crazy chinese mother

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

waiting for the big 'gotcha!' where the author reveals she was trolling us all along

I'm sure if you went to whatever institution her kids are in in 20 years, they'll say their mom did right

all asian parents are like this

laughed out loud at

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it.

i'm gonna raise my kids like this. i'll tell u what happens

this is like a daily mail article

guess old rupe knows about the subject at hand tho

dr whiney phd cultural study #5, right?

a friend of mine when i was growing up kind of had this upbringing, and was half-chinese, but it was all her german mother (the only parent in the history of parents to think i was a "dangerous influence", which was of course awesome) and not her really laid-back chinese father.

This is actually why I never call my mother now.

fb friend commenting on this article my mom was the original Tiger Mother.

http://grab.by/8hox
das right

hot half-asian daughters http://i.imgur.com/O6lPk.gif

As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.

A+ irl trolling

i haven't read the article yet and don't expect much from it, but

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it.

i definitely lean towards thinking that nothing is fun unless you're good at it

just as well i'm not gonna have kids eh

i remember years ago in nyc, this chinese girl at columbia self-immolated in her dorm room during parent week

her parents were probably screaming at the smoke - LOOK AT YOU FATSMOKE

irl guilty lolz

this is basically, as nakhchivan says, a really reductive portrayal of chinese people. it refers at best to a tiny class (not race) stratum and shouldn't be taken the slightest bit seriously. chinese people do better at maths because the way they're taught maths is better (and the language is probably neurologically more suited to it) (idk)

What is with the "can only play the piano or violin" fascism?

yea wtf is wrong with the oboe

piano & violin are classy and difficult - no glory in scrub instruments

instrumentist

seems like the common thread through all this sort of high achievement theory and the world of zuckerbergs is a lack of introspection - some sort of feeling that taking a moment to question yr own motivation is the ultimate betrayal - that the only things of value are those that can be captured and held

The main idea I took away from the article is "asians have a narrow definition of success."

fb friend commenting on this article my mom was the original Tiger Mother.

― ice cr?m, Sunday, January 9, 2011 11:39 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

btw this girl is v successful and completely batshit

The main idea I took away from the article is "asians have a narrow definition of success."

funny how asians have devoted most study and devotion to the very beliefs jho (and I) would promote regarding fulfilment thru inner peace and one-ness with the cosmos

as I say, this article is narrow, not asians

ur narrow

ur mom's anything but narrow

My idea of succcess is actually not to be anything like my crazy chinese mother.

'Nothing is fun until you're good at it' is such grade A nonsense. Being good at things is fun, but so is a whole load of other stuff.

I found basketball to be an enjoyable game. I am not good at it.

it's just funny because imagine how frantic that ethos is going to make you about anything competitive, which, under this ethos, is everything

I mean my entire life I've struggled with self-criticism and frantically telling myself that I had to be good at it to participate, or I shouldn't bother, but see I always thought this made me wrong....thanks chinese mom!

ur mom's anything but narrow

― http://i26.tinypic.com/2ajucf4.jpg (acoleuthic), Sunday, January 9, 2011 12:04 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

whoa! WHOA! OVER THE LINE.

yes, her belly certainly is

I mean my entire life I've struggled with self-criticism and frantically telling myself that I had to be good at it to participate, or I shouldn't bother, but see I always thought this made me wrong....thanks chinese mom!

― mavisbeacon666 (San Te), Sunday, January 9, 2011 5:08 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

^^^
Decadent Western mind set right there.

Actually what this reminds me of most is Tracey Flick and her mother.

being hilariously bad at things imo

lol tamtam itt

newspaper articles by parents about their children are almost always terrible, and often deliberate trolling on the part of comissioning editors

http://images.inmagine.com/img/inmagineasia/ins011/ins011042.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/djyrl.jpg

u will never ever play soccer aboobooboo

http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/553141/553141,1266999345,1/stock-photo-an-asian-kid-crying-and-looking-sad-47408095.jpg

newspaper articles by parents about their children are almost always terrible, and often deliberate trolling on the part of comissioning editors

― max bro'd (nakhchivan), Sunday, January 9, 2011 12:17 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Agreed. Haven't these kind of articles become pretty standard attention-grabbing-by-trolling fare as part of the fight against the declining journalism industry?

http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/553141/553141,1266999345,1/stock-photo-an-asian-kid-crying-and-looking-sad-47408095.jpg

hush little whiner, u could be at Getty, Corbis, Associated Press by now, but oho u choose to have weak jaw, stubby fingers, colic, no sense of decorum.

there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.

Well, yeah. The real problem in the West is the confusion between self-esteem and self-efficacy, between "you're smart, you're talented" and "look what you accomplished with hard work." The confrontation with her daughter strikes me as insane: Of course there are ways to teach kids out of giving up that don't also involve teaching passivity to authority.

:) xp

I love the daughter saying, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?"

chinese people do better at maths because the way they're taught maths is better

Couldn't agree with this less - the single biggest controllable factor in how well kids do at maths is whether they live in a household where maths is prioritized and seen as important - nothing else matters a fraction as much.

gp otm. additionally, chinese classrooms are far, far more socially/cognitively/linguistically/culturally homogeneous than western classrooms, which makes teaching a far sight more efficient.

Jesus christ there's a lot of my crazy non-chinese mother in that article including but not limited to parents feeling their kids owe them something and the instrument stuff. I played both violin and piano and the practice time thing otm. This is a really great way to make your kids great at something but suck all enjoyment out of it for them.

man if my parents were like that about getting As in school I'd have been called "garbage" more than 30 times a month in high school

My mom hit me once because I got a C in shop. Anything less than As were "unacceptable".

Which is just to say that there are parents like this and def not only Asian ones.

o_O. geez

oh for sure there are. I've had friends who had such overbearing parents and see what it turned em into. it's no wonder the suicide rate is so high among teens, everything feels like life or death until you get the proper perspective as an adult.

whats the logic in prioritizing music over sports, sports id think correlate better to 'success in life'

sports is for poor people

in sports someone else gets the satisfaction of the routine mental abuse of your child

^^^^ lol

lol jordan otm

one of my favorite memories as a young teen was my brother playing in a soccer game and this anonymous parent, for whatever reason, kept riding him the whole game, and finally he said it again and my mother turned around and SHRIEKED at him to shut the hell up and leave him alone, and the sideline was silent for like a half hour.

haha jordan

http://i35.tinypic.com/d798m.jpg

man if my parents were like that about getting As in school I'd have been called "garbage" more than 30 times a month in high school

― mavisbeacon666 (San Te), Sunday, 9 January 2011 22:05 (18 minutes ago)

haha god yes. i almost didn't graduate from high school. if she were my mother that woman would have had seizures.

i participated in various sports through most of my school days and i don't think i ever witnessed more parent-->child verbal abuse than when i was in wrestling during elementary school. bothered the hell out of me and made me so appreciative of my nice, supportive parents.

my parents were uber supportive. they probably went to every sporting event, recital, theatrical performance I was ever a part of up until they moved out of state 1.5 years ago.

sports seen as lowbrow; music seen as highbrow.

one of my favorite memories as a young teen was my brother playing in a soccer game and this anonymous parent, for whatever reason, kept riding him the whole game, and finally he said it again and my mother turned around and SHRIEKED at him to shut the hell up and leave him alone, and the sideline was silent for like a half hour.

haha, dude, this happened to me when i was maybe thirteen or something, and my friend/teammate's dad kept yelling from the sidelines at me during a game (he wasn't even a coach at the time) and then finally i stopped running and looked at him and just yelled "okay, okay... SHUT. UP!!". I just couldn't help myself any longer. after the game my mom was like "oh i can understand why you were frustrated but there was probably a better way of dealing with that situation..."

fucking adults amirite (btw i am 38 as i write this :/)

keep thinking this says crazy chinese motherfuckers

fine motor skills vs gross motor skills xp

oh i can understand why you were frustrated but there was probably a better way of dealing with that situation

probably not honestly

lol many adults need to be screamed at like kids, serves em the fuck right

the people above adults are even worse, though

this thread title reminds me of rem

crazy chinese mother swallowing the ocean
Seven thousand years to sleep away the pain
She will return, she will return

i just damn refused to do shit i didn't want to do like play piano etc

r u chinese, if no plz shut it

^^^^^Shaggy lyric

ice cr?m is crazn board lawyer

ain't gonna listen to u

....................../´¯/)
....................,/¯../
.................../..../
............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸
........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\
........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...')
.........\.................'...../
..........''...\.......... _.·´
............\..............(
..............\.............\...

I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too.

reminds me of that 'azns are the new jews' model minority pos article from last year

i was talking with someone a couple of wks back about family stuff and she was saying how she felt really lucky b/c her parents were so sweet and supportive... but, almost too supportive. the nature of her complaint was that she said she could tell her parents that she was up to anything in life and they would be unswervingly supportive of her. i don't think she was lamenting a permissiveness, but more almost half-heartedly wishing that they would push her more at times? she also mentioned that she had an older sibling who was ridiculously successful, so i guess maybe that figures into the picture somehow

they've already settled imo

idk my parents have always been *pretty much* "its ur life to fuck up", this is fine w/ me

what is this thread about anyway

thread is about what u want it to be [via liberal caucazn parenting]

they've already settled imo

lol imo they recognize that she is cool and pretty set with good shoulders up there, and she was just being a tad neurotic. IMO

this thread will be more fun as it begins to reek of virtuosity

a good set with good shoulders is half the battle imo

a good set with good shoulders is half the battle imo

yeah, with earlobes like hers, there's nowhere to go but up towards the crown of her gaul head

but anyway, yeah, parenting, i hate it just as much as phil donahue does.

speaking of parenting, have you guys seen the morton downey, jr. documentary?

when these kids grow up they're gonna find out that their mom used their life experiences to troll for hits on the internet

not as bad as

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/18/television-talent-children-alice-douglas/print

Love these sports stories. Reminds me of this starting at about 7 minutes in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntisjBTiX6I

My Dad told my Mum that she probably shouldnt come watch me play sports. Every time she did she would end up reaming me out on the car ride home about not taking sport seriously enough or w/e and I would walk back into the house in tears. Dad was a "just have fun" guy and Mum was "Fight first! Fight hard! No mercy served!" Cobra-Kai crazy woman when it came to sports. She was like town sports superstar so I don't think she really understood about not being competitive and not caring about sport (ie, my mindset as a kid)

i want to apologize to sandra tsing loh for suspecting she had anything to do with this article.

I'm kind of amazed that she would publicly admit to this:

Lulu couldn't [learn a difficult piano piece]. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.

"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.

"You can't make me."

"Oh yes, I can."

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

...
I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts...

Lulu learned the piece but I mean, still.

Yeah if the article isnt hyperbole (and I hope it is) thats abusive.

the best part about all this is that she's a yale law professor

and never goes home.

Funny thread, but as pointed out many times upthread, this behavior is not exclusive to Chinese parents, wtf.

Anyways, I was watching The Biggest Loser last night and there was a local (Bay Area) gal of Chinese descent on the program.

They interviewed her mother and the subtitles showed the Mom was saying something like "I am glad to have my daughter back"; however, in Cantonese I recognized her saying something like "She was so fat!" (wa ho fei wor ahhh*)

*please feel free to correct if I'm wrong.

Now I want to see the results of parenting by this mother and the guy who wrote this: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/how-to-be-a-father-a-guide-to-unhappiness/Content?oid=5960877

wow thanks for posting that, great article

this article is kinda challoppy. "omg, everybody thinks childhood is a special, magical time, but it is RUBBISH i tells ya!" my childhood was pretty happy i would say, and one of the things i really miss about being a kid/teenager is the intensity and newness of everything. kids, like adults, can be miserable or happy, obvs.

the misery and fundamental unfairness in being a child has been well-established by Calvin & Hobbes (the cartoon), which speaks to childlike wonderment as well, but it's worth noting that a lot of Calvin's epic fantasies are basically escape from standard second-class citizen treatment that is fundamental to being a kid.

i thought that stranger article was a joke?

its no joke

No matter what you do, how much love and care you supply, how many toys and distractions you provide, a childhood will never be happy. Why? Because the content of a childhood is unhappiness. What's being a child? It's being something you do not want to be—incomplete, unshaped, future-bound.

This is complete bollocks, I had an awesome childhood.

"What's being a child? It's being something you do not want to be—incomplete, unshaped, future-bound."

yeah, looking forward to the future sure sucks. especially when you're naive and optimistic, what fresh hell!

I dunno, childhood does kind of suck.

it's true that you want to be something else when you're a kid, but that something else isn't necessarily "a full-grown adult" -- it's "10" or "13" or "15" or "18" or "21". it's exciting to count down to those things! adults only have one thing to count down to, and they'd rather not.

Isn't the way it goes essentially: kids want to be adults, adults want to kids, and therein lies the neverending discontent?

My dad gave me shit when I only got a 1400 on the SAT. Based on my reaction to that (it was sophomore year, I just stopped giving any kind of fuck junior and senior years), this woman would have killed me as a child. Or I would have pulled a Menendez Bros while she slept.

i remember really wanting to be 11 when i was 8

Isn't the way it goes essentially: kids want to be adults, adults want to kids, and therein lies the neverending discontent? chillwave

Being an adult is awesome, i would never trade it in a million years

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l7cve4WYyB1qdpfemo1_500.jpg

everyone knows that advertising makes big silly promises, but i was just in the grocery store and saw an ad for air-popped potato chips that said "REGRET NOTHING" and i thought man in terms of promises to humans that's like a sliver beneath "NEVER DIE"

anyway yeah if i'd change my childhood it would only be to make myself do different stuff. it was fine. now's fine too. things are just generally fine.

i'm not chinese though so

being an adult vs being a kid would be a great poll

will say my boy who's six will, when overpowered with joy or excitement, let out the funniest "whooooooo" sound, it is kind of a high pitched yelp. yesterday, we built a jump on the sledding hill, sent him over it, and he went flying up in the air. he double bounced out of the tube, slid to a stop, and "WHOOOOOOOO," cue exultations. it was so pure, so fantastic that i started laughing, the too-cool-for-everything tweeners next to us started laughing.

i don't know if his childhood will be happy to him. but i will never forget that. he was happy for a moment.

also, rosebud is now inflatable.

i remember really wanting to be 11 when i was 8

Haha yes I remember on Sesame st in the 70s one of the kids was, maybe 12? And to me she was like the awesome grownup one. I would have been about 6 or 7 I guess.

speaking as a first generation (non-chinese) immigrant and professional educator, i'd say there's a lot of truth to this article re: western and non-western approaches to parenting

man if my parents were like that about getting As in school I'd have been called "garbage" more than 30 times a month in high school

― mavisbeacon666 (San Te), Sunday, 9 January 2011 22:05

BTW the argument is that if your parents were like that you wouldn't not be getting As

i'm sorry if that sounds snarky - i didn't mean it to - i just think a lot of people are ignoring the woman's premise, which is that by being selectively crazy harsh she doesn't have to pull out the crazy harsh very often

speaking as a first generation (non-chinese) immigrant and professional educator, i'd say there's a lot of truth to this article re: western and non-western approaches to parenting

speaking as a first generation (non-chinese) immigrant and professional educator, i'd say there's definitely not

wait, i misread your post vahid. i totally agree. ignore the above.

fwiw my parents weren't exactly "crazy harsh" about grades (nb haven't read the article), but straight As were basically non-negotiable when I was a kid. so i got straight As.*

*actually i got one A-, in 10th grade bio. FFFFUUUUUUUU

"FFFFUUUUUUUU"
"WHOOOOOOOO"

same number of letters (!)

xpost: I kept going for the Calvin & Hobbes book on my shelf while student-teaching, never really knowing why, until one day realized that Calvin was my students and I was the monster battling Spaceman Spiff.

i'm interested in this "non-negotiability" concept

There's probably also something to be said about growing up in New Haven, where probably most-all families there (well the one's that don't live in the highest-crime-rate-in-the-US part of town, at least) are Yale families. I mean, when all the parents of their friends and schoolmates are Ivy League professors, you're probably getting a very different frame of reference about your success.

well i was a terrible negotiator

i dunno, it started with me just being precocious and doing well on my own as a kiddo, without prompting or much effort. then really all my parents had to do was point at past success, remind me that it wouldn't be that difficult (it wasn't, really), and say the word "disappointed"

lol, my parents didn't even check my report card or go to parent-teacher meetings. i'd just give 'em stuff to sign and they'd go "ok". i was generally a well-behaved kid and an A/B student though.

I think I got more grief for being bad at sport and for being shy socially around kids my own age. Grades were the least of my problems.

I was an idiot and high

Hi! :)

I'm a first generation immigrant (chinese too!) and my experience was pretty similar to gbx's. as long as I got good grades I was allowed to play starcraft and N64 and go online in peace. I did play the piano but never practiced for more than 30 minutes a day, and most of that was just desultory going through the motions practicing. lol

there are so many kids with many thousands of hours of vln/piano practice who almost never play said instruments in adulthood

I cheated so much in and at everything sometimes it makes me sick just thinking about it

I'm not gonna front, playing piano probably did help some with my music appreesh nowadays

how physically abusive would you say parents are by race

i was that "if you'd only apply yourself" kid. spectacularly bad grades in high school. senior year my friends watched my scramble to graduate like it was 24.

(i eventually did it by submitting work supposedly done for a "home study" english class that was actually just a binder of longwinded livejournal posts, vouched for by a counselor who like many teachers at that school at that time loathed the administration. so yeah:

I cheated so much in and at everything sometimes it makes me sick just thinking about it)

i sorta wish my parents made me practice instruments harder/more rigorously than they did, tbh

Differences in parenting style I can see, higher academic standards I've witnessed.

But this lady is insane and abusive and not representative of any of the immigrant families I grew up around (primarily Vietnamese and Mexican). Those families were more about helping out at the family business than PRACTICE FOR THREE HOURS OR DIE.

tho not by this woman's insane dictatorial standards, i should say

I can read sheet music, and I can play arpeggios, but I still know nothing about time signatures or how to read guitar chords :(

I hope nobody makes her or her kids look into the abyss and realize that achievements are ~meaningless~

maybe they make her look into the abyss and ~push her~.

would gladly do so

not out of sadism, but deepest goodwill

xp...

? they have finger position things for guitar chords, much easier than sheet music.

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.

how physically abusive would you say parents are by race

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, January 10, 2011 4:29 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

what kind of question is that? standards and expectations regarding such things clearly vary a great deal from culture to culture. race doesn't figure in.

i don't have any idea about how 'realistic' this piece is, but i'd say those girls could use a little perspective nonetheless

and maybe i could borrow some of their stakhanovite work ethic

i'm not sure they'd fall for tam tam's charms even after their glimpse of the void tho....

I've 'known'* a fair amount of ABCs and such and they've by and large struck me as nice and harmless but not very interesting, wondering if they came out of the same parenting background as this

*I once attended a chinese students association meeting and walked out about 15 minutes in, it was like the 9th circle of hell

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.

was it about Mr. Hands??

yeah, it's as boring a movie as you could make, given the subject matter

mudede wrote mr. hands??

being an adult vs being a kid would be a great poll

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Monday, January 10, 2011 5:44 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Has anyone done this yet? I want it to be a poll, but I'm not ready to make a poll right now.

my mom is chinese

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.

pretty sure this is just because you don't feel as strongly about this as you do about those things and so your mild dislike is failing to overwhelm your moral-judgement gag reflex. it is okay to just think this is kind of uncool, nobody will be oppressed.

like i don't think there should be u.n. action to make chinese parents allow a B+ now and then but i still think it's kinda lame

yeah, that's a sensible distinction. chinese lady: be more cool.

wouldnt care to be in a room w/this lady or likely her weird lil success zombie offspring

lol matt yglesias makes a good point

The larger issue about Chua’s piece is that it just seems very strange for her to be so worried about this. On the list of problems typically experienced by the children of Yale Law School faculty “not successful enough” comes way below “has dysfunctional relationship with mother.”

are you people fucking stupid that article is brilliantly written in a lot of place holy shit

my mom is chinese

― buzza, Monday, January 10, 2011 9:12 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

this is totally not surprising

Mudede's article made me scared to ever go near another human at risk of procreating :(

apparently the chinese-mother article is a teaser for an entire book she's written on the same subject. i saw an ad in entertainment weekly.

(it says that at the bottom of the article but i'd missed it)

would love to get husband "jed"'s perspective

according to entertainment weekly, "jed" was "fine with the chinese strategy as long as the kids were also raised jewish". two great tastes that taste great together!

hakkalically jewish eh?

actually wait maybe it was time magazine, i can't remember. (WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE LOL)

My friend's Chinese mother had trouble sleeping last night because Chua article pissed her off so much.

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.

― carles marx (contenderizer),

i feel like this is the point for her, though. if she's not exhausted she's not doing enough.

what shines through for me is that this woman has absolutely nothing going on for her except her kids (which is fine) (though her husband probably disagrees) but unfortunately has decided to channel her obviously prodigious talent for management and stick-to-it-iveness into this totalitarian vision for her children. and of course it will "work" in the sense that her children will get good grades, etc, in the same sense that stalin's plan "worked" in the sense of industrializing russia

in the era of both parents working full-time though it's hard to see how this template could really be applied across the board - can you imagine her list of requirements for a childminder??

xposts haha yeah, jed. man. the way she writes about him reminds me of polly filla in private eye, always mentioning "the useless simon"

I'm not sure I can buy this "of course it will work" thing. Well, maybe it will with her children, but I have a feeling there are many who are "fragile" enough to completely buckle or show extreme behavioural difficulties in the face of an authoritarian parenting regime that involves calling them worthless when they fail to get As or whatever.

gotta break a few eggs i guess

but yes, i agree

http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/local/massri/images/Peter-the-Great_1.jpg

"this woman has absolutely nothing going on for her except her kids"

she's a yale law prof isn't she? HAVING IT ALL

also she has a book deal let's not forget

books lol

well obviously it backfires sometimes - a lot of well-intentioned approaches to parenting do

according to entertainment weekly, "jed" was "fine with the chinese strategy as long as the kids were also raised jewish". two great tastes that taste great together!

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, January 12, 2011 7:53 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol almost all the halfie (hakka?) azns i knew grewing up were chinese/jewish. the han are actually one of the lost tribes.

On a less extremist tip, has anyone read Po Bronson on modern western kids getting overpraised?

http://www.npr.org/tablet/#story/?storyId=112292248

Where did this whole "praise your kids for every crappy little thing they do" thing start? In a parenting manual? In academic research? As a spontaneous overcorrection to mistakes of the past?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0Qfn689ZA

I'm not sure I can buy this "of course it will work" thing. Well, maybe it will with her children, but I have a feeling there are many who are "fragile" enough to completely buckle or show extreme behavioural difficulties in the face of an authoritarian parenting regime that involves calling them worthless when they fail to get As or whatever.

― Alba, Wednesday, January 12, 2011 8:07 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

one of the most comforting things that I found out after I moved to HK and spending time in China was that, though yes the Chinese do value education, there are tons of underachieving and middling children over here too. and tons of parents who don't really GAF. it's like, yes, chinese people are normal just like the rest of the world.

how did human life start

normal, disgusting, savages

Well yeah, but she's not writing about Chinese children, she's talking about "Chinese children", dayo.

I wonder how many of these kids just totally decompose once they move away to college and sink into a world of hedonism. Or conversely turn into the protagonist from The Piano Teacher.

she's a yale law prof isn't she?

hahaha jesus i must have missed that part. well shows what i know. who fucking knows.

the tantalizing undercurrent to the whole thing is her relationship w/jed

though i wouldn't stoop to speculating on her proclivities in the sack

Slate article about her book: http://www.slate.com/id/2280712/

for being a professor she's also a really really graceless writer

I found its repetitive rhythm quite effective. Maybe not for a whole book.

it's not like she has a phd in English (or anything)

this chinese success meme hasn't really caught on in england, parental pressure & intense work ethic is seen as a generic 'middle class immigrant' virtue, mainly south asian by virtue of numbers. nigerians also ime, and nigerian kids themselves are often 'omg nigerian parents damn'.

http://highexpectationsasianfather.tumblr.com/

Yeah, it seems to be more of an FOB thing. Most of the immigrant kids at my school were from eastern Europe and they dominated the soccer teams. xpost

This woman's CV indicates that she got both her degrees at Harvard; she must be heartbroken that she only managed to find employment at Yale.

i heard somewhere tracy jordan's kids are mechanical engineering majors at MIT.

In spite of her charming glibness, her self-effacing confessions, her guffaw-inducing rants, Chua’s jaw-dropping methods…are often of the “don’t try this at home” variety: rejecting hurriedly handmade birthday cards, insisting she deserves better; “bloodbath practice sessions”; arranging piano access for multihour practices wherever the family vacationed (which was often and far); even humiliating her daughters to force them to present pitch-perfect tributes at their beloved grandmother’s funeral.

lololololol

tracy morgan i meant. whoever is real.

They really should turn her life into an HBO sitcom.

whoaa cool cover bro http://files0.cityweekend.com.cn/files/images/image-20110105-reld0x5ahi9k53makbjg_t_w300_h300.jpg

interesting exchange here

http://www.quora.com/Parenting/Is-Amy-Chua-right-when-she-explains-Why-Chinese-Mothers-Are-Superior-in-an-op-ed-in-the-Wall-Street-Journal

what a spectacle - this exorbitantly cruel woman not only refusing to apologize for herself but telling you that you're getting parenting wrong

i feel silly for even posting about it b/c the whole thing seems so obviously trolly, on the part of her and her agent and PR people and her publisher and the WSJ, who must be feeling pretty pleased with themselves

chinese mother superiors
http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/071R8zu4ozfi3/610x.jpg

sorry.

wait, so she was playing a role or something...??

xpost

well, her reply to the quora poster basically says she didn't write the headline, the book is more nuanced, and "much of it is about my decision to retreat from the "strict Chinese immigrant" model."
xpost

She got straight As. Skipped 5th grade. Perfect SAT score. Varsity swim team. Student council. Advanced level piano. Harvard early admission. An international post with the Boston Consulting Group in Hong Kong before returning to the U.S. for her Harvard MBA. Six figure salary. Oracle. Peoplesoft. Got engaged to a PhD. Bought a home. Got married.

Her life summed up in one paragraph above.

Her death summed up in one paragraph below.

Committed suicide a month after her wedding at the age of 30 after hiding her depression for 2 years.

Holy ouch.

(Though I winced in expectation of that "punchline" in all honesty)

Guys I don't think that Mudede article was serious

It wasn't, but what connects it to Chua and Bronson is the trope going back to John Locke that parents spoil their children.

I'm open to Bronson, I just wish he wouldn't use "overpraise," where he really means "stupid praise" or "insincere praise." I don't remember ever getting praise for something I did well and saying, "All right, enough of this crap."

The thing about ageism, which inheres in all this, is that it's so impervious: You don't even have to say "some of my best friends are," you can say "I was you once" and "now I know better."

all this self conscious parenting whether controlling/hectoring or praising/nurturing or w/e takes its inspiration from the desire to trivialize the humanity of children, because you know parents are threatened by these all too real little people theyre responsable for

This woman can keep her parenting methods.

I can tell you that, as the middle of three, the most academically successful was also the one with which the least amount of hectoring by my folks.

she's doing a reading in haight/ashbury soon... i kinda want to go, just to see if she gets ambushed by a bunch of hippies. it could be a bloodbath.

I think in SF, chinese mothers and children of chinese mothers outnumber hippies about 30,000:1.

Now if you replaced hippies with crusts you may be on to something.

turns out crazy chinese mom ain't that crazy, just a victim of WSJ's editorial department:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/13/apop011311.DTL&type=printable

"Amy Chua thinks she's raising her kids the Chinese way, but she is really raising them to be what the WSJ considers China to be: a pool of highly skilled labor that someone else will profit from."

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/why_chinese_mothers_are_not_su.html#more

ie this article is not about Chua or her kids but about the WSJ tellings its readers what they want to hear

in chinese, the symbol for "child abuse" is also the symbol for "opportunity."

I dunno, I think I'm relatively cynical about the press but it seems kind of incredible that the WSJ could have totally just picked these misleading excerpts without input from Chua or even allowing her to publish a rebuttal if it is in fact so misleading.

she seems only to have made a token protest - am guessing that she and the book are as described in that interview, but she (and the WSJ) knew exactly how much publicity it'd get if presented as they did. presumably she's relying on all those people who've sent it rocketing up the amazon list to read it (or interviews like this) so she's not demonised forever.

pretty sure amy chua walked into this w/ both eyes open by letting the WSJ edit her piece - after all, she knows better than anyone else what's in the book!

if she is the victim of the WSJ editing department, well who better to screw over than a law professor huh? no possible fallout could come from that

i've been trying to think of the right way to say this but i think something else the WSJ readership probably "wants to hear" in a masochistic kind of way is that today's children are overcosseted and that we'd all better man up if we want to be tough and strong and, well, beat the chinese. as a new parent you hear a lot of this kind of overcompensatory talk from other new bourgie parents (maybe minus the part about the chinese) - a kind of reaction against the dr spock school of listening and encouraging which might be best summed up by the classic, contentious, gina ford books, which promote the idea of rigid iron laws that your newborn must follow. these books are VERY popular (and also VERY disparaged). i still don't know if i've put this the right way. perhaps i can sum it up with a jpg.

http://www.onelargeprawn.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2010/Harden_the_fuck_up.jpg

lol

like seriously, check out the comments on any gina ford "contented little baby" books some time - half of them are like "if you follow these instructions you are committing child abuse" and the other half are like "lol worked for me i guess"

that's an interesting thought

i'd guess it's a rather limited understanding of 'toughness' tho, no muscular xtianity or bloodied knuckles...

but it will help to ironplate their progenies' fragile self confidence when they end up in the bottom quartile at goldman and need to asset-strip a few more surinamese coffee plantations to keep their own kids at philips academy for another year

There are people who read the WSJ (namely me and other people in my family) who don't earn piles of money. Moreover, some wealthy people are first- or second-generation wealth who don't identify with this "we" stuff or this either / or business. If you have to fret too much about how to treat your children, maybe you need some time off.

Honestly, I am sick and tired of these articles where what is probably a small percentage of America's affluent calls attention to its psychological handicaps. Don't know how to raise children? Don't have them!

holy shit, this book is like pageview christmas for everyone.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/01/13/is-extreme-parenting-effective/balancing-freedom-with-discipline

to sum it up, this lady is a see you next tuesday.

Ms. Chua is one half of the kind of Asian-Jewish academic power couple that, as she notes, populates many university towns. Her husband is Jed Rubenfeld, also a Yale law professor, and the author of two successful mystery novels. Ms. Chua, herself the author of two previous books, was reported to have received an advance in the high six figures for “Tiger Mother.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/fashion/16Cultural.html?_r=1&hp

never saw that coming

piano lessons must be expensive

I am gonna force my kids to play an instrument btw

high six figures uhm srlsy?

rip publishing industry

Cheng 10 months ago
Jewish men and asian girls are the new power couple. They make beautiful couples and its a great . I love my Jewish husband and don't regret it ever

http://www.filination.com/blog/2009/03/30/cross-cultural-interracial-relationships-jewish-boys-and-asian-girls/

Ms. Chua’s husband appears only peripherally in “Tiger Mother” — though there is one battle in which she lashes out at him after he worries that she is pushing their daughters to the point that there is “no breathing room” in their home.

this guys such a whipped faygelah, has no say in how his household is run - smh

why hasn't there been an azn version of portnoys complaint written yet

reading the NYT interview, gotta say the PR campaign for this has been magnificent

hubby's better looking than i imagined

http://tlcbooktours.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/JedRubenfeld.jpg

wannabe actor!

When describing his Juilliard years, one can hear a smile in his voice. They were such great years, and it was such fun to be at Juilliard and studying drama, he said, adding that he also made wonderful friends, some of whom—like Marcia Cross and Eriq La Salle—have gone on to successful acting careers.

After his two years at Juilliard, Rubenfeld switched gears yet again, and entered Harvard Law School.

anyone read his book???

"In September 2006, Rubenfeld's first novel, The Interpretation of Murder, was published by Henry Holt & Co. It was a number one bestseller in the United Kingdom"

if anyone reads that sfgate article through, they'll see that it's not that WSJ 'edited' the stuff, it's more that they only focused on one part of it. I think the point of the book is that she learns not to be this way, and they didn't bother to put any of that in. whether or not she knew they would do that, I don't know.

i got nothing for this thread. good thread though. both my kids are taking piano lessons now though! a half hour a week would probably make a chinese mom laugh though. they are learning some groovy new method. the songs are bizarre. maria is taking them too.

oh and speaking of chinese stereotypes and maria i was really sad the other day that i couldn't find dana carvey's chicken make lousy house pet guy on youtube. maria had never seen it.

Chicken make good pet!

http://asianssleepinginthelibrary.tumblr.com/

I've noticed that abt asian students in general! Trams/trains here - esp after 5pm - every single asian kid is asleep. Usually leaning against each other.

I sleep in my office quite often tbh

they lean against each other to promote knowledge transfer by osmosis, btw

lol. like kang and kodos transferring long strings of protein.

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lf135y3LQe1qfqttvo1_500.jpg

haha

lol. like kang and kodos transferring long strings of protein.

― Stargazey Pi (Trayce), Sunday, January 16, 2011 6:22 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

ftw

http://twitter.com/#!/thetigermother/status/26904456276738048

currently #6 on amazon

I have just been told the following:

• Jed has been known to cheat on her w/ students
• She herself hits on students (also, wears miniskirts and sexyish boots to class)
• This source has been to their house a few times. The first time, the daughters were kept in some sort of cage and were not to be let out until they finished their homework
• When the were finally let out, the oldest one began flirting with EVERYONE in sight
• Every time the source has been to their house, Jed has been drunk

a++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

awwwwwwwwwwwwwweeeeeeees

some sort of cage = a room, one imagines

I have nothing more to add to this discussion, but this seems like as good a thread as any to tell this story:

A friend's roommate was dating a Chinese girl in college. One day the phone rings and he answers it, and a voice says "AMAZING MOTHER."
"I'm sorry, what?"
"AMAZING MOTHER!"
"Who is this?"
"AMAZING MOTHER!"
"I'm sorry, I don't understand."
"AMAZING MOTHER! AMAZING MOTHER! AMAZING MOTHER!"
So he says "Listen Amazing Mother, I don't know what you want, but I don't have time for this right now." And he hangs up.

Moments later, he realizes that it was the mother of his girlfriend, M@e Z@ng.

pretty obviously she wanted him to say "amazing mother who"

AMAZING MOTHER YOU PIECE OF TRASH

question: do ya'll think the tiger mother is a WSable milf or does her being crazy put you off

I have just been told the following:

Jed has been known to cheat on her w/ students
She herself hits on students (also, wears miniskirts and sexyish boots to class)
This source has been to their house a few times. The first time, the daughters were kept in some sort of cage and were not to be let out until they finished their homework
When the were finally let out, the oldest one began flirting with EVERYONE in sight
Every time the source has been to their house, Jed has been drunk

― lamey g. curtis (Stevie D(eux)), Monday, January 17, 2011 1:01 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

plz more btw

question: do ya'll think the tiger mother is a WSable milf or does her being crazy put you off

― dayo, Monday, January 17, 2011 7:45 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

maybe if you have an 'imprisoned kids' fetish or somethin idk

The former, definitely.

how about the crazy mum from gilmore girls?
http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/5593/mrs20kim201a.gif

thought that was david carradine on first glance

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/why_love_my_strict_chinese_mom_uUvfmLcA5eteY0u2KXt7hM

I pretty much do my own thing these days — like building greenhouses downtown, blasting Daft Punk

that whole thing is like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

the best part is how she tries to be funny but it comes across as tone-deaf

too bad they don't have piano camps for humor

lol

Why the heck is that story in the NYP? Isnt that a hideous tabloid rag?

Massive Chinese population in New York it's a Murdoch paper (although the only significance of this seems to be his chinese wife, NewsCorp aren't publishing the book)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18brooks.html?_r=2&hp

I lol'd at the nietzschean reversal here but he does have some good points

post has a lot of good "real" reporters esp. on media

and headlines

Spud

01/18/2011 9:50 AM

I would tutor her.

spud otm

on the other hand Maybe striving to win a Nobel Prize and going skydiving are just two sides of the same coin.

http://i.imgur.com/05fm5.jpg

stone cold

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/23/AR2011012303712.html

Holy shit. The merits of this parenting aside, that was a bunch of Grade A Misogyny right there.

http://www.theawl.com/2011/01/why-minnesota-mothers-are-doing-pretty-good

an ole and lena joke! good night.

Holy shit. The merits of this parenting aside, that was a bunch of Grade A Misogyny right there.

― Mr. Fart Pop Bass (Phil D.), Thursday, January 27, 2011 1:50 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

OTM. Simply WOW.

does the new year bode well for tiger mothers

http://www.chinapage.com/images/zmf1bx.gif

fragrant

on charlie rose she said:

"this book is misunderstood, when i wrote it you know what my models were i had nabokov's pale fire and dave eggers, it's a memoir, it's supposed to be funny, i am a character in this book, a flawed character, and my daughters are the heroes"

shes kinda pulling a reverse james frey here?

never change, ccm

she sounded mostly incoherent & a lot like a politician

this book you wrote in 2 weeks for a 6 figure advance is definitely similar to pale fire, congrats

haha this woman is the worst

you know i read that excerpt in the WSJ and the whole time i was thinking "wow, this really is the 21st century pale fire"

http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/

ppl talking about it here

Portrayal of people of Asian descent in American/ Western culture

oop, thanks

http://tigersophia.blogspot.com/

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Z_vYpXt62ZI/Tbht1zsP5HI/AAAAAAAAADg/TQg34zFNdfk/s640/wahlberg.jpg

"Say hi to your mother for me."

typically shitty coverage of ccm on newsnight

fucking wite ppl

ccm is fairly serene and selfreflexive for a cuckold and pr bankrupt

they have her next to some flinty lumpenbourgie english nothing person who has written some other book about childrearing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27xDyihzilU

semper_phi Sophia ChuaRubenfeld

Am I allowed to take this art history class? I don't have a scarf on, I have no artistic ability, and I'm wearing cowboy boots.

she seems to satisfy 2 out of the 3 requirements?

her blog is cute

4. The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
Weird little book. You're carefully marching along, and then you realize things are happening right and left, and you frantically try to snatch at the pieces. It's like being in the middle of a giant conspiracy theory...more of an experience than a novel.

tangentially related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMfihId30ME

via one of the noise dude threads

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UM2bu23Uq2U/TZaOWw_cQOI/AAAAAAAAAAU/VuJLqfyVgUw/s660/tiger.jpg

dayo what does the calligraphy say

I fuck goats

wait no "Benevolence to all"

uhuh

Someone brought up "the tiger mother controversy" in class tonight and it took me minutes....minutes...before I realized what he was talking about. During those minutes I imagined a rascally lactating tiger.

it says 秋鸿春...

assuming it's from the ci poem: 一番雨过，江头绿涨，催唤扁舟解去。重来言语是相宽，怎得似、而今且住。 阳关声断，同心未绾，簌簌泪珠无数。秋鸿春燕往还时，莫忘了、锦笺分付。

http://tigersophia.blogspot.com/2011/10/no-one-gets-my-doors-quotes-i-give-up.html

@semper_phi Sophia ChuaRubenfeld
Might bitchslap this lady on the T who is trashing new haven #SoSorry #DidntKnowYouOrderedAMaximumSecurityPrincessPalace #MyBad

that seems like a pretty accurate description of new haven?

Note: Lulu and I had Uglydolls before they became kitschy. Like, before they turned Trey into a girl.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OzvonJfIDtM/TrQHZBQP0JI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/sWhSBd4RXWs/s600/college2+0202.jpg

uh oh

semper_phi Sophia ChuaRubenfeld
Thank you, occupy Boston, for keeping me out of my room and library tonight. I'm sure the policemen you're keeping awake appreciate it too
9 Nov Favorite Retweet Reply

ws of shame-o-meter just went haywire

semper_phi Sophia ChuaRubenfeld
harvard yard a ghost town; only those w IDs are allowed in for safety of #occupyharvard campers. the 99% is now physically locked out #irony
13 Nov Favorite Retweet Reply

http://shanghaiist.com/2011/11/17/tiger-mom-wolf-father.php

When I was little, my mom told me never to complain about anti-Asian discrimination. “It’s the easiest stereotype to overcome,” she pointed out. “If you don’t like the model minority stereotype, all you have to do is get a nose ring.” And indeed, today, Asians in America are successfully outgrowing the model minority fable. But the stereotype is changing much faster than the population; the stereotype has become amorphous, all-encompassing, and practically impossible to overcome. And even when exceptions are identified, I’m not sure they should be. Why does Jeremy Lin have to be the exception to the rule? Why can’t he just be a posterchild for everything awesome and empowering about this (our) generation of rule-breaking Asian-Americans?

Anyways, that’s my rant of the month. By the way, I mean rule-breaking in a broad sense. Of course we still do our homework. Oh, and Jeremy Lin...here’s my number, so call me maybe?

http://tigersophia.blogspot.com/2012/03/claws-out-brace-yourself.html

26 Mar Sophia ChuaRubenfeld ‏ @SophiaCaribou

So it's settled, i'll be rapping in chinese class this friday. #baller

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http://www.cjxtv.com/uploadfiles/image/2010%E7%BA%A2%E6%AD%8C%E4%BC%9A/1192593137.jpg

always wanted song dandan as my momssssss

http://www.montgomerynews.com/articles/2012/05/29/ambler_gazette/news/doc4fc59f4dde4b6001668384.txt

dang

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-x-3_MCcr1E0/T-vEKrZXBzI/AAAAAAAAARA/278X608c-Kg/s640/465249_456508041026850_55264270_o.jpg

did they get a gift basket?

buzza, interacialist

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/9375038/Australian-student-mocked-after-appealing-99.95-per-cent-exam-score.html

ugh, they're yankees fans. WS hall of shame.

https://twitter.com/SophiaCaribou/status/234743650410700801/photo/1/large

carry an axe around & shes got an easy nicholson in the shining halloween costume, stuff of nightmares

he didn't wear a tiger jacket or a skirt in that movie.

nah i just mean her face

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2215667/Rescuers-sent-save-Eagle-Dad-ignored-warnings-took-long-suffering-son-trek-Mount-Fuji.html

The pushy parent had brought only a chocolate bar and a cup of water for rations, thinking there would be shops en route.

He soon realised that, 'unlike a lot of Chinese mountains', Fuji does not have steps, according to Chinese media sources.

http://nypost.com/2014/01/04/tiger-mom-some-groups-are-just-better-than-others/

Yeah, I was about to post that in the race thread but since the original post asked for only Important Race Discussions and that will only bring about "yeah, what the fuck, this is dumb" reactions, I decided not to.

"triple package" is one of the worst attempted thinkmemes I've ever heard

it's interesting though that the combination of "superiority" and "insecurity" is normally described more succinctly as "narcissism." Which I do indeed believe is a common trait of the "successful."

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/books/2014/02/amy_chua_and_jed_rubenfeld_s_the_triple_package_reviewed.html

The only thing you need to read about their new book, really

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/jed-rubenfeld-amy-chua-yale-law-school.html

idk if ilx has discussed this elsewhere. until recently i'd totally forgotten what the tiger mom's actual job was. seems like maybe elite law schools shouldn't exist.

Durrrrr, actually she’s been really busy:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/amy-chua-advice-brett-kavanaugh-clerks-report.html

Guess Amy Chua’s high praise of Kavanaugh finally paid off. Her daughter, Sophia Chua, is now his intern at the Supreme Court. You don’t need to be a Tiger Mom to have successful kids, you just need to sell your soul and shit on women. pic.twitter.com/bWaSN4qFLu

— Talent (@Talentiest) June 10, 2019