Why our Vietnamese Mother kicks your “Chinese” Mother’s ass (A Response to Ms. Chua’s WSJ Essay)
After seeing multiple people link this essay by Yale Law professor Amy Chua called “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” I finally rolled out of bed this morning and read through the WSJ bit. Unsurprisingly the essay effectively reinforced ethnic and cultural stereotypes; what caught my attention, however, is the fervor in which Ms. Chua writes and explains cultural differences all of which ironically, is predominantly from a what I consider an Americanized POV. Moreover, the underlying tone with which Ms. Chua stipulates her position – that there is a distinctly “Chinese” and “Western” perspective on how to raise a family and live – heavily burrows into the terminological distinction of “Traditional” and “White–washed” – that either you’re part of a distinct ethnic culture or relinquish these cultural roots and subscribe to a larger conglomerate “white” culture – something not dissimilar to traditionalist Manifest Destiny philosophy which sought to overtake non–Caucasian cultures and standardize them into a “greater White standard.”
I disagree with Ms. Chua not for her parental style – to each their own, I say – but for how she goes about defining and justifying her terms for cultural nuances and differences. At the core of her argument is an assumption I fundamentally disagree with, one that states you are either “Chinese” or “not Chinese,” “Western” or “not Western,” “strict” or “not strict,” “hard working” or “not hard working,” “smart” or “not smart,” and so on. Chua misuses these terms distinctions in attempting to explain herself – her cultural background and parental philosophy – and simultaneously reinforces stereotypes that are not only lazy, but grossly misleading. There is a aggressive “superiority” ideal tha Chua uses to define “Chinese” and “not Chinese,” that either you’re above or below par – all assuming, of course, that this “superiority” ideal is actually an ideal to begin with, given it is a socially derived ideal that doesn’t have any grounds outside of human social understanding, nonetheless one’s perception of what “superior” is at all. But most of all – and I must emphasize this a great deal – Ms. Chua accomplishes the greatest farce by describing people’s philosophies and personalities in terms of ethnities, as if adjectives are somehow tied to one’s skin tone, body and facial characteristics – something not dissimilar to White supremacists justifying the intellectual “inferiority” of Africans after measuring and comparing skull sizes.
If I subscribed to Chua’s social terms and philosophies, I’d probably end up being the bastard Frankenstein child of world cultures: perhaps my left leg would be from an Ghanian native and my right from a Frenchman, with my right arm from a Mongolian and my left from an Indian, and maybe my hair would be from a Cambodian and torso from a Brazilian, all topped off with my face from an Austrian (maybe here there patches of skin would be from a Kiwi native). I’m sure Ms. Chua would have a field day trying to determine if I were “Chinese” or “not Chinese,” or maybe not – her definitions could be so stringent that if I deviate in one aspect from being “Chinese,” that automatically puts me in the “not Chinese” category.
I’m using the term “Chinese mother” loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I’m also using the term “Western parents” loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.
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 30 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.
– Amy Chua
I don’t care for these kind of terms or definitions because they’re haphazard and lazy. Moreover Ms. Chua radicalizes philosophies, cultural upbringing and experiences that not all Asian Americans go through: she touts a model to be emulated uncritically by a racial group as opposed to presenting it in a nuanced manner replete with flaws or set parenting styles, reinforcing a particularly pernicious and frankly dangerous parenting style, and presents a very narrow, strictly constructed interpretation of the Asian American experience. In doing so she reinforces the socially acceptable prism in which the Asian American experience can exist, and slanders individuals who do not fall within that framework. Chua’s definition of “Chinese” and “Western” is particularly narrow and she does not have the right to define those parameters. I’m Asian American just as Asian American as she is, and I do not accept the terms of “whitewash” or that somehow my philosophies or experiences make me less Asian or more American, or vice versa. Asian Americans have the unique experience of being both Asian and American, an experience that is hybridized – Asian and American are not in opposition with one another.
What Ms. Chua does is actively pit Asian and American experiences in opposition, when said opposition can only exist in the most conservative interpretations of what it means to be Asian and what it means to be American – and we are all familiar with what a conservative interpretation of what Asian is, as most Asian Americans grew up in that sort of household. However, to tout a conservative interpretation of Asian culture as the ideal and only standard is pernicious, myopic, and wrong. It must not and cannot be the only way to be Asian American.
I’m Vietnamese American. Both my parents are Vietnamese refugees and have been divorced since I was five years old, and for many years my brothers and I lived as lower middle class citizens with a single mother. We spent a lot of our childhood reading books of all kinds and being read to by our mom before we fell asleep – my older brother read through all the Penguin classics, and at one point my younger brother finished an anthology of Shakespeare’s works in addition to Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, while I would ruffle through the Redwall series because I like animals and Brian Jacques’ description of food sounded tantalizing delicious. We grew up listening and watching famous broadway musicals on CD and video cassette (I used to replay the broadway version of Les Miserables to sing along) and visiting various museums, and at one point we were regular subscribers of the Laguna Playhouse and OC concert series. We all got piano lessons and played soccer for some time but eventually stopped because we couldn’t stand being in a piano studio who thought Richard Clayderman music was for liberal hippies, or stand children’s sports enthusiasts who thought the term “soccer mom” meant getting double D implants and driving around a hummer in suburbia. In high school both my younger brother and I played for the school orchestras – I the violin, and he the viola – while my older brother said “f**k it” and joined marching band to play clarinet (“Orchestra can’t swing for shit!”). As children our mother disciplined us with the typical spanking or even worse, make us kneel and face against the wall and consider our wrongdoings, which never worked – in fact it only made us get faster at coming up with bullshit repents so we could get at each other’s throats faster after being released. As teenagers, our mother never actively set rules of what we could or couldn’t do, instead giving us a frank explanation that put not our individuality at stake, but our intellectual pride – typically, she ended all her explanations with “don’t come crying to me if you can’t live with the consequences” or “go ahead and do it if you want to be a stupid idiot.” We only started watching television and playing games when we were growing out of our elementary school phases, as our mother had tyrannically forbidden us from ever touching a console or remote control when she wasn’t around (“It makes you STUPID, that’s why!”); by the time we were teenagers a typical family television program would be The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, or maybe something on Discovery Channel if it involved blowing up stuff (of which my chemistry teacher mother would take notes for her soon–to–be–victim classes). Our family dynamic is unforgivably sharp, where you have to be informed, quick, and funny too – otherwise you fall to the sidelines of discussion, where you can either passively listen (boring) or pick your ass back up and try again (what frequently happens to me – I’m the slowest in the entire family).
This has been my experience as a Asian American, as a Vietnamese individual growing with an American citizenship. It is, of course, a hybrid experience, intertwined and uniquely mine alone. For someone like Ms. Chua to take my experience and sharply categorize my philosophy and outlook as either strictly “Chinese” or “not Chinese” is not only inappropriate, but offensive too: such a stringent and racialized definition of cultural upbringing unfairly puts me either in line or in opposition of a cultural heritage I’ve grown up with and understand, discounting the nuances and overlap that invariably occurs with all experiences. This conservative notion of either or, “Chinese” or “not Chinese” is grossly ignorant and wrong.
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.”
– Amy Chua
While Ms. Chua attempts to justify her claims by using such statistics as above, these findings are a statistical farce given how small the sample sizes are for each “category” – that is, in using a sample group of fifty Chinese immigrant mothers, somehow each of them represents twenty percent of the entire Asian American population of 14.9 million people who considers themselves of Asian heritage. Chua’s “statistical justification” is logically unsound, too, in that somehow first generation Asian mothers – nonetheless Chinese mothers – somehow account for all Asian Americans.
Even if such a designation were true, such a statistic would still not justify the usage of a flawed and reductive binary. That single exemption to the statistic would still be expressive of the Asian American experience. Their perspective and their experience of being Asian American would still be Asian American in nature, not an experience to be easily folded into the larger litany of the white hegemonic experience of America. That single experience still holds legitimacy, that single deviant experience is still indicative and springs forth from an Asian American perspective. And to betray the kinship of this experience, to somehow designate this experience as illegitimate because it does not fall within a narrow framework of what an author arbitrarily deigns the ‘unitary Asian American experience’ is to do an gross injustice to the uniqueness, the nuances and quickly evolving face of the Asian American experience. To reassert a narrow and unflinchingly rigid interpretation of what constitutes ‘Asian’ is to further promote the most harrowing and unhappy of Asian American rites of passage: distancing, alienation, and the fruitless attempts to scrub away at a part of oneself which is both inexorable and inherent.
To narrowly define that which is Asian is to do a gross injustice to those at the periphery of the internal ethnic community which seek to modernize and redefine that which it means to be Asian. To discount their contributions to counteracting stereotypes and expectations – arbitrarily assigned – of Asian Americans is to exhibit nothing but a rank ungratefulness to those who have sought to expand the horizons between which Asian Americans can acceptable express themselves. We are all Asian American. All of our perspectives are legitimate. We come from across the entire world stemming from the same Confucian upbringings to set up shop in here, the land of opportunity. But this is not all that we are. We are perpetually and irrevocably hyphenates: individuals in the process of transition and even as we give up elements of cultures we left behind in our native countries we bring to the larger American society beliefs, practices and ideas that otherwise would be unthought of in the larger American society.
There is no clear–cut distinction, no radicalized binary that can adequately encompass the totality of the Asian American experience. We have roots, we have a base: but we must improvise off of our ideas, our training, our culture. To adhere so resolutely to a falsely constructed static interpretation of what it means to be ‘Asian’ is both ignorant and wrong. Even in the world outside, things are changing: Japan is changing, China is changing, Vietnam is changing. Change is the last and inexorable fact of the world. So too must we change. We will change in the manner that is specific to our own needs, our own philosophies, but what unifies us is the base from which we began. We are not unified in our abject devotion to a static cultural lodestone which the conservatives amongst us would purport to be unending and unchanging, but we are unified in that we have all come from that place. And we are again unified under the notion that even those of us who have left, who have sought to change and modernize and adapt and bring new perspectives – all of us have come from this place, all of us owe allegiance to this place, and all of us – through our own lives – are seeking to make this place amenable to our own lives, our own personalities, and relevant to the situations we find ourselves in.
We are the new and changing face of Asian–america. We are the future of what it means to be Asian American, and neither the Confucian ghosts of the past, nor Ms. Chua will ever be able to change that.
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*Note from the writer: major contributions have been made by Viet Le, the elder sibling of mine. All things italicized above are his own words after we spent some time talking about Ms. Chua’s essay. I highly recommend anyone to go ahead and read his other articles, my favorite of which are:
• On ‘My Neighbor Totoro,’ which is not Western
• ‘Kick-Ass’ – Gender and Hit-Girl
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Recommended Links
• Meet Kenton Chen – this brilliant musician went to my high school, and I remember watching his performances on stage for theatre and the choir group. He was recently on NBC’s “The Sing-Off” as the group manager and music arrangement lead of “The Backbeats.” He attended USC and graduated in 2010, and I wish him the best for his promising future endeavors.
