Out for Tiger Mother Blood: In Defense of Chinese Kids

Listening: I face the storms at the tides from the lighthouse and I want that. Unleash the storm and the night.
What's my problem? Some parents don't realize that sometimes their kids know better.

I have just finished reading Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. To be honest, It only took me a few days to read over the commute times back and forth to work and a couple of hours here at the coffee shop, where I, yet again, have no free wifi. At least it's close to my house.

Anyhow, as I have read this book, all I have wanted to do for the entire book was punch Amy Chua in the face. Seriously. It dredged up a lot of specific feelings that I still harbor from my childhood. The book brings up memories I have of wanting to stab my parents in the face with a pencil, smash my violin against the wall and climb out the window either to escape or face plant on the pavement.

The parenting model that Amy Chua used on her daughters isn't too far from that which my parents used, and her two daughters aren't too far off from my brother and I. I can all too well imagine what Chua's youngest (a number two as well) felt and was thinking. It seriously puts a lump in my chest and fury in my arms. (I am completely serious about the book making me want to punch someone.)

I think that the parenting model used by both Chua and my parents, though they claim that it's all for the children, is not one of altruism, but one of narcissism. Who can have "the best" child? Of course, it will be them. While they claim to have faith in their child to be "the best," they don't realize that, of course, they can be "the best," but it may not be in the way that they deem valuable.

Something that I have realized over the past ten years is that prestige in youth means dick. I'll take my brother as an example. He was a top ten chess champion under the age of eighteen. He was a national mathlete. He went to MIT for undergrad and Cornell for a Ph.D.. Even though he only played piano up until sixth or seventh grade (if I remember correctly), he did play piano... until chess took over his life. He made straight As in high school. He had plenty of extra-curricular activities. He was a parent's (any parent's) wet dream. Now, he's a statistics professor at a small college in Boston, and he hates his job.

You would figure that someone with that much success would find a job to love, or at least he would have his choice of jobs, one of which he would love. Not so much. I see that he loves game theory and things like that, but I don't see him moving towards it at all. I think that it may be partially due to the fact that jobs in that field are few and far between. I also think that it might because my parents would be clearly disappointed in him if he started working in gaming. Then they would have two failure children.

This brings me to the self-endulgent part of the blog where I hold a pity party for myself. Well, it won't be too big of a party, maybe just a small gathering of pity friends.

Growing up, I was carted around the country as my brother played chess. We would go on amazing road trips. To be honest, I enjoyed seeing different cities, even if it was from the hotels or the hotel ballrooms where the chess tournaments took place. I ate Steak & Shake and McDonald's at rest stops on the road and met kids from New York, Massachusetts, California, New Mexico and Indiana. At the time, I lived in either St. Louis or Chicago, so those places were far away to me. And although I played in some of the tournaments (my rating never broke 1100, which is pretty damn low), I never cared about the game. I was just dragged around like a sock monkey, second fiddle to the golden boy.

Much like Chua's second daughter, I was given a choice of piano or violin, and I chose violin just to be different from my brother, but it wasn't really much of a choice. It was EITHER piano OR violin. There was no guitar. There wasn't even a trumpet. And it wasn't even fiddle or jazz violin. It was strictly classical. I'm not saying that I don't like classical music, because I do. I just didn't want to be playing it, much like the fact that I love sushi, but I don't want to be rolling it as a career. I think that I would have stuck with the violin a little longer if I hadn't been forced into taking orchestra class, and maybe if I was shown the different dimensions of the violin. That's one of the major flaws of Chua's "Chinese parenting" model is that it's one dimensional. If it does work, those children look good on paper.

My brother looks fantastic on paper, but sometimes I look at him and I see a train wreck. Sometimes my parents ask me to help him dress a little better, take him traveling and get his life together a little bit, but the problems are too big and they don't present themselves in a conventional sense. It's not something that one can teach either. It's something someone has to realize about themselves, much like the way a lot of Americans need to realize that America isn't the end-all/be-all of the world. So, in a sad commentary, I have chosen to distance myself and focus on the train wreck that is my own life.

I am a cook. It's not a career that any Chinese parent would want for their kid. I'm not the next Ming Tsai (without the douchey hair), and although at one point I wanted to be, I have no desire to be that any more. The unequivocal truth is also, that I'm not a shoemaker. I've cooked for the Governor and Branford Marsalis in just the last week. Over the course of my career, the list of people who have eaten off of plates that I have composed is both long and distinguished. I may or may not be great, but I'm certainly good. I don't cook at the Cheesecake Factory. But, I am also at least five years behind my peers.

When I talk about what a waste of thirty thousand dollars a year college was, my parents always say, "Well, if you didn't go to college, you wouldn't have started cooking for yourself and you wouldn't be cooking now." True. Indisputable. However, I first discovered food one night with two of my pals at the California Grill in Disney's Contemporary Resort. What would have happened if I had been given the option of having a more active role in family dinners growing up instead of strictly the awful task of doing dishes (something I abhor to this day unless I have a restaurant dishwasher, and I'm not talking about Miguel, Fredo or Ramiro). Would I have gone to culinary school instead of college? What would have happened if I took the year off that I wanted to take off after high school? Would I have gotten a job in a kitchen and started my career earlier?

What would have happened if I was raised with more of an ability to explore? Maybe I could have been a good musician. I constantly wonder how my life would have turned out if I had been given the option of having my own opinion about things. I wonder if I would actually have more confidence than I do if I hadn't been mentally lambasted throughout childhood. There's a fine line between pushing and making someone feel like shit. It's a line that Amy Chua may or may not have learned by the end of the book, and it's one that I'm not sure that my parents ever got.

I've spent the majority of my life feeling like I was shit. Granted it wasn't ALL my parents' fault. There were a vast array of women in there that also contributed to that. But up until I took my life into my own hands and stop listening to the crowd (which included my parents and random women who wouldn't even engage in small talk at a bar), that I started feeling better about myself. Chua's "Chinese parenting" model had nothing to do with my new found inner strength. It had everything to do with telling everyone to fuck off and bootstrapping it. I'm sure that my parents want to take credit for my work ethic, but it had nothing to do with them. It had everything to do with being tired of my life and living up to everyone else's standards. It had everything to do with me wanting something for myself.

It is because of this transformation that didn't happen overnight that I don't want to be the next Ming Tsai (with or without douchey hair). I want to do what I love. I want to assign value on my life and what I produce. I don't care if my name is out there or not (although I would prefer it not to be big). I just want to do what I do and hope that some small demographic appreciates it. I don't want approval from Michelin, Zagat, Yelp or Chowhound when I open my own joint. I just want the accolades of people "mmm"-ing, chewing loudly and being boisterous about their own lives.

Chua's story isn't over, though. Her daughters are eighteen and fifteen right now. One is about to go off to college (I'm assuming Ivy League), the other one is in the midst of, for me, one of the most awful parts of my life. Their and Chua's success doesn't mistakenly come from an Ivy League education. The answer of success or not comes from whether Chua's daughters excel at what they love, if they can even figure out what they love.

That's one thing that Chua's "Chinese parenting" model doesn't allow, even more so than the "Western" parenting model. How to find your passion. How to find what you dig. How to find what will get your rocks off every day you wake up in the morning. It upsets me that when I ask so many of my friends what they dig, what they want to do with their lives, even as far behind as I am, they have no idea. But they're entrenched in this nine to five grind, happy to give their forty plus hours a week for the two days of weekend and two weeks of paid vacation.

Today, I was catching up with a friend of mine in Germany. She's about to finish school and she's already resigned to being enslaved by corporate Germany. I'm sure that there are people out there who are perfectly happy being a cube-dweller. But, if you know that you're not going to be, why would you do it? Why would you resign yourself to it? It's like my friend in Germany can't see the possibilities in the world, something that I couldn't do for the longest time, because I was brought up to believe in the mainstream ideal of success and security. Ugh. It's just so infuriating.

I'm not saying that childhood should be easy and that children should be allowed to do whatever they want to. I do, however, believe that children should be encouraged to think outside the box. I believe that children should be encouraged to try things that they want to try, but that they shouldn't be allowed to butterfly about. By this, I mean that children should be allowed to try whatever they want to try, but they should commit to it for a decent amount of time.

Anyhow, as you can see, this book has kind of riled me up. It makes me so angry to look at some of the parenting going on, not just by Chinese parents, but by Western parents as well. Too strict and iron handed, too free and uncontrolled. Each side is a slippery slope. I know it's easy to make criticisms from the cheap seats, being that I am not a parent myself (at least not that I know of), but I can speak on my experiences being a child who felt like he was the subject of mental warfare. Part of me really wanted to re-read the book, underline, highlight and put notes in the margin and send the book to my parents. The notes would read things like, "When you did things like this, I wanted to stab you" and "I feel like I should still be in therapy for times when you talked like this to me," but what would that do now?

I realize that the book was not a how-to guide of parenting, but I wonder sometimes if she, through all of the time raising her daughters thought that her way was the right and only way. I wonder if at any time from her youngest daughter was born until she finally cut down on violin at age thirteen, did Chua ever think that she didn't know better than her daughter. She talks about giving her daughters credit to be able to take the criticism, and yet she didn't give her daughters the credit of knowing themselves, knowing what they dig and what they don't. Taking out the garbage, no one digs. It's something that has to be done though. Practicing the violin for X hours a day, when you didn't even choose the instrument that you wanted to play, no one digs. That's just bullshit. That's just parents projecting their own displeasure in their own lives on their kids. You fucking take violin lessons and practice X hours a day. Don't drag your kids/me into your personal dream. Your dreams for your kids are not the same as your kids' dreams.

I'm lucky. I'm lucky I bootstrapped my ass out of the hole I was put in. I'm lucky I made the friends that I made who supported me in my career change, who even encouraged it before I even knew that it was what I wanted to do with my life. I'm lucky that I've found mentors and brothers and sisters in the kitchen brigades that I have been lucky enough to have been a part of. It is because of that luck that I now try to help my friends and my fellow cooks to follow their dreams, to help them bootstrap it, to help them to make a fearless leap of faith to become who they want to become. I don't know how to get everywhere or anywhere for that matter. I do know how to take a leap though. I have leaped over the tiger gorge, but I still have some climbing to do before I'm out of the ravine completely.

Well, this blog has turned into a bit of a tirade or book report gone bad. I had meant to tell you all about the fact that I have been kind of clutch in the kitchen these days filling in wherever needed whether it be raw bar, pastry, grill or private dining. I'm all over the place. I'm working around forty eight or forty nine hours a week with time and a half for everything over forty, so I'm making decent money. When baseball season hits, I'm sure I'll be making sixty hours at least. For now, I'm bored on my days off and work is work. I can't wait for it to get warm.