Doing School in Palo Alto

A year after all the stress of coming up with enough cash and qualifying for a massive loan to buy a house in Palo Alto because of its good schools, I’m no longer sure that that remains a valid reason. When we moved out of China, we were escaping not just the smog but also the boot-camp style schools more appropriate for training GI Joes than nurturing children. I was naively optimistic that Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, a hub for revolutionary innovations that have swept the world, would surely offer the perfect education. But the more we’ve been here, but more dubious I’ve become about the alleged excellence of the Palo Alto schools (I’m referring to the public schools. But there may be similarities with some of the private schools as well).

At first I thought the problem was with the mismatch between lax elementary schools with uber-competitive high schools. Supposedly some elementary schools in the district are more academic, but least with our current school, the kids are not being adequately prepared to face that kind of competitiveness down the road. It’s as if they will be expected to run a marathon, but they get no training before the big day. Initially I wanted to believe that the educators here knew what they were doing--perhaps this was how elementary schools should be, relaxed without much discipline so the children can enjoy school more. But then the lack of discipline, or maybe the lack of emphasis on good work ethics is a more apt way to put it, started to be rather disconcerting.

For the past month I’ve caught Jojo, my third grader, not doing his homework multiple times. I must admit that I flipped out more than I needed to, but a kid who is not doing his homework! That’s a sure path leading not only to an Asian F but an actual F! I asked him why he was so derelict, and he said that the teachers here weren’t strict. If he didn’t turn in his homework, he could do it the next day, or the day after, or even never, and the teacher wouldn’t do anything about it. He even reasoned with me that since the homework here was so simple, he wasn’t causing himself harm by neglecting it. This was in stark contrast with how conscientious he was as a student in China.

In first grade at Jojo’s Chinese school, the kids were required to memorize these long arduous historical poems for their semester-end exam. I didn’t buy into all this rote memorization, especially of things that they hardly understood. And the kids were given a very short lead time to do it. When Jojo asked me to help him with the memorization, I told him to forget it and to go to bed. He became visibly distressed and said kids who didn’t get a perfect score would have to repeat the test until they did, and everyday those who didn’t pass the test had their names on the board. It would be humiliating! I told him that it wasn’t going to do him any good to memorize things he didn’t understand and was going to forget as soon as the test was over, and that he needed to go to bed, more firmly this time. He reluctantly obeyed. However, half an hour later, as I walked past our spare bedroom that also served as a study, I noticed him crouched in a corner, stealthily but dutifully memorizing the poems on his own. He made sure that he received a perfect score on the first try, even when I was unsupportive.

If I had wanted the kids better prepared for stressful times ahead in high school, we should have stayed with the Chinese school system. But Chinese schools use too much harsh discipline to make sure the kids do as they should, and over time it really kills the joy of learning. Except our school here doesn’t seem to foster a joy for learning either. The kids’ last year here was hard, because they were “fresh off the boat” and spoke no English, so they faced a steep learning curve (and they had better teachers). But this year, since they had caught up on the language, they became bored in school. New material is taught at a crawling rate, and not much is done for kids who yearn to do more. I was in the classroom a lot last year; the kids here had abysmal math skills, and those who were good at math learned it not in the classrooms but from outside tutors or parents. Being privately tutored isn’t something unique to our school but a district-wide phenomenon, and when I was finally clued in about this, it felt like the ultimate betrayal that all but destroyed my faith in our school district.

Engaging a private tutor here is like doping in sports: everyone’s heard of everyone else doing it, a lot, but nobody is doing it himself. However, it is clear that tutoring must be a thriving business because of all these learning centers that have sprung up around town like mushrooms after the first spring rain, and that’s not counting all the freelance tutors out there. Sometimes the kid will let it slip--that his tutor taught him how to do something differently. Or the mom will confess, if you get close enough (which I haven’t--I’ve only been told of other parents doing it, never the parents I talk to directly). If not tutoring, then I suspect it’s some other form of learning outside the school, be it an especially motivated child on her own, or parents stepping in as tutors. Otherwise I find it hard to explain how these kids catch up when they’ve received so little instruction in school. I would love to find out just how many kids engage in some form of learning outside the school and how much they get from these venues versus school. Some parents have even mused that perhaps so little learning happens in school because the teachers are well-aware of how much everyone is doing outside the classroom, so why bother? Other parents claim that they love the schools here--what a great opportunity for the kids to play together, right before they are whisked off to a myriad of after school activities, where actual learning takes place. What is especially sinister about private tutoring is that it widens the gap between the haves and the have nots. Kids whose families can’t afford tutoring are counting on the schools to provide them with a quality education, but in reality the schools may be failing them, and making it even more difficult for them to compete with their wealthier peers.

I have realized that we had left one pressurized and stressful school environment and jumped into another, but the difference is that in China, for the most part the schools provide a systematic way to bloat the kids with knowledge and basic skills, whereas here parents need to come up with private solutions to supplement their academically undernourished kids. This also serves as a rudely short explanation for why Chinese kids tend to be very cookie cutter and more uniformly good at school while American kids are much differentiated, with a few blindingly brilliant stars atop mostly middling underachievers. At least in China, the system, though harsh, puts the squeeze on everyone, so it is actually somewhat more equalized and gives the poor kids a fighting chance if they are willing to work hard (probably suffocating a few Jobs and Zuckerbergs along the way). The thought that after paying an arm and a leg for a house and tens of thousands for property tax each year, that I would have to dish out more money still to hire private tutors sickens me. And that’s not even considering the possibility of needing psychological counseling when the kids are in high school, because then school gets intolerably stressful, either for them or for their friends, or so we’ve heard. Furthermore, the kids are not utilizing their time efficiently at school and must continue with more work after school. I have become increasingly suspicious that I had suffered a classic case of mistaking correlation for causation, that a school set in an affluent neighborhood will always be rated highly because the parents make sure the kids do well. Our schools here aren’t bad, but just no better than schools in any Middleclasstown, USA, and come with much much MUCH more expensive real estate.

In the recent article on Palo Alto teen suicides in The Atlantic, the reporter touches upon what everyone thinks but is too politically correct to say out loud, that it is the Asian tiger moms who have made Bay Area schools ultra competitive. I understand this sentiment, as I have experienced first hand just how important prestige is to the Chinese. Where one has gone to school or employed for work becomes too large a portion of a Chinese person’s identity, as I’ve noticed far too many weibo (Chinese twitter) or wechat aliases with the likes of “Harvard_Liu” or “Yale_Li” or even “Harvard Mom”, as gaining prestige through name brands is a sure way to bring honor to the entire family. When I was working in China, I was always introduced by the name of my college alma mater, sometimes even before my own. In my Silicon Valley Chinese parent wechat groups, there have been somber and self-reflective moments after the recent suicides, but those quickly gave way to congratulations to parents whose kids have gained admissions to the Ivies or Stanford and reposts on how to become one of those parents. These parents are not the poor immigrants of yesteryear--they have the will and the means to launch their kids into uber achievers who make the stereotype of nerdy, socially awkward Asians only making the grades outdated. These kids are typically not just well-rounded but often also have what is considered a “spike” in college admissions-speak, may it be achievement in an instrument, charitable efforts or a STEM competition, at the national or even international level. These parents and their children certainly up the ante in the gladiatorial academic scene here.

While the increase of the Asian population may be the most visible change to the Bay Area demographics related to academic competitiveness, they are not solely to blame. I suspect there are other changes as well. What about the increase of the proportion of population with advanced degrees from prestigious universities all around the globe? Prosperous parents (as evidenced by another article from The Atlantic) of all shapes and form tend to push their kids to be like themselves. The Chinese moms in my group argue that the non-Asian parent here are just as cutthroat when it comes to pushing their kids and admit they are in awe of how much (usually) non-Asian parents push their kids to do competitive sports at all ages even at the risk of harm and injury, as data have shown an increase in sports-related injuries at younger ages. I’ve heard of multiple weekly practices plus out-of-town weekend competitions for elementary school kids. When I looked into enrolling my eight year old Jojo in soccer, I could not find an appropriate class--he was three years too late into the game.

It seems that the Bay Area schools are bound to be competitive and stressful, more so than other comparable schools around the nation, because they are in an area that attracts Asians, wealth, and talent (and sometimes all in the same person). Perhaps elementary schools here are lax because everyone is preparing for the race privately, and since the stakes are low, the tiger moms (of all backgrounds) and their cubs haven’t bared their sharp teeth yet. And I’ve only seen our school, so my viewpoint is admittedly narrow. Who knows, maybe the other elementary schools are already drilling their kids on the quadratic equation and the Pythagorean theorem. I could look to transfer my kids into a more academic school, but that gave me pause. Would that provide the excellent education that I’ve been seeking? Did I even have a clear idea what an excellent education looked like, after all this time?

In the course of jotting down my thoughts I have also been playing my own devil’s advocate and examining my assumptions. It seems that a lot of people say the high schools here are stressful, but what if they are a vocal minority? People who don’t find school stressful probably aren’t going to come out and risk the wrath of others by admitting so. I would need more exploration there to draw my own conclusions. But would my conclusion, either way, ease my original discontent with the schools here? I get the sense that the stress is largely related to winning the few coveted spots to highly selective colleges, and the competition here is especially ruthless because there is an over-abundance of qualified and driven kids (and parents). But suppose that my kids can actually win the academic arms race to Prestige U, does that mean they got a good education? While we certainly don’t mind getting my kids into Prestige U, we’ve always known that that cannot be the ultimate goal we set for their education, else we would have moved to another part of the country where the competition was easier to swallow. I wanted a solid education for my kids, regardless of where they end up going to college, but I had failed to examine whether Palo Alto schools actually provided one, taking too much stock in their competitiveness and US News rankings. A person is in school for 12+ years; that is a scarily long time to waste if she is just doing school but not getting an education, too scary to not think things through more carefully.

So, I am back to the drawing board and I plan to look at things more deeply. I had contemplated reaching out to the highschoolers here to get a sense of their experience, but I think I will first read School of Dreams, which is about a similarly competitive high school in the Los Angeles Area named Whitney High. I’ve also had multiple conversations with friends about what they thought of their education, and while they were able to pinpoint which segment of their education they deemed most enlightening, often they failed to articulate what it was that made it so. I have thought deeply about my own experience and I regret to say that even though I had attended Prestige U myself, I was too foolish to really take advantage of it. I was doing school, a continuation of a habit that I had acquired and even perfected 12 years prior to that. I didn’t feel like a somewhat educated person until I had graduated from business school, and that was mostly due to the high quality of teaching there, not necessarily because I had become wiser. I will read about how children are educated historically and how education has evolved with time. I plan to document my findings, thoughts, and conclusions as I try to define what constitutes an excellent education in our time, and maybe more specifically for my kids, though I haven’t decided whether I will publish them. If you were patient enough to read all the way to the end, will you please share your thoughts and experience about your or your kids’ education, or education in general, here or privately with me?

Note: I had intended to post this before my decision to home school, but my thoughts were occurring at a faster rate than I can document so I kept revising and never felt I was able to fully capture all of my observations and thoughts. There were a lot of multidimensional nitty gritty details to our experiences with our school/school district here that I am not able to include (or else bore you to death, if I haven’t already). I was also afraid of inciting too much controversy, thus shattering the submissive little Asian girl stereotype I’ve worked hard to foster (OK, not really, I’ve just become less comfortable putting my thoughts out there for all to see as I’ve grown older). My decision to home school is actually mostly due to Jojo’s health, so my expectations are low. Even if he doesn’t progress academically but improves his health during this time I would consider it a win. But as I started to look into home schooling, it just became more attractive the more I found out about it. Trying it out for a semester here in CA is also very low risk, so it’s not nearly as dramatic as some people think it is. Currently I don’t plan on doing it for too long, but we shall see. Thank you for reading.

Visit to the Den of the Tiger Parents

No matter what you think of Amy Chua, the original Tiger Mom, you have to admire her audacity to share her story and then be judged by the world.  I know I wouldn't want to air all my parenting trials and tribulations to pretty much anyone except for my husband, juicy and entertaining (to other people, that is) material they may be.  Though I didn't think I agreed with her parenting style, as my children have grown, I've found myself veering towards some of her believes and practices.  For example, my children know that they can’t quit stuff without a good reason, and that whatever they do, they have to work hard at it.  However, after meeting some true blood tiger parents, I've realized that I’m nothing but a soft-purring kitty mom, with no danger of turning into a tiger any time soon or ever, simply because I don’t have the energy or the resources to devote myself wholly to the education of my children.  These other parents are scary, and their kids will eat mine for lunch at any kind of STEM competition.  Actually, hold that thought.  Given their existence, I’m not sure if my kids will even want to go into any competitions with them.

The best thing about having native fluency in a language is that you get to traverse between different cultures, and when it comes to education, these cultural differences are more sharply pronounced.  At Juju and Jojo’s school, I've talked to some of the non-Asian parents.  Most of them are not too concerned about academics.  Sure, some of them do experience resistance to homework or hardship as their children progress to middle and then high school, but they are not overly worried.  Some of them do supplement math at home, but at least at the elementary school level I don’t know of any kids who receive any outside tutoring.  If they did, they are covert about it and none of the children in their classes except one show any abilities too far beyond their grade level.  A few of them in fact cannot fathom why Asian parents make their kids do so much.  Quite a few of these parents would rather spend the time having their kids play sports.  All sorts of sports, so many in fact that sometimes I have trouble calculating how they shuttle their multiple kids to their multiple practices and matches.  Nobody’s ever mentioned anything about having an eye on Ivies/Stanford, though I’m sure some of them are plotting away (refer to recent article on parents hiring application consultants).

Then, last week a friend told me about a Chinese parent get-together to talk about the different schooling options around the Valley.  I was immediately piqued, and even made my husband attend a major school event at the kids’ school so I could be freed to go.  First of all, let me just say that Chinese people can do food.  There was a potluck lunch and for a mere $6 dollars we had a feast!  There were buns, dumplings, homemade spicy beef, veggies, and all types of desserts.  I know I'm going to the next event even if just for the food.  Oh you want to tag along?  Well too bad you didn't listen to your parents and study hard at Chinese school!  OK, let’s stop the digression and get to the real topic. 

Ever wonder why Bay Area real estate prices are so crazy and who’s gobbling up multi-million dollar houses across the Valley?  Well, there were 40+ of those reasons at the meeting.  These are not your Chinese immigrants of the past.  They are rich, well-educated, and sophisticated.  They've been around the world a few times and now have chosen to settle down here for the sake of their children.  Some have very respectable jobs and some don’t actually seem to have any kind of job.  When it comes to their kids’ education, they are well-informed, devoted, concerned and maybe a bit overzealous and conflicted at times.  Some actually said out loud that they wish they could combine the diversity of public schools with teaching quality of private schools with flexibility of homeschooling.  In other words, they wish they could create an environment where their children could have everything. 

What struck me was that even though most of these parents lived in the best school districts around here (Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Saratoga), a third of them chose to send their children to this school named BASIS in San Jose.  It is by far the most popular private school amongst this cohort of parents.  I asked one Palo Alto parent how she dealt with the commute, she said that there was enough critical mass here that they can round up a whole week worth of carpool with other families.  Another parent said that the curriculum at BASIS was two grade levels above other schools, and that it was even more advanced than actual Chinese schools in China!  These parents are also very strategic.  Some wondered out loud whether it was good to be a chicken head or phoenix tail, which was the Chinese way of saying big-fish in a small-pond or small-fish in a big-pond.  Other parents suggested going to BASIS for middle school, and then transferring back to public high schools to become chicken head and ensure a ticket to the Ivies/Stanford.  In any case money never seemed to be an issue when these parents talked about education.  In addition to private schooling their kids also attended out-of-area music, math and science camps. 

Even amongst this fairly homogeneous crowd there was still some diversity of thought.  Some parents voiced a balanced view, that it wasn't completely necessary to put kids in private schools or tutor them to death.  They believed in being involved, and providing help where needed, but not making their kids learn everything all the time.  There was also a fair number of overzealous tigers, who said that getting As in school simply wasn't enough.  They had to medal at competitions to really prove themselves.   

The general impression I got was that it was almost impossible for these tiger kids NOT to be strong academically.  At the earliest sign that they may be weak at something, the parents will pounce on it and supplement, tutor and drill until they become maestros.  Are Asians really naturally good at STEM? Of course not!  They just have parents who think it’s really important to be good at it.  And in this cohort, being good at math and science simply isn't enough.  They need to be good at English, music, sports (some are serious athletes), and leadership as well.  I wouldn't be surprised to see these kids crowd out second generation Asian Americans at top universities, and many of them will break the mold and stereotype of the quiet, one-dimensional Asian kid who got in because they were good at math.  Sometimes even I wonder why it is so important for these parents to drive their kids to such an extent.  These are not chip-on-the shoulder poor immigrants who needed their children to do well to get out of a life of poverty.  A good number of these parents will probably leave enough money for their children to never work a day in their lives.  It was also interesting that while people were impressed by parents who sent their kids to Harvard/Princeton, it was the mention of a Stanford admit that elicited sharp intakes of breaths.   

To ye faithful readers, these parents may sound strange or scary or even kind of repulsive, but for better or for worse, they are dedicated, involved parents.  In fact they are keen to beat out the Indian parents in terms of being active in their schools.  From this group I've finally heard the most coherent and comprehensive discussions on education.  Sure, some of them are a bit much, but they keep the conversation going, and they share resources on tutors, classes, and activities.  In many ways, I’m really glad that I found this crowd.  I will just have to keep my meowing to myself while they roar their tiger roars.  MEOW!

China: Let's Talk About Schools

What Has the World Come to?

Every time I bitch about all the annoyances of living in China, my mom retorts, bring the kids back to the US already!  But in light of the recent Sandy Hook shooting, I'm riddled with fear of sending my kids to school even in wealthy suburban neighborhoods in the US.  I tell my mom, they could be shot!  She says, well, in China they could be hacked at by a knife (referring to the recent knife-hacking event that injured 22 at an elementary school in Henan)!  I say, being hacked at is better than being shot!  At least you are still alive!  She snorts, and says, living with such pain and possibly severe disability is a fate worse than death.  If you've been to the  hospitals in China, you know she's right.  What has the world come to, that we are wondering whether we prefer our children hacked at or shot? 

Anyway, having two young children, your mind is never too far from pondering on what kind of education to provide for them.  And our quest for education in China has not been straightforward and easy.  As if that's not enough to kill my brain cells over, now I have to worry about their safety. 

If You Aren't Rich, Life Truly Sucks

To understand the kind of competition Chinese kids face, you have to first understand the pressure of living in modern China.  Development is concentrated in large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, so housing prices in these places have skyrocketed.  Take Beijing, the market I am most familiar with, for example, to purchase a home that comfortably houses a family of three, you need about a million dollars.  US dollars, that is.  In cash, or a lot of sellers won't sell (an overwhelming number of Chinese buy houses with cash rather than take on a mortgage).  Sure, I guess you could get away with buying a place for say, 300k to 400k, but then you won't actually be living in Beijing.  It would be like saying you live in NYC when you actually live in suburban (like, very suburban, NJ, not like Jersey City).  Your commute will be at least an hour and you'll either be pressed up nose to nose against someone on the subway or bumper to bumper on the high way. 

Beijing is built on concentric ring roads and just by telling people where you live along the rings can reveal a lot about you.  The second ring road is build around the old city center, and to live within the city center, either you are an older Beijinger (like my parents with a very old government provided flat that they bought for pennies on the dollar) or you are a very wealthy expat paying over $5000 in rent living in one of those traditional courtyards.  And your next door neighbor may be twenty families squeezed in the same-sized courtyard as yours.  With a public bathroom (squatting style, no less) two doors down.  Within the second and third ring roads, you'll find a mishmash of residences--some very expensive and some very rundown.  Then come the space between third and fourth ring roads--those used to be farm land, so the developments are newer and somewhat more affordable.  That's where we live and due to limitation of space, our kids share a room with stackable beds.  Beyond fourth ring roads you have these expat compounds where they are bubbled up in their own little worlds, where they can pretend they never left their home countries (I've found for many of them, when they think of local Chinese, they think of their drivers and nannies, so it's hard for someone like me to make friends with them.  I imagine it may be hard for them to treat me as one of them when I look like one of their nannies.  All sorts of racist sentiments come loose so after a few dissatisfying encounters I've pretty much given up on the whole lot of them.  It's a whole complicated issue that merits its own blog entry).  If you live outside the fifth ring road and not in one of those McMansions, well, life is a bitch. 

And wealth is very unevenly distributed these days.  Some people are ultra rich, driving their Maseratis and Ferraris up their (multiple) villas while those earning average wage may never be able to buy a house in Beijing.  Most people still opt for salaried jobs, and the kind of job you can get is largely driven by where you had received your college degree.  For a mid-tier college graduate, a steady, high paying job may be forever out of reach.  The pressure of being able to afford a house and car is so great, because it very directly affects your ability to attract a mate or to even marry.  Sometimes I think these Chinese youngsters see each other as tradeable goods with a price-tag where one person can be straightforwardly compared with another based on annual income, square-footage of housing and size of savings account.  Competition starts as early as kindergarten, because getting into the right one will boost your chance of getting into a good elementary school, then a good middle school, then a good high school, and eventually, a good college. 

Let me run some numbers by ye faithful readers so you get a glimpse of the kind of competition these kids and their parents face.  Beijing has a dozen tier-one elementary schools, pretty much all concentrated within the third ring road.  All of them require entrance interviews.  Not the "sing Mary Had a Little Lamb for me and count to ten" kind of interview.  More like, read a newspaper in English and do additions and subtractions within 100 and write a novel maybe we'll even consider you.  I'm pretty sure I, and many of you, would have failed.  Next, bring in the parents and let's check out their socio-economic status.  If your kid isn't a bona-fide genius, or you aren't a member of China's PolitBuro, you really have no shot.  But no worries!  If your parents can find the right connections and for $10,000-$100,000 in cash (depending on the school--the most ridiculous I've heard is $150,000), you will find yourself in the welcoming arms of the school of your choice.  Though sometimes I wonder, if you had that much cash to spare, do you really need to vie for a spot so your kid can get a good salaried job?

This Is Our Experience

Our quest to find the right school had been pretty strenuous.  I knew I didn't want to dish out that much cash for my kid to be in an over-crowded tier-one school where I have to secretly slip cash and gift cards to teachers even after we get in (or your kid becomes "special" in ways you may not like).  I also loathed the ridigity of Chinese schools, but international schools don't teach Chinese and cost more than my college tuition.  For Juju's first year, we opted for a Chinese private school 30 minutes away, but with city's worsening traffic, it soon became clear that that wasn't sustainable.

We had another school right downstairs by where we lived, but it was a "migrant worker school".  Any Beijing family with any means would consider sending their kid there a travesty in the truest sense of the word.  In fact, even some migrant workers turn their noses up at the school.  But hey, it was better than having to be bused.  And it turned out, even that school wasn't easy to get in.  I called multiple times, and then went to the school with cash in hand, and they still almost turned me down.  In the end, I pretty much begged, and it cost us $1,500 in cash for them to take Juju.  Coming from a private school where she was previously coddled, Juju was shocked at how teachers treated the students and became very unhappy.  Her only consolation was the deal that we had struck: that she'd only be in that school until she finished second grade, then we were moving back to the US.  Our friends and coworkers practically dropped jaws when they found out where our daughter went to school.  It was that dramatic--as if we were sending her to juvie camp. 

Then, one day, in the first week of second grade, I had by chance discovered another school.  It was built just last year and only had first and second grades.  It was a satellite school operated by one of those not-tier-one-but-highly-desirable schools.  Again, I turned on my charms and begged (you really have to have thick skin if you want anything done in china) the school to take Juju.  In the end though, it was her own charm and good looks that got her in.  That, and $4500 in cash.  But it was the best money we'd ever spent.  The school is still taught in Chinese style, but the principal has an eye towards the west and incorporates some of the ways found in foreign schools, which, ironically, is why the original school isn't a tier-one school.  It's not as focused on just grades and the kids don't have truckloads of homework.  They put on school plays and musicals and let the kids out to play when it snows. 

Of course, none of that is as reassuring as the fact that now Juju comes home happy, singing praises of her new school.  So much so that she's forgotten about our deal.  I still think we paid heftily to go to a public school, but many parents in the city have paid much much more.  The saddest part is, while we like our school, these other parents, after paying all that money, their kids may not even be happy going to their schools.  They are overloaded with homework and have to overcome the crushing pressure of testing well. Majority of Chinese kids tend to wallow in the middle--the bad students are not that bad as once they've completed all that homework they are bound to learn a thing or two while few good students have the chance be truly extraordinary or develop into Steve Jobs/Bill Gates.  But what if suddenly one day, they wake up, and find that it's not these cookie-cutter test-taking androids but different-thinking, inventive minds that the world needs?  Some parents are realizing this early and doing everything they can to send or at least plan to send their kids outside the country for school. 

As for us, we consider ourselves very lucky.  The kids like their schools now, and we have the choice of bringing them back to the US once the pressure becomes too much. 

More on China

I've now had more than one person say that they find our travels to China fascinating.  I always thought our lives were anything but.

One of the things I always do, upon every return trip to the US, is to shop.  By the way Abercrombie and Fitch is having a great sale!  Now, now, I do realize that this is a brand that is somewhat age-inappropriate for me at this point in my life, but theirs was the only store where I actually found a more forward and fun sense of fashion.  I did realize, however, that my time shopping there for myself is limited.  In another five years or shorter, Juju will want to shop there for herself, and what could be worse than *GASP* running into your own mom in the fitting rooms!  And, oh man, it may still be ok for me to check out the hunky A&B models right now, but who wants to ogle the same guys with one's own daughter!

Anyway, I digress.  I see that some of ye faithful readers had some questions about our travels to China.  In terms of safety, China has up and down sides.  On the one hand, you never have to worry about someone shooting you with a gun or commit some kind of hate crime against you.  But on the other hand, things are not so regulated there, so accidents happen a lot.  There was an incident where a car actually ran over a foreign child lying down in the playground and then dragging him for quite some distance, injuring him pretty severely. I worry about the kids' bus rides to school, bus being this flimsy Chinese made van where the air conditioner doesn't even work sometimes.  Did you know that US school buses are made on some of the same specs as a military vehicle so that they are sturdy and can withstand a lot of force should an accident happen?  But, if we made decisions on incidents, then I'd have fears about schooling in the US as well, when I think back to Columbine or Virginia Tech shootings.

Yes, food and water safety is also a concern.  However, if we wanted to be really safe, we'd pick Europe or Australia over the US.  US is actually more liberal than Europe or Australia in terms of pesticide or fertilizer use.  It's also very very liberal with genetically modified foods, which, even in China, is much more restricted.

I wish I had more time to write about this, but we are at the airport, ready to take off for Beijing again.  I'll try to post more to satisfy ye faithful readers' curiosity when I get access to blogger again.  Until then, so long!

The Come Back Question

Dinner with Mr. Mouse Potato's ex-colleague and wife.  The question of when we bring the kids back to the States permanently comes up.  My stomach ties itself into knots.  I go into mental paralysis.

A little over four years ago when we took the kids to Beijing, the move felt right.  My mom had already signed up one of my aunts to help out and we had other family members available and willing to work for us.  In fact, for the first two years or so that we had been there, Mr. MP and I never lifted a finger doing any household chores--why should we when we had not one but two live-in help?  For the year that I had worked at Lehman Brothers, I so seldom saw the kids that now when I think back to that year, I can't recall what they were like (didn't help that I was stationed in HK for four months out of the year).  Mr. MP was also traveling frequently, trying to get promoted at work.  So what if we didn't have a normal family life?  Our careers were going full-speed ahead.  I had naively thought, at the time, that at the rate I was going, I could pretty much afford everything to my heart's content well before I turned 35.  And that's excluding the "measly" sum that Mr. MP was earning as a consultant.

I burned out even before Lehman went belly-up.  As vulgar as it sounds, when the bankruptcy was announced, I was all but relieved--I could finally have a break!  After Lehman Asia was bought out by Nomura, I stayed for another half year and then took a six-month break.  I had no real desire to go back to a real job.  I got together with a couple of guys and looked into opening our own chain of dessert shops.  When that didn't pan out, I started looking for gigs that could pay a couple of thousand dollars a month just so that I had something to do.  But my next job had found me as much as I had found 'it'.  I had a good offer--nothing like investment banking but dollar-per-hour value was much better.  As soon as I had said yes, our help left us to tend to their own families--the economic boom was good for everyone--our help had found more profitable things to do.  For the first time in more than two years, I was finally faced with the prospect of do-it-all myself.  Suddenly, staying in China lost a lot of its original allure.

When our friend Derek came to visit us in Beijing, he was very perceptive to the difficulties of life in Beijing.  For those who have not traveled to developing countries, it's very hard to imagine just how bad the pollution is in China.  New York City is pristine compared to Beijing.  And the traffic--it's so bad that you need to participate in a lottery to buy a new car; the chance of winning is something akin to Stanford's admissions rate.  For one day out of the week, our car is restricted from going on the road, creating logistic nightmares for our commute.

Beijing is hard place to raise kids.  Good local public schools are impossible to get into unless you are willing to pay (sometimes well) over $10,000 in cash to lubricate your way through, and that's if your kid can read, write, do long division during the entrance interview.  International schools sometimes restrict admissions to kids whose both parents are foreign nationals, and cost $20,000 to $25,000 a year.  We enrolled Juju and Jojo in a local private school, which costs $15,000 per child, but requires a half-hour bus ride each way.  All Chinese schools, public or private, teach in the traditional manner, where kids sit upright with their hands behind their back, and can only speak when they are asked to.  Rote-learning is the way to go and kids are encouraged to conform to the obedient good child who is easy to manage.

Then we come back to the US.  Being immersed in life in Beijing makes us forget what life was like in the US.  The level of wealth in the US is simply shocking even for those of us who have lived here for so long.  Grocery stores are spacious, clean and well-lit.  Sure, there are grocery stores in China, but be ready to be elbowing your way through the crowd and then wait in long checkout lines.  In the Jersey suburbs, sightings of actual people on the side-walks never go without me pointing out to everyone that there ARE live people in town!  Life in the US is just so much more convenient.

What is most salient for us, however, is the freedom that children have throughout their education.  It's true that Chinese kids know and memorize more stuff, but the system is stifling and produces cookie-cutter adults who need to be told what to do.  We've had a few interns at work who are graduate students from the Chinese education system.  None of them are what we'd call self-starter, mature or responsible.  Just last week my boss caught our new intern enthusiastically saying hi to one very confused office janitor, mistaking her for me, simply because she was watering the plant on my desk.  You'd think she'd be clued in by the janitorial uniform!  All of the interns have had these "what were you thinking" moments, prompting one to question just what their education did to them (and these are grads from top Chinese universities).  I shudder to think what Chinese schooling would do to Juju and Jojo, my spirited, opinionated children.  Is it any wonder why US is still the most productive country when it comes to technology innovations and cinematic wonders?

But the 9%+ GDP growth in China is hard to ignore.  Due to the currency appreciation, we've experienced steady increase in pay in US dollar terms over the years.  It is jarring to think that we get more pay in a developing country than we would in the US, but I don't even know if we'd be able to find jobs in the US nowadays.  We could move back with our current employers but we'd face effective pay cuts.

Another upside of being in China is that we are able to afford all sorts of lessons for our kids.  Currently they take singing, piano, wushu, dance and ice-skating lessons and I pay perhaps $400 a month, if even that.  But, through some investigation this week I do believe that we can get the same lessons here in the US, and though we'd have to pay a premium, I'd like to believe that the quality of the lessons would be higher.

In the end, I do believe that we'll bring the kids back permanently--it's just a question of when and where.  Even with all the talk of the US declining, I believe in America's ability to recover and to re-invent itself.  So do the Communist leaders in China.  After all, why else would almost all top political leaders in China send their kids/grandkids to the US?  You'd be surprised at just how many "Americans" these political leaders have in their families.

To Blog or Not to Blog

Whenever a new internet trend catches on in the US, someone in China will produce a copy.  Even though Twitter is censured in China, two (or maybe even more) of the internet portals in China have launched their own versions of Twitter and they are gaining popularity.  At the encouragement of one of my friends, I opened up a micro-blog (that’s what a tweet is called, literally in Chinese) account and alas, I’ve gained all of 13 followers so far, which is probably more than the number of friends I actually have in China.  Blogging had gained popularity in China in the last decade, but micro-blogs have caught on like wildfire.  To blog you have to like writing, and a lot of people see writing as a chore, but tweeting is fun!  You don’t have to think too hard about it and others don’t have to work too hard to read through them.

Even though some of my friends (the ones younger than me) are addicted to twittering, I see it as a waste of time for the most part.  So many people write so many things, most of which are not well-thought out, and in the end a lot of internet junk is created.  To be fair though, most people here have more friends and connections than I do, so it’s an effective way for them to instantly connect and share things with their fans, and maybe that’s why Twitter has been so popular both abroad and in China. 

The real reason for this entry, however, is that I often wonder about the value of me adding to the already ginormous  amount of internet junk.  If I tweet, all thirteen of my followers, some of whom are complete strangers, may not may not read it.  My blog has even fewer readership; my Chinese blog has all but one follower, and I don’t even know when is the next time I can access blogspot.  But writing is fun!  But then today I read somewhere that to make your blog popular you have to write for the readers, not for yourself.  That puts me at a dichotomy.  In the future and maybe even in the present, the readership of my blog consists of one person—me, and if I need to write for the reader, which is again, me, then I should write for me.  But if that really were the case, I’m better off keeping a journal, because blogging means that I have to be mindful of what I should and should not share with a stranger who might stumble across my blog, and I’d have to omit many interesting but intimate details in my writing. 

In the end, there is just so much stuff out there on the internet nowadays.  There is barely any time to read through enough to catch up with the rest of the world, much less to write about stuff that matters to no one but myself.  This is why I’ve been neglecting my blog.   

Who's Afraid of the Chinese Mom?

I believe by now the entire North America continent as well as people from far-reaching places in other parts of the world has read the WSJ article that’s an excerpt from Professor Amy Chua’s book.  The entire blogsphere is talking about it.  I feel like I should say something since I’m a Chinese mother myself. 

Mr. Mouse Potato was the one who sent the link to me.  As I was reading through the article, I was confused, appalled and fascinated at the same time.  I was confused because I couldn’t actually tell how, if we Chinese mothers indeed raised our children like Prof Chua, that we’d be considered superior.  I thought we resorted to such forceful tactics precisely because we really didn’t know how to do it a better way.  I was appalled that something like this was just going to perpetuate stereotypes and invite attacks on all of us Chinese mothers; we aren’t all like this!  Well, at least not exactly!  I was also fascinated because I had thought that these tactics were us Chinese mothers’ little dirty secret, something to hide under all that overachieving facade, something I thought we weren’t all that proud of.  And here she was, an educated Chinese American woman who surely cared more about saving face above all else, a professional educator, no less, touting them for the world to see!  I couldn’t believe that she just put it all out there, and lumped all of us together in there! 

When I asked Mr. Mouse Potato what he thought of the article, I was due for another surprise.  I thought he’d have some of the same reactions, but instead, he thought that perhaps we should follow Prof Chua’s example and really start cracking the whip on Juju and Jojo.  All I can say is that all these business trips one after another has made him rather far removed from the home and he must not have an idea what’s really going on. 

Professor Chua is at best a meowing kitty mom rather than a brave, well-informed roaring tiger mom, an outdated Chinese Mother version 1.0, if you will.  I’m surprised, that given her uber education, she hasn’t really advanced too far from the original version of the “Chinese Mother”, the immigrant who valued future financial stability for her children above all else, who only aimed to produce well-packaged college admissions poster children.  As a side note, I find it disturbing that she calls herself a Chinese mother; she’s not; let’s please at least get the nomenclature right—she’s a Chinese American mother (I know she used the term “Chinese mother” loosely to define strict parents, but still, that’s really misleading).  The moms here in China are Chinese mothers, and even they are attempting to shed their Chinese Mother 1.0 ways and quickly studying up on alternative parenting methods. 

I find it sad and ironic that growing up in the US and now being a professionally successful woman hasn't made Prof Chua open up to other perspectives on child-rearing.  For me, while I find most of my Asian American classmates/friends/colleagues driven, well-educated, and competent, I always thought we were kind of…one-dimensional and so similar.  Why aren’t there more Asian American actresses, star athletes, politicians??? Oh, it’s probably because they weren’t allowed to participate in school plays, spend a lot of time on PE activities, attend sleepovers and have playdates (yes, I realize there are other factors at work as well, but at least working towards these less traveled paths beginning in childhood is a start!)!  My parents weren’t really like Prof Chua, but just by being Chinese, I didn’t know another way of growing up other than being a straight-A student, a violin player and an agreeable obedient child.  Cheerleading was for those slutty white girls; school plays were for those weird drama types and they took up valuable study time anyway; dating was of course unthinkable—not only would it take up much needed time and energy only meant for studying, it will surely lead eventually to sex and pregnancy!  Now looking back, I wish I had done all that and I sure hope my children will take advantage of all the opportunities I had naively missed out on.  Well, except the dating part—don’t get me wrong, I still wish I had done it, but it’s not for my kids as it will surely lead eventually to sex (big no no ) and pregnancy (hells no!). 

I also feel sorry for Prof Chua.  She needs to come over to China and see how parents here have no choice but to raise their kids the Chinese way.  Because of such breakneck competition amongst Chinese kids, parents have no choice but to force their kids to study all the time, attend all these extra-curricular activities and avoid all activities which will not contribute to their getting into a good college.  She needs to see how unhappy these parents and children are, how parents here complain that they are raising drones, and how any family with any means will send their children overseas for school.  Prof Chua has a choice!  She can choose not to be so forceful on her children and they’ll probably still get into Harvard or Yale (and not only because she’s got legacy). 

Prof Chua needs to think about what kind of people she wants her children to be.  If we all raised our children like a so called “Chinese Mother”, how boring the world would be!  I, for one, want my children to be interesting, creative, and sociable.  I will not only let them attend playdates, I will host them!  I will encourage them to be in school plays!  They can play an instrument other than the piano or violin if they promise to persevere at it!  I want them to be good in PE, and be a star athlete!  I would think that most first or latter generation Asian American moms would have take on a more reasonable approach like me.  Why not?  We’ve seen firsthand that Stanford and Harvard will actually accept kids who are not all like us, kids who may be good at drama, kids who may not always have gotten straight As but who dared to excel in different ways.  We’ve also experienced firsthand that prestigious degrees and steady six-figure jobs do not necessarily happy people make. 

Does this mean that I will take the “western mom” approach?  Absolutely not.  There are ways that I’ll always be a Chinese mother, whether by choice or habit.  I’ve forced my not-yet six-year-old Juju play the piano for hours on end or shouted myself hoarse because she was obviously not trying hard enough.  But believe me, I was not proud of it—I was just frustrated and couldn’t think of a better way.  I will also expect my children to work hard at their school work, but if they really tried, and still couldn’t be the number one student in every subject or even get straight As, then that’s ok.  I think it might even be ok with Stanford, and if not, I’m sure there are still ways for them to be productive, happy members of society (though there will be a secretly disappointed Chinese mother who tries to remain upbeat about her children’s future).  A more balanced approach is what will make us mothers, Chinese or otherwise, tiger moms and this is what I consider Chinese Mother version 2.0, a much improved, user-friendly, flexible yet dynamic version of Chinese Mother 1.0.  We are not superior to any other moms; we are just moms who’ve learned from our predecessors and who try to be the best moms for our children.