The principal rules, according to Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, go something like this: school work always comes first; children must always be two years ahead of their classmates in math; they should never be complimented in public; parents must always take the side of the teacher or coaches above their children; an A-minus is a bad grade; and children should only be permitted to engage in activities in which they can eventually win medals (always gold).
Chua is justified in her mind in part because of the Confucian virtue of filial piety, a vital aspect of Chinese culture that dictates that children have a lifelong duty of respect; and obedience, and care for their parents and elderly family members. This is legitimized by parents’ intense sacrifice for their children. In return, children must hold up their end of that preordained bargain, spending their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud. A rudimentary guide to the Confucian social contract might go something like this: I will spend all my time and money ensuring your safety and success as a child, but when I grow too old to take care of myself, I expect you to do that for me. This viewpoint was in opposition to Chua’s husband Jeb’s philosophy. “Children don’t choose their parents,” he tells her in the book. “They don’t even choose to be born. It’s parents who foist life on their kids, so it’s the parents’ responsibility to provide for them. Kids don’t owe parents anything. Their duty will be toward their own kids.”
Part of her message is derived from what she sees as a major failing in modern Western society. She attempts to illustrate how Western parents spend an undo amount of time focusing on a child’s self-esteem, but miss the point, falling short of the desired results. Chua argues that only accomplishments can lead to a child’s true confidence. It’s only through adversity, hard work, and subsequent achievement that abilities can be developed and genuine self-esteem accrued.
There is plenty of proof that Asian homes produce adults who possess academic, professional, and certain personal skills that are largely unrivalled, especially in the United States. According to evolutionary anthropologist Gwen Dewar, founder of Parenting Science, a child psychology website, decades of research suggest that Chinese kids have two big advantages in contrast to Western kids. First, Asian parents tend to emphasize effort rather than innate ability as the determiner for success. Second, their children’s peer groups support one another when they work hard at school. The suggestion is that when adolescents in the United States perform well at school, they often get rejected or called names by their peers. Traditional forms of Asian parenting often result in children learning vital characteristics for success, including self-control, tolerance of frustration, and the ability to engage in hard work. “While in the dominant Western culture in the United States, the desired child-rearing goals are independence, individualism, social assertiveness, confidence, and competence,” write researchers in one paper on Asian-American parenting, “traditional Asian families tend to be culturally collectivistic, emphasizing interdependence, conformity, emotional self-control, and humility. These cultural values produce deeply ingrained family values, such as a strong sense of obligation and orientation to the family and respect for and obedience to parents and elders.”
A 2000 census in the United States shows the success that Asian Americans have achieved — 50 percent have a college or graduate degree (twice as many as Caucasians). Compared to other ethnicities, they have the highest rates of college degrees, advanced degrees, and highly skilled occupations, such as medicine, law, and engineering. The median income in Asian-American households is also the highest, and Asians are the most likely to be married and live with their spouses. Despite making up less than 5 percent of Americans, Asian Americans form 17 percent of incoming Harvard freshmen and almost 30 percent of Harvard medical school students. However, Dr. Helen Hsu, president of the Asian American Psychological Association, insists that, while tiger parenting can lead to plenty of good grades, it often also results in “extremely poor emotional indicators.” Although it would be foolish to say that any book, including Chua’s, can accurately illustrate the scenario inside another person’s house, the similarities are so striking between her account and the parenting style described by Jennifer in the Pan household — sometimes down to minute details — that the role of tiger parenting in Jennifer’s life should be examined.
21
Great Expectations
For a naturally obliging and obedient girl like Jennifer, the parenting style in her home drove her to go over and above her parents’ expectations. From the outside, it might have looked as if she was the ideal daughter, happily performing her tasks to the highest standards imaginable without resentment or contest. And, in part, that was true; however, this behaviour lasted only as long as her parents were able to shelter her from the outside world, the activity of others, romantic involvement, and her own insecurities. During her youth, achievement was marshalled via the never-ending schedule of activities and the practice regimen that followed. Jennifer spent her formative years attempting to make her parents proud. When she didn’t succeed to their standards, she redoubled her efforts to prove her mettle. As a result, she developed an unrivalled ability to learn new skills. She was put through a tireless childhood, one in which she followed a well-trodden path for Asians across Canada and around the world, beginning piano at the tender age of four. Like careers, sports, education, and cultural pursuits, for many Asians, have their own hierarchies — violin and piano are at the top, percussion instruments — which at least one author says her parents implied might lead to drug use — are at the bottom. At the same time, art and culture are often used to distinguish the middle class from those beneath them. In her article “On Tiger Moms,” Julie Park quotes political theorist Hannah Arendt: “In this fight for social position, culture began to play an enormous role as one of the weapons, if not the best-suited one, to advance oneself socially, and to ‘educate oneself’ out of the lower regions.”
Two years after she began piano lessons, Jennifer started competing in the cutthroat world of youth figure skating. Both pursuits were solitary ones in which Jennifer could achieve awards, prizes, and trophies as proof of a job well done. Only in individual sports, as opposed to the team sports preferred by many Western families, can success or failure be accurately measured; physical ability aside, it’s determined by the amount of effort you put in. Although they quickly fell by the wayside, Jennifer was also enrolled in swimming and wushu (an ancient Chinese martial art).
None of these expensive pastimes were Jennifer’s choice, and although they were heavy strains on the family’s pocketbook, they were a sure way to raise a high achiever. University professor and researcher Julie Park argues that, in many homes, the purpose of musical or sporting performance is not to express oneself or create something beautiful, but rather to demonstrate one’s ability and technical proficiency to impress judges and win competitions. Jennifer was well and truly on her way down this path, a similar route taken by countless families who must start their lives again in a new country. It’s their determination to ensure success for their children that drives them. But it can extend beyond class distinction and venture into ensuring children land a quality job with a good salary and health benefits, which in turn provides a comfortable and successful life. However, the problem with children following a parent’s path is that it often begins and ends with someone else’s decision, and can be based on a restrictive cultural outlook, often shunning children’s instincts to distinguish themselves. When children deviate from this constrictive path, it can be construed as error or delinquency rather than individualism.
There were some major victories. Despite Jennifer never being involved in the decision to take up piano or skating, she developed a passion for both. Skating provided a release from what Jennifer called her “scheduled life,” which had her on the move almost constantly as she grew up, travelling throughout Southern Ontario on countless winter weekends to attend regio
nal competitions. It was during these contests that she continually fought her fear of falling or letting down her father, who was always by her side. “I was petrified of the competitions,” she said while talking about winning trophies. “I wanted to be Daddy’s girl.”
When she was out on the ice, she felt free of the controls in her life. Despite natural inhibitors, including severe asthma and poor eyesight — which allowed her to see shapes but no definition — her innate abilities and unbridled will to succeed saw her improve at an astonishing rate. Ultimately, though, it was often her dedication to the task that brought her success and ever more pressure to reach greater levels of achievement. “I’d rather skate than walk,” she later remarked, describing how she felt when the tension left her and she began to perform with ease. “It was just feeling the breeze on your cheek, having control of what I did, and the way I moved. There [were] no restraints.”
Although her love of skating was intense, it was piano and the emotive world of music that really got her heart racing. Music provided a space where enjoyment and hard work met without fear of pain or punishment, allowing Jennifer to cultivate her life’s one true passion. The piano was her therapy — a place where she could release pent-up emotion and shed the emotional ups and downs she claimed dotted her childhood. “I love music. Piano is almost second nature to me…. It brings out all your emotions. You can put all your feelings into it, pour it all out there,” she said. Jennifer was equally ambitious in school. Raised Catholic, like her father, as opposed to Buddhist, like her mother, Jennifer attended St. Barnabas Catholic School. It was here that the intense pressure she was under to perform at the highest level was apparent, according to one teacher. Jennifer described herself as “not just the teacher’s pet, but the school pet,” which to this day, nearly two decades later, is still talked about by some of the staff. Often shunning schoolyard activities, Jennifer spent hours in the office helping administrators to complete tasks. She not only volunteered to check homework for grade ones and twos and help them with their reading, but she also watched over them during lunch-hour and recess. It was during this time that she fostered her adoration for small children.
Long-time school secretary Jeannine Brown remembers a virtuous and respectful young girl, always around the office wanting to help. “She was talented and very respectful,” Brown says. “She was one of those students other teachers were always talking about.”
Jennifer’s grade eight teacher, Frank Wilcott, who’s been teaching at the school for most of his thirty-five years in the profession, says she was not only one of his favourite students, but a “great role model” in the class who scored between 85 and 95 percent in almost everything she did. “She was a great student to have in your class,” he says, explaining she was in the top ten best students he ever taught. “She was meticulous and neat. She handed in her work on time. She was someone the others could emulate. I didn’t have very many negative experiences with her. I would have taught her from junior kindergarten to grade eight if I could have.”
It was this dedication to pleasing her teachers that left an indelible mark on Wilcott’s memory. He recounts how she whipped out her agenda before he even got that evening’s assignments out of his mouth. “As we talk, I can picture her [in her] seat,” he says. “She’d be done before I even wrote it on the board. She was first to hand her stuff in, and she’d compete to hand it in first.” But it isn’t only her scholarly pursuits at which he still marvels. He also remembers her keen athletic ability. Although she was never allowed to try out for school teams, Wilcott says he was once left awestruck at Jennifer’s grace after witnessing the eleven-year-old figure-skating during one school trip. “I saw her performing single axels with ease in grade seven. That was very impressive,” the long-time coach says, noting her dedication was astounding. “She was more than driven. She never settled. And she could be trained. That doesn’t sound nice, but for a coach it’s hard to find. I like that. I like a little fire in your belly.”
However, Wilcott also saw the other side of Jennifer’s commitment to success. He explains how she was the ultimate perfectionist, driven to the point of concern. On top of teaching many Asian students, he says, he was raised around Asian classmates who complained about 99 percent marks on their math tests. One, he notes, always remarked that mathematics was a “perfect science” in which it was possible to receive 100 percent. He faced similar issues in his classroom, often, he says, with Chinese and Vietnamese students whose parents didn’t “smile or applaud efforts,” sensing that might lead to “complacency.” Wilcott recounts an instance in which the parents of one of his highest-performing students complained and threatened to move their daughter because he frequently praised what he called her “almost perfect work.” And although he never witnessed this behaviour with Jennifer or her parents, he remembers worrying about the atmosphere at her home where he felt it might have been a situation where “nothing was good enough.”
“[Jennifer] was a high achiever, to the point where you’d be worried she was trying to keep up to a standard at home,” he says. “If she received a mark that she didn’t like, she’d never complain, but sought out advice for the next time and then [she’d] do it. She would take it to heart. She never lost focus, maybe to the point where it’s not healthy, like Okay, Jennifer take a break, take a breath. It’s okay, you didn’t get perfect. It’s okay. She wouldn’t say it out loud, but you could read it in her body language as she was walking away. And the look on her face. She never complained … but she would take it to heart.” Wilcott says this was especially true if she knew what sort of marks her friends achieved. “Her friendship circle was very similar,” he says. “They seemed to be friendly, but they always had a little competition going. I never saw Jennifer do this, but Tiffany would let Jennifer know if and when she achieved a higher mark. You could see fire in Jennifer, that she would want to do something better next time. She would not have wanted that to happen again.”
Wilcott further remarks that he noticed Jennifer’s joylessness in class several times, which at one point prompted him to organize creative-writing workshops and in-class group skits to provoke a show of unbridled emotion from her. While the exercises were moderately successful, he also observed that Jennifer was so intent on perfection that she’d memorize not only her own lines but everyone else’s. “She wasn’t disliked [among classmates], but she was kind of cold, especially with the way she moved around,” he says. “I wouldn’t call her dour, but maybe sour. I never saw her as jovial or excited … openly happy or smiling about something … everything was serious.”
Jennifer later said it was around this time that depression made its first foray into her life. She said she felt unloved, unworthy, and over time developed a keen sense of self-hatred. “A lot of young teens have a deep internal emptiness and insecurity, and this can be amplified if the teen has acculturative or identity stress and also does not feel loved and supported by family,” says psychologist Dr. Helen Hsu. “Asian-American families tend to show love by pushing their kids academically, providing good food, but tend to demonstrate far less verbal and physical affection than Western families. Teens often mistake that for lack of love.”
According to Julie Park, in many overly strict Asian homes “fun, pleasure, and joy” are devalued and life begins to seem like “nothing but toil.” Rather than the pursuit of happiness, life becomes more about hard work, meaning “happiness was, at best, the incidental by-product of success and respectability.” Inside the home, a parent’s goals can become solely driven toward having obedient, well-behaved, and above all, honourable children; while outside the home the focus is the achievement of academic credentials, competitive accolades, and career achievements. “Children who are taught to privilege academic success are more likely to suffer from stress and depression,” writes Park. “Straight A’s, gold medals, promotions, and Nobel Prizes are not simply rewards of one’s hard work, but evidence of one’s worth. S
pecific achievements are never enough … [they simply] fuel the desire for success.”
Jennifer explained how much of her youth became about a never-ending and punishing schedule of extracurricular activities, training, and school work. “Working hard and coming home from skating at ten o’clock sometimes,” she said, “I would work hard for school until midnight in elementary school. I tried to stay up late nights and wake up early for morning practices.” Although Jennifer had plenty of chances to interact with her immediate and extended family, social relationships outside the home weren’t fostered. A by-product was that Jennifer was left emotionally stunted and, to quote her own lawyer, by age twenty-four she had the “social skills of a fifteen-year-old.” Like Amy Chua’s children, she was rarely allowed to go on play dates or sleepovers, and when she was, her parents controlled both the duration and parameters. “I only ever had two [sleepovers] — one was at my own house and one at my friend Cecilia’s house,” she said. “But I was picked up right away the next morning and dropped off late that night.” She only occasionally attended birthday parties for her friends, that is, if she didn’t have to practise piano or participate in one of her other extracurricular activities. “My father wanted me to focus on school or piano … he wanted me to focus on something, something productive.” Writer Amy Tan, in a jaunty retelling of her youth in the essay “Midlife Confidential,” aptly describes Jennifer’s situation when she says that the three “F-words” in her home were fun, freedom, and friends.
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