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writing for godot

A Dirge for the Tiger Moms: A Reply to Amy Chua

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Written by Edward Boudreau   
Thursday, 07 March 2013 21:43
“Oh, Tiger Mom! What have you done?”

This thought came to me soon after my wife and I arrived last July from Shanghai at the family fishing and hunting cabin on Lindsley Lake in Watersmeet, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The cabin is 100 years old, so there’s always work to be done. Zhi Hui sent her son, Lulu, out to work with me as I rebuilt a portion of the boathouse dock, replaced siding, then – armed with clippers, hatchet, axe, wedge and chainsaw. -- set to pruning, felling, limbing and cutting up trees. Lulu was 16 years old.

It was Lulu’s first time in the States, first time out deep in the woods and first time doing – or attempting to do – manual labor. It was immediately apparent that it was the first time he ever found himself on the end of a shovel, wielded a saw much less a bow saw, or held an axe. Despite careful demonstrations and explanations, Lulu almost took off his toes the first time he swung the axe, and singed his fingers lighting a wood fire. He even had trouble using the screwdriver, which promptly gave him blisters. He was a hazard to himself for the first week. I decided not to introduce him to firearms, though he took to his first fishing rod well enough to catch fish daily without running a hook through his thumb. The kid was a klutz.

Also, there was the issue of dishes. Lulu walked away after dinner the first night. I asked Zhi Hui to call him back to explain that, since he could not and did not cook, all cleaning of dishes was up to him. There was also the issue of common courtesy: please, thank you, hold the door for your mother, for my mother, especially when they are carrying groceries. In fact, why don’t you carry some of those groceries without being asked or told? And don’t let the door slam in your mother’s face again, OK?

After a few days my Zhi Hui asked me how Lulu was doing. I replied, with a laugh, “He’s useless.” Blunt but true. Zhi Hui was appalled; she went stone-faced. Reading the storm warnings, I hastened to add, “It’s not his fault. It’s yours and his father’s, it’s Chinese culture.” She sighed; she agreed. Alas, Tiger Moms.

This illuminates one of the central issues for Tiger Moms: They raise hopelessly self-absorbed kids. Most Chinese children are, due to China’s one child policy, the apples of their parents’ and grandparents’ eyes. Plus the kids are under enormous pressure to achieve academic excellence so they can get into elite colleges, whence they will go on to achieve financial success by landing high-paying jobs. So they are freed up to concentrate on their studies, their pianos or violins, secure in the knowledge that their doting parents and grandparents will cook, clean, take out the garbage and shower them with gifts. They have no chores, thus no work ethic other than studies. Furthermore, without siblings who also require attention or affection, they are cosseted, pampered, indulged and made much of in a manner all but unknown in the West. In brief, they are spoiled rotten, the Little Emperors and Empresses about whom much has been written. They grow into their teens with an exaggerated sense of confidence, entitlement, and self-worth bordering on and often spilling over into arrogance – especially in the sole male heirs.

But don’t get me wrong. Lulu is a good kid, an entirely normal, average Chinese boy who loves playing badminton, soccer or basketball when he has time off from the unrelenting burden of school, extra classes on weekends and constant study married to sky-high parental expectations. He doesn’t even know he’s spoiled, and he is very solicitous of his grandparents and my beloved Mimi, his delightful cousin, the sole granddaughter. He’s an excellent student, too, especially in math and science. He is indicative of the Chinese norm.

Yet I cannot help but contrast Lulu’s upbringing with my own, my five siblings’ and our friends’. Before I was Lulu’s age I could handle firearms, gut a fish, split firewood, prep food over an open fire, mix cement, bang nails, survive a meter of snowfall on an isolated campsite. My father, The Bear, was a fine athlete, an excellent pianist, an honors student through high school and college, a captain in the 82nd Airborne as a young man, and a top physician. His father, a psychiatrist born into very humble circumstances, was the first in his family’s long history of woodsmen, laborers and carpenters dating back some 400 years to attend college. Dad and Gramp took us into the woods as a matter of course. My mother hails from the highly educated Chicago-Watersmeet side of the family. She grew up on water with firearms, fishing poles, axes, bow saws and books. She taught me to fish and shoot. (Thanks, Mom!) This was our norm

My parents always had to live near or on water, so their six kids swam, fished and sailed from an early age. I was too small to play varsity football in high school, as two of my brothers did; I played racquet sports. My dad was active in Boy Scouts, so my brothers and I were, too, starting around eight or nine years of age. My mom was a Girl Scout troop Mother. We went on co-ed camping trips and ski holidays during high school – a great scandal back in the ‘60’s. We hiked, trekked and camped throughout the year, the guys spending weeks of the summer at Sabattis, the Boy Scout camp in the Adirondacks. Thus my siblings and I, like our friends, grew up learning skills that had little to do with school. Such was normal. Plus both my parents were passionate about the arts, music especially, so they shipped their kids off to the symphony, opera, museums, ballet and so on. Me Mum also drilled her children in etiquette and courtesy, wielding a long wooden spoon at dinner to enforce good table manners.

//A Shakespearean aside: Of course, my mom’s strong medicine included the germ theory of disease. I still wash my hands with soap at least 10 times per day, a practice that occasioned much hilarity among my male Chinese students, whose hands I often would not touch or shake without demanding, “When did you last wash your hands?” Germ theory apparently passed over the Tiger Moms of China. A couple of the guys said with straight faces that not washing hands saved time. I didn’t dare ask the girls.//

None of the above prevented my siblings and our friends from attending good schools. I was the slacker of the family, just a lousy student in high school, grades all over the spectrum. But I graduated with highest honors from Boston College after dropping out for two years to save money, then working two jobs to pay tuition and rent. My three brothers attended schools higher up the food chain. The Bear was all ahoo when I announced I would drop out. He loomed over me, wagging his finger: “You’re on your own if you leave school.” I told him that was precisely the point. He stepped back; said, “Aha! Very good.” None of my Chinese students but for one – a female who returned to get a Master’s -- understood this among the hundreds of high-schoolers, undergrads and graduate students I taught over eight years. One brilliant graduate student, with an IQ I figured was somewhere around 500, complained in his perfect English of boredom. I suggested getting a part-time job. He replied, “Why would I do that? My parents send me money.”

Thus the second most important issue for Tiger Moms: immaturity. Tiger Moms and grandparents on both sides of the family so indulge and smother Chinese kids -- with comforts, affection, gifts, expectations, unpaid labor -- that those kids are helpless in the face of real-world challenges and issues such as an axe, staying abreast of the news on all fronts or doing chores. My siblings and I were required to make our own beds, set the table, assist with cooking, wash up afterward, sweep, and take out the trash. The boys had to mow and rake the lawn, tend the summer garden, shovel snow come winter, help The Bear with his building projects, and get summer jobs mowing lawns and gardening or painting houses or bagging groceries. Fierce debate about politics, science and the arts echoed over my mother’s dinner table.

Not so among Tiger Moms. I was very depressed after presenting an article I wrote for the China Daily about Darfur to an English class at an elite high school in Shanghai. There was silence for a few seconds, then one of the students asked, “Where’s Darfur?” Turned out none of them knew. Nor did my economics students have the faintest clue as to the causes of the financial crisis. What depressed me the most was that not one of them cared.(Except you, Bonnie at USC! You hear?)Chinese kids are so intent on maximizing their GPA’s that they make no time for reading the news, nor are they encouraged to do so. When they do have free time, they play computer games or watch silly movies, though the boys often go out to play sports. They are so thoroughly hidden under the rocks of their digital entertainment fortresses, bestowed by parents and grandparents alike, that they have no idea what’s going on in the world. This is frightening because these kids are the future leaders of China, yet they cannot be bothered to follow, much less debate, the most pressing contemporary issues or volunteer to help out around the house. Even if they did volunteer, they would be shooed off to study or play by grandma, who will do all the chores. The result: lack of responsibilities other than study, thus a lack of maturity. Someone else will always be there to take care of me, to clean up the mess, so why should I bother? A curious combination of immaturity, a sense of entitlement, and absolute dependency is obvious yet completely unconscious. As I said, Lulu is not a bad kid, just so indulged, thus spoiled, that he’s oblivious. He simply has not been raised to know better. Alas, Tiger Moms.

Then there’s the Chinese educational system itself. It is test-based, a legacy going back 3,500 years. I grew to loathe the monthly high school tests. Supposedly, they prepare students for the national college entrance exam, the all-important gao kao, which determines where the kids go to university. Rote memorization is emphasized, required.

Further, as in Chinese culture generally, elders, mentors, supervisors and teachers -- superiors of any sort – are never challenged, questioned or engaged in debate, nor are children given honor, even in death. This is as true in education as it is in business, politics, the military and society at large. It’s an issue of culture, tradition and Face, the normative, all-pervasive social metric for all behavior. So getting kids to debate in class is simply fighting the tide. The result is stultifying. Creative, independent thought – the heart and soul of innovation, entrepreneurship, new business, scientific breakthroughs, and of course all art -- is actively discouraged, quashed. If you follow the major business media, you will have already heard that your average Chinese graduate works very hard, is very good at standardized tasks, yet simply cannot be relied on to find innovative solutions in any field because they lack the knack for creative thought.

Sure, Tiger Moms have no choice in the matter: they are not responsible for the education system in China or anywhere else. But in China they are complicit in perpetuating it by buying into it through encouraging -- demanding -- that their children do little but study. Yet rote memorization and deference to authority cannot engender creative thought. My students chafed me playfully throughout the run-up to the Beijing Olympics and afterwards, with justifiable pride in China’s formal coming-out on the world stage and Chinese athletes’ achievements. Some of their ribbing went over the top during economics, so I challenged them:

“Okay, people, tell me what technologies China invented to build the Olympic village?” Silence.

“What has China invented in the last 100 years that makes your lives or mine better, safer, more comfortable?” Silence and mutterings in Mandarin.

“Alright, how about in the past one-thousand years, so you can’t tell me about gunpowder or the printing press or the compass?” They glared at me. From one of my favorites, the superb Shirley Zhi: “Mr. Ned, that is very mean.”

It was not meant to be mean. It was a discussion point about creativity, thus innovation, thus entrepreneurship – the animal spirits Adam Smith insisted are the life-blood of capitalism. Vehement debate erupted. Finally. Yet the fact remained that Chinese students and their elders of the last 1,000-plus years have not invented a single transformative technology or widget. Nor has the most populous nation on earth produced Nobel Prize winners but for the now politicized, hence dubious if not disgraced, peace award, and of course Mo Yan’s much deserved prize. The Chinese Nobel laureates in science earned their prizes for work they did in the West. They had to leave China to escape the education system, to escape the stultifying culture dominated by Face. This is precisely why all my high school students were enrolled in the International Baccalaureate Organization’s diploma program. They and their moms – dads, too – wanted out of the Chinese educational system. This is why many of the wealthiest Chinese are emigrating to the U.S. or Canada or other countries. Alas, Tiger Moms.

All that said, creativity in China is locked up like water sequestered in a glacier: A little heat releases torrents. Former students at a local university taught me that. From the Shakespeare Players to my Poetry Club, the lads and lasses displayed enormous gifts for poetry, prose, drama, painting, set design, multimedia, all things creative. Given the chance, my university and high school students outdid each other in art class, exhibiting great stores of pent-up creativity in everything from poster art to painting to drama, much of it at quite a high level. Their parents and grandparents, many of them, showed great entrepreneurship by creating businesses of all sorts, taking to capitalism like fish to water after the opening up of China in 1979. Those folks grew China – in only 30 years – to the second largest economy in the world. And what could be more creative, in Disraeli’s “Great Game” of geopolitics, than owning or otherwise controlling one’s greatest competitor through the debt and bond markets?

When first I read Amy Chua’s “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” I laughed out loud; sent it to many Shanghai friends and colleagues, too. I thought it was a very, very good joke, a spoof or caricature. It was funnier still when she was taken seriously. But recently I read -- finally -- her Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It was only then that I realized she was serious. Yet I had too many slackers during seven years teaching in Shanghai. Like the kids who cheated repeatedly even after I flunked them on their next monthly exams, or those who sat through an entire exam without even signing their names, or those who simply did not do their work. In any case, Prof. Chua described and extrapolated from herself, a curious a posteriori error of inductive logic coming from a Yale professor of law. Thus she gave the game away. Certainly, she and the “Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian” mothers in her community of alpha females are representatives of an identifiable international class of privileged, wealthy, driven über-achievers. I’ve encountered them in the U.S., Europe, Israel, Africa and now in China. However, if it weren’t so patently a spoof to argue from that limited, wealthy set to the majority of Chinese moms, her argument would be . . . well, laughable. The reality is much sadder.

Special note: As I worked on this manuscript during a Sunday family dinner of ten persons here in Shanghai, my beloved Mimi – at eleven years of age already an accomplished calligrapher, ballet dancer -- crawled into my arms. She was weeping. She had been invited earlier to spend the night with us. Mimi and I play Stomp Foot, Hide-and-Seek and compete to see who can make the silliest or grossest faces at each other, plus we always go out for pizza the next day. My Zhi Hui, however, had come down with a severe head cold, so Mimi’s father decided to take her home, saying she could not miss school. Mimi wept into my shoulder. She reported that her parents “will make me study all day tomorrow.” Alas, Tiger Moms.

Word count: 2,814

Ned Boudreau taught for seven years in the Chinese educational system. Six of those years were in the International Baccalaureate Organization diploma program. He now manages a firm in Shanghai
by: Ned Boudreau<
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