"The day I received my letter of acceptance to New York University, I was ecstatic. It was my dream university, and my parents were pleased for me. But they also hadn’t pushed me to get into such a competitive school. In fact, the best thing they ever did for me was to discourage my perfectionist tendencies – indeed, when I was in elementary school, my dad offered to buy me a present if I got a C.
It happened when I was in third grade. An only child in an Asian family, I had just moved with my family from Taiwan to Los Angeles. Months into third grade, I developed a consuming worry about getting subpar grades. Seeing my anxiety, Dad said, “Kate, tell you what. If you get a C or lower, I’ll buy you a present. If you score higher than that, I won’t buy you anything, because you won’t need it.”
Its nice to read a “thank you” letter from an asian college student who was not pressured by her parents into a career she did not want.
That seems to be a too rare occurrence these days.
Asian is a continent. There are many different countries and cultures. Even among those countries/regions that speak Chinese, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, there are somewhat different family power structures between parents and children. In addition, many Asian parents in the US received their higher education in the US and have lived in this country for many decades, their way of thinking toward parenting and education have been americanized to some degree.
Realistically speaking, among my Asian friends, I do see quite a few tigers. The stereotype is not untrue. But at the same time, I also see quite a few “pussycats.” I see myself somewhere in between. I will not buy a gift for my kids when they get a C. I did initially refute my daughter’s request of wanting to learn violin when she was 6 because that should be the age of fooling around like what I used to be. Nevertheless, I gave in after she kept on trying for 1 year.
This is the part which makes her “Asian pussycat” parents more unusual than most parents…including Caucasian-American parents I knew in my old neighborhood and among the upper-middle class relatives’ neighbors.
For most such parents, getting a gift for a student when they got a C or lower grade was viewed as “rewarding/subsidizing poor performance” and thus, a bad thing. It was something which merited a stern discussion/lecture at the very least, not a reward.
Especially considering from their own experiences in the working world, most employers/clients/customers would not only not reward poor performance, but actually punish it in the form of poor performance reviews or firings…whether actual or in the form of clients/customers refusing to patronize the poorly performing business/professional.
It also reminds me of one Hispanic elementary school classmate whose father was a 20+ year retired Marine Veteran(Korea & Vietnam) and SNCO/former drill sergeant and an extreme “tiger dad” who was obsessed with preparing his son to attend one of the Federal Service Academies…preferably Annapolis so he can be an “Annapolis Marine officer”.
If the father found his son misbehaved in school as third graders were inclined to do or had bad grades of C or lower…the father would not only be yelling at the son, but also force him to do pushups and run for hours in the local public park in the view of all of us neighbors.
His “tigerishness” was so extreme even several older neighbors who were also war veterans/20+ year military retirees and my Asian immigrant father who did his 2 years of national military service in Taiwan as a junior commissioned officer in the '50s felt it was too much and tried to get that father to relent to no avail.
While this classmate’s room was so neat and well-organized that it would have likely passed the strictest SAMI inspection as one cousin described from his experiences at a FSA and was very athletic, he didn’t have enough of the academic acumen or standardized scores to pass muster with the FSA admissions when we were applying to colleges.
Despite all that, he did do well enough to gain a full-ride Army ROTC scholarship to a local private college. Unfortunately, that father regarded this as a serious disappointment and a manifestation of his son’s “failure”. Last time I talked with the classmate, he hadn’t talked to his father for nearly 2 years after he graduated and was commissioned as an infantry officer in the US Army.
Nevertheless, I gave in after she kept on trying for 1 year.