Race Card: The Chinese Parenting Controversy and the Vilification of Mothers of Color

I read this article when a friend passed it to me and immediately picked up on Chua's repeatedly shown prejudice that drama is not a real subject. It angered me for the reasons you have described.

I am a white Anglo-Irish woman whose parents come from a working-class background and worked themselves up to being middle-class. I won scholarships to a private school and attended that school six days a week. When I came home, I did hours and hours of homework. I don't look back on my early teens often because I was unbelievably lonely, but I did get very good grades. During that time, if there was a school play on and I did NOT audition for it, my parents, knowing I was a talented actress, would demand to know why. I also took professional drama exams outside school. Treating acting as a fluff profession and subject, as Chua clearly does, is indicative of the chip on her shoulder. Forcing her children not to do drama is not indicative of either better or stricter parenting, as my own experience proves. I would also say I had to raise an eyebrow at Chua's apparent demands that her daughters are thin but also physically unfit - she deprioritised athletics but critisised them as 'fatty'. If it's an accurate impression I've gained here, the only way to achieve that goal is by extreme dieting, which is disgusting and not healthy. This looks like it's related to the concept of 'Face' - i.e. others' opinions of you must be maintained - rather than being anything to do with their actual achievement. A number of ex-students of my school are now professional athletes. Their physical fitness required insane amounts of effort and self-discipline.

In my current teaching job, I am administering a middle school winter camp because as a public school teacher in Korea, I am employed by the government and that's my duty in the school holidays. My students are divided into high level and low level. This is a very interesting assessment of Chua's parenting style, which some families here share - though obviously Korean and Chinese culture are really quite different in a large number of ways. I find the so-called high level students, who have mostly been raised according to similar ideals to Chua's, significantly less imaginative than the low level ones, much slower to grasp new concepts and far more shocked by anything that is out of their field of experience (including when one girl saw my figure without a cardigan on, but only a long-sleeved blouse, thick tights and smart suit skirt - I have a Kim Kardashian-esque hourglass and also work out constantly. The girl dissolved into hysterical laughter for the next half an hour). Although their level of conversational English is higher, they have effectively been drilled by after-school academies to tick boxes and pass multiple choice questions, so are vastly less capable of thinking critically.

An example was during a lesson on onomatopoeia in English. Korean is the most onomatopoeic language I have ever encountered. No high level student picked up on this at all. The supposed low level students, on the other hand, immediately seized on parallels between their own language and what I was teaching them about English, giving a number of their own examples of onomatopoeic words. One girl said, "Teacher, I think Korean has so many of that word, onomatopoeia word." Typically, when the kids start a sentence with 'I think', they are trying to be tentative about an idea they feel another may not share, but she'd hit the nail on the head. In a story I wrote and gave to them, they were more able to pick out the words fitting this category than the high level classes. Another example, during a lesson on irregular verbs, was that the low level students were more able to work out what the past tense of an unfamiliar irregular verb would be, whereas the high level students refused to answer any question they were not sure of.

I would point out that these low level students still come from families which are strict about academic achievement. Remember, they have been enrolled in an optional winter school (with a foreign teacher who is notorious for pushing students. I don't show them movies and the like). However, their familes are not fanatical about it, unlike the high level students, who are also much more likely to start dozing in either my class or someone else's from simple exhaustion and need to be woken up. As a result they have developed more of a personality and be simply less fazed by life and more able to resolve problems. Oh, one thing I didn't mention but which is also worth considering is that some of the high level students argue with me about cultural things, despite never having traveled, and are very bad at accepting cultural difference. In Korean culture and language, a vegetable is 'anything you can make side dishes from', including a chestnut and a tomato. When I was explaining why this is not like Western definitions of that word, some high level students tried to battle me on it. I'm sure Chua considers herself to have been a great parent, but she is not representative of all Asian parenting - hence the split amongst my students - and I absolutely wouldn't adopt her norms if I ever wanted kids.

Finally, over to China, that gigantic country which has about 54 recognised indigenous ethnic groups and about which it is rather hard to generalise. I have a friend who is Chinese and who is a kind of party girl. She is also as open as she can be about her bisexuality, which I admire. Some of the behaviours she has got away with during her life, I would never have visited on my parents. Her mother takes it on the chin, though she is strict about some things. Perhaps Chua would have stated that this person is 'westernised' or something similar. She is actually Chinese born and bred; she has never visited a Western country. Food for thought, and another example of why self-generalisation is stupid.