I failed to call my parents on Chinese New Year’s Eve again.
I used to blame it on miscalculation of time zone differences between Chicago and Taipei.
This year I am gonna blame it on the 3rd largest snowfall (20+ inches) Chicago has ever seen.
We had to shovel in the blizzard almost every hour yesterday.
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Mr. Monk vs. Chicago Blizzard 2011
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When I finally got up this morning, it was already 8 am (i.e. 10 pm in Taipei), and this is what I saw outside the window:
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Sigh.
I wanted to go right back to bed and hibernate until the snow melted away on its own, oh, say, a month from now. (Did I tell you that we do NOT own a snow blower? Out of principle? The Husband’s. Not Mine, thank you very much).
Still I dragged myself downstairs. I had to make the call, knowing that I had missed the opportunity to call during the Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner, arguably THE most important meal for every Chinese, when all my families got together. Getting my call when everybody was together having Chinese New Year dinner would make up, to a >0 extent, for the fact that I was not there physically. But I had missed the golden window. Sure enough, I found my parents back in their apartment.
“Your brother wanted to call you at 8. But I told him not to because it would have been 6 in the morning your time. Your father wanted to wait for you to call but then it got too late, we had to come home. Your father was tired.” Mom said.
Sigh.
Since I have a flair for the dramatic, I felt I had ruined Chinese New Year and I was more than happy to ignore it. If I did not mention it, my kids would not even notice that Chinese New Year has come and gone. So why bother. I’ve had enough to do all day.
At 5 o’clock, the guilty conscience finally got a hold of me.
“Hey, how about we go to a Chinese restaurant tonight. It’s Chinese New Year’s Eve.” I said to The Husband. “And how about you invite the two Chinese co-workers of yours who are here by themselves? It would make it feel more like Chinese New Year having dinner with them than with our children who would undoubtedly whine about the food.”
The roads are still treacherous and not many cars were outside. Almost all stores and restaurants were closed, including McDonald’s. Thank goodness for the cliche “Chinese restaurants are always open” because it is true.
I am glad that I made the last minute decision to have some semblance of a Chinese New Year’s Eve: We made it to Chef Ping’s and for once it was not crowded; I got to order a shrimp dish AND a whole fish; I did NOT eat one single piece of the stupid General Tsao’s Chicken that we have to order every single time for the kids; I said Happy New Year in Chinese to more than a dozen people in the restaurant and it made me feel so much better, that Chinese New Year is not ruined after all.
I am really deprived, I know.
When I came home, I saw the email from Amanda who told me that her kids get a day off tomorrow for Chinese New Year because that is how they roll in San Francisco. And she sent me this picture of a fellow Taiwanese celebrating Chinese New Year. She at least made Mango a hat. I guess I need to get it together.
I need to go find some red envelops to give to the boys tomorrow. I was supposed to give it to them on Chinese New Year’s Eve. Oh well. They would have had to kneel and kowtow to me and The Husband and wish us long life and stuff before we gave them the red envelops anyway.
I was supposed to buy them new underwear too. I guess what you don’t know won’t hurt you.
Here’s to The Year of the Rabbit!
In case you are wondering what 2011 holds for you according to your Chinese Zodiac signs, here it is.
And for some of you, you’d be excited to know that for the Vietnamese, this year is indeed The Year of the Cat. Yes, that song is for real.
Now… who wants to look at The walking Bunny again?
I sometimes feel very sorry for my children: because how I am caught between two worlds, they too are caught between two worlds.
Many of you have commented on my responses to the Tiger Mom Controversy with great insight, grace and kindness. One comment that made me pause and reflect upon the factual state of what I am doing to my children came from MacDougal Street Baby:
Nobody knows what happens behind closed doors. We can pontificate all we want about how others are raising their kids but, really, there’s no way to know what’s going on. Believe in your own way. Trust yourself. And then deal with the fallout.
It is this unwavering conviction that has been eluding me ever since I became a parent. I am torn between the “Chinese way of parenting” and the, for the lack of a better term, “Modern American” way.
So I wobble.
One day I am a Chinese mother. The next day I am an American mother. I feel so schizophrenic and now am worried what this kind of wishy-washy parenting is doing to my children: they have no way of knowing which mother will be greeting them every morning. It is like living with Eve White.
Either way, I am constantly feeling guilty because of the pressure coming from both sides.
I am either too strict and overprotective or too lenient and permissive.
The worst would be when I am “confronted” by other Chinese parents either in this country or back home.
I am not kidding when I mentioned my brother asking me whether he could discipline my children on my behalf. “Just a slap on the face will solve all your problems!” In fact, he did not even need my approval since he is my elder brother and as their uncle, he has all the “right” to discipline my children the way he sees fit. Even my nephew, who was a so-called “problem child” in his youth (with petty misdemeanors, unfinished high school and truancy which constituted as “family scandals” that shall not be spoken of, and who, one would thought, should hate this kind of heavy-handed, literally, parenting style), asked quite a few times with exasperation, “What do you mean you cannot beat your child? Oh I am telling you, it pangs me to watch them misbehave so much that my hands are itching. Could I please just hit them upside the head?”
(If you are wondering WHAT crime did my children commit to deserve such wrath? My kids were simply, according to the American standard, “being independent, rambunctious boys”.)
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We have a babysitter that comes every morning to accompany Mr. Monk to his bus stop: I have to leave before that in order to catch my train downtown and my husband travels a lot. We are now on our second babysitter who started last month. Our babysitter does not need this job: she lives in a house bigger than ours and drives a Mercedes. As a fellow Chinese, she is doing this as a favor for me and for that, I am very grateful. But I am afraid that she is going to quit very soon.
Mr. Monk was reading at the kitchen table and ignoring both of us when we asked him what he would like for lunch. I could see his finger moving across the page. I could tell that he was frantically trying to get to a place where he could stop without losing his place on the page.
He is a child of many peculiarities since birth. I have learned to go along with these special requirements of his to keep a smooth and orderly existence. I have learned the hard way.
If it were his elder brother at the table this morning? I would have punished him for blatantly ignoring me.
“You are very permissive. I would have snatched that book away this instant.” My babysitter commented in Chinese.
I explained to her what Mr. Monk was trying to do and his needing such an order in his life.
“You should have fought to get him to change. You should have made him change through persistence. If it were my daughter, I would have taken that book away already.”
I made some feeble attempt to explain why I did not. Could not. “He’d be harping on this for the rest of the day if I did so. Maybe even tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. He’ll remember this for the rest of his life.”
“My daughter remembers everything too. Oh she fought but I persisted. You just have to be persistent and make them change their ways. It is not possible for him to not change if you just work harder.”
“You must have been very strict with your daughter?” I asked, as a compliment.
“Yes, I was.” She beamed with pride as she should since her daughter is now a VP at a prestigious investment bank on Wall Street.
“Oh she hated me back then. I am pretty sure she hated me but I persisted. She is very nice to me now, she calls me all the time. I think she finally understands why I needed to do what I did. She can see now.”
“You know, I cannot do that.” I admitted to her. “It must have taken a lot of strength on your part to remain strict.” I stopped short at telling her, “But I need my children to like me, and I cannot stand the thought that they may hate me.”
“Yes.” She paused. “But I did what I had to do.”
In traditional Chinese culture, (Warning: Gross generalization ahead. Buyer beware!) your success as a parent is not evaluated by how happy your children are but by how obedient they are when young and how successful they are when grown-up. Providing your children with a happy childhood is not a requisite for being a good mother. I am not suggesting that Chinese parents go out of their way to make their children miserable but rather that IT is not a priority. Or rather, the definition of happiness is quite different, and also who gets to define happiness is debatable since we were often told, “You don’t know what you want. You don’t know what will make you happy. You will know when you are older.”
I am happy for her and for her daughter’s accomplishment. As I said, I am grateful for her coming here every morning so that I could keep my job. But it feels like an indictment of me as a parent every single morning. I will be getting out of the house as soon as she arrives from now on.
This is a different reaction from my reading of the controversy surrounding Amy Chua’s WSJ article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior?”
Yesterday, I said, Bring it on! The can of worms has been opened! Today, I will continue to clear this raging case of “Oh oh oh I have something to say Pick Me Pick Me” via pontificating on my blog.
Disclaimer needed, again: I am not agreeing with Chua’s parenting style. This is simply ONE of my reactions as all these conflicting thoughts racing through my brains…
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Like many, I felt great anxiety and anger when I was reading Chua’s article. But I get anxious easily when it comes to parenting. Heck, I felt like screaming when I watched a holiday video from a Chinese friend showing her kids playing piano AND violin at a recital, speaking fluent Chinese AND French. Again, not because I wished my kids were better but because that video, akin to a resume for the future “survival of the fittest” audition, raised my anxiety level over whether I am doing enough to prepare my children for their future. And you know what? I wish my friend were a Tiger Mom, so I could easily dismiss her accomplishment as a parent by thinking, “Well, but her kids are like robots, and she is cold and unemotional.” They are not, and she is not.
To parent like this (ok, sans the name calling, BUT I did call my kids dumbasses more than once when they were, well, being dumbasses), it takes a lot of dedication and efforts. I am too selfish to devote myself like that to my children. I cannot even spend an hour every day teaching my children Chinese. It really is easier to say, “To hell with it. Who needs to know Chinese anyway? [Ha!]” than to deal with all the crying and resisting. I WANT my children to like me. I don’t want to be the mean parent. My husband can be the bad cop. Me? I want to be the good cop.
I thank Amy Chua, not for the article since I knew all about “The Chinese Way of Parenting” and there was no surprise there, but for the 7000+ hateful comments and the public condemnations. They reassured me, “Hey, what I am doing or not doing is OK. She thinks she is so successful, and her children are so successful, and her family is so successful, but you know what? They are all zombies with no emotions. And the Americans, including the Chinese Americans, HATE her.” Hopefully when I go home this February, when my parents cannot communicate with my children because they do not speak English, when people ask me why my children cannot speak Chinese and how come so-and-so’s American grandchildren can not only speak but read and write fluent Chinese and why I did not beat their asses so they would learn Chinese against their will, when my brother asks for the Nth time whether it is ok if he gives my independent children a beating and I say “Of course not” and he relents with a sigh “Americans…”, I will feel less like a failure.
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As the kids and I hurried along Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago this Sunday night in the freezing temperature, I spotted a mother bundled up with her two children on the sidewalk. There was a can in front of them with a few coins inside. She was trying to cover the little one’s head with a tiny scarf. My heart skipped a beat. I stopped to give her some money and quickly walked away. My oldest patted my arm as we walked further.
“It is freezing. Those kids must be freezing.” I said. “I don’t know why she’s sitting on the sidewalk in the cold. There are shelters. Doesn’t she know there are shelters?”
In an effort to comfort me, he said, “I heard a story about this guy who would go into the city every day and beg and then every night he comes home to a big house and car and everything.”
“Do you know why this story became so popular and everybody likes to talk about it?”
“Because it gives you the justification you need for not doing anything?”
“Exactly.”
Tiger Moms. That’s all I hear/read about these past few days.
Ugh.
Yeah I hear you. But are you surprised that I need to talk about it?
In case you have not heard, the “Tiger Mom Controversy” refers to a WSJ article written by a Yale Law School professor, Amy Chua, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior?” In addition to the 6900+ comments on WSJ.com (and counting), the article (and the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) has inspired (mostly out of anger and spite) numerous articles and discussions, and Chua was interviewed on NPR (and they took heat for that interview).
You can go and read about all that by googling. So much anger. It’s like Mommy War all over again. Perhaps this time we (i.e. SAHMs and Working Mothers) can all band together by hating one common enemy.
“At least we are NOT like that.”
“Yeah, High Five, sister!”
Or you can read the non-angry posts that do NOT dwell on whether her parenting style is right or wrong (or “evil” as so many commenters have declared without actually reading her book). Instead these posts pointed out a couple of interesting ways to look at this controversy:
Brilliant marketing! Amy Chua and her publisher are laughing all the way home. Cha ching cha ching. “Thumbs up to the writer”
This controversy provides opportunities for ourselves to discuss and examine our own parenting styles and philosophies. “Be A Better Parent Through Blogging”.
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Or, read a post by someone who has actually read the book — Gosh, what a novel concept, eh? Amy Chua: Tiger Mother without a Plan, and draw your own conclusion.
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Because I am a lazy blogger, I now hate Amy Chua with a passion, not because of her unattainable parenting style or the whole perpetuating the stereotype thing, but because I cannot stop thinking about it. I have drafted several completely different responses to this giant can of worms that she has opened, and I hate working on drafts. Drafts are for suckers who like to work hard, who practices piano or (or “AND”) violin two hours every day, who does everything to perfection.
Curse you, Amy Chua!
Ok. So below is my second reaction (and NOT the last) after I recovered from the initial, visceral reaction.
Disclaimer: This is one of the post-visceral reactions I’ve felt. I am conflicted. I have argued against myself and contradicted myself. In this post, I am telling one of my responses like it is. I will follow up with the rest because OH GOOD GRAVY my head hurts. I need to now go rub Tiger Balm on my temples and tummy.
I may just be jealous.
There. I said it.
I am not suggesting that I wish my children were better or different or somebody else; I swear on my life, I am very happy with and proud of their performances and accomplishments in everything that they are doing, including the failed attempt at learning Chinese. However, I will cop to the wild fantasy that my kids were somehow more obedient, better disciplined, less wise-ass-y, and more “convenient” when I want to go to a fancy restaurant with real napkins and nice crystals. A girl can dream, right?
I may just be jealous because Amy Chua’s children seem to have it made: They are not teen moms. They don’t do drugs. They are not bums. They did not turn Goth or Punk or Neo-Nazi. They did not rebel. They did not run away and end up turning tricks. They did not turn into Valley Girls either. (Yes, as you can see, my expectations are fairly low…) They did not get with the wrong crowd. They are on their way to prestigious universities and presumably will end up with great jobs, and so on and so forth. I can see their bright futures, and as a mother, that is what I am worried about: my kids’ futures.
Raise your hand if your child’s class is full of the so-called Asian prodigies.
Raise your hand if you ever shake your head or wince at the prevalence of Asian-sounding names on the list of winners at Spelling Bees, Academic competitions, Lego Leagues, Science Fairs, concerts, recitals, and what not.
Raise your hand if you ever try to dismiss the conclusion that Asian cultures put a lot more emphasis on academic excellence by saying, “But it is NOT the American way, and maybe THESE people should become more American now that they are in America.”
Raise your hand if you comfort yourself by thinking, “But colleges look at MORE THAN just SAT scores. You need to be well-rounded.”
Raise your hand if you ever think to yourself, “But they suck at sports.”
Here is a Chinese American raised in “The Chinese Way” (different from the way I was raised and I am 100% “authentic” Chinese — I use “authentic” with quotation marks and I can show you a chapter from my dissertation dissecting this word so don’t sling mud at me, yet) spelling it all out, for all her American readers (and by god, did she get readers or what because of this controversy!), sharing the Ancient Secret Chinese recipe with all of us, and we got all pissed at her.
Because the truth is difficult to hear.
The truth is not whether HER parenting style (or anybody else’s for that matter) is better.
The truth is… I am going out on a limb here… we feel anxiety for our children’s future because the way the world has been changing.
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Here is a theory:
Raise your hand if you are ever concerned, or even outraged, by the state of the teenagers.
Raise your hand if, even though you do not believe in hovering or overprotecting, you still sometimes wonder whether what you are doing with your children is enough to prevent them from going astray.
Raise your hand if you are not sure what the correct balance is between discipline and freedom, between rules and independence.
Raise your hand if you ever worry about your kids not being able to get a job when they grow up because of the fierce competition. Not just in the U.S., but from all over the world.
Raise your hand if you are not sure about the outsourcing trend, worried about people in China and India taking the jobs away.
Raise your hand if you are convinced that social security is going to disappear by the time you retire.
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By now many have heard and probably been shaken by the much cited line from the documentary Waiting for Superman:
Out of 30 Industrialized Nations, our country’s children rank 25th in Math, 21st in Science & falling behind in every other category. The only thing our children seem to be ranked number 1. in is confidence.
Coupling that with the revelation and the fear that China is US’ biggest foreign creditor, with roughly $900 billion in Treasury Securities, and $1 trillion if you include Hong Kong. (Don’t think there is a mass hysteria over the “imminent” Chinese threat? Remember the “Chinese Professor” political ad running last October?)
I suspect what we have observed in the disproportionate outcry against Amy Chua’s short article is a perfect storm.
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I woke up to a bad allergy attack this morning:
runny nose
sneezing
itchy, watery eyes
itching of the nose or throat
p.s. I just copied that litany from the back of my bottle of Zyrtec.
I’ve got them all. As I was using up the last tissue from the giant Kleenex box, I was contemplating tweeting about it. (Yes, I do compose tweets in my head as I go about my daily business. Shut up! Don’t tell me you don’t. Liar!)
Something to the fact of:
Bad allergy! Every hole on my face has liquid coming out of it!
I slay myself sometimes.
This imaginary tweet reminded me of the common Chinese phrase for describing a brutal death (e.g. from poisoning or from a freakishly ginormous renegade Shaolin monk clapping his Thunderous Fists over your ears in a mortal combat) :
Bleeding from seven holes 七孔流血*
Here is an illustration:
This guy is dying from Psychic Powers.
PSA: Do NOT search for images with keywords “七孔流血” or worse, “nose bleed manga” at work. It is like a codeword for “Show me pornographic images please”. Srly, people? The above is like the only image not involving a scantily-clad lass.
Since I am such a math geek (Har har) I automatically counted out the seven holes (and I swear I did not point my fingers to my body parts as I did this…)
My two eyes
My two ears.
My nose.
My mouth.
Hey, that’s only SIX. WTF? So I started thinking of other holes there could be…
Oh.
No.
Could it be that?
No…?
Or that?
Hmmmm.
Then it hit me. Of course! There are TWO nostrils. Duh.
As I opened up a new box of Kleenex, I thought to myself, “I am sucking more and more at being Chinese. And you people really have a bad influence on me!”
—The End—
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* Google Translate is so awesome! I typed in “Bleeding from seven holes” and it presented the exact phrase! I *heart* you Google Translate even though you say dumb things sometimes…
