Hymn of the Tiger Mother

I post an article about the Parenting styles of Chinese mothers, a topic that has received a lot of press recently.

I have thought about this topic extensively, given that I have a young son.

I wish to elaborate on my views and experiences on the topic of parenting, in particular the cultural influences and values that tend to have an overwhelming impact on our parenting styles.

But first an article on the topic that has been in the news of late.

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By Amy Chua

In “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Amy Chua describes her relentless determination to make her two daughters successful by raising them in a strict fashion, contrary to what she sees as modern American standards of permissiveness and mediocrity. In this excerpt, she starts to explain her parenting philosophy.

Part One

The Tiger, the living symbol of strength and power, generally inspires fear and respect.

The Chinese mother

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

I’m also using the term “Western parents” loosely. Western parents come in all varieties. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Westerners are far more diverse in their parenting styles than the Chinese. Some Western parents are strict; others are lax. There are same-sex parents, Orthodox Jewish parents, single parents, ex-hippie parents, investment banker parents, and military parents. None of these “Western” parents necessarily see eye to eye, so when I use the term “Western parents,” of course I’m not referring to all Western parents—just as “Chinese mother” doesn’t refer to all Chinese mothers.

All the same, even when Western parents think they’re being strict, they usually don’t come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments thirty minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough.

Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that “stressing academic success is not good for children” or that “parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.” By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be “the best” students, that “academic achievement reflects successful parenting,” and that if children did not excel at school then there was “a problem” and parents “were not doing their job.” Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

This brings me to my final point. Some might think that the American sports parent is an analog to the Chinese mother. This is so wrong. Unlike your typical Western over-scheduling soccer mom, the Chinese mother believes that (1) schoolwork always comes first; (2) an A-minus is a bad grade; (3) your children must be two years ahead of their classmates in math; (4) you must never compliment your children in public; (5) if your child ever disagrees with a teacher or coach, you must always take the side of the teacher or coach; (6) the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal; and (7) that medal must be gold.

Song of the Sirens

Well, I finally have my wife's banking details. She has saved a lot of money over the course of our marriage, and before.

I did not expect her to so casually provide her bank account details to me, especially given her refusal to do so in the past, but she probably thought she had no choice.

This surprisingly does not make me feel relieved or satisfied. In fact I feel more frustrated than ever, especially when I consider why it has taken so long, and why there was so much resistance.

I sometimes think back to when we first met, and I wonder why I never picked up on her "Me not Us" view of marriage. Or if I did, why or how I let it get to this point.

I remember in fact the day that we met, and all the circumstances behind it. I had been about a year out of a long-term relationship, and my colleague and his wife invited me for dinner at a restaurant.

Once dinner was over, they surprised me by providing me a ticket, and dropping me off in the city for what I was to find out was a speed-dating evening.

Now I am not the most charming of men, and I often get tongue tied in these situations, so I felt quite uneasy about going ahead with this, but I thought it may be a good laugh if nothing else, so I gave it a shot.

I waited for an anxious half an hour in a bar with another 30 or so men and women, all strangers to me.

Most of the men and women congregated in small groups. It was obvious to me that women came prepared in groups, while men came alone but grouped up out of necessity.

Despite feeling anxious at being all alone, I felt quite out of my element, and stood there like a statue until the event formally began.

It was at that point that I caught my wife's attention. She too was alone, and as far as I could tell, very shy.

Once formalities began, we got to sit down with each person of the opposite sex for 5 minutes each, and then move on. We were told to make small-talk, but not talk about our work, and not to provide private contact information.

I actually did not like the majority of the women I spoke to, because I felt that they were too self-involved, too demanding, too assertive. But when I got to sit with my wife, it was obvious that we hit it off straight away.

We did not talk about work, money, success, or anything of the sought. It was merely small talk, just a little banter and fun.

So I thought she liked me for me.

In any case I didn't really pursue her, except for the fact that she managed to get my mobile phone number by nights end.

Come next day, I really cooled off on her, and decided that if she called, I would simply make up some excuse, and hopefully she would get the idea.

And so it happened, problem is, she didn't get the message.

So she kept calling, and calling, and calling, and finally I guess I simply caved in to her ongoing request to go out one night.

So try as I may, I can't see how I missed those vital calling signs of things to come....or am I missing something here?

We bought a new house, but…

Well, we just bought a new house.

Its actually quite big, even majestic really. It cost an absolute fortune.

I was happy where we lived, but my wife wanted opulence.

We will move in the next few months.

However my wife and I have come to an impasse.

My wife’s salary goes into a separate bank account, and despite my best efforts, its always been kept out of my reach. In fact I don’t even know how much she has saved.

We have, I say embarrassingly, been living on my income alone since we got married.

Now with the new house purchase, I have demanded that she contribute to the purchase with all her saved funds.

She has refused.

Surprisingly she has been referring to this purchase as “her new house”, and yet she expects not to contribute to it at all.

Given our troubles in the past, this is simply not on.

So I have laid down my terms to her. Either she contributes to the house with her funds, to the extent that she has saved, or I will simply borrow against the house that we have, so that the burden is shared.

I have accepted that our first house will be split equally or thereabouts should we ever separate, despite she never contributing, but I will not make that mistake again.

She has been acting very upset over this, but her expectations are remarkably unreasonable.

This is not an issue that I am prepared to compromise on. If I am to be fair to her, I also have to be just as fair to myself.

Mr Cat, meet Mr Pidgeon

"Mr Cat, meet Mr Pidgeon...the rest I leave to you."

So goes the old saying, which indicates the strong order of things that seem to drive so much of the human condition.

Much like the laws of nature, so with humans, our likes, our reactions, our affiliations and our nemeses.

Or so I thought.

A few months ago I started seeing a new patient, an elderly Chinese man who was suffering from moderately advanced Parkinson's Disease. In the consultation was his daughter, a feisty, assertive but genuinely caring woman, doing all she could for her father, as well as the gentleman's wife, a woman in her eighties who could not speak any English, but seemed to be the decision maker in the unit.

This man was luckily very responsive to first line treatment, and at least for now many of his symptoms have come under control, resulting in a better quality of life for this man, and as is almost always the case, for his long suffering wife.

At our last appointment the wife expressed her delight that she could now go for long walks without worrying about her husband, who she previously believed needed 24 hr monitoring. In response, I jokingly mentioned that since they live close to me, that she could come and visit my mother-in-law.

Given all that they had in common, their age, their heritage, their language, the vicinity to each other's households, I thought this was a no brainer, and this would provide my mother-in-law an opportunity to mix with other people, and have broader interests and independent friends.

So naively, I arranged for us to meet one day over yum cha.

From where I was sitting, everything seemed to go smoothly. There was a lot of chatter, a lot of smiles. My mother-in-law and the elderly women seemed to talk the most, and why not after-all, they were so remarkably similar.

Well in the days and weeks after that lunch, I slowly noticed that there was no reference, no discussion about the new friend.

At first I barely noticed it, but I kept on asking my wife whether her mother saw her new friend today, in a way feeling chuffed that through my handy work, my mother-in-law had benefitted.

My wife would respond without asking her mother, with a bland "no".

After a few weeks of this, it occurred to me that this simply didn't sound right, so one night, while lying in bed with my wife, I asked her why her mother had not seen her new friend since the yum cha.

My wife said that the woman called 3 times, but her mother didn't want to see her.

I found this so strange. My mother-in-law has so few friends, so few peers of the same age, and she had such a burning desire for conversation, how could she not want to see her new friend?

After more prodding, my wife finally spilled the beans.

She said:

"My mother doesn't like her. She feels that she is below her."

My wife continued:

"My mother was a teacher back in China. This woman was just a commoner."

"My mother now has a son-in-law who is a doctor. This woman's daughter works in a factory. How could you think they would have anything in common. All you have done is embarrassed my mother."

Ditto! Maybe there are some things about the laws of nature that I have yet to fully understand!

The Lingering Dream

Things have pretty much settled down in my relationship, at least that's what I have been telling myself.

However I have recently had a very vivid dream which has kinda thrown things upside down for me, at least emotionally.

I am still baffled as to what it means, and why it has appeared now.

My dream has me separated from my wife, contemplating my future.

In reality I am 7 years younger than my wife, but in my dream I was 20 years younger than my wife, as irrational as that may sound, but it felt like an unquestionable truth.

In this dream I also felt a sense of comfort in knowing that my wife was probably too old to have another child.

This I felt freed me to consider my future, where I had decided that it was time for me to meet another woman.

Here's the crunch though, I got into a conflicting mind-set, trying to work out whether I should allow myself to enter a relationship with another Chinese woman, or a woman of any other race.

I kept going back and forth, convincing myself of one approach only to realise the problems it would evoke.

The conflict I was experiencing was quite palpable. At one point I felt that for my own well-being, I should try and avoid any woman who has the same cultural emphasis as my wife does.

But I kept getting pulled back to the very real needs of my child.

I kept fearing, maybe irrationally, that were I to have another child who looked 'caucasian', that my son would not see this chiild as his sibling, and in a way my son would see me as emotionally abandoning him for my other similar-looking child.

I felt the only chance of ensuring my son still felt part of my life was to have another euro-asian child, to look essentially like my son.

I know that this makes little sense and quite possibly my son, given these circumstances, would care less whether his half-sibling had blonde hair or black hair, but obviously this dream means something to me, but exactly what I don't know.

It is one of those dreams however that lingers on, troubling me evening when in the back of my mind.

Struggles of a bi-lingual child

One of the advantages of having a euro-asian child, as I see it, is the opportunity for the child to learn two languages from a  very young age, and possibly optimising the child’s intellectual capacity at a time when the child has capacity to spare.

Because of my mother-in-law, my child learned to speak Mandarin in parallel with his English from the start.

This may or may not explain why my son experienced speech delay problems when he reached about 12 months old, but I suspect not.

These delay problems eventually required about 4 years of speech pathology treatment. I suspect however that maybe my son had an inherent weakness with language to begin with, rather than any complications arising out of his bi-lingual environment.

Despite my son making remarkable progress with his English speech once he entered speech pathology, he still struggles with learning Mandarin.

At this stage my son has a genuine appreciation of the English language. He is an excellent speller and he has developed a very broad and impressive vocabulary.

But his Mandarin, despite being given every opportunity to learn, is quite woeful.

He attends Chinese lessons once a week, and I am wondering whether more lessons will help him gain some traction in this language.

It would be a terrible shame if my son does not master this language, given the importance of this language to my son’s heritage, and the ever growing role this language will play on the world scene.

Talking & hearing Chinese

I was always quite good at school.

I excelled in maths and physics, biology and chemistry, but always did exceptionally well in English.

When I went to University I also studied French as an aside, foolishly believing at the stage that French was still an important language to learn.

To my credit I picked it up rather quickly, and can still speak it well today.

So you may think that I have an aptitude for languages, given that history, and I would have agreed with you before I was confronted with a language that I can hardly “hear”, and one that simply does not follow any of the language structures that I am familiar with.

I realised that my ability to learn French, as well as some self-taught conversational German, was less to do with my exceptional prowess at absorbing language, and more to do with paralleling similar language structures.

German for instance is effectively the mother tongue of English, and is very similar to English in its structures. French, although less so, is still a related language with similar sounds and language rules.

Chinese Mandarin however is a completely different beast. Although I have become very familiar with so many words, given that I hear them every single day, I am still at a loss when I try and repeat these words.

Even my son laughs at me when he hears my Chinese.

“No daddy” he laughs. “It doesn’t sound like that at all.”

The problem is not simply in the pronunciation of course. It starts off in the hearing, and there are so many nuances in the Chinese language, that once you get to a particular age, you will forever struggle to hear.

So I struggle, although I wish it wasn’t so.

If only I could learn Chinese, I sometimes think, it would open up an incredible new world for me, one where I would directly engage with so many people that I am surrounded by, people that otherwise are off limits to me because of the language barrier.

Taking off my shoes in the house

Like most Australians I have always worn my footwear in the house.

As a young boy the only time there was an issue with footwear in the house was when there was mud on my shoes.

When I initially met my future wife, as a matter of courtesy and respect I would always take my shoes off before entering her unit.

I did this as a show of respect for her property, her unit, her home. It did not occur to me at the time that if I was to marry this woman at some point, that I would be forgoing my home life sensibilities for hers.

But so it was.

No compromise, no meeting in the middle, no delicate mix between of east and west.

Basically I live my home life as if I was raised in a Chinese family.

This expectation laso extends to the TV set. In fact watching TV for anything other than the new is  big no-no. The house is almost always quiet, with some activity going on that requires silence, or so I am told.

Anytime I watch sport on TV, I am quickly reminded that I am being lazy. No ifs or buts.

What is not appreciated by my wife is that many Australians keep the TV on at all times, simply as background noise that will take our attention from time to time, but we still get all our work done.

Completely different approach to home life, and one that I simply didn’t expect when I entered into a cross-cultural relationship.