Japanese/Hawaiian Butter Mochi for Chinese New Year’s anyone?

            Thursday was Chinese New Year so the year of the rabbit has begun! Happy New Year!

After leaving Hawaii for college, I went for many years missing Chinese New Years and only feeling faint regret that I had passed by the biggest celebration in Chinese culture without noticing. But now that I have children, everything has changed. Chinese New Year now symbolizes Chinese ethnicity, and I am always feeling slightly guilty for how little I impart of my culture and background to our three children.

Growing up, I rebelled against my parents shoving Chinese ethnicity and superiority down my throat. Which is probably why I married a white guy and have hapa-Haole children rather than the pure-breds I was told as a child I needed to produce. (My Chinese conflict with my parents is the subject of the memoir I’ve been writing for 8 years—someday hope to get it out there!)

But now, as the parent of 3 half-Chinese children, I want them to appreciate and be proud of their Chinese side, a challenging task when you live in a white suburb of Boston. It doesn’t help that a study on bi-racial child identity I read years ago while researching interracial friendships for my dissertation basically said there are 4 or 5 responses a child can have to being bi-racial. All but one are incredibly negative. The one positive outcome? Grow up in Hawaii where it’s actually more valued to be mixed-race than pure-bred, and where the culture has created a term for those kids—“hapa” which means half in Hawaiian.

Because moving home to Hawaii has been the impossible dream, I’ve tried to make Chinese New Year a more exciting and fun holiday in Boston to woo the kids towards healthy ethnic identity. I cook Chinese food for a week. I brave the parking nightmare in Boston’s Chinatown to buy nian gao (sticky cake) the quintessential Chinese New Year’s dessert because nian is a pun for sticky and year. Scott and I give them red envelopes stuffed with $20 bills and make them kow tow like I was forced to do as a child. I even googled the next decade of Chinese New Year dates and put them in my calendar so I wouldn’t forget.

Unfortunately, my Entourage calendar no longer works, which means I didn’t know when Chinese New Year fell this year. Luckily, my friend Tara invited me to a Chinese New Year’s party several weeks ago, so I was forewarned. And Tara, at half Finnish/half-Jewish isn’t even Chinese.

Two weeks ago, I happened to be near Chinatown with 2 kids and thought I’d better buy the nian gao because who knows with the snow when I’ll ever make it back?

A dense patty of sweet rice flour, sugar and oil, traditionally wrapped with a ti or banana leaf, nian gao is steamed for hours. When it’s fresh, it’s so sticky that a knife will only sink in and not cut, and you have to scrape it off your fingers with your teeth. As it ages, it gets harder and harder until it’s so hard you can barely cut it at all. When it was hard, Mama would slice it and pan fry the slabs. In the heat, the nian gao grows soft and sticky again, but also develops a delicious crunchy crust.

Nian Gao

One year Mama decided to make her own nian gao, and spent hours upon hours steaming them to give away to her friends. All the windows in our house steamed up so that the paint peeled off the walls in our kitchen. Mama’s nian gao was very good, but the next month’s electric bill meant that was our one and only year of home-made nian gao.

Unfortunately, in Boston’s Chinatown, nian gao comes in a tin pan rather than a ti leaf, and it’s always hard when I buy it, which I find annoying. So last year, inspired by my mother’s example, I decided to make my own nian gao. I got her recipe and compared it with those on-line. I steamed that darn thing for 4 hours and it still hadn’t cooked, so I called home and found out the water had to be at a roiling boil the whole time. 6 hours later, I had homemade nian gao.

And the kids hated it. They said it didn’t taste right and was the wrong color—the result of using brown sugar instead of Chinese stick sugar that some of the on-line recipes said to use. Perhaps overwhelmed by the effort it took to make that nian gao, I forgot to give the kids their red envelopes. They didn’t get them until September. So last year’s Chinese new year was a bust, and they constantly delight in reminding me of that!

I can’t count how many folks have told me that they like Chinese food, but just don’t prefer Chinese desserts. This even includes fellow Chinese-Americans. One, a gourmet dessert chef, says it’s because the Chinese never invented ovens, so our desserts are limited to what you can steam, fry or boil.

My kids were part of that nay-saying crowd for a long time, but I’ve finally converted their taste buds. They were ecstatic about going to the Chinese bakery, and even more ecstatic when I allowed them to buy almost everything they wanted. $48 later, we left with a large nian gao and lots of Chinese treats—egg tarts, coconut mochi, “footballs” (what we call ham sui gok which is like a sesame ball with savory fillings instead of sweet), mooncakes, banana rolls.

We devoured the treats, but I protected the nian gao, wanting to save it for Chinese New Year. It was hard when we bought it, by Chinese New Year’s Eve it was somewhat cracked and I had to use my weight with my giant chef’s knife to slice it.

We brought it to Tara’s Chinese New Year’s Eve party, which included many Chinese international students. I fried it like my mother, and all the Chinese students had no idea what I was serving them.

“It’s nian gao!” I told them, “We ate it every Chinese New Year in Hawaii!”

“Oh,” they said, nodding politely, “Hmm. Back home nian gao is white. I think this type is Southern tradition.” Turns out, these students coming from all over China, had different Chinese New Year’s food traditions, and nian gao wasn’t one of them.

But when they tasted my nian gao, now softened with the heat and crunchy on the outside, everyone was delighted—it was delicious, and they devoured it all.

Which meant that by Chinese New Year’s day, I had no nian gao. With the 3 snowstorms that have hit since our Chinatown trip, there’s no way I was going to brave parking downtown, so I decided to make butter mochi, which is about the world’s easiest recipe. I just couldn’t face steaming a nian gao for 8 hours only to have it rejected because I don’t have the right kind of sugar. I think butter mochi is a Japanese/Hawaiian concoction, not authentically from any culture, but since it uses sticky sweet rice it’d suffice for a “sticky cake.”

The kids liked it more than traditional nian gao. I fed it to my staff team, who also loved it—and most non-Chinese who try nian gao will only take a small taste (I’ve brought it to numerous kindergarten Chinese New Year’s parties and always go home with almost the entire cake). The butter mochi was gone after a day, so I baked another one last night.

And in our Chinese/Scottish/Hawaii/Maine/Boston household, it probably makes sense to serve Japanese/Hawaiian butter mochi to hapa-Haole kids on Chinese New Year!

Butter Mochi

1 box mochiko or sweet (glutinous) rice flour, 1 lb.

2 cups sugar

1 cup shredded coconut

1 tsp. baking powder

½ cup butter (1 stick), melted

5 eggs, beaten

3 cups milk

1 tsp. vanilla

1. Mix dry ingredients together.

2. Mix eggs into butter, then add milk.

3. Mix wet ingredients with dry.

4. Either butter a 9 x 13 dish or spray it with Pam.

5. Pour batter into pan, Bake at 350 for 1 hour.

Note: You can buy Mochiko at any Japanese grocery store and at many Chinese or Korean stores. Otherwise, look for glutinous rice flour.

Collard Greens

A couple weeks ago, during my typical Whole Foods visit (a trip with at least one kid, tasting every sample we can find throughout the store, ending up at the gelato counter where we taste at least 2 flavors each, and finally ordering a $2.88 gelato for the kid while I abstain), they gave out Dixie cups “double green smoothie.” To be charitable, it didn’t taste too bad, but it did look like what you find in your 6 month old’s diaper after you start her on spinach. And given that the smoothie contained both spinach and kale, it’s not surprising it looked like the contents of that diaper.

The double green smoothie lady also pushed a website: eatrightamerica.com where she promised I could see how nutritious my diet is. Because I’m incredibly self-absorbed and a trained social scientist, I always want to see how I score on everything—personality, strengths, even what my handbag says about me—and given what a foodie I am, my nutrition score was no less intriguing.

So I came home, took the test, and found that I have an excellent prognosis to live into my 90s! However, although the test conceded I was doing pretty well by having about 68% of my diet consisting of vegetables, fruits and whole grains (as opposed to most Americans with only about 30%), their goal for me was to raise that number to 94%!

You’ve got to be kidding.

In fact, what kept me from looking more healthy by their standards is that I eat a rich dessert 1-3/week, drink wine 1-3/week, eat red meat 1-3/week, and eat “white” meat or eggs 5-7/week. I already feel so deprived, I can’t imagine going further!

But now I get a daily nutritarian e-mail message advising how I should eat. What I’ve found most interesting is the ANDI score, that score that you can find in Whole Foods, which rates each food based on how nutritious it is per calorie. Here’s the top ten, with 1000 being top and 0 being bottom:

Kale (cooked) 1000

Mustard, Turnip, Collard Greens (cooked) 1000

Watercress (raw) 1000

Bok Choy/Baby Bok chok (cooked) 824

Spinach (raw) 739

Broccoli Rabe (cooked) 715

Chinese or Napa Cabbage (cooked) 704

Brussels Sprouts (raw) 672

Swiss Chard (cooked) 670

Arugula (raw) 559

I first ate collard greens when I ate “soul food” on an summer urban missions project. It was love at first bite. Some years later, I attempted to stir fry my good friend’s canned collard greens. Didn’t work. Unlike in Chinese tradition, you’ve got to cook those greens until they cry uncle!

Inspired by their 1000 point ranking, I bought 3 bunches of collards, cooked them with 2 ham hocks and produced incredibly delicious greens that even the kids all liked. Of course, everything’s delicious with smoked pork grease! The bummer was that 3 bunches cooked to almost nothing so that we devoured almost all of it that night, leaving lots of good pork juice. So the next day I bought 5 bunches and cooked them in the remaining juice. Still delicious.

Eatrightamerica.com doesn’t tell me how much damage the smoked pork hocks (which are probably -500 on the ANDI score) wreak on 1000 point collards. But in case you want to give them a try, here’s the recipe I came up with.

Collard Greens

5 big bunches collard greens, rinsed, chopped, big stems removed

olive oil

8 cloves garlic

4 cups chicken broth

2 ham hocks

1 Tbs. vinegar

2 tsp. sugar

1 tsp. crushed red pepper

Salt and pepper to taste

1. Saute garlic in a little olive oil

2. Add chicken broth and ham hocks, simmer for awhile

3. Add collard greens, turn heat to medium high. Let greens cook down for about 45 minutes, stirring occasionally

4. Reduce heat to medium and season with salt, sugar, vinegar & red pepper. Continue cooking for 45 minutes-1 hour.

Oh What a Beautiful Morning!

Not.

This morning is our 4^th snow day in 4 weeks. 4-8 inches of snow and freezing rain. Snow soaked with rain so each shovelful feels like lifting bricks.

But I’m humming “Oh what a beautiful morning” because we watched the Hugh Jackman version of Oklahoma last night. School was cancelled at 6 p.m., prompting shouts and dancing and lots of joy from the younger set. I already knew Scott wasn’t coming home—his hospital discovered their surprise 5 day audit started on Monday, and with the snow storm, all the leaders got hotel rooms—so after dinner, I announced the kids could either go straight to bed or watch Oklahoma and finish folding laundry.

The two younger ones wanted to watch whatever Disney show was on TV, even begging to take laundry to my bedroom, promising to fold it while watching the show on our upstairs TV so I could watch Oklahoma downstairs. What kind of fool do they think I am??? Laundry barely gets folded when they watch TV in our family room. Why would I, a seasoned mother for almost 15 years, trust that laundry would get folded out of my eyesight?

There’s no way I was going to sleep on clean laundry or fold it myself. So I repeated my offer, “Go to bed right now or fold laundry while watching Oklahoma.”

The lure of screen time, even watching antiquated Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals while folding laundry was too much for them. They caved, and Hugh Jackman strode on stage with a cowboy strut, “All the cattle are standing like statues. . .”

I love Broadway musicals, and Oklahoma was the first musical I ever watched on TV when I was exactly the same age as my son, 10. I don’t know why a 10 year old Chinese girl in Hawaii would fall in love with singing and strutting farmers and ranchers, but I was hooked, and have been obsessed with Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals ever since.

It probably didn’t hurt that Mama also loved musicals. She watched the original Broadway versions of many musicals during her days living in NYC, so she gladly passed her love of Broadway to me, letting me lie in her bed to watch TV versions late at night because our color TV resided in her bedroom.

I sometimes wonder about the loves we pass onto our children as opposed to the pressures we place on them. From my mother, I received my love of Broadway musicals, my value for good friends you can laugh with, an overweening obsession with food, and the passion for great bargains.

Academic achievement, Chinese identification, loving my siblings—all these felt like pressures in contrast, even though I now am grateful that I was coerced into valuing all three.

Faith in God was always my choice, perhaps even my rebellion, but as a result, I’ve completely owned it all by myself.

With my kids, the love of the Broadway musical is well on its way no matter how much they groaned that Oklahoma looked old fashioned in the beginning. They couldn’t believe Hugh Jackman is also Wolverine—we’ve seen all 4 X-men movies in the past 2 months—and we marveled at his talent. When the show finally ended at 11:30, I had to force them to go to bed rather than click on the songs they wanted to re-hear.

The love/obsession with food is clearly in place. From Scott they’ve received the love of snow skiing, water-skiing, Shirley Temples, and (for the girls so far) orderliness. (I keep wishing the latter on all 3 kids since not only do I not love order, I’m also completely incapable of it)

But how to help them love God, the greatest and most important love of all, that I still wonder about. I’ve seen the pressure strategy backfire, making the child think God’s all about control and behavior codes and breaking your will for the hell of it.

So maybe it’s like raising your kids to love Oklahoma. Exposing them, talking with them, doing it together, and hoping the love catches on. At least with God, there’s someone on the other side who wants a relationship too, unlike Hugh Jackman who I’m sure is perfectly happy without us.

So we go to church. We pray as a family most nights. We talk about Jesus. And I pray fervently that God will talk back so the kids know he’s more than just a random entertainment option.

Meanwhile, today after putting away all the laundry, the kids will have to shovel snow that’s as high as an elephants eye and it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up to the sky. . .

Oh what a beautiful morning!

Finally read the book

Last week, during a snow day, my oldest daughter Ling-Ling read all of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and really enjoyed it. I finally finished it this afternoon, on yet another snow day, while taking Ling to her physical--the same physical I forgot to take her to last week because, yes, it was a snow day.

To my annoyance, Ling kept reading over my shoulder, saying things like, “Oh, this chapter gets sad,” and “This chapter is funny and. . .”

“Uh Uh Uh!” I said while pretending to slap her face, “Shh, quiet! You’re ruining it for me!”

But she kept going until I threatened to take something precious away and the pediatrician finally walked in the door. This is why I needed my own copy of Harry Potter 7. My kids have the leisure to read Amy Chua or Harry Potter, while I cook, shop, work and keep the family going.

All to say, I’m clearly a Western mother.

So here are my quick responses to the book:

1. I really liked it. I laughed out loud. I stayed engaged. All my outrage was already spent on Chua’s WSJ article, so I just enjoyed the ride. Chua is funny, self-deprecating, brutally honest about her own foibles and clearly slightly (or even majorly) crazy. But the whole point of self-deprecating memoir writing is to bare one’s soul so that readers know we’re crazy. You, the public, are supposed to laugh knowingly along with us.

2. I loved the insider jokes, ones most likely only other Chinese/Asian-Americans can properly understand or appreciate. Riffs on White men with “Yellow fever,” or how 2^nd generation Chinese women generally marry White men, or how we worry that our 3^rd generation children are just soft, or examples of the foibles of Chinese parenting had me cracking up. She doesn’t couch these (often throwaway) comments, so for some they may be offensive. But as a woman who’s been part of a string of Asian interests for more than one man, someone’s finally talking about my world! (I was sure my husband had “yellow fever” because he’s the profile of White men who date Asian women, tall, thin, sensitive, gentle, good listener, somewhat melancholy. He kept protesting that I was the first Asian woman he ever dated. I came back that if he actually lived in places that had an Asian population, he would have dated a string of Asian women. Poor guy, no way he could win. . .)

3. I feel insecure and underachieving. She went to Harvard for 2 degrees, teaches law at Yale, has published 3 books the latest of which is on Amazon’s top 10 list, AND produced 2 daughters who are musical prodigies and straight A students (plus the younger one plays tennis). I haven’t done any of those things. Enough said.

4. I feel lazy. Chua has spent hours upon hours drilling and training her daughters in math, piano and violin. I haven’t. Enough said.

I brought the book with me to the elementary school ice skating party yesterday (it was early release—we had early release and then another a snow day—kill me now. . .) I had left the book jacket at home for no reason other than it fell off and I never bothered to put it back on, but another mom noticed what I was reading and asked what I thought. Having just laughed out loud from some quip, I said without thinking, “I’m really liking it!” Then thought, “Oh no, what have I just done?”

Thankfully, the mom didn’t immediately excoriate me but asked why, and I told her all the points I wrote above. She said it was a good thing I had left the book jacket at home, otherwise I would have been inundated with questions and not had the chance to read the book in peace.

I realized I might have also spent the entire ice-skating party defending Chua—because at the end of it all, the book leaves me with more questions than answers about parenting, both Chinese and Western, and that’s a good thing.

As I drove Ling to swim practice tonight (another sign that I’m not really a Chinese mom—that I let my kid, nay even encouraged my kid to do a sport even though she has almost no chance of ever being great in it), I asked her how she thinks I should parent in light of the book. She said that the book made her feel like a failure given that she’s not a concert pianist or a straight A student. She also said she thought that if I had pulled an Amy Chua rather than a Kathy Tuan-MacLean parenting style, she might be a higher achiever.

“Is that what you want? We have 3 and a half years left to go—should I push you harder?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Before I read the book, I thought I had it pretty bad already.”

But before we got to the Y, after much prodding and pushing, Ling said she thinks I probably parent like Chua does at the end of the book, where she comes to some middle ground, except I had that concept the whole time and that was a good thing.

Whew!

Tiger Moms racing to nowhere?

I feel like a ping-pong ball. Yesterday Time magazine arrived with the cover story focusing on Amy Chua and Tiger Mothering. Then last night, the whole family went to see “Race to Nowhere,” a documentary looking at the inordinate stress we’re placing on our kids through too much homework and high pressured schooling. We skipped the discussion to rush back home to listen to Obama’s State of the Union, where he spoke about our need to out-educate China and India.

What’s a mother to do?

On one hand, I resonate with “Race to Nowhere.” My high-schooler gets 4.5 hours of homework a night, and that doesn’t count projects. Too much! Add swim team and her (loser-un-Chinese) 30 minutes of piano practice per day, and the poor kid barely has time to do anything else. She did that exercise of evaluating how many hours she spends on everything to see if she could join ski team. My husband was floored to see that she spends more hours doing homework each week than she spends in school. Ergo, no ski team. . .

On the other hand, I’m feeling a little defensive for Amy Chua, probably the most hated woman in America right now. I feel defensive because while I mostly despised being yelled at and pressured and pushed non-stop by my own Tiger mama, I’m also strangely grateful because knowing my lazy-bone self, I don’t know what I would have become or achieved otherwise. Chua writes:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences.

When I was in 9^th grade, my family moved to Beijing for my father to take a year-long sabbatical. This was 3 years after the Cultural Revolution when the Chinese still called each other “comrade” and wore Mao-fits. Added to the horror that my parents were forcing me to return to my homeland in order to brainwash me into embracing my Chinese identity, was the realization that I would need to learn geometry in Chinese. I was forced to live in China the one year reading and writing was necessary for math. And I was illiterate.

It was hard, really, really hard. I eventually needed a tutor because I couldn’t understand either Chinese or geometry. I spent hours each night trying to decipher Chinese characters, angles and equations. But one day, my teacher, Li lao shi, realized I knew what I was doing and called on me in class. I jumped up, bellowed the answer, we beamed at one another, and then I glowed.

That’s one of my favorite memories. Studying geometry in China taught me it’s possible to work insanely hard, and that work pays off. Not necessarily in a terrific grade, but with a sense of achievement and accomplishment.

So maybe the question is, what are we racing for? According to “Race to Nowhere,” the answer is nothing. We’re pressuring our kids and stressing them out so they can go NOWHERE, because ultimately even getting into a great college, having a prestigious job and owning a big house means little if you’ve lost your soul, health or even life along the way. The movie producers are saying, “Stop the rat race! Smell the roses! Focus on what’s really important!” and what’s important is a happy childhood leading to a happy and healthy adulthood.

I haven’t read much of Chua’s book yet (which is much funnier and self-deprecating than critics would have you believe), but if she’s like most Chinese parents, the race is to get to the most prestigious college possible, then the most prestigious graduate school so you can find a great job, a great spouse (preferably Chinese), bear great achieving children, and then support your parents. The race is to do your family and your people proud.

And here we have it, the classic difference between the Western value of individualism, where the ultimate goal is often about satisfying oneself as an individual and the Chinese value of filial piety, where the ultimate goal is pleasing and honoring one’s parents.

So what does God think? Is God asking us to race somewhere? Christians talk about performing for an audience of one, God, and seeking God’s pleasure only. Is that all God requires? What do you think?

My ponderings about these questions will have to be posted another time because despite Winchester’s persistent race of homework inundation, today’s yet another half day with a snow day possible tomorrow. We're going ice-skating with the 5^th grade, then maybe watch Hugh Jackman in PBS’s version of “Oklahoma.”

Now that’s a race I really can enjoy. . .

Are Chinese moms social?

Today a daughter came home from school, placed the back of her hand against her forehead, and declared that she had been MORTIFIED at school. In class they played the game “That’s me” where everyone stood to various questions. To the statement “I can text on my phone,” apparently everyone stood up but her.

Yes, I am that evil Chinese mother who has not provided texting to her children.

But I suspect my motives for barring texting are different from Amy Chua, of late evil Chinese mother fame, who didn’t let her kids do sleepovers or playdates or other such social things. I’ve resisted texting specifically because I WANT my kids to have social skills, and I don’t think texting helps anyone develop emotional intelligence, good eye contact, or listening skills.

OK, OK. I’m also annoyed by teens, and yes, fellow adults, who rather than paying attention to the folks they’re with, engage socially with those they’d rather be with via texting or e-mail or even conversations. It hurts my feelings. Literally someone else is prioritized over me, and if I’ve taken time out of my life to be with you, I don’t really want to hang around while you hang around with someone else—feels too much like bad times from fourth grade. Of course, now that I have an i-phone—I can and do engage in that very egregious behavior at times. Sorry.

My mother was a strange Chinese mother in many ways. While I never felt she prioritized my development as a social or emotional being—always emphasizing the stereotypical grades, perfect oldest child behavior, and filial piety—what she practiced came out more than what she preached, and my Mama LOVES people. My Mama becomes bosom buddies with check-out ladies at Safeway. My Mama spends life surrounded by her coterie of companions. In fact, as I’ve been trying to interview her for her life history these past weeks, I’m constantly foiled by her need to go to small group, or cook dinner for the interim pastor, or just go out to breakfast, lunch or dinner with whomever she wants to hang with that day.

As a result, growing up, I enjoyed a constant stream of playdates and sleepovers. Not because Mama diligently set them up, but because she was perpetually having her own playdates, which meant I got to play with her playdate’s kids. Three of my closest friendships growing up all came from Mama hanging out with their moms. I don’t think Mama ever denied me a sleepover or social event in my entire life because it went completely against her nature and values. Any lack of social life I faced was entirely my own fault, my own lack of attractiveness or reaching out.

David Brooks in his op-ed “Amy Chua is a wimp” thinks that Chua has coddled her children because the real cognitive test of intelligence comes from navigating social situations, much more than the focused attention of practicing 4 hours at the piano. Brooks writes, “Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18brooks.html

I have to say I agree with Brooks, and hence my anti-texting stance. I want my kids to learn how to have real conversations, to learn subtle body language, to read the mood of a group by both non-verbal and verbal signals. No matter how texting and Facebook have taken over teen socializing, I still can’t believe that genuine friendships and intimate marriages will survive on a diet of texting and tweets. And this is from a woman who sometimes sits on the couch next to her gorgeous husband and e-mails back and forth with him while watching “House” on TV rather than talking.

When I visited Northwestern with my father my junior year of high school, we hung out with a crew of physicists because my father is a physicist. I talked in the elevator with a Chinese female physicist, whose Chinese husband was also a physicist. She told me her son, a year younger than me, was already studying at Caltech.

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” I said, all while acutely feeling what a loser Chinese daughter I had already proven myself to be. Here I was, the exact average age for my grade, not a math genius, and looking at Northwestern—a subpar school for Chinese dream daughters.

“No it’s not,” she corrected me. Tapping her head, she continued, “He’s very smart, but socially not so good. It’s a problem he’s had since he was very young.”

And then she looked at me with longing in her eyes. Despite my bad hair, buckteeth and impoverished fashion sense, apparently my ability to even engage her in conversation contrasted with her son who I now think probably has Asberger’s.

I ended up going to Northwestern. And even though I would eventually have to wrestle with what it meant that I was the only Tuan of four to never attend an Ivy League school (let the music of a thousand tiny violins begin here—and if that’s what you were thinking, you clearly weren’t raised by a Chinese Tiger mom!), my brief conversation with that Chinese physicist mother has always hung with me. She got all the brilliance, all the pedigree, all the status that Chinese moms want, but she also mourned some losses.

Tomorrow my oldest daughter takes her midterm in PE, which involves writing a short essay on what’s a healthy lifestyle. I quizzed her about what she thought, given being raised by me. “Eat vegetables and exercise?” she said.

“Yes, but what’s a healthy life?” I pushed. After lots of hemming and hawing and feeding her many answers, we talked about enjoying a healthy body, healthy relationships, healthy spirituality, healthy self-concept, and a healthy connection with the world. After all, God created us body, soul, emotions, and mind within a web of relationships and embedded in a marvelous creation.

Yeah, that’s what this Tiger mom’s trying to instill.

Someday soon we’re going to provide texting. But not just yet. Let’s work on standing straight and good eye contact just a little more.

Are Chinese Mothers are Superior?

For anyone who hasn't heard about it yet, read Amy Chua's article in the Wall street Journal "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html?=no#articleTabs%3Darticle

Anyone who’s read anything in my blog knows that I can neither claim with confidence that Chinese mothers are superior, nor can I broadcast with smug self-assurance that I’ve done everything right, as Amy Chua apparently is able in her WSJ article “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.” I have spent the past 14.5 years of motherhood feeling like quite the failure as a mother, for some of the very reasons that Chua thinks she’s a success.

Case in point: Today we experienced “Snow-mageddon” as my husband likes to call it. 15 inches of snow by the time my 3 children and I braved shoveling around noon. Like the quintessential superlative Chinese mother, I had already cooked my kids a wonderful breakfast—diced potatoes baked with bacon, broccoli, spinach, cheese and two fried eggs on top. A Western breakfast, and like the quintessential Western mom who’s always dieting, I refrained and ate a double-fiber English muffin with almond butter. I made the kids clean up the kitchen afterwards—something I’m so sporadic about enforcing that the typical squabbling over who does what and who had more work than the other ensued.

Now my kids knew that we were about to spend a lot of time shoveling. They knew we’d be shoveling our front walk, our long sidewalk, the driveway entrance that now boasted 4 feet of packed snow the snowplow had deposited, and our driveway that fits 4 cars. But does that stop the whining even with the gourmet and somewhat healthy breakfast solidly sitting in their tummies? Not a chance.

Within 10 minutes, I was reduced to how Chua describes the “Tiger Mom”—Chinese shrieking. An hour later, when I saw the child given the task of shoveling the walk—the same child who had already lost $14 because everyone was being charged $1/whine—when I noticed this child wasn’t even touching a shovel, but lying face down and waving his arms--pushing snow off the front porch like an upside down snow angel, I couldn’t help it. I waded through the snow, a Chinese mother’s version of the abominable snowman, shrieking over the roar of our neighbor’s snow blower. Bumping him with my shovel, I screamed that he was a lazy bum and there’s no place in our family for lazy bums because there’s too much work that has to get done.

He started crying.

Did that melt my heart? Not at all. I continued excoriating him. But a pause later I amended my initial charge to “You’re ACTING like a lazy bum!”—the Western mother’s correction.

Chua asserts that shrieking at your children over their lousy performance is a common phenomenon in the Chinese household, and it certainly was true both of my family of origin and my household now. But I hated being shrieked at growing up. I hated the quintessential lecture I received, while sitting on the piano bench, that my parents gave me at least twice a year from first grade through eighth—the lecture that unless I worked harder, they would pull me out of my posh private school (Punahou, the same school Obama attended), and send me to public school where I would eventually end up on Skid Row. I hated how my mother raged at me about my laziness, selfishness and how I was a sorry excuse for the oldest child of the family, the one who should have been the perfect role model who watched after her siblings rather than tormented them. I yelled back that I never asked to be oldest.

Yet now that I’m a mother, I have to admit she was right. I was lazy, mean and selfish. And I suspect that I never would have pushed myself harder in school if my mother hadn’t harangued me so much. My Harvard-educated sister remembers discussing with a bunch of friends, half White, half Asian, about how they got to Harvard. All the Asian kids felt their parents had pushed and prodded them to high achievement. All the White kids thought their own self-motivation got them there.

I started seeking God at a very young age—about 3 when I realized if I believed in Jesus I would never have to die—something my parents felt uncomfortable about for most of my childhood. So as I’ve parented, I’ve tried to incorporate Christ’s worldview rather than either the Chinese or Western perspective. I’ve emphasized trying our best in school, not to protect their self-esteems, but because we’re called to steward our intellect and opportunities. I’ve emphasized the value of working hard in school to learn the material and grow our minds, rather than seeking the elusive perfect academic GPA. So as my daughter started with an F in honors geometry and worked it up to a B- last quarter, complaining that if she dropped down a level she’d be getting an A+, I told her of all her grades, I was most proud of the B- because she had worked for it and challenged herself.

After shoveling, my friend Helen and her kids came over for lunch and fun. Helen’s also Chinese-American, and of course, as two Chinese-American moms, we’ve been talking non-stop about Chua’s article. My husband sent the article to our two girls as well as all the Chinese friends and siblings we have, and the two girls have expressed their relief that I’m not the quintessential Chinese mom. But both Helen and I confessed how our inner Tiger Mom came out with shoveling, noting that only our half-Chinese kids were expected to shovel out their homes on the street.

When I said I was trying to parent with a Christian worldview rather than a Chinese one, all three of my kids burst into laughter with a “Yeah, right.”

“I didn’t say I was successful at being a Christian mother!” I protested, “I just said that I was TRYING to parent with Jesus’s values.”

They continued to look skeptical.

“But all that really means,” I added, “Is that I get to say sorry to you guys. . . a lot.”

Because after all, the heart of the Christian gospel is that we mess up. We don’t get straight As. We don’t practice piano 3 hours/day. We don’t even practice every day. We squander our opportunities, and we pit ourselves against our neighbor as a competitor rather than fellow child of God. We need a lot of forgiveness, and Jesus graciously offers it, each and every time.

My parents never apologized to me for anything until I was an adult, and only after they both became ardent Jesus freaks also.

I wonder what would Chua think of that?