Why Chinese Mothers are Messed Up
Yeah, I read Amy Chua's article in the WSJ, and I know now that her book on the subject, reportedly, also talks about the pitfalls of the "Chinese" style of suppresion parenting. Counter arguments have been presented by others. (My favourites are here and here, with the most notable piece of info from the links being the discovery that the rate of suicide in the US is highest among Asian American females compared to other races. And, someone raised the point that the Chinese style of dictatorship parenting is also the management style of Chinese office tools executives.) Growing up in my generation, I often felt that to be born a Chinese female was to be born undervalued, even if not by your own family, then always by your own culture. That alone is messed up, but is a symptom (like Amy Chua's so-called "Tiger moms") of the Chinese culture of always choosing the evaluation of others over your own (or your kids') sense of self-worth.
In a nutshell, it's that battle between extrinsic and intrinsic values again. I'm going to think aloud in this post on why the Chinese lack of intrinsic values is a vicious cycle played out, quite destructively, in the tiger-mom-saving-face style of parenting, and why Chinese tiger moms (and the results of their parenting) are not superior. Often, the children are guilt-ridden and extremely fear-driven beings petrified of their own desires and others' opinions until they find a way to break out the cycle.
One of the things you'll hear a lot about in Chinese culture is filial piety. If this is a concept alien, read the link (just the first 3 paragraphs), I'll wait. Ideally, this virtue encourages a child to pay back the kindness his parents have shown him, to keep his parents supported and comfortable in their old age (yeah, no selfishness there; you want to live longer, tell your kids that ensuring your survival is a "virtue"), and to keep parents and ancestors supported and comfortable in the afterlife (you want to be comfortable in the spirit world, so you tell your kids to show filial piety even after you're dead or else the family will not prosper, or their farm animals will sicken and die, they will have no sons, etc etc). At least one son is required to send you off at your funeral, (and wives for your male progeny) to tend the family altar and to make offerings to keep you happy and comfortable in the spirit world. Should your one son happen to die before you do, it is an unforgivable sin (for him, not you), because that meant he left for the spirit world without taking care of your funeral and your future needs in the spirit world.
YOU, YOU, YOU. This is what filial piety is, carried to its extreme, which it commonly was/is. Children are not had for their own sake. For the traditional Chinese, they are a means of survival. So YOU are taken care of in your old age. So YOU will have hell money and food sent to you after you die.
It is so twisted, that Buddhism had to kowtow to filial piety in China and Japan, and a bodhisattva given the portfolio that included protecting/saving the "souls" of children (strictly speaking, Buddhism doesn't talk of souls) who'd had the bad bad bad taste to die before their parents. Oh no, the tragedy of kids dying isn't that they died too young, before they had more time on earth, in a precious human life, or that they just died. The tragedy is that they died before they could repay their parents' kindness, died before they could carry out good deeds that would accumulate merit that they could have dedicated to their parents. They died and made THE PARENTS suffer.
It is so twisted, that OF COURSE Chinese kids have to be everything in their life their parents want them to be, otherwise they're just ungrateful and evil, and they'll go to hell. (Though, then again, everyone kinda does, but the kids would go to the bad district of hell.) For the Chinese, with kids, it isn't just your parenting skills under scrutiny from your friends, family and colleages, it's your karma... what kind of kids YOU deserved, what kind of kids you got and how well you will live in your old age because of them.
By god, you're going to beat your kids to study hard and become smart and one day be a doctor or lawyer and then they'll have a comfortable happy life and then they're going to be SO DAMN GRATEFUL you did all that for them. They may not be happy while you're beating them and calling them morons and idiots, but they're going to be happy when they've made it.
That's your Chinese tiger parenting: All for them, the parents insist. It's all for their kids' good. Not the parents' own survival, or selfishness, or ego, or their face. (Little wonder Confucianists saw Buddhism as a threat on first encounter.)
These wealth- and face-obsessed parents can't teach their own kids that each life has its own intrinsic value, because they don't know it themselves. They can't teach that a life or a person has more worth than just how much money that person makes, because they don't know it themselves. What they wind up teaching is guilt. What they wind up teaching is that life is measured by how much you make, what nice things you own, wear, and drive around. What they wind up teaching is that people are judged by that, that it's OK to judge others by that, that it's the only way to judge people, that it's expected of you to judge people and be judged, and have your worth set by that. The lesson taught is that you're responsible for your parents' happiness, and by extension, happiness is something you only get when you have all the material luxuries you want, and when you have have other people doing everything YOU want.
Children of such parents are not taught how to be happy. They are not taught how, or allowed to figure out what they want or what they need. They do not exist for themselves, and they are not taught how to have faith in themselves other than to keep trying harder, longer, better for somebody else's happiness.
In this culture, kids are not told "I love you". Children are told: "Study hard and get all As or you'll become like that old cleaning lady over there." They are told "So-and-so's daughter got 100 out of 100, why couldn't you do the same? You're a lazy idiot and there'll be no more TV or going out until you score the same or better." Their career path, if not chosen for them, becomes a subject of contention all their lives, and by proximity, their salary does as well, then their love life, then their ability to produce (male) progeny. Any child that does anything other than what their parents wanted for him or her is a failure.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs would be utter nonsense to the traditional Chinese. What they would agree on is that the lowest level of need is material comfort. That's fine. But above that, the Chinese child does not live for his own spiritual or emotional fulfillment. His purpose in life is to serve his parents, then to make sure his own kids serve him. Full stop.
AND Confucius said that this was all for the good of society. You do not argue with Confucius. (Unless you're me.)
For that matter, you do not argue with parents, teachers or figures of authority.
When Asian political figures expound on how wonderful "Asian values" are, this is what they're actually praising: this stupid, mindless, unquestioning, so-called Confucian virtue of always doing what you're told, being grateful for what you've been given, and never, ever asking anything--especially not difficult questions about how else things could be, that may imply that there are other, possibly better, ways of doing things.
See, that would make the figures of authority lose face. And that is rude. Figures of authority should be respected and given face no matter how badly they're doing their jobs. (Greek rhetoric would never have had a chance in Confucian China. You can't argue at all because it would make your opponent lose face. And that's just rude, so having been shown as rude, you lose. Oh, and old people are always right.)
I wish this was all just me going on a long, huge hyperbole, but I'm not really. This sums up everything I've been taught, in my life, about what it means to be Chinese, or to be the Chinese that a real Chinese should be. It's not a rant against my parents, because what I found out early in my life was that my more progressive parents (though not the most progressive parents) were the exception rather than the rule. Rather, I listened to what my friends' said about tbeir parents. Met their parents. Was hired by parents to give private tuition to their disappointing children who weren't scoring As. I listened to my teachers and their opinions on what made good or bad students, what made good or bad children. I listened to my school principals and heard the same. I listened to my government and their opinions on what made good or bad youths, and what made good or bad citizens.
I think what started me realizing that "Asian values" was just a huge crock of shit was that so many of these people talking about Chinese superiority were just ignorant, self-centered, raging, racist, assholes. And usually misogynist, to boot. (Which doesn't mean these assholes didn't include females. They did.) Threatened, insecure in themselves and possibly their own culture from which they had drawn their entire value system, I was frequently exposed in school (in Chinese language class, to be exact) to diatribes against dirty, stinky, loud, "loose" (ie.slutty) white people who had no respect. And (again, from Chinese class) white people were disgusting because in their films, they kissed mouth-to-mouth, some guys had long hair (er... so did all the Chinese sages in history...?) and just talked back too much. (You do not want to hear what they thought of dark people.) The Chinese were superior because we had ethics, manners, and teachers like Confucius, and respect for our elders.
You couldn't argue that if Chinese were so superior, we should have had no crime, ever. You couldn't argue that not all white people were like those in films. You couldn't argue that if Chinese were so superior, they shouldn't have gotten trounced by the Japanese and by white people in multiple wars, or had their country mired in disaster after disaster under Mao Tse Tung, or that we were in a classroom with electricity (powering the lights, the fans, the overhead projector, the tape recorder and its casette tapes for oral lessons) thanks to white scientists, inventors, and colonial powers.... because you just weren't allowed to argue, period.
Older now, I'm starting to see that people who saw the world in such black and white terms are everywhere. In the west, you'd probably call them fundamentalist Christians. Or maybe white supermacists. The people always talking about "family values". People with family values don't question tradition, have sex before marriage, become gay, support gay marriage, or challenge the status quo (unless the godless Democrats are in power). People with Asian values or Confucian values don't question tradition, have sex before marriage, become gay, support gay marriage, or challenge the status quo (unless white people or darker people are in power).
I'm going to argue that fundamentalists of all stripes, whether religious, racist, Chinese chauvinist, whatever, are deficient in the cognitive ability to attach their own value to things in their life. It is the ability to weigh ideas, thoughts and actions using values they've figured out on their own. I say that because these deficient thinkers are frequently the people who think atheists/people-not-like-them in skin colour/religion/culture have no morals of their own (or like their own). That because a person has no religious or moral teachers, that person, on their own, has no way of figuring out that murder is wrong, theft is wrong, violence is wrong, or that dishonesty is wrong. Without god/Confucian teachings/the Bible/family values/Asian values, that person is compelled to kill, cheat, lie, steal, be a sloth, a slut, sleep around, talk back, and have all sorts of immoral godless fun with impunity and no sense of the consequences.
These are the people who believe that without god/Confucian teachings/the Bible/family values/Asian values, all of society would break down. When they meet a "decent person", they assume immediately that the person was "taught right", which, while not out of the question, presumes that values can only be imparted from without, and only from trusted sources, they are not innate, nor can empathy, respect, or compassion ever be cultivated or shown without the promise of a reward, whether it's a monetary one in this life, or in the form of eternal salvation or the reputation of being filial.
Nothing is ever its own reward.
Love is always conditional. (And hence, to the traditional Chinese, children must be guilted, threatened and coerced by Confucian values to support you in your old age--they would not do it out of love.)
Religious and cultural fundamentalists/chauvinists/bigots are distinctly unable to imagine or comprehend a person being "decent" without having an upbringing or a religion (or a sexual orientation, for that matter) that is entirely the same as their own. Instead of opening up to the possibility that decency/morality/empathy/compassion/success is possible through other belief systems or without any belief in, or lessons from, God/Jesus/Confucius/spaghetti monster, they will instead find fault in the person that defies their categorization. You are not Christian. Or you're not a REAL Christian. Or you say you're Buddhist/atheist/Muslim/Hindu but you behave like a Christian, so you're actually a Christian though you deny it. You may look successful and happy but you're probably unhappy. Or you may be successful and/or happy now but you're going to hell. You are not Chinese, or you're not Chinese enough, or you're a banana (yellow outside, white inside).
Categorization and re-categorization/defining and re-definition in order to save one's culture/belief system/ego is a double-edged sword. Because appearances, labels, and other people's opinions matter so much, and one's ability to assign intrinsic values so atrophied, these people are always at the mercy of others' thoughts about them as well. Or at least, in their heads, they always worry what others think of them. I think they do not know what to think of themselves. That shit is too hard.
And so the pursuit of perfect jobs, perfect children, perfect behavior and perfect possessions (as defined by others) goes on and on. The "pursuit of happiness" is a rather cruel joke, because it usually means that while you're pursuing it, you haven't got it. And man, do you hate watching those godless/Confucian-less libruls getting it.
But it's especially cruel when these hang-ups are taken out on, and perpetuated in children.
ETA: As I posted more concisely in a comment somewhere else, I think parents can always get their kids to push themselves and try their best without the emotional abuse. (see How Not to Talk to Your Kids)
In a nutshell, it's that battle between extrinsic and intrinsic values again. I'm going to think aloud in this post on why the Chinese lack of intrinsic values is a vicious cycle played out, quite destructively, in the tiger-mom-saving-face style of parenting, and why Chinese tiger moms (and the results of their parenting) are not superior. Often, the children are guilt-ridden and extremely fear-driven beings petrified of their own desires and others' opinions until they find a way to break out the cycle.
One of the things you'll hear a lot about in Chinese culture is filial piety. If this is a concept alien, read the link (just the first 3 paragraphs), I'll wait. Ideally, this virtue encourages a child to pay back the kindness his parents have shown him, to keep his parents supported and comfortable in their old age (yeah, no selfishness there; you want to live longer, tell your kids that ensuring your survival is a "virtue"), and to keep parents and ancestors supported and comfortable in the afterlife (you want to be comfortable in the spirit world, so you tell your kids to show filial piety even after you're dead or else the family will not prosper, or their farm animals will sicken and die, they will have no sons, etc etc). At least one son is required to send you off at your funeral, (and wives for your male progeny) to tend the family altar and to make offerings to keep you happy and comfortable in the spirit world. Should your one son happen to die before you do, it is an unforgivable sin (for him, not you), because that meant he left for the spirit world without taking care of your funeral and your future needs in the spirit world.
YOU, YOU, YOU. This is what filial piety is, carried to its extreme, which it commonly was/is. Children are not had for their own sake. For the traditional Chinese, they are a means of survival. So YOU are taken care of in your old age. So YOU will have hell money and food sent to you after you die.
It is so twisted, that Buddhism had to kowtow to filial piety in China and Japan, and a bodhisattva given the portfolio that included protecting/saving the "souls" of children (strictly speaking, Buddhism doesn't talk of souls) who'd had the bad bad bad taste to die before their parents. Oh no, the tragedy of kids dying isn't that they died too young, before they had more time on earth, in a precious human life, or that they just died. The tragedy is that they died before they could repay their parents' kindness, died before they could carry out good deeds that would accumulate merit that they could have dedicated to their parents. They died and made THE PARENTS suffer.
It is so twisted, that OF COURSE Chinese kids have to be everything in their life their parents want them to be, otherwise they're just ungrateful and evil, and they'll go to hell. (Though, then again, everyone kinda does, but the kids would go to the bad district of hell.) For the Chinese, with kids, it isn't just your parenting skills under scrutiny from your friends, family and colleages, it's your karma... what kind of kids YOU deserved, what kind of kids you got and how well you will live in your old age because of them.
By god, you're going to beat your kids to study hard and become smart and one day be a doctor or lawyer and then they'll have a comfortable happy life and then they're going to be SO DAMN GRATEFUL you did all that for them. They may not be happy while you're beating them and calling them morons and idiots, but they're going to be happy when they've made it.
That's your Chinese tiger parenting: All for them, the parents insist. It's all for their kids' good. Not the parents' own survival, or selfishness, or ego, or their face. (Little wonder Confucianists saw Buddhism as a threat on first encounter.)
These wealth- and face-obsessed parents can't teach their own kids that each life has its own intrinsic value, because they don't know it themselves. They can't teach that a life or a person has more worth than just how much money that person makes, because they don't know it themselves. What they wind up teaching is guilt. What they wind up teaching is that life is measured by how much you make, what nice things you own, wear, and drive around. What they wind up teaching is that people are judged by that, that it's OK to judge others by that, that it's the only way to judge people, that it's expected of you to judge people and be judged, and have your worth set by that. The lesson taught is that you're responsible for your parents' happiness, and by extension, happiness is something you only get when you have all the material luxuries you want, and when you have have other people doing everything YOU want.
Children of such parents are not taught how to be happy. They are not taught how, or allowed to figure out what they want or what they need. They do not exist for themselves, and they are not taught how to have faith in themselves other than to keep trying harder, longer, better for somebody else's happiness.
In this culture, kids are not told "I love you". Children are told: "Study hard and get all As or you'll become like that old cleaning lady over there." They are told "So-and-so's daughter got 100 out of 100, why couldn't you do the same? You're a lazy idiot and there'll be no more TV or going out until you score the same or better." Their career path, if not chosen for them, becomes a subject of contention all their lives, and by proximity, their salary does as well, then their love life, then their ability to produce (male) progeny. Any child that does anything other than what their parents wanted for him or her is a failure.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs would be utter nonsense to the traditional Chinese. What they would agree on is that the lowest level of need is material comfort. That's fine. But above that, the Chinese child does not live for his own spiritual or emotional fulfillment. His purpose in life is to serve his parents, then to make sure his own kids serve him. Full stop.
AND Confucius said that this was all for the good of society. You do not argue with Confucius. (Unless you're me.)
For that matter, you do not argue with parents, teachers or figures of authority.
When Asian political figures expound on how wonderful "Asian values" are, this is what they're actually praising: this stupid, mindless, unquestioning, so-called Confucian virtue of always doing what you're told, being grateful for what you've been given, and never, ever asking anything--especially not difficult questions about how else things could be, that may imply that there are other, possibly better, ways of doing things.
See, that would make the figures of authority lose face. And that is rude. Figures of authority should be respected and given face no matter how badly they're doing their jobs. (Greek rhetoric would never have had a chance in Confucian China. You can't argue at all because it would make your opponent lose face. And that's just rude, so having been shown as rude, you lose. Oh, and old people are always right.)
I wish this was all just me going on a long, huge hyperbole, but I'm not really. This sums up everything I've been taught, in my life, about what it means to be Chinese, or to be the Chinese that a real Chinese should be. It's not a rant against my parents, because what I found out early in my life was that my more progressive parents (though not the most progressive parents) were the exception rather than the rule. Rather, I listened to what my friends' said about tbeir parents. Met their parents. Was hired by parents to give private tuition to their disappointing children who weren't scoring As. I listened to my teachers and their opinions on what made good or bad students, what made good or bad children. I listened to my school principals and heard the same. I listened to my government and their opinions on what made good or bad youths, and what made good or bad citizens.
I think what started me realizing that "Asian values" was just a huge crock of shit was that so many of these people talking about Chinese superiority were just ignorant, self-centered, raging, racist, assholes. And usually misogynist, to boot. (Which doesn't mean these assholes didn't include females. They did.) Threatened, insecure in themselves and possibly their own culture from which they had drawn their entire value system, I was frequently exposed in school (in Chinese language class, to be exact) to diatribes against dirty, stinky, loud, "loose" (ie.slutty) white people who had no respect. And (again, from Chinese class) white people were disgusting because in their films, they kissed mouth-to-mouth, some guys had long hair (er... so did all the Chinese sages in history...?) and just talked back too much. (You do not want to hear what they thought of dark people.) The Chinese were superior because we had ethics, manners, and teachers like Confucius, and respect for our elders.
You couldn't argue that if Chinese were so superior, we should have had no crime, ever. You couldn't argue that not all white people were like those in films. You couldn't argue that if Chinese were so superior, they shouldn't have gotten trounced by the Japanese and by white people in multiple wars, or had their country mired in disaster after disaster under Mao Tse Tung, or that we were in a classroom with electricity (powering the lights, the fans, the overhead projector, the tape recorder and its casette tapes for oral lessons) thanks to white scientists, inventors, and colonial powers.... because you just weren't allowed to argue, period.
Older now, I'm starting to see that people who saw the world in such black and white terms are everywhere. In the west, you'd probably call them fundamentalist Christians. Or maybe white supermacists. The people always talking about "family values". People with family values don't question tradition, have sex before marriage, become gay, support gay marriage, or challenge the status quo (unless the godless Democrats are in power). People with Asian values or Confucian values don't question tradition, have sex before marriage, become gay, support gay marriage, or challenge the status quo (unless white people or darker people are in power).
I'm going to argue that fundamentalists of all stripes, whether religious, racist, Chinese chauvinist, whatever, are deficient in the cognitive ability to attach their own value to things in their life. It is the ability to weigh ideas, thoughts and actions using values they've figured out on their own. I say that because these deficient thinkers are frequently the people who think atheists/people-not-like-them in skin colour/religion/culture have no morals of their own (or like their own). That because a person has no religious or moral teachers, that person, on their own, has no way of figuring out that murder is wrong, theft is wrong, violence is wrong, or that dishonesty is wrong. Without god/Confucian teachings/the Bible/family values/Asian values, that person is compelled to kill, cheat, lie, steal, be a sloth, a slut, sleep around, talk back, and have all sorts of immoral godless fun with impunity and no sense of the consequences.
These are the people who believe that without god/Confucian teachings/the Bible/family values/Asian values, all of society would break down. When they meet a "decent person", they assume immediately that the person was "taught right", which, while not out of the question, presumes that values can only be imparted from without, and only from trusted sources, they are not innate, nor can empathy, respect, or compassion ever be cultivated or shown without the promise of a reward, whether it's a monetary one in this life, or in the form of eternal salvation or the reputation of being filial.
Nothing is ever its own reward.
Love is always conditional. (And hence, to the traditional Chinese, children must be guilted, threatened and coerced by Confucian values to support you in your old age--they would not do it out of love.)
Religious and cultural fundamentalists/chauvinists/bigots are distinctly unable to imagine or comprehend a person being "decent" without having an upbringing or a religion (or a sexual orientation, for that matter) that is entirely the same as their own. Instead of opening up to the possibility that decency/morality/empathy/compassion/success is possible through other belief systems or without any belief in, or lessons from, God/Jesus/Confucius/spaghetti monster, they will instead find fault in the person that defies their categorization. You are not Christian. Or you're not a REAL Christian. Or you say you're Buddhist/atheist/Muslim/Hindu but you behave like a Christian, so you're actually a Christian though you deny it. You may look successful and happy but you're probably unhappy. Or you may be successful and/or happy now but you're going to hell. You are not Chinese, or you're not Chinese enough, or you're a banana (yellow outside, white inside).
Categorization and re-categorization/defining and re-definition in order to save one's culture/belief system/ego is a double-edged sword. Because appearances, labels, and other people's opinions matter so much, and one's ability to assign intrinsic values so atrophied, these people are always at the mercy of others' thoughts about them as well. Or at least, in their heads, they always worry what others think of them. I think they do not know what to think of themselves. That shit is too hard.
And so the pursuit of perfect jobs, perfect children, perfect behavior and perfect possessions (as defined by others) goes on and on. The "pursuit of happiness" is a rather cruel joke, because it usually means that while you're pursuing it, you haven't got it. And man, do you hate watching those godless/Confucian-less libruls getting it.
But it's especially cruel when these hang-ups are taken out on, and perpetuated in children.
ETA: As I posted more concisely in a comment somewhere else, I think parents can always get their kids to push themselves and try their best without the emotional abuse. (see How Not to Talk to Your Kids)