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There's been this hoo-ha over "the western mom vs. the chinese mom" since the Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt from Amy Chua's memoir about her parenting as an Asian mother in the USA. She's received a lot of criticisms and death threats even since the article ran in the paper. So her daughter's (Sophia) written in in response. I'll leave you to read it - you can click on the link below the title. I got it from my friend's facebook page (yay to mobile surfing!) and totally enjoyed the read on my train journey.
Just as I stepped out of the train door, it hit me in a "!!!!!" kind of moment that I was actually brought up in exactly the same way. It seemed unrecognizably different being lived out through another person's life. I've been so conditioned by years of western education to think that the stereotypical pro-open and creative american parenting style is the way to go that I forgot my parents' current laidback-ness is a not too long ago change.
My mom was always the stricter one - and I daresay she held standards as tight as Amy Chua. I was rarely allowed to watch the television as a child (a pastime that is still non-existent to me now); I was forced to learn the piano - a process I hardly enjoyed; my Dad was prone to pampering me but it was a different story with my grades. Very typically Singaporean-Chinese, except for the television part. Yet, they lent a balance in the way they encouraged me to expand my capacities and experiences and was never for confining me to a measured and rigid route to success.
After I hit 18, I stopped buying the "live for the moment" cliche. I learnt that it is almost the cleverest way to make people live stupidly.
There’s one more thing: I think the desire to live a meaningful life is universal. To some people, it’s working toward a goal. To others, it’s enjoying every minute of every day. So what does it really mean to live life to the fullest? Maybe striving to win a Nobel Prize and going skydiving are just two sides of the same coin. To me, it’s not about achievement or self-gratification. It’s about knowing that you’ve pushed yourself, body and mind, to the limits of your own potential. You feel it when you’re sprinting, and when the piano piece you’ve practiced for hours finally comes to life beneath your fingertips. You feel it when you encounter a life-changing idea, and when you do something on your own that you never thought you could. If I died tomorrow, I would die feeling I’ve lived my whole life at 110 percent.
She's right. Creativity counts for nothing without discipline and perseverence. Life will be meaningless without responsibility and morality. It's not just an either-or; they're two sides that a coin must have in order to be of value.
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