There is a fundamental mismatch between Asian culture and American culture. This mismatch is even greater than it is between European culture and Asian culture. Americans are extraordinarily individualist. Asians are extraordinarily communitarian. Family is, in a very real way, the economic and social basis of survival in most of Asia. And yes, filial piety is a big part of that. I will also say that my wife can't stand the US because of the cultural gap, so she took the opposite direction than many of these writers, and instead of wondering about Asian values, rejected entirely the American ones. We now live in Indonesia.
Asian culture works for the most part, even as strict and harsh as it is. Many of my Asian-American friends in the US have been able to retire early. And yes, Asians do dominate some industries. And later in life, having children who will care for you in your old age is far better than the American way. There is much that mainstream American culture can learn from Asian culture as we must find more sustainable ways to live.
But there are costs too. At least here among the Chinese-Indonesians, very little or no value is placed on childhood play. It's just a waste of time when one could be learning how to be an adult. What is vitally missing in my view is a recognition that kids learn extremely important lessons through play, and that these lessons are no less important to success than learning math or science in school. This has been a challenge for our kids because cultivating a sense of play goes against the culture.
What disappoints me about the article is the fact that it seems very much like a one-sided self-critique. Immigrants generally have the potential to disrupt existing cultural ways of thinking by offering a different sort of critique. But here what I see is "I want to stop being Asian and be just American."
But instead if we had a dialog, we'd see that there are things we can learn from eachother, and that is a far better way forward than lamenting Asian values.
Play is sometimes seen as important (in animals) because it establishes a dominance ranking in a less formal/less dangerous way than full-on fighting.
Is that then a positive thing for children to engage in?
For a culture to be more meritocratic, it would seem reasonable and perhaps necessary for society to discourage this type of play, no?
The value of play is that it teaches a couple of very important things. The first is that things fit together in different ways. When children are playing they are usually engaging in highly creative activity (provided it isn't sitting in front of the video game console). This activity is important to a whole range of things, and it includes things as diverse as self-motivation and invention.
For a culture to discourage play is to focus not so much on meritocracy so much as it is in quashing individualism both regarding internal motivation and innovation.
I say this even though I sincerely believe that innovation depends on details and that masters of a craft are the best able to innovate within it. But unless you have a sense of empowerment and motivation to do this, this is significantly slowed down.
Again, this is just tackling the point on play. I don't think it is about meritocracy. I think it is about the relationship between individual production and community.
Rather than giving us a discussion, the writer attempts to dispel a myth so that we as the readers can have our own discussion.
Something tells me you have very little input on how the kids are raised.
And actually I have a fair bit of input. We lived in the US for 7 years. It's time to live in her country now for a time, especially since she wasn't happy in the US.
When people tear apart the Tiger Mom book because they think overachievers miss out on important things, they miss the core point of the book. The author admits that something was wrong, but she just can't help herself.
He's an American middle class poseur. Consciously or unconsciously he rejects middle class values so that he not be confused for them, the bourgeois. Neither poor people nor rich people have this kind of bile, because the first are not going to be mistaken for it and the second don't care if they are.
When applying to colleges, I only got into one school (although I only applied to six) - despite having rather good scores, but also having directed a full-length theatre production, and being captain of a regionally victorious chess team (which, you would think, would imply leadership potential). I even placed in my category at the International Science Fair and failed to get a position at MIT.
There's racism against Asians, it's deep-seated, and it's not going away anytime soon for many many reasons.
That's an overreaction for a small error, don't you think? Not to mention unconstructively critical and unnecessarily antagonistic. Definitely not something I'd want to see coming from faculty.
Data presentation is not a small error. A line graph implies a quantitative relationship between the ordinates in the independent variable, which did not exist in this case.
And antagonism is not bad in science. Its certainly better than fealty or consensus.
It's an accurate stereotype of human beings that they have two legs, but there are still people who can tell their story of how this stereotype doesn't fit them.
If you have just one exam which basically defines your ability (and effectively that of your family) to succeed then it encourages exactly the sort of behaviour that is stereotypical of Asian-Americans. You could argue that certain schools in France, Oxbridge in the UK, and the US' Ivy League are part of a similar phenomenon, but the difference there is even if you don't get to those institutions you can still do reasonably well in life.
