It's Still Racism: WSJ's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior"

My mother pushed me very hard in school.

But she is Trinidadian, not Chinese

 

Letting a child choose his own career path is grossly overrated, it makes the very false assumption that a 12 - 16 year old actually has a clue what's best for his life.

And western individualism is only "innovative" because at present, the Chinese are behind (and that's already changing). To be ahead they've actually gotta re-invent the wheel first, not because the inherent superiority of an individualistic system. Want proof? For the first 1,800+ years, CE, individualistic western system certainly wasn't very innovative.

 

The author has bough into her own the stereotype and has some serious self worth issues. I know many stereotypical overachieving Asians and most weren't raised like in the the article.

They had TV, video games, and participated in extra curricular activities. The only common theme was that school was the highest priority before everything else and if you didn't have the natural talents, you just had to work harder. A's took precedence over touchdowns.

 

Sir, you are making a gross assumption. No one is advocating a laissez-faire approach. You let the 17-18 yo decide the direction they want to go in, but you don't completely abandon them. Guidance is integral to success in this manner; you don't stand in their way and prevent what come naturally to them.

Is it? Why do you say that?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/magazine/28China-t.html
Its an extremely long article, but its a good read

 

It has also brought us great idols to worship like Snookie and Paris Hilton.

 

Kids will rebel, lie, detach or just flat out runaway if you push them too hard. Unless you start early, set a good example, remain consistent and manage their peer group so that fitting in is the equivalent of being a good kid.

 

You don't consider the Classic Greeks and Italians during the renaissance innovative? You don't consider traditional European architecture innovative?

China is kicking ass right now because they have a billion cheap laborers. Do you think if those laborers made the equivalent to the US minimum wage that China would still be kicking ass?

Its interesting how Asian kids do so well in the US, but 2 billion people raised the "chinese" couldn't make a dent globally until recently.

 

Spoiler

 

"Modern" China as it exists today is barely 30 years old and you do realize you're doing some hefty stereotyping. Quite a few posters here are getting a little too redneck patriotic over this topic. Which is foolish considering what started this, the article at hand, was complete garbage to begin with.

The writer was practically rolling around in stereotypes and yet people are willing to actually discuss this just for some chance to throw in some cultural cheapshots

 

Let's do a simple test. Take your 17-18 year old, ask him what he wants to do with his life. I have some pretty good guesses as to what the top 5 would be. Now, if you happen to actually find one with even the inkling of sense as to what he wants to do, ask him what's his back-up plan.

Then here's the fun part, ask him how he's progressing towards his claimed plan and how he is otherwise preparing towards it. I've actually done it several times, and while I don't claim it to be a representative study, from what I heard, it ain't pretty.

I've read it before. I'll let you have a guess though, how many were in the top 100 30 years ago. Heck, how many were in the top 500 30 years ago. What you've done is prove exactly what I've said all along. The Chinese, before they've caught up, have to re-invent the wheel. To expect them to get from A to G instead of B is highly unrealistic.

Actually I do, but I think you have a problem with reading comprehension. Classical Greece ended somewhere around 4th Century BCE, certainly not the first 1800 years, CE. Perhaps you are referring to the Romans.

Secondly, shastarocket's point was that western individualism fosters innovation. Were the individualistic Classic Greeks and Renaissance era Italians more innovative than the collectivist/disciplinarian/whatever you want to call it Chinese? No they were not. In fact, aside from those brief episodic shining moments, the argument was so much against them it's rather embarrassing.

*Chuckles. India has a billion cheap labourers. Indonesia, another 240 million. The continent of Africa, collectively, a billion. The US was called a place for cheap labour, inferior goods and copied European designs from oh, since about 1850 to 1900. Your point?

China was the pre-eminent economic/political/cultural power for 18 of the 20 centuries of the last millennium. Dominant military power for about 15. And it wasn't just the high population factor either. As a matter of fact, they had a higher population each having a higher standard of living compared to the rest of the world. Chinese goods/ideas/inventions were worldly known for their quality.

If anything, the last 200 years were more an aberration than anything else. So yes, please tell me how those "2 billion people" couldn't make a dent globally. If you had an argument for individualism, I must have missed it.

 

You guys are all fooled.

WSJ created the sensationalized title and took the most controversial excerpts from Amy Chua's book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom," which really is a personal journey, not meant to be a how-to-raise-your-kid-the-Chinese-way manual. Chua herself even evolved to be a quite different mom from what was depicted in that WSJ "article."

Here's the real story from San Francisco Chronicle by Jeff Yang.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/13/apop011311.DTL&ao=all

The most notable thing to me is that some red-blooded Americans take the WSJ assay extremely personal and made death threats to Amy Chua.

 

Indians have the highest average income in this country so Indian moms must be better than Chinese mom.

I think the more logical explanation is immigrants who came here were either smarter or worked harder and they just pass these traits to their kids.

 

Quoted for a 2nd time:

If you look past taking the sensational title at face value, there are other things in the article which are worth discussing. eg. how far should children be pushed? how much freedom to make their own choices should children be given? Coddling vs throwing them into the deep end, etc.

 

Thanks for clarifying that. The OP being offended makes sense since thats the reaction they WANT. People's anger should be re-directed to WSJ for making it an anti-American hit piece.

Its still an interesting topic in general, I'll read the rest of the article later.

(And lets be honest, we can conclude that Jeremy Lin probably had a strong parental support system behind him compared to the average ball player )

 

And do you know how many hours of apprenticeship, discipline, and overall focused mastery it took for those civilizations to create what they did? Besides, the Chinese have historically been one of the most innovative and inventive civilizations in the entire world.

Innovation is not chained to one path or the other. It takes truly balanced genius to make the tug both ways.

 

Said for the first time:

Yes I saw where she tried to clean it up during the post, but I'm still going to call her out on her stupidity.

All of that could have been discussed w/o an ethnocentric title.

 

Expecting an 18 year old kid to know exactly what profession he wants to do, and already knowing how it will be done, is a ridiculous standard. That said, one should know by 18 what he is good at and what he is not good at, and in that sense you can guide them to help them give a greater sense of what to do with their life using their strengths and weaknesses. It does NOT mean forcing a kid into a career path which he has little interest in, the result being that he will simply do things for the sake of obedience, rather then actually having an interest in the field.

While the woman is a slight extreme, Asian parents are more or less like this. All of my friends in high school are currently working to become engineers, because it's what they are supposed to do. I got fed up with it, and went off and did my own thing, and while I've not been as successful, I have zero regrets about doing it.

 

Has this been mentioned?

-Suicide second-leading cause of death for Asian-American women 15-24
-Highest suicide rate among women of any race, ethnicity for that age group
-Experts cite "model minority" expectations, family pressures as factors

By Elizabeth Cohen
CNN

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- One evening in 1990, Eliza Noh hung up the phone with her sister. Disturbed about the conversation, Noh immediately started writing a letter to her sister, a college student who was often depressed. "I told her I supported her, and I encouraged her," Noh says.

But her sister never read the letter. By the time it arrived, she'd killed herself.

Moved by that tragedy, Noh has spent much of her professional life studying depression and suicide among Asian-American women. An assistant professor of Asian-American studies at California State University at Fullerton, Noh has read the sobering statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services: Asian-American women ages 15-24 have the highest suicide rate of women in any race or ethnic group in that age group. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for Asian-American women in that age range. (Watch more about Asian-Americans' feelings of pressure to hide depression )

Depression starts even younger than age 15. Noh says one study has shown that as young as the fifth grade, Asian-American girls have the highest rate of depression so severe they've contemplated suicide.

As Noh and others have searched for the reasons, a complex answer has emerged.

First and foremost, they say "model minority" pressure -- the pressure some Asian-American families put on children to be high achievers at school and professionally -- helps explain the problem.

"In my study, the model minority pressure is a huge factor," says Noh, who studied 41 Asian-American women who'd attempted or contemplated suicide. "Sometimes it's very overt -- parents say, 'You must choose this major or this type of job' or 'You should not bring home As and Bs, only As," she says. "And girls have to be the perfect mother and daughter and wife as well."

Family pressure often affects girls more than boys, according to Dr. Dung Ngo, a psychologist at Baylor University in Texas. "When I go talk to high school students and ask them if they experience pressure, the majority who raised their hands were the girls," he said.

Asian-American parents, he says, are stricter with girls than with boys. "The cultural expectations are that Asian women don't have that kind of freedom to hang out, to go out with friends, to do the kinds of things most teenagers growing up want to do."

And in Asian cultures, he added, you don't question parents. "The line of communication in Asian culture one way. It's communicated from the parents downward," he says. "If you can't express your anger, it turns to helplessness. It turns inward into depression for girls. For boys it's more likely to turn outwards into rebellious behavior and behavioral problems like drinking and fighting."

But Noh says pressure from within the family doesn't completely explain the shocking suicide statistics for young women like her sister.

She says American culture has adopted the myth that Asians are smarter and harder-working than other minorities.

"It's become a U.S.-based ideology, popular from the 1960s onward, that Asian-Americans are smarter, and should be doing well whether at school or work."

Noh added that simply being a minority can also lead to depression.

"My sister had a really low self-image. She thought of herself as ugly," she says. "We grew up in Houston in the '70s and '80s, and at that time in school there were very few Asian faces. The standard of beauty she wanted to emulate was white women." In college, Noh's sister had plastic surgery to make her eyes and nose appear more European-looking.

Heredity, Noh says, also plays a role. She says in her study, many of the suicidal women had mothers who were also suicidal. She says perhaps it's genetic -- some biochemical marker handed down from mother to daughter -- or perhaps it's the daughter observing the mother's behavior. "It makes sense. You model yourself after the parent of the same gender."

As varied as the causes of depression, Noh says she saw just as many approaches to overcoming it.

While some women in her study did seek help through counseling and prescription drugs, most of her subjects were ambivalent or even negative about counseling. "They felt the counselor couldn't understand their situation. They said it would have helped if the counselor were another Asian-American woman."

These women found help through their religious faith, herbs, acupuncture, or becoming involved in groups that help other Asian women.

"It shows the resourcefulness of these women," she says. "They had really diverse healing strategies."

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/05/16/asian.suicides/index.html

 

as a chinese person, i loathe chinese parents who act like this. it's their own disgusting version of gamesmanship and raising a kid is some sort of sick competition for bragging rights. not to mention the kids are miserable.

amy chua can go **** herself.

 

You see the same thing in little league, cheer leading, anything involving status, but let's be honest, Chinese kids are very bright.
Combine that with a decent work ethic, a two parent family, and you get a higher rate of success.