“Certainly, the idea of a traditional Chinese parenting style would surprise the billion inhabitants of mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, few of whom attended Harvard, became a doctor, lawyer, or banker, or ever completed a Scantron.”
- Ken Chen, executive director of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, in a CNN opinion piece
Photo by Laurie Pink/Flickr (Creative Commons)
In the wake of the controversy over author Amy Chua’s memoir “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Chen puts the Asian-vs.-Western-parenting furor sparked by the book and a related essay in perspective, calling out the stereotyping, the fear, and the immigration history behind the story. He points out that U.S. immigration policies in recent decades have welcomed skilled professionals from Taiwan and Hong Kong, creating a bourgeois class of immigrants who, not surprisingly, bring up their children to do well academically, just as their affluent white counterparts do.
Chen also writes:
What I find more threatening than Chua’s parenting style is the typical reader’s response to Chua’s piece, seeing her and her children as hypercompetitive robots instead of people who have their own joys and sorrows.
This reaction leads to withholding empathy from teenagers often driven to suicide because of pressures and expectations, and to colleges rejecting Asian-Americans for being uncreative “grinds.” This dehumanization extends as far back as the 1800s, when Mark Twain referred to coolie laborers as “The Gentle, Inoffensive Chinese,” and is as contemporaneous as our current insecurities about a rising China, which is often characterized as an authoritarian parent overseeing brainwashed children.
It’s a good read, an interesting take on a complicated subject.
