crazy chinese mother

i've been like violently supressing the "this woman is a skin-crawlingly awful mother and her priorities are so hollow as to be deranged" reaction cuz it's so obviously the one the piece is baiting but it's HARD.

― difficult listening hour, Monday, January 10, 2011 7:47 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

lol well really its just trolling white parents... like, "i raised my kids according to the worst stereotypes of controlling asian mothers... and they are still better than yours"

fwiw all of My Asian Friends(™) had parents like this, in some cases better and in some cases worse than dragonlady here, and their feelings on their upbringings generally seem to be about 50/50 gratitude/resentment... i think its as valid a way to raise kids as any, but it seems like a really exhausting parenting style 2 me

hot half-asian daughters

― Princess TamTam, Sunday, January 9, 2011 4:42 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/3118/pedobearsealofapprovalvm2.gif

*thumbs up*

chinese kids i knew growing up mostly had v busy parents so largely did their own thing afaict

a friend in prep school whose parents were separated (iirc) and whose mother ran a business once insisted to the point of tears that he had done NOTHING all summer holiday apart from watching tv, despite the teacher's inane 'well, you must have done something?' bitching

cool kid, srsly

i think its as valid a way to raise kids as any, but it seems like a really exhausting parenting style 2 me

― Princess TamTam, Monday, January 10, 2011 4:56 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

otm. everybody's talking about how grueling this must be for the kids, but it gotta be damn hard on the parents, too. time-consuming, emotionally demanding, just plain exhausting.

what a waste of a childhood summer. i'd always complete at least 3 snes games.

xpost

andre agassi's dad probably suffered a lot, too. he's still shitty dad, right?

I keep remembering that story of ichiro's father and how he would make ichiro wrestle truck tires or something when he was 10.

wondering what the venn diagram between "crazy asian mother" and "crazy sports dad" is like, probably just a circle

i grew up in hawaii so most of My Asian Friends (read: most of my friends) were like third-generation japanese, which is not very Asian, but some of the second-gen kids had these families. in high school a lot of them did the high-school-rebellion thing, which in these cases was... heartening. pot helped.

generally i find people who went through this kind of thing feel, like TamTam said, mixed: they're grateful because the discipline meant they got As and went to a good college and now have a good job and a stable life; they're resentful because the whole thing was totally insane and they suspect they could have gotten As without it. although then there are the people who seem to have had their imagination like surgically removed -- not "imagination" in some arty finding nemo sense but "imagination" in the sense of "if anything even remotely unexpected or unplanned for happens, are you going to have any idea what should be done about it". flexibility. insouciance. i dunno.

I keep remembering that story of ichiro's father and how he would make ichiro wrestle truck tires or something when he was 10.

heh, i thought of that too! he despises his dad now btw, sooo

http://abovethelaw.com/_old/Bad%20Report%20Card.jpg

http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs30/f/2008/082/4/b/Gendo_Ikari_by_Darthval.jpg

i think my dad was chill as long as i wasn't " a poof" or "a bloody drug addict".

lol lamp

andre agassi's dad probably suffered a lot, too. he's still shitty dad, right?

― Philip Nunez, Monday, January 10, 2011 5:09 PM (29 seconds ago) Bookmark

well, if this kind of parenting is considered "normal", acceptable, laudable or whatever in china, then condemning it starts to slide into xenophobia, self-righteousness, even something like racism (though not racism, because we're talking about differences in culture, not the semblance of differences in race).

note that i'm not saying that such parenting is accepted/encouraged in china, i'm just accepting the author's assertion for the sake of argument. if she's right, then who are we to quibble? especially if her approach gets results (in terms of the "success" it values) and doesn't in the long run result in more damaged children than a laissez-faire approach? i mean, i've known many people raised by much less demanding parents who have mixed appreciation/resentment feelings about them.

hard as a liberal relativist to answer these sorts of questions. i'm comfortable opposing honor killings, female circumcision, the death penalty and other "normal" cultural practices that i find abhorrent, but not so comfortable condemning this.

^ so many scare quotes...

to quote upthread, I doubt had my parents employed the approach chinese mother in article did that I would have gotten As. I was quite fragile as a kid, moreso than most, and probably would have shut down or had a breakdown.

(you don't get As when you don't go to school!)

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/how-to-be-a-father-a-guide-to-unhappiness/Content?oid=5960877

lol @ http://www.thestranger.com/binary/c018/feature-570.jpg

well, if this kind of parenting is considered "normal", acceptable, laudable or whatever in china, then condemning it starts to slide into xenophobia, self-righteousness, even something like racism (though not racism, because we're talking about differences in culture, not the semblance of differences in race).

note that i'm not saying that such parenting is accepted/encouraged in china, i'm just accepting the author's assertion for the sake of argument. if she's right, then who are we to quibble? especially if her approach gets results (in terms of the "success" it values) and doesn't in the long run result in more damaged children than a laissez-faire approach? i mean, i've known many people raised by much less demanding parents who have mixed appreciation/resentment feelings about them.

hard as a liberal relativist to answer these sorts of questions. i'm comfortable opposing honor killings, female circumcision, the death penalty and other "normal" cultural practices that i find abhorrent, but not so comfortable condemning this.

^ so many scare quotes...

― carles marx (contenderizer), Monday, January 10, 2011 8:23 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

well know you're making me want to condemn it

*now

http://journoontheprowl.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/angry_chinese.jpg

san te if u had the foresight to be chinese ud have better emotional strength

chinese just feel contempt 4 ppl whose parents dont love them enough to abuse them into success ime

i had to practice piano w/ the meanest old polish lady for hours shed hit me w/ a ruler if my posture was bad... have nothing but respect for her

i saw a classmate go apeshit on the math teacher at the end of semester over some petty grade thing. it wasn't until now that i realize what was probably going on.
there was a suicide, too, but everyone connected the dots on that one immediately.

no doubt it gets results, but it's a soft bigotry thing if we can condemn this behavior in one circle and not another.

If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen

By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way.

when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me “garbage” in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well.

There's too many of these perfect asides for me to believe there isn't supposed to be at least partly comedic.

maybe this is why china is doing so well and america/europe are going "down the shitter".

also, did tiger woods draw both crazy sports dad and crazy asian mom, or was the mom pretty chill?

his dropping out of stanford makes me think the mom was pretty chill.

"forget the pre-med track, tiger, go play golf with your buddies while I smoke this sweet kush"

wonder what his mom said when he called her after his accident

also, did tiger woods draw both crazy sports dad and crazy asian mom, or was the mom pretty chill?

iirc it wa just crazy sports dad

i dont think tiger's crazy sports dad actually pushed him that hard, which would account for their good relaysh up till his death

how can straight a's be non-negotiable? are they given out for effort or something?

I may have missed the part where people discussed this but:

Not long ago, I was sitting with both my kids in the living room. I was reading a book and my daughter was trying to knit something—it was very slow going and almost impossible to see what would become of all that wool that was steadily leaving the order of a ball and entering the chaos of her creation. My son was next to her doing nothing in particular (he had become a teenager). Then, I caught him looking at her knitting with interest. He noticed that I noticed his interest and he tried to affect disinterest (even disgust) in what his sister was doing. I put my book down and put my foot down: I told him that if he became openly gay, he could knit freely in the house and I'd buy him all the wool he needed to express himself. Just come out and be open—be free!

As he had many times before, he refused the offer. He claimed he was straight. He said he likes to visit a local girls' high school (he attends a boys' high school). He went to his room and started playing a violent video game. I told him that if I ever caught him knitting, I'd cut his allowance. I was not going to have a closeted person knitting in my house. That's more than ridiculous. My son ignored me.

Wow dumbest thing I've read today.

i'm not even going to try to engage that article

yeah, okay, missed that on the first pass. assume that she was mocking him "affectionately", but that moves past any kind of cultural difference i'm prepared to accept/justify and into plain old asshole behavior. like, "i am a stereotypical chinese mother, ha ha, and also a complete fucking asshole. the best part is i'm totally proud of it lol!"

mordy's quoting the other article:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/how-to-be-a-father-a-guide-to-unhappiness/Content?oid=5960877

i only skimmed it

My son also used to have the need to show me and other adults his drawings. This, of course, I had a problem with. Why did he think these crude images that hardly resembled the things they were supposed to represent could be of any interest to an adult who was not doing scientific research relating to child development—someone who has been trained to make some sense of these scribbles? I did my best to let my son know how I felt about his drawings: They were terrible and that was not surprising because he was a boy. (If he were an adult and drew like this, I'd be concerned; if he were an adult chimp and drew anything at all, I'd be very impressed.) But at the age of 5, his hands and mind were basically putty, and the things he drew did not reflect the world outside but this inner puttiness. Only when he had mastered his body and mind could he hope to do anything worth showing adults.

My honesty would sometimes make my son cry, and I'd look at him with eyes that said this: Enjoy your crying for now—and I know children enjoy this crying business, as it's one of the few things they do exceptionally well—but when you are finally a young man (meaning, a real person), you'll have to stop the nonsense with the tears and learn to draw something that can actually impress people, something that looks like a bird or a cloud and not the confused state of a raw mind. (Human brains don't stop growing until age 21.) My son eventually stopped showing me his drawings and also crying (he has not shed a tear since he turned 10, and he is now 14) and our father/son relationship greatly improved.

1) what would this mom do if one of her children were mentally disabled?

2) stuff about making her daughter stay at the piano reminded me of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHwoRFe70jk

(warning: scene is brutal)

the miracle worker is awesome

lol, I totally believe that children enjoy crying. It's a full body experience.

Seemed relevant and at least more fun than these articles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkN9VdjgDwM

oh, the mudede article. didn't read it, cuz the few bits i skimmed were making me furious. something about his blithe insistence that his own half-baked "philosophical" observations = incontrovertible truth makes my blood boil. but the quote makes a lot more sense, somehow, coming from him. maybe that's because i long ago accepted that he's a complete tool, and also an occasionally interesting writer.

who is he

okay, that second excerpt from the mudede article is hilarious (and horrible, of course). wanna read the whole thing now.

Is Mudede the intellectual Maddox?

he's a critic who's been writing for the stranger for quite a while now. nearly from the beginning, at least 10 years going. largely sticks to film, hip hop and a "police beat" log. used to be heavily into the idea of african-american science fiction, but he hasn't written about that in a long time. sort of a shame, cuz i like his writing/thinking on the subject. clearly shooled in philosophy, criticism as an academic discipline. guess he grew up in the US and zimbabwe? anyway, he's a great speaker. seen him read and lecture a couple times, very entertaining.

fucking "shooled"

oic, ty

I did my best to let my son know how I felt about his drawings: They were terrible and that was not surprising because he was a boy.

lol @ this

Shit I was taking that article seriously doh.

Then I read this bit and almost lost it:

Parents who fool their poor children into believing they are interesting have done them a great disservice. Often, nothing can undo or mend this damage, and the child grows into an adult who says anything to anybody because he/she has been long convinced that anything that falls out of his/her mouth is made of gold. Such adults are almost always lonely and turn to animals for friendship.

so is he trolling? is it satire?? i just dont even

i think he's being sincere, in a snarky sort of way, but putting it across through a field of sarcastic trolling. the last line is a joke about a film he wrote, inspired by real events, concerning a man fatally doinked by a horse.