title, not her, and she says that’s not what she was intending to convey). She said the full memoir makes clear that her technique was not necessarily the best, particularly for one of her daughters, Lulu, who chafed under it more, and that she ultimately changed her approach because of it.
See the full response: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-01-12/nese-mom-amy-chua-talks-about-her-controversial-new-parenting-book/full/
Key points from the very bottom of the article:
Go read the whole thing for more detail.
That said, I do think that the excerpt is a great starting point for the harm that such parenting techniques can do, regardless of the orgin. Just know that Chua’s take is more nuanced than that, and that she too thinks the approach was (sometimes, at least) too harsh.
“Jim@3:24 pm – Oh dear, my BS meter just pegged.”
It5 woulod look like that bcause it isn’t very well developed in that post. It helps to have lived some of this too.
Ruthie, thanks. The SF Chronicle had a similar story, and it does appear that the WSJ did Chua a huge disservice here. I’m curious to read the book now, though no amount of duplicitous editing could by itself account for her jaw-dropping assertions about children, culture, and success.
Many people are repeating the statistic about higher suicide rates in Asian American females ages 15-24, but I have yet to see any of the articles linked actually cite the source study, data, and year. The first article linked in this blog post cites a study done in 1989 when the demographic of 15-24 year old Asian Americans was probably very different since the 1968 immigration policy changes had such a huge effect on Asian American immigration. Another of the articles linked in this blog post vaguely mentions CDC data to support its assertions, but the actual CDC data I find does not support this.
Please see:
Health, United States, 2009
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus09.pdf (10.5 MB)
Table 42
Death rates for suicide, by sex, race, Hispanic origin, and age:
United States, selected years 1950–2006
According to this data, the suicide death rate for Asian American males ages 15-24 is the lowest of any race group for all years with data given since 1990, and the suicide death rate for Asian American females ages 15-24 is lower than that of white females but higher than that of black and Latina females for most years with data given since 1990 except in the latest data from 2006 when it is higher than that of white females. However, the suicide death rate of Asian American females ages 15-24 are much lower than that of Asian American males ages 15-24. The are lower for females than males in this age group across the board.
So while everyone has been throwing around this statistic about high suicide rates in Asian American females ages 15-24, the suicide death rate in Asian American males ages 15-24 is actually 3 times higher than that of females. And this rate in Asian American males ages 15-24 is the lowest of all racial groups in this age group for males.
The real question this data suggests needs asking is why is there a gender difference intersecting with race.
Table 58
Serious psychological distress in the past 30 days among adults 18 years of age and over, by selected characteristics: United States, average annual, selected years 1997–1998 through 2006–2007
This data shows that Asian Americans have by far the lowest rate of serious psychological distress among all race groups.
Table 59
Suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and injurious suicide attempts among students in grades 9–12, by sex, grade level, race, and Hispanic origin: United States, selected years 1991–2007
Unfortunately, this data does not include Asian Americans.
There could be conflicting studies but could someone please post real references?
The person doing the research right now is Eliza Noh at CSU Fullerton: http://calstate.fullerton.edu/spotlight/2010/Eliza-noh-studies-suicide.asp
More links here: http://www.pacificcitizen.org/site/details/tabid/55/selectmoduleid/373/ArticleID/490/reftab/36/Default.aspx?title=The_Growing_Rate_of_Depression,_Suicide_Among_Asian_American_Students_
Thanks for the links. I still don’t see any direct citations but at least I can look up the researcher by name. I haven’t found any research papers regarding this statistic yet though.
It still seems that the statistic in the first article is somewhat misrepresented because it selectively mentions that Asian American females, ages 15-24, have the highest suicide rates by race within this female age group while omitting the fact that Asian American men, ages 15-24, have the lowest male suicide rates within the corresponding groups, and that the male rate is actually many times higher. And based on the CDC data, Asian American females ages 15-24 suicide rate is only highest some selective years while most of the time white females have been highest, and really not that different. I still haven’t found what other data set she might be basing this on.
I think some of the cited statistics are being influenced by several articles on suicide in China,(google female suicide china and you get 283,000 results)
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-09/11/content_6095710.htm , http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/190/3/273-a
though if you look at this table from WHO, eastern Europe has a far worse problem than China, http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suiciderates/en/
There’s a 2009 CDC study that everyone cites (and yes, it was done on Americans only). But where to get that study is the question! http://newsjunkiepost.com/2009/08/13/asian-americans-more-likely-to-commit-suicide-says-cdc/
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I looked through all the CDC suicide stats and the only panel where the Asian female suicide rate is significantly higher is 65 and older, not student age http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/statistics/rates05.html
Even in the aggregate panels, asian rates are lower than native american male and female, white non-hispanic and hispanic males. I’d be really curious to see where the asian suicide info is coming from, because it certainly isn’t in the CDC stats – even if it’s by percent of population rather than general population, the native ameican statisitcs are still much higher. ??
Terrific post by the way.
this is getting way OT , but it occurs to me that what the stats really say about 15-25 YO asians is that they are much less likely to die of causes that drive death stats for other ethnic groups in the same age range- excess alcohol, driving while intoxicated, easy access to weapons, engaging in extreme sports, and have possibly have had better access to quality heath care over their lifetime.
Just a thought.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/statab/mortfinal2001_work250F.pdf
Of the 245 female asian deaths in the 15-24 category, 39 were suicides, roughly 20%. But that’s way behind the leading contender, Motor vehicle accidents, which claimed 70. Back to Googling.
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Thank you for this post Hugo.
It was completely necessary. Please keep writing about this.
Thanks, Josephine. More coming. And thanks for your good work!
My 8-year-old daughter got better grades after joining the drama club and appearing as Calpurnia in a play about the last days of Julius Caesar. Just saying…
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I had a high school friend whose parents were very extreme supporters of this line of parenting, although they were far from the only ones – there were a lot of Asian-American kids at my school, and I remember hearing the “Actual fail, or Asian fail?” joke a lot. (Granted, there were also a fair number of White parents who had similar attitudes; this was a school for honors students, so parents who overworked and over-pressured their kids were common across all races.) This friend killed herself a year after our high school graduation, reportedly because she couldn’t take the pressure her parents were exerting on her. So I really have no sympathy for people who treat their children like this. As you said, this particular parenting method DOES have a body count.