by Amy Chua
When the Ming completed their new capital, the Forbidden City, 26,000 guests enjoyed a ten-course banquet served on fine porcelain; at the wedding feast of Henry V and Catherine of Valois, 600 guests ate salted cod on “plates” of stale bread. In this period and well after, the Chinese belief that other kingdoms and peoples were subservient to the Son of Heaven extended far beyond Asia. As late as 1818, even when the powerful empires of Europe were on the verge of taking over China, Qing dynasty imperial records refer to England, Holland, and Portugal as countries of “barbarians that send tribute” to China.
Today, Chinese kids—in America as in the rest of the world—are typically raised on a diet of stories about how Chinese civilization is the oldest and most magnificent in world history, how China was advanced far earlier than the West, how countries like Japan derived everything from China (including sushi, origami, and kanji writing characters), how the Chinese language is the subtlest, most complex, and most sophisticated—and ditto Chinese cuisine. One Chinese American writer remembers that his father
used to take every opportunity to show how advanced the Chinese civilization had been in ancient times. He always sneered at the American history books that I studied for class: “You kids have it so easy here in America! You only have to study 200 years of American history! We had to study over 5,000 years of Chinese history in school! The great Chinese civilization has been around far, far longer than America!” Whenever we went out to eat Italian food, he would tell me about how the Chinese had first invented pizza and spaghetti, not the Italians, and how the Chinese had invented just about everything else thousands of years before the Europeans did.
Andrea Jung, former CEO of Avon Products, learned a similar catechism as a child: “[I]n our house, everything important in life came from China, was invented in China and owed all to the Chinese.” This exaltation of Chinese history, Jung says, gave her an important “advantage” growing up. “For me, my Chinese heritage has been a wonderful compass, a fortuitous gift, and an enormous source of strength.”
But the long era of Chinese stagnation and decline, which historians like Paul Kennedy date to the fifteenth century, and especially the period of European domination, have created deep insecurities alongside this superiority. The unequal treaties imposed on China by the Western powers, with their “treaty ports” and “foreign concessions,” brought shame and humiliation. China was opiated, carved up, and dished out, with the British, French, Germans, Americans, Russians, and Portuguese each getting a piece. Allegedly, there were signs saying NO DOGS AND CHINESE ALLOWED in China itself. And any resentment China may harbor toward the West pales in comparison to its attitude toward Japan, which invaded and occupied China in the 1930s, massacring an estimated 300,000 and raping tens of thousands of women. “Never will China be humiliated again,” declared Mao Zedong in 1949, and even in present-day booming, ever-more-confident China, this collective chip on the shoulder—this need to “show” both West and East—remains a powerful, palpable force.
Thus when, after 1965, Chinese immigrants in the hundreds of thousands began arriving in America, the mentality many brought with them was infused not only with superiority, but with insecurity as well. Once here, that insecurity only increased. Like so many newcomers to America, Chinese immigrants often experience “the twin burdens of foreignness and marginalization”; they’re the ones with the funny accents and wrong clothes, who don’t know where anything is or how things work. Some worry about how they’re going to earn a livelihood. One Chinese American recalls his father insisting that he excel at school so “you won’t have to work like me in the restaurant, sweating.” Many find it rankling that Americans look down on them. As a Taiwanese American woman put it, “we don’t speak English that clearly, okay. . . Actually, most Chinese people who came here to study, came for higher education, they are the elite of our society. But people here, they don’t know. They talk to you like dumb-dumb.”
Then there’s the racial dimension discussed in the last chapter. Anti-Chinese hostility has a long history in the United States, going back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. A 2012 Pew study found that only 24 percent of Chinese Americans felt that discrimination was “not a problem”; 21 percent said they had personally experienced discrimination. There are signs, moreover, that China’s rising global power, together with resentment at Chinese Americans’ strong performance in schools—they “work too hard,” it’s sometimes charged—may start to rekindle anti-Chinese animus in the United States. This in turn could intensify Chinese American insecurity.
In classic Triple Package fashion, the combination of superiority and insecurity in Chinese Americans often produces a “how dare they look down on me?” mentality and an iron will to prove oneself. A Chinese American woman who arrived in the U.S. as a girl in the 1990s still remembers the sting she felt when a teacher told her mother that “she’ll never learn English.” Now a professional, she says, “I was so driven to prove her wrong that I taught myself English by reading books, eventually receiving a perfect score on the SAT Verbal section.”
At the height of his NBA fame, Jeremy Lin described the same need to prove himself:
I know a lot of people say I’m deceptively athletic and deceptively quick, and I’m not sure what’s “deceptive.” But it could be the fact that I’m Asian-American. But I think that’s fine. It’s something that I embrace, and it gives me a chip on my shoulder.
Lin went on: “I’m going to have to prove myself more so again and again and again, and some people may not believe it.”
In a recent study of Chinese communities in New York City, similar themes appeared over and over. “Being Chinese will never be a plus, it will always be something against you,” one Chinese American respondent remembers her physicist father telling her. “My father wanted us to be smarter, you have to be smarter than other people, than the majority, because unless you have 110, they’re not going to take you.” Chinese American novelist Anchee Min writes of telling her high-school-age daughter: “It’s better that you’re taught the truth. If America honored race-blind competition, the nation’s elite colleges would be filled with the hard-working Asians. Have you heard of the American saying ‘You don’t stand a Chinaman’s chance’? Chinaman, that’s who you are.” A Chinese immigrant living in Queens warned his son: “You have to work harder. . . . they’re going to look down on you. . . you have to be much better than whites.”
How do Chinese immigrant parents expect their kids to do “better than whites”? Through impulse control.
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THERE’S A CHINESE TERM, chi ku, that a billion Chinese people know, that every Chinese immigrant in America knows, and that probably all their children are deeply familiar with too. Translated literally, chi ku means “eating bitterness” and refers to the capacity to endure hardship, which, along with perseverance and diligence, is a cardinal Confucian “learning virtue.” For a thousand years, these virtues—which include discipline, self-control, resisting the temptation to complain, wallow, or give up—have been fundamental elements of child rearing and education in China and Confucian-influenced societies.
A cultural chasm separates “learning should be fun” from the idea that learning anything well requires hardship, exhaustion, even pain. Visit just about any primary school in China, Taiwan, or Singapore, and rather than children running around exploring and being rewarded for spontaneity and originality, you’ll find students sitting upright, drilling, memorizing, and reciting excruciatingly long passages. Calligraphy, part of the basic school curriculum, is all about patience, mastery, and exactitude. After school and on weekends, it’s rare for even very young children to “hang out with friends.” Far more typical are hours of additional study and tutoring, followed by more hours of highly regimented music or sports practice. “You need to make more effort, not be so lazy,” was a typical comment by a Chinese mother to her child (recorded in a large 2008 comparative study of parent
ing)—and considered not harsh, but supportive.
That’s in Asia. What about the Chinese living in the United States? In theory, the roughly 66 percent of Chinese Americans who are first-generation immigrants could be opposed to traditional Chinese parenting. After all, many were themselves raised by exceedingly harsh parents, and today a growing number say that it’s important for parents to express love and to give their kids more freedom. (Even in mainland China itself, some parents today have swung to the other extreme, coddling their only children, raising concerns about a generation of pampered, spoiled-brat “little emperors.”) But study after study—and there’s been a prodigious amount of research—confirms that overall, Chinese immigrants parent far more strictly than non-Asian Americans, making discipline, high expectations, perseverance, and self-control part of their children’s daily lives.
The Asian American child pianist or violinist is so common as to be a cliché; what puzzles many is not only how Asian American parents produce such accomplished musicians, but why. What’s the point of the grueling hours of practice? In one study, the Asian immigrant parents (primarily Chinese and Korean) of Juilliard Pre-College students identified discipline, focus, hard work, and self-sacrifice as typically “Asian” qualities, but not in the sense of being innate. On the contrary, these were qualities that had to be “learned” and “repeatedly practiced,” qualities the parents “hoped to instill in their children through classical music training,” starting at a very early age. “If they learn an instrument, they don’t have any big problems when they are learning science, mathematics,” said one parent. “Because if you have this kind of discipline, the concentration to overcome obstacles, do something over and over again, then you will know, “‘Oh! If I put in every kind of effort, then I will win.’”
With numerous exceptions, of course, Chinese immigrant parents—whether affluent or poor, well educated or not—tend to force on their children rules and regimens very different from those prevailing in white American households. Here are just a few typical findings from empirical studies. Chinese American preschoolers and kindergartners engage in a “focused activity” at home about an hour a day, compared to less than six minutes per day for white American children the same age. Chinese American children watch about one-third less television than white Americans. Asian kids are more likely to attribute success or failure at school to how hard a student works; by contrast, white American kids are more likely to attribute it to innate talent, luck, or teacher “favoritism.”
Chinese immigrant mothers tend to make their children do extra work at home, while the majority of white American mothers are more interested in building their children’s social skills and self-esteem. Zappos founder Tony Hsieh recalls that his Taiwanese immigrant parents made him start preparing for the SAT in sixth grade. He was supposed to practice the piano, violin, trumpet, and French horn a half hour each per day; on weekends and “[d]uring the summer, it was an hour per instrument per day.” He eventually figured out how to play a tape-recording of himself practicing to fool his parents while he read magazines instead.*
Studies also confirm that Chinese immigrant parents tend to be much stricter than Western parents when it comes to their children’s social behavior, often imposing restrictions on “hanging out” with friends after school, talking on the phone, and, as their kids get older, dating and going to late-night parties. In a study of both suburban and working-class Chinese immigrants, sociologist Vivian Louie found that “[t]hings that other children took for granted, like sleepovers, were matters of contention” in Chinese immigrant households. As one of her respondents recalled: “for the longest time, I wasn’t allowed to sleep over at someone’s house. God forbid, like, I get corrupted there [laughs]. But that was when I was young. As I got older, they just really had like, academic expectations.” Another respondent said that it made her feel better to know that her Chinese American friends had to struggle with similar rules. “I have a friend, she’s older than me, she can’t go anywhere, and she’s still hiding her boyfriend from her mother. She can’t hang out, you know, stuff like that, till twelve, one.”
Because of the unpleasantness of imposed impulse control, intergenerational conflict is a frequent theme in Chinese immigrant households. Louie’s respondents often referred to arguing with their parents, concealing from them, or having them “flip out.” Such parenting can cause frustration, alienation, rebellion, and in extreme cases, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, deeply damaging effects. Nevertheless, the consistent finding is that the children of Chinese immigrants develop habits of discipline and persistence exceeding those of their non-Asian peers—habits they themselves generally see as giving them an “educational advantage.” Although Chinese immigrant parents may rarely say so aloud, the willpower they instill in their kids is wrapped up with a sense of the superiority of the Chinese work ethic and ability to endure hardship. As a Juilliard parent put it, the reason high school orchestras throughout the United States are disproportionately Asian is that:
American kids, they do not have the discipline. They have parties, they have play dates, they have soccer games, outside activities, lots of activities outside. But for music you have to sacrifice. American families cannot do it. . . . So there is orchestra group and band group. Band you don’t have to practice a lot, but it’s easy to play. . . . You see more American kids in band group. But Asian kids more statistically, you see in orchestra, because they have discipline so well.
Parents of kids who make it into Juilliard may be extreme even in Asian culture, but these views are hardly atypical. In a nationwide Pew survey, over 62 percent of Asian Americans agreed that “most American parents do not put enough pressure on their children to do well in school.” In fact, Chinese (and other Asian) immigrant parents sometimes perceive American parents as lacking in the very work-ethic and diligence they are trying to instill in their children. As a respondent in one study put it, “American parents, if they too hard have to sacrifice, they don’t do it. They don’t like it, they’re kind of children themselves a little bit. . . . So how can I say, we always count first our children. Whatever is good for them, we like to provide for them as much as we can.”
Thus cultivating impulse control in their children is woven into the Chinese superiority complex, and the result can be—often to the distress of the children—a full-court, high-pressure Triple Package press that becomes an ingrained part of everyday family life. One young Taiwanese American professional’s recollections are typical:
There wasn’t much praise when my brother and I returned home from school with top marks; that was the expectation. After all, we were the only Chinese (or Asian) students in our classes. . . . We hadn’t yet been compared against our real competition. . . . There was a lot of “good job, but don’t forget that hundreds of Chinese kids younger than you in Taipei, Beijing, and Palo Alto are doing better and working harder”-style commentary. Even at the age of 8, there was a sense that we were already behind. Conversations at the dinner table . . . read like status updates of outstanding Asian kids our family knew. So-and-so’s son just got into Stanford; the daughter of an old roommate just graduated first in her class. . . . Embedded within these statements was an assumption that Chinese students (Chinese-American and Chinese nationals) were more diligent, and more likely to succeed in school and beyond.
All three Triple Package forces are on vivid display here. The idea that the children belong to a culturally superior group and are therefore more capable is simply assumed, even as the children are told that they are “falling behind.” The only successes that really count are conventional forms of prestigious achievement, like getting into Stanford, graduating first in one’s class. In this simultaneous condition of superiority and insecurity, the only way to get ahead—to live up to expectations, to prove yourself—is by working even harder, never slacking off.
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MUCH OF WHAT’S JUST been said about impulse cont
rol in Chinese American parenting could also be said of other successful immigrant groups. With exceptions as always, first-generation Korean and Indian Americans also tend to impose demanding academic expectations on their children. United States Attorney Preet Bharara, who has called his Indian immigrant father “a tiger dad,” was expected to get perfect scores on all his tests. Many of these parents teach their children the alphabet earlier and drill extra math at home from an early age (often because they view the math taught in U.S. primary schools as woefully deficient). As one South Asian undergraduate told us:
I remember when I was learning decimals in middle school and I just couldn’t get the hang of it. My dad stayed up with me all night after coming back exhausted from a 12-hour work day and I remember this so clearly: he would give me 2 seconds to answer the question. I remember being assigned hundreds of problems to do and getting so tired and annoyed but today, math is a breeze for me and I totally attribute that to him.
Typically, these immigrant parents expect their children to come right home from school to do “productive” activities and impose strict rules on socializing. “My parents were obsessed with our not being tainted by loose American values,” reported one young Indian American woman. “It was literally like they believed I should do nothing but study for twenty-two years but somehow be married by the age of twenty-five to a nice Indian man.” A Nigerian American parent said she always told her children: “We are your parents, we are here to support you, and your job is to study. We are not asking you to pay us money. Your job is to go to school, listen to the teachers, come home, and do your homework.” Another Nigerian American mother said, “[G]oing to the mall was forbidden in my house unless you were going to buy something. You don’t go to the mall to start walking around as some people do in this country.”