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Preface Tiger mom and paper
tigers Shyan-Yih Chou (Class of 1966) Tiger
mom.
Amy Chua is the John Duff Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law
School, the author of two acclaimed books, “World
on Fire” and “Day of
Empire.” She is
a noted expert in the fields of international business, globalization
and ethnic conflict. Her
parents are Chinese, growing up in the Philippines, speaking Hokkien
dialect, and immensely proud of their pure “Han” blood. When
she was four years of age, her father issued an edict,
“You will marry a non-Chinese over my dead body.”
At the time of applying for college, her father announced that
she was to live at home and attend Berkeley and that was that – no
visiting campuses and agonizing choices for her.
Disobeying him, she forged his signature, secretly applied for
Harvard and got accepted. Her
father went from anger to pride. When
she later graduated from Harvard Law School, he was equally proud.
His next daughter graduated from Yale College and Yale Law
School. He was even prouder
when his third daughter left home for Harvard, and received her
M.D./Ph.D. Such
was the backdrop of Amy Chua’s upbringing.
Growing up in the Midwest, all three sisters were required to
speak Chinese at home – the punishment was one whack of the chopsticks
for every English word uttered. All
sisters drilled math and piano every afternoon, and all never allowed to
sleep over at their friends’ houses.
When her father came home from work, she took off his shoes and
brought him his slippers. Her
report cards were expected to be no less than “A.” An
anecdote further portrays the stern Chinese household discipline.
In 8th grade, she won second place in a history
contest and took her family to the awards ceremony.
Someone else had won the prize for best all-around student.
Afterward, her father said to her: ”Never, never disgrace me
like that again.” Amy
Chua’s recent book, “Battle
Hymn of the Tiger Mother “
stirs up a firestorm of controversies.
After her essay, “Why
Chinese mothers are superior” published in The
Wall Street Journal, the readers’ responses encompass less
admiration and approval but more repulsion and death threats.
A reader wrote, “I
am in disbelief after reading this article.” The
book is a memoir, carrying an “it will leave you breathless.”
The author subscribes to strict Chinese disciplines and believes
that they are the recipes for success. Paper
tigers.
Wesley Yang is a Korean American writer, son of
Korean immigrants, but does not speak his parents’ native tongue.
He has never called his elders by the proper honorific, “big
brother” or ”big sister.” He
does not believe that his roots define him and that he is in most
respects devoid of Asian characteristics.
He is, however, painfully convinced that his Asian face is the
origin of many racially directed assumptions – “Here is what I
sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an invisible
person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it.
A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid
of any individuality. An
icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact
patronizes and exploits. Not
just people who are good at math and play the violin, but a mass of
stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not
matter, socially or culturally.”
He utterly rejects Asian values: filial piety,
grade-grubbing, Ivy League mania, deference to authority, humility and
hard work, harmonious relations, sacrificing for the future, earnest,
striving middle-class servility. He
is asking a harsh question: what happens to all the Asian-American
overachievers when the test-taking ends?
He is begging answers to the statistical anomalies.
Asian-Americans represent 5% of the population but only 0.3% of
corporate officers, less than 1% of corporate board members, and 2% of
college presidents. There
are only 9 Asian-American CEOs in the fortune 500.
A third of all software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian,
but they make up only 6% of board members.
At the National Institutes of Health, where 21.5% of tenure-track
scientists are Asian, only 4.7% of directors are Asian.
This invisible barrier is what some refer to as the “Bamboo
Ceiling.” These
are the two extremes. Some
of us might be vaguely conscious of or burdened by either view.
I do not intend to incite arguments on how an Asian should live
in white American society. Leading
our daily life, we may straddle between these two opposing mental
images, shifting and adjusting between them.
But at some point in life, we might settle at some position and
be convinced that this is where we can be most comfortable with.
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