Thoughts From the Daughter of a Chinese Mother
Julianne Hing of Colorlines responds to Amy Chua’s piece, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior:
…my parents sacrificed a great deal to raise me and my siblings—they make for great stories now that we’re all adults. My mom would hand us math workbooks to occupy us during car rides the way other parents hand their kids Pop Tarts or carrot sticks. She, like Chua, packed our violins in the trunk of the minivan so we could practice even while we were on vacation and forbade sleepovers and weeknight television well into my high school years. I struggled mightily with math and science and my mother would wake me up at 6 am on weekends so we could go over math drills together for hours. Letting me fail was not an option to her, though I occasionally wished she would have. Thanks to her, I didn’t.
All of this I recognize as love.
Source: The Atlantic
This is how I feel. I think the time has passed when we shake our heads at the poor joyless Asians studying calculus in 7th grade. True, some mothers can be insane in their expectations, but I truly believe that 99% of parents do what they do out of love. That’s something important that we must keep in mind.
Of course there’s that 1% of parents who is truly abusive. The parents who might not let their kids eat dinner until they’ve practiced their 2 hours of violin. The parents who refuse to let the kids pursue their passion toward art because they absolutely have to be a lawyer, you shut your mouth or else. But I believe that most parents will be swayed by a child’s tears, and I believe that most parents will understand the difference between “I can’t” and “I won’t.”
One thing that sticks out in my mind is this: In junior year of college, I went home to visit. My long-term boyfriend and I had just broken up, and I was pretty upset and smoking a lot. My mom with her super ninja psychic mom skills figured out that I smoked. I went back to college and she wouldn’t talk to me for a month.
I couldn’t figure out why she was mad at me. Was she disappointed in me? Did she think that, somehow, because I smoked that I was a bad kid? Was she worried that people would think she hadn’t raised me right? Was she mad because I didn’t listen to her when she said that smoking was bad for me? Because I wasn’t a good daughter and obeyed all the house rules?
I finally got her on the phone, and she asked, “Why do you smoke?”
“It’s nothing, Mom,” I said. ”I’m just stressed out.”
Then, near tears, she asked me, “What did your father and I do to ever to make you stressed?”
That was it. She thought it was her fault. The whole time it wasn’t “My daughter’s a bad daughter.” It was “I’m a bad mom.” My kid’s so stressed out that she’s smoking. What did I do to hurt her? What can I do to help her?
So whenever a (n Asian) mom is making her kids do calculus or practice violin or go to science camp, I don’t think she’s thinking, “This is what a good daughter should do.” I think she’s thinking, “This is what a good mom would do.”
A good mom would give her children all the opportunities in the world. A good mom would give her children the skill set to confront any problems that they might face. A good mom would try not to push her children to do anything that might make them seriously miserable or upset. A good mom does everything she does because she loves her kids and wants to be a good parent.
My 2 cents.
