Why our Vietnamese Mother kicks your “Chinese” Mother’s ass (A Response to Ms. Chua’s WSJ Essay)
After seeing multiple people link this essay by Yale Law professor Amy Chua called “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” I finally rolled out of bed this morning and read through the WSJ bit. Unsurprisingly the essay effectively reinforced ethnic and cultural stereotypes; what caught my attention, however, is the fervor in which Ms. Chua writes and explains cultural differences all of which ironically, is predominantly from a what I consider an Americanized POV. Moreover, the underlying tone with which Ms. Chua stipulates her position – that there is a distinctly “Chinese” and “Western” perspective on how to raise a family and live – heavily burrows into the terminological distinction of “Traditional” and “White–washed” – that either you’re part of a distinct ethnic culture or relinquish these cultural roots and subscribe to a larger conglomerate “white” culture – something not dissimilar to traditionalist Manifest Destiny philosophy which sought to overtake non–Caucasian cultures and standardize them into a “greater White standard.”
I disagree with Ms. Chua not for her parental style – to each their own, I say – but for how she goes about defining and justifying her terms for cultural nuances and differences. At the core of her argument is an assumption I fundamentally disagree with, one that states you are either “Chinese” or “not Chinese,” “Western” or “not Western,” “strict” or “not strict,” “hard working” or “not hard working,” “smart” or “not smart,” and so on. Chua misuses these terms distinctions in attempting to explain herself – her cultural background and parental philosophy – and simultaneously reinforces stereotypes that are not only lazy, but grossly misleading. There is a aggressive “superiority” ideal tha Chua uses to define “Chinese” and “not Chinese,” that either you’re above or below par – all assuming, of course, that this “superiority” ideal is actually an ideal to begin with, given it is a socially derived ideal that doesn’t have any grounds outside of human social understanding, nonetheless one’s perception of what “superior” is at all. But most of all – and I must emphasize this a great deal – Ms. Chua accomplishes the greatest farce by describing people’s philosophies and personalities in terms of ethnities, as if adjectives are somehow tied to one’s skin tone, body and facial characteristics – something not dissimilar to White supremacists justifying the intellectual “inferiority” of Africans after measuring and comparing skull sizes.
If I subscribed to Chua’s social terms and philosophies, I’d probably end up being the bastard Frankenstein child of world cultures: perhaps my left leg would be from an Ghanian native and my right from a Frenchman, with my right arm from a Mongolian and my left from an Indian, and maybe my hair would be from a Cambodian and torso from a Brazilian, all topped off with my face from an Austrian (maybe here there patches of skin would be from a Kiwi native). I’m sure Ms. Chua would have a field day trying to determine if I were “Chinese” or “not Chinese,” or maybe not – her definitions could be so stringent that if I deviate in one aspect from being “Chinese,” that automatically puts me in the “not Chinese” category.
