Tiger mothers and the Asian F.
Okay, look. I usually avoid reading things about 'tiger mothers' and things like that - I even have difficulty watching television shows that depict overbearing and extremely exacting parents, so the fact that a book came out in what should be the modern year of 2011, written by a Chinese-American depicting what they think is the best method to raise their child and promoting it as good and proper, even healthy, is... I'll be blunt about this - fucking infuriating. I was really only led to this person, Amy Chua, and her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by a blog entry that pointed out how completely wrong she was, but that still exists and people think it works. Too many people think it works.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you that her kids are unhappy. I don't know if they are or if they aren't, I do know that in my life I have had two brothers who have undergone similar treatment and one is very happy and successful. It depends on the type of person you are, and sometimes you are not that person. You can't take hours sitting at home alone, hovering over textbooks. Or looking outside at all the kids who are actually having fun. You can't completely focus yourself on the future and sacrificing the present to get it. You can't stop from reaching for Harry Potter when you're supposed to be reading Kant. Sometimes you aren't that person and the main problem with this kind of parenting is that they do not understand that. It's like feet-binding. They break you in at birth and keep binding you up into a certain shape so that you never grow into what you are or could be.
Eventually you lose the ability to conceive anything else, can only watch other people live their lives in the way that you never could. Then when you hit success, it turns out they were right and you were wrong every time you sat and resented them for every play that they pulled you out of, every sleepover they denied and every miserable fucking page of David Copperfield that you had to sit through. And so you do it to your kids, expecting them to take it too. But they might not be able to.
People think it's funny. It'd depicted in so many media: the geeky Asian kid who is closed off and prohibited from attending things that other kids are normally allowed to go to, and instead to go home and study. Asians are "perfect students", of course they are, haha. It's hilarious when they have a breakdown over a B. Or, to quote Glee, an 'Asian F'. And it's funny. And you know what, I chuckle on occasion, but never without the reminder in my head that the writers don't fucking understand how difficult it actually is.
I don't know if Amy Chua forced any corporal punishment on her children in her book, but I know that it happened in my house, and I know that it happens in many others. I believe there was some criticism on the harshness of setting her child's stuffed animals on fire? One of the first years I lived with my parents, when I was five or six, they gave me a Barbie set. It ended up being thrown out months later as punishment. In middle school, my parents took gifts that my friends had given me for my birthday (a birthday that they had mostly forgotten that year), which had extreme sentimental value, and threw them in the trash as well. They subsequently punished me for taking them back. A library book was torn to shreds when I was caught reading it, and was the sort of material that they didn't approve of, which could range from Animorphs to pretty much any young adult novel. I don't even remember how I paid that fee anymore.
I've been locked in the bathroom, once walked around with bruises on my calves for weeks, had textbooks thrown at me, missed dinner more times than I can count. The kicker? They still consider how they treated me much better than how they treated my brothers. At least I was in someways allowed to rebel. I've watched my father hit my brothers in the back of the neck while they were hunched over their desks because they had been playing Starcraft while my parents had been gone, and clearly hadn't studied what they'd been supposed to study.
My parents don't know any better. They didn't live any other life except the life they were presented. In their minds, beating me was okay. They were shaping me to have a bright future. I just didn't understand because I was young and stupid and ungrateful. I've been directly told by my mother that she would have preferred her friend's daughter over me. I've been directly told by my father that he hates me. The latter might have been said in the height of anger, but that never changed the fact that he said it. Children hate their parents all the time, in the midst of floor pounding tantrums and "you never let me do anything". Parents don't.
I still have difficulty convincing myself that I wasn't the one at fault. In some ways, though I'm bitter and I take potshots and snide comments about my parents, I still don't really believe that anyone was at fault. But I do know that I have so many self-esteem issues about my image, the type of person I turned out to be, my abilities, my creativity, and my future that sometimes it becomes difficult to function because my brain tells me I've already failed in it by trying. I haven't opened up a word document in weeks because as soon as one word goes down, I've already screwed up. It gets terrifying to pick up a pen and draw because one stroke and it's already gone wrong. Because I can't immediately excel at something, it becomes 'I'm no good at it at all'.
Socially, in many ways, my upbringing has crippled me. I have difficulty handling more than three people at a time, can't walk up to any new ones, feel anxiety when I pick up the phone on someone I'm not familiar with. It even effects how I walk - I'm always walking behind people because walking in front or even beside weirds me out, especially with more than one person, especially when they're in a conversation with someone else. I'm used to staying quiet, and staying unnoticed. I only recently got over flinching anytime someone raised their hand at me. I have difficulty even feeling extreme emotions unless I'm directly faced with them, and even then they don't last very long.
I'm not going to get into the emotional abuse I had to go through when my parents re-entered my life. But after six miserable years in Korea, with grandparents who smothered me more than I could handle, and was overbearingly controlling, after I had taken every night to muse and wonder and think about how I ended up there, I had turned out so well, my dad told me, that he was thinking of doing the same to my second oldest brother, who had himself taken to a sort of rebellion. While going to Harvard Business School. He's 22.
So yeah. I can tell you first hand that growing up like this is miserable, unless you're the right type of person. My oldest brother was and good for him. But it's a miserable existence where you are at fault, constantly. I could not count you the times I contemplated suicide, and in fact, South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. I felt worthless and stupid and like I was a terrible person, who could not be good enough for her parents. Even without living in America, Korean students are shoved at young ages into cram schools, where they cram all their life for a test that they will take when they are eighteen.
It's not fun.
It's not funny.
It's grueling and tiring and you end up hating yourself, and getting terrified of risks. Like not becoming a doctor, or a business man, or something along those lines. Those kids you see on television are stunted and broken. They might love to draw, but they'll never be artists. They might love to write, but won't be writers.
They're bound. And they might never know what it's like to take their own shape.
So let's get this clear:
That's sad.
Also stop calling it "child-rearing" books. CHILDREN ARE NOT CATTLE.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you that her kids are unhappy. I don't know if they are or if they aren't, I do know that in my life I have had two brothers who have undergone similar treatment and one is very happy and successful. It depends on the type of person you are, and sometimes you are not that person. You can't take hours sitting at home alone, hovering over textbooks. Or looking outside at all the kids who are actually having fun. You can't completely focus yourself on the future and sacrificing the present to get it. You can't stop from reaching for Harry Potter when you're supposed to be reading Kant. Sometimes you aren't that person and the main problem with this kind of parenting is that they do not understand that. It's like feet-binding. They break you in at birth and keep binding you up into a certain shape so that you never grow into what you are or could be.
Eventually you lose the ability to conceive anything else, can only watch other people live their lives in the way that you never could. Then when you hit success, it turns out they were right and you were wrong every time you sat and resented them for every play that they pulled you out of, every sleepover they denied and every miserable fucking page of David Copperfield that you had to sit through. And so you do it to your kids, expecting them to take it too. But they might not be able to.
People think it's funny. It'd depicted in so many media: the geeky Asian kid who is closed off and prohibited from attending things that other kids are normally allowed to go to, and instead to go home and study. Asians are "perfect students", of course they are, haha. It's hilarious when they have a breakdown over a B. Or, to quote Glee, an 'Asian F'. And it's funny. And you know what, I chuckle on occasion, but never without the reminder in my head that the writers don't fucking understand how difficult it actually is.
I don't know if Amy Chua forced any corporal punishment on her children in her book, but I know that it happened in my house, and I know that it happens in many others. I believe there was some criticism on the harshness of setting her child's stuffed animals on fire? One of the first years I lived with my parents, when I was five or six, they gave me a Barbie set. It ended up being thrown out months later as punishment. In middle school, my parents took gifts that my friends had given me for my birthday (a birthday that they had mostly forgotten that year), which had extreme sentimental value, and threw them in the trash as well. They subsequently punished me for taking them back. A library book was torn to shreds when I was caught reading it, and was the sort of material that they didn't approve of, which could range from Animorphs to pretty much any young adult novel. I don't even remember how I paid that fee anymore.
I've been locked in the bathroom, once walked around with bruises on my calves for weeks, had textbooks thrown at me, missed dinner more times than I can count. The kicker? They still consider how they treated me much better than how they treated my brothers. At least I was in someways allowed to rebel. I've watched my father hit my brothers in the back of the neck while they were hunched over their desks because they had been playing Starcraft while my parents had been gone, and clearly hadn't studied what they'd been supposed to study.
My parents don't know any better. They didn't live any other life except the life they were presented. In their minds, beating me was okay. They were shaping me to have a bright future. I just didn't understand because I was young and stupid and ungrateful. I've been directly told by my mother that she would have preferred her friend's daughter over me. I've been directly told by my father that he hates me. The latter might have been said in the height of anger, but that never changed the fact that he said it. Children hate their parents all the time, in the midst of floor pounding tantrums and "you never let me do anything". Parents don't.
I still have difficulty convincing myself that I wasn't the one at fault. In some ways, though I'm bitter and I take potshots and snide comments about my parents, I still don't really believe that anyone was at fault. But I do know that I have so many self-esteem issues about my image, the type of person I turned out to be, my abilities, my creativity, and my future that sometimes it becomes difficult to function because my brain tells me I've already failed in it by trying. I haven't opened up a word document in weeks because as soon as one word goes down, I've already screwed up. It gets terrifying to pick up a pen and draw because one stroke and it's already gone wrong. Because I can't immediately excel at something, it becomes 'I'm no good at it at all'.
Socially, in many ways, my upbringing has crippled me. I have difficulty handling more than three people at a time, can't walk up to any new ones, feel anxiety when I pick up the phone on someone I'm not familiar with. It even effects how I walk - I'm always walking behind people because walking in front or even beside weirds me out, especially with more than one person, especially when they're in a conversation with someone else. I'm used to staying quiet, and staying unnoticed. I only recently got over flinching anytime someone raised their hand at me. I have difficulty even feeling extreme emotions unless I'm directly faced with them, and even then they don't last very long.
I'm not going to get into the emotional abuse I had to go through when my parents re-entered my life. But after six miserable years in Korea, with grandparents who smothered me more than I could handle, and was overbearingly controlling, after I had taken every night to muse and wonder and think about how I ended up there, I had turned out so well, my dad told me, that he was thinking of doing the same to my second oldest brother, who had himself taken to a sort of rebellion. While going to Harvard Business School. He's 22.
So yeah. I can tell you first hand that growing up like this is miserable, unless you're the right type of person. My oldest brother was and good for him. But it's a miserable existence where you are at fault, constantly. I could not count you the times I contemplated suicide, and in fact, South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. I felt worthless and stupid and like I was a terrible person, who could not be good enough for her parents. Even without living in America, Korean students are shoved at young ages into cram schools, where they cram all their life for a test that they will take when they are eighteen.
It's not fun.
It's not funny.
It's grueling and tiring and you end up hating yourself, and getting terrified of risks. Like not becoming a doctor, or a business man, or something along those lines. Those kids you see on television are stunted and broken. They might love to draw, but they'll never be artists. They might love to write, but won't be writers.
They're bound. And they might never know what it's like to take their own shape.
So let's get this clear:
That's sad.
Also stop calling it "child-rearing" books. CHILDREN ARE NOT CATTLE.