Tigers roar

No matter how much flack Amy Chua has received, how many times she has been called a monster, or the amount of negative press about Asian parenting this year, there is one excellent outcome from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: A chance for Asian diaspora around the world to air out their ethnic identity issues.

Two interesting articles I’ve read lately: “Paper Tigers” in New York magazine by Wesley Yang, and “Asian American Like Me”, in which Erin Khue Ninh hits back at Yang’s article on the Huffington Post.

Battle Hymn became lost in a marketing ploy. Not long after Shanghai shocked US educators with top test results, Chua ignited a media firestorm because her book was presented as a guidebook about how Chinese parenting is superior to Western methods. But Yang’s article sweeps in and picks up on Chua’s true examination – the failures of her parenting and upbringing: Asian-Americans are often ill-prepared for the real world after a childhood of acing tests; they are timid and caught below a Bamboo Ceiling because they’re not raised to be leaders like their white peers.

Take this excerpt from Yang’s article:

Chu has a pleasant face, but it would not be wrong to characterize his demeanor as reserved. He speaks in a quiet, unemphatic voice. He doesn’t move his features much. He attributes these traits to the atmosphere in his household. “When you grow up in a Chinese home,” he says, “you don’t talk. You shut up and listen to what your parents tell you to do.”

I cringed when I read that last sentence. Why? Because I was raised in a Chinese home in Canada – and that’s not how my story (or my sister’s) has played out. Sure, we weren’t allowed to go to sleepovers, practiced piano and went to Cantonese school every Saturday morning instead of watching Saved by the Bell. But our parents speak up all the time, to the point where it can actually be quite embarrassing when we’re in public. The decibel levels my mother reaches are nothing like the “invisible” Asians that Yang describes, and – in many ways – that’s shown me the power of my own voice.

Not every Chinese household is the same. We are not simply a generation of servility, hard work and good grades. These traits are not inherently Chinese or Asian, but telltale signs of Made in America/Made in Canada visible minorities. It’s precisely the point Ninh makes in her retort to “Paper Tigers”:

What Yang misses, though, in calling these the values and behaviors of Asian people — is how very American they are … Because, what, are the industries of China, Japan, and India made up entirely of underlings? Are these societies wholly comprised of doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers whose parents insisted?

… The Asian immigrant parent’s vision of the model child — obedient, faithful, professional-managerial — is none other than American society’s vision of the model minority.

In all these conversations about Asian American identity or fears of schools becoming “too Asian”, this is what we have to remember: Not every overseas Asian is a test-taking slave. A household in China is very different from a Chinese household in North America. And we are not all overachievers – or non-assimilating loners – who are doomed to fail after school ends. Young Asian diaspora should not be made to feel that they are frauds – many do well in school, their careers and understanding their distinct identity. They deserve that happiness.