Is your kid "manufactured"?

mcat2
Sat, 01 Aug 2015 17:48:15 +0000

The student’s silence in the presence of parents and college officials would not necessarily be a sign of being managed, let alone manufactured, but a sign that the student is being respectful of elders.

This reminds me of a youtube video, in which Elaine Chao (after she had stepped down as the Secretary of the Department of Labor) was invited to give a talk to a group of college students in China. When her father was invited to go up to the platform toward the end of the talk - likely before the question and answer session (mostly just to honor him only), she subconciously walk outward of the center of the platform and let her father be in the center. This is likely to “pay her respect” toward his father. Her father really said very little from that point on because most questions from the students were for her rather than for her father. But still, she stood not in the center and somewhat behind her father from that point on. (She spoke in English in this interview. I think she once mentioned , not in this particular talk, that she had to speak in English in any more public event – kind of hinting that she needed to do so because the US government needs to make sure what she said would not result in any “damage” to her country, or something along this line.)

In some other interviews, whenever the father happened to have something to say, the daughters would immediately keep their silence, until their father finished all that he wanted to say. (For some reason, the mother has never been interviewed (language barriers and/or cultural reason?) – but a building in Harvard Business School was named after her, a year after she passed away. It was named after her because these daughters and their families wanted to honor her. BTW, the father once said his eldest daughter, Elaine, was the poorest among all of her daughters but she achieved the most. So he had to pass more of his money to her. There was an article in which it is said Elaine’s own family became wealthy mostly because of the money passed down from her father, neither from her husband nor from herself - because both of them have been working for the government for their whole life – but I have side-tracked here.)

In other interview, I heard that when the parents had invited guests to their family to have a meal, daughters were not expected to sit and eat at the same table at the same time with the guests and their parents (i.e., elders). They were supposed to eat afterwards - just in case they might be called to “serve” the guests/parents when needed. This family’s dynamic was still like this when the daughters were quite grown and Elaine had become a government official (but not the head of the department of labor yet). Some guests finally protested and said they felt “uncomfortable” being served by them and their family changed this practice.