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.