Yesterday, an apparent attempt to assassinate US Rep. Gabrielle
Giffords left her gravely wounded and several other people dead. The
accused, a young man named Jared Loughner, evokes the Time
Cube guy for many of us who know our Internet crackpots. Of course,
Loughner has not been convicted of any crime. But folks like him are
quite convenient for the political cabal that marked a map of the US
with gun-sights to denote the locations of Democrats who they wanted
gone. If Loughner hadn't been born or hadn't grown up to be who he is,
then the right wing (let's not waste adjectives like "radical" or
"violent", as they're wholly redundant) would have to invent him. If you can blame an apparently unstable person and claim he
acted unpredictably, you can escape responsibility for creating an
environment of violent discourse that finds work for the idle hands of
the unstable. The advantage of blaming acts of political
violence on random, unstable people is that random, unstable people
will always be with us. Hence, nothing need be done, and no
guilt or blame assigned except to people who were marginal to begin
with. The problem with that argument is that if it were sound,
political violence would be just about equally common in every
culture and at every historical moment, yet cross-cultural differences show that some cultures
encourage erratic people to turn to violence, while others might steer
them towards, say, collecting bus transfers. (It might make a
difference whether it's easier to get a gun or a bus transfer,
for one thing.)
I felt similarly after reading a Wall Street Journal article that a
friend linked to, deliberately-provocatively titled "Why
Chinese Mothers Are Superior". It's written charmingly and with a
certain amount of irony. I admire the author, Amy Chua, for being
willing to state controversial opinions in plain language that makes
her intent clear, free from weasel words. I also think her opinions are
wrong and destructive; not so much for how she describes raising her own
daughters, but for the kinds of behavior she's rhetorically endorsing
in other people.
I'm not really qualified to address whether there's something
intrinsic about Chinese culture that produces what I'll call, along
with Chua, "Chinese mothers". She acknowledges that various people who
are not Chinese exemplify the same paradigm. My mother, who grew up in
Indonesia with a Northern/Western European background, was one of
them. I am qualified to talk about my life, and the effect that being
raised with some of Chua's "Chinese mother" behavior characteristics had on it. So that's what I'm going to talk about.
(By the way, there is a
discussion to be had here about racism, or about cultural
generalizations, or about attributing personal pathologies to larger
cultures or vice versa, or all of the above. But I'm focusing
on something else in order to emphasize what I have experience with
rather than to ignore racism.)
Do you ever read something in a non-fiction piece that makes you think
that the author wouldn't believe you existed even if they met you, as
they are so invested in a certain point of view and your own
subjective experience undermines their point of view so much? So I did when I read this paragraph in Chua's
article:
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is
fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work,
and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is
crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude
on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are
always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend
to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a
virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for
excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child
starts to excel at something---whether it's math, piano, pitching or
ballet---he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds
confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes
it easier for the parent to get the child to work even
more.
Chua's claims here are so stunningly counter to my own life
experience---and she states them with such certainty---that I
nearly started to wonder whether I am just a figment of my own
imagination. My mother, similarly to the "Chinese parents" Chua describes
(among whom Chua counts herself), started me on violin lessons when I
was three. I was finally allowed to switch to the cello when I was a
few years older. Playing the violin was physically painful for me; the
first hundred times or so that I said so, my mother ignored me, but
eventually I was allowed to play the cello if I would continue with
both instruments, and even later I was allowed to stop playing
violin. My mother, and most of the music teachers I had that I can
remember (there was a succession of them, especially I got older and
showed less and less willingness to be present in mind as opposed to
body), emphasized the value of "discipline" and would ask me why I
didn't have any, when I was eight and nine and ten. I learned that "discipline" is a word adults use when they don't know how else to get you to do what they want you to do that serves their needs rather than your own. I had a teacher when I was 12 who was more honest than most. I said it hurt me to sit up straight while I played. He said, basically, that life was pain and you had to suffer to be great. (Later it turned out I had scoliosis.) I don't remember the joy
or fun of playing an instrument being talked about much. I hated
lessons and I hated practicing. My mother thought intonation was all-important, so both to stress that, and to make sure I
couldn't escape, she would accompany me on the piano while I
practiced. I don't mean that she would play the accompaniment part
that the composer wrote for piano---she played the solo line in unison with me. So she got
to set the tempo and I'd think about the book I wished was reading as my
hands moved mechanically. The main thing I learned from enforced music
practice is to get really, really good at doing one thing with my body
while my mind was somewhere completely different. I learned that skill
so well that I use it all the time even now that I'm thirty, involuntarily, whether I'm having sex or trying to listen to a lecture.
I never started to enjoy playing music, the way Chua claims all children will if they're coerced
initially. Maybe that's because she's right about how you can't enjoy
it unless you're really good at it, and maybe you can be passable---like I
was---but not good if you're not paying any attention to what
you're doing. The question remains as to how being forced to play
could possibly ever have caused me to enjoy it, given that all evidence
suggests I was either born with the kind of mind that doesn't allow me
to take pleasure in something I'm being forced to do, or developed
that kind of mind at a very young age because of the environment I was
in.
I quit taking lessons a little bit before I started
college, and although I played some chamber music in college, it was
out of a hope that maybe it would magically start being fun. It
wasn't. I stopped. That was eleven years ago. In the past two years, I
tried again. I played in a community orchestra for a couple of
months. Playing cello had become physically painful the way that
violin once was, and I just couldn't make myself sit down and practice
enough to feel good about what I was contributing to the orchestra. I
quit. I tried singing, because that was something I was never coerced
into as a kid (my mother didn't think as highly of voice as of
instruments when it came to ways to make me someone she could use to
impress people, I get the impression). That was more fun, but I still
couldn't practice. When I tried, I felt the way I'd imagine a
claustrophobic person feels if locked in an Amtrak restroom.
Being forced to practice for what in retrospect seems like
hours a day (although it was probably more like half an hour or an
hour) not only didn't give me the ability to do that freely as an
adult, the way Chua claims it does. It destroyed my ability to do that, to enjoy playing music, and
to some extent to enjoy listening to classical music. It makes me
angry that although I still retain some technical skills that might
make me a serviceable amateur player, the chance to use those
skills for my own pleasure was taken away from me. I had to
turn off the Spike Lee movie "Mo' Better Blues" after about five
minutes because it shows the protagonist, a jazz musician, being
bullied as a child by his mother into practicing the trumpet, then
cuts directly into him giving a great performance as an adult,
implying a causal relationship between coercion and excellence. That
isn't my life: if coercion worked, I'd be the next Pablo Casals by
now. (If you asked my mom why I'm not a successful musician now or even an adult who enjoys playing for fun, she'd probably tell you it's because I never had enough discipline.) And I suspect it isn't the life of any of my friends who are
professional or serious amateur musicians, either. I suspect nobody
could have stopped many of them from making music, on the contrary.
As an aside, it's interesting that Chua picks music as an example,
because human beings have made music for about as long as we've been
human beings, so far as I can tell, and contrary to the tale she spins
in which no one ever enjoys music unless they're perfect at it and no
one ever gets perfect at it without a bullying parent behind the
chair, it seems to be something that you need violence to stop
people from doing. Why have a number of repressive religious movements seen fit to proscribe music and dancing? You'd think it would be easy to keep people from doing something that requires that much preparation and discipline. You might as well say that kids will never enjoy
peeing unless they're good at it, and that someone has to force them
to be good at it. I wonder about the connection between a social
climate in which her example looks reasonable, and the one in which
we've been taught that nothing is valuable except that which we buy
and pay for, so that we have to listen to recorded music produced by
expert musicians rather than making music for ourselves. If that's the
premise, it might look reasonable to conclude that becoming one of
those experts is the only way to glean any happiness. What are
people trying to sell you when they tell you that you can't satisfy
your own needs, that (whether you're 5 or 85) pleasure isn't something
you can create for yourself, but something that you have to depend on
someone else to give you (whether they're a parent or an advertising
agent)? But I digress.
The only things in life that I've ever truly enjoyed are things that nobody
wanted me to do, nobody initially asked me to do, that in some cases my mother actively tried to stop
me from doing: reading, writing, and computer science. She hated that
I read all the time and would unscrew the light bulb from a walk-in
closet in our apartment so I wouldn't hide in there reading late at
night (I had bad insomnia as a kid, and she thought I should lie in
bed awake rather than read). When I got interested in computer
science, she kept telling me I should study neuroscience instead,
because that's what she wanted to do. I got interested in computer
science in the first place because I read about the Internet in books
or magazines that I got from the library, so I got Internet access
through classes I was taking, so I took an intro computer science
class so I could understand hacker culture. While I had supportive
teachers later on in college and grad school who encouraged me, nobody
had to coerce or push me to get interested in it in the first place,
and I have never been as enthusiastic and motivated about computer
science (or anything, really) as I was in the first two years, before
I matriculated, before I'd even been seriously evaluated on that work
or paid to do it. I've never worked as hard on programming as a grad
student or as a professional programmer as I did when I was 14-16 years old and doing it
almost entirely for pleasure.
My point here is not to complain about what a rough life I had,
because that would be the whining of a privileged youth. My point is
that I'm dismayed that people like Chua are advocating harmful and
borderline abusive parenting practices in a forum---the Wall Street
Journal---such that some people will take her seriously. Moreover, my
experience shows that her claims about what's good for all children
cannot be substantiated.
Okay, well, you say, what is good for all children? All
children are different, so there's no advice that will be helpful for
raising all of them. So what's wrong with Chua giving her particular
perspective? Let a thousand flowers bloom, right? What I think is
harmful about Chua's perspective---and about the legitimacy that her
position as a university professor writing
in a highly respected publication, rather than just another mom on the playground, lends her---doesn't have to do much with music
in particular, or any other of the pastimes people foist on their
children. What I think is harmful is the hidden curriculum of the
"Chinese mother", or of my own: the lesson that
adults know what's best for you because you're a child, so you must
let them do to you whatever they want. That's what kids really learn
when they get told that adults get to decide how they spend their time
and their life. An adult who uses their child to live out vicariously
all the things they wanted to do when they were a kid themselves, or
who uses their child as a status symbol to brag about to other adults
(my kid won the concerto competition at age ten! Well, mine won the
science fair when she was seven! Well, mine joined the NBA when he
was four!) is using their child to satisfy their own needs, just as an
adult who sexually abuses their child to satisfy their own needs is
doing the same. The main difference is that the latter is illegal. And
if you're a kid who's been taught to allow yourself to be used for one
purpose, you'll also allow yourself to be used for the other, should
anybody ever take advantage of the opportunity.
What other kinds of needs might an adult use their child to satisfy?
Chua writes:
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things
that would seem unimaginable---even legally actionable---to
Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey
fatty---lose some weight."
Chua goes on to write that being
called a "fatty" is acceptable---nay, helpful---to Chinese daughters
because it means that their parents see them as strong, rather than as
weak: "They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they
behave very differently." Frankly, I find this statement
mind-blowing. And this is the sentence that seems to inspire quite a
bit of sympathy from young, American-born readers. You hear quite a
bit about the alleged "self-esteem" movement, like you heard more
recently about the movement to institute "death panels", in which
children (which ones? We were never sure) were allegedly taught to
believe in their innate self-worth---obviously, a terribly subversive
thing. I hear quite a few of my peers blaming whatever's wrong with
"the kids these days" on the idea that these kids allegedly believe
that there is something inside them of worth that's not contingent on
their achievements or on the approval of others. Apparently, name-calling is the healthy alternative to nurturing self-esteem. And what's the excuse for
calling your kids names that you yourself were called when you were a
child and too frightened to fight back (Chua herself talks proudly about
calling her daughter "garbage" because she was called that by her
parents when she was young)? The excuse is that you believe your kids
are strong, strong enough to endure your abuse. It's a little like the
argument I've heard some Christians use that God only inflicts pain
and suffering on you because you're strong enough to endure it. Well,
if there is a God, then that's a God with a limitless capacity to
behave self-servingly. And when parents set themselves up like gods,
they rely on nobody pointing out the conflict of interest inherent in
telling you "I'm only hurting you because I believe you're so strong
that I
can't break you."
The ways in which this makes no sense are manifold. Among the same
people who don't believe that people other than themselves should have
self-esteem, the canard that children ought to "respect their parents'
authority" is popular. Okay, so---you're teaching your child to
respect your authority, which presumably entails taking what you say
seriously. Yet at the same time, you call your child "garbage" or a
"fatty" and... expect it'll just bounce right off them? Because they
don't take you seriously, and thus don't respect your authority?
What's with that?
The other problem with the concept of "treating your kids as if they
are strong" is that its acceptance necessitates willful ignorance of the power disparity
between parents and children. Again, there's some rather blatant
doublethink involved, since the same people are saying in the next
breath that parents get to use their power to determine that the kids
should spend 3 hours a day practicing piano rather than having
friends. But if you do acknowledge that the relationship
between a child and their parent(s)---parents being the only people
legally empowered to assault the child physically for any reason they
choose, and being the only people legally required to see to the
child's needs for food and shelter---is wildly unequal, then how in
the hell can the stronger person in the relationship countenance
treating the weaker person "as if they're strong"? I'm going to punch
a kitten in the face because I like to treat kittens as if they're
strong, not fragile; it doesn't matter that I weigh about 90 times more.
The conspiracy of silence in which Chua participates, and which psychologist Alice
Miller (for example, in her book For Your Own Good) has written
about, involves perpetuating this myth: What adults do to you is for
your own good. Be grateful for it, and suck it up, cupcake. It's a
politically useful myth. Kids who internalize it turn into obedient
workers (bosses naturally replace parents) and into supporters of
authoritarian politicians. They also tend to turn into bullying
parents themselves. And the cycle goes on. But people like Chua aren't
helping break it. Read Chua's essay while asking: "What is it doing
for her to treat her children in all of the ways she
describes?" This is a question she never seems to ask herself. But
it's a question that would decenter her perspective and show that claiming that coercion
is "for your own good" is the act of psychological coercion that
enables all others.
There is a lot of noise about how one oughtn't to criticize how other
people raise their kids. I, by the way, don't speak from experience raising a kid,
but I do speak from experience having been raised, which gives me
exactly as
much credibility as anyone else. Anyway, the argument goes, "everybody has
their own way of being a parent, and kids usually turn out fine, so
it's all good." Well, many kids aren't fine. Some of us spend
most of our lives dealing with depression, and some find that
becoming an adult isn't enough to escape their childhoods and have to
escape using the only method that's left to them. Even so, it's probably a good rule of thumb to avoid
critiquing your friends' friends' parenting habits during dinner
parties. But I believe that a person with a lot of middle-class
credibility, like Chua, can actually influence what kinds of behaviors
are considered acceptable. And I think that when she uses a bully
pulpit (no pun intended) to advocate coercion, that contributes to an
environment in which coercion is a socially acceptable tactic to
deploy upon your children.
Chua herself talks about attending a party where some
of her friends were horrified to learn she'd called her daughter
"garbage". Like many such arguments, that one appears to have changed
no one's mind, but aided by sources of cognitive authority like Chua's
article, the next round of dinner-party arguments about parenting
might do more than just keep yuppies off the streets. I do
think that whether people in the mainstream media talk
about---say---hitting your kids in a way that's approving, or
disapproving, influences whether people hit their kids. It's not that
parents read the manual first before making any decision about raising
their kids---it's that as social animals, the approval or disapproval
of our peers matters to us, whether it comes to how we treat our kids
or whether we drink artisanal water. So I do not think that critiquing
this article puts me in the same bucket as those ladies who talk about
how if your baby isn't getting breastfed and wearing cloth diapers
until it's five, you're a terrible parent. Ok?
Finally: I can imagine someone responding to this with, "well, Chua
wasn't saying that the 'Chinese style' of parenting is better, she's
just describing two different parenting cultures and the different
sets of assumptions and actions involved in each." Perhaps so,
although personally it's quite clear to me that she's advocating her
way (just read the bit about the American daughter who felt horrible
that her father called her beautiful and talented---it's interesting
that Chua didn't look for any Chinese daughters to quote who are in therapy
dealing with their mothers calling them "fatty"). But given the number
of people who apparently read this article and came away nodding with
approval for the "Chinese style"---even, in some cases, wishing
they'd had parents like that!---I think that's a moot point. By
expressing pride over having called her daughter "garbage" (and not
spending a word interrogating herself about whether by using a word that
her parents used against her when she was a child, she was using her
daughter to satisfy her own psychological needs), Chua locates herself
squarely in the Dan "Kids are sociopaths until you beat it out of
them... metaphorically" Savage camp. It's the camp
that gives aid and comfort to abusers in their quest to make more
abusers. It's the camp of being worse than an abuser, because many
abusers act in the thrall of their emotions and lack the ability to reflect on their own motivations
intellectually. People like Savage and Chua do reflect on their own
actions in the cool light of day, and decide to justify the path of violence, of emotional
manipulation, of taking out
your anger over how you were treated when you were small and powerless
on a new set of small, powerless people, by rhetorically recasting
selfishness as selflessness.
Won't somebody please, please think of the children? It's remarkable
how often the question is asked and how rarely anyone actually does.
ETA: According to
an SF Chronicle story, Chua feels the WSJ misrepresented her book by giving excerpts without context.
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