Amy Chua on Superior Chinese Mothers

January 11, 2011

I’m sure that Amy Chua had no idea she was about to light a Baby Boomer fuse that would explode when she wrote her essay published in The Wall Street Journal about Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.

In 2000, Paul Begala, a political strategist for President Bill Clinton, wrote in Esquire, “The Baby Boomers are the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self aggrandizing generation in American history.”

Begala was right.

The Boomers also gave birth to the narcissistic, self-esteem generation.

Amy Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother went on sale today (January 11, 2011), and my wife and I went to the local Barnes and Noble and bought a copy.

Nancy (not her real name), who works for Barnes and Noble, told us of an experience she had substitute teaching in a girls P.E. Class. She said there were about 150 girls. Half were Asian and half were Caucasian.  When Nancy told them to sit and read or do what they wanted, the Asians took out books and studied. The Caucasians started to text, do makeup and gossip.

Studies show that the average American Boomer parent talks to his or her children less than five minutes a day and more than 80% never attend a parent-teacher conference. Boomer parents are so self-absorbed with other interests that TV, the Internet, video games and other teens raised many of their children.

However, when Chinese mothers come together, their conversations focus on their children and education, which explains why studies show Asian students have the lowest incidence of STDs, teen pregnancy, illegal drug use and the highest GPAs, graduation rates from high school and highest ratio of college attendance.

What do you think Boomer mothers talk about when they get together?

A close friend of mine, who isn’t Chinese, read Amy Chua’s essay and many of the comments attacking Chua for her tough stance as a mother. He said it is obvious that Chinese mothers love their children and American mothers don’t because love means sacrifice.

The vicious responses I have been reading on Blogs and in some book reviews are obviously a guilt reaction for not being good parents. The truth hurts.

Learn about Education Chinese Style

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

3 Comments | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese women, cultural differences, education, family values, parenting | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Harbin’s Winter Wonderland

January 5, 2011

Casey Chan of Gizmodo posted A Winter Wonderland in China with two photos of The Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival in Harbin, which is located in Northeast China where the average winter temperature is a (minus) – 16.8 degrees Celsius.  The Festival is held in January.

Wikipedia says the annual Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival has been held since 1963. 

However, it was interrupted for a few years during the Cultural Revolution until it resumed in 1985.  Mao died in 1976, and it took time for China’s economic engine to build momentum. The fact that the festival resumed in 1985 is a sign of the changes taking place in China.

In the Comment section of Chan’s Gizmodo post, Adam wrote, “China is awesome when it comes to giant decorations and celebrations (just remember the Olympics!), but the people there still have an extremely low quality of life. Why, if they can do some things so well, do they fail at others?”

Sega8800 replied to Adam,” How do you know their life is low quality?”

Adam’s answer was a Wikipedia  link to a post of a 1994 book, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power. The couple that wrote the book spent five year in China (1988 to 1993) as journalists for the New York Times.

I laughed.

The material for this book is over 17 years old. Time did not stand still. During those years, China transformed itself by rebuilding the old cities while building more than a hundred new ones.

In fact, the standard of living in China has skyrocketed as the middle class expands and grows. Last year, Chinese bought more new cars than Americans did.

Even the lifestyle of peasants in rural China improved and will continue to do so as China extends electricity to rural China, subsidizes appliances for the rural Chinese, builds new roads, airports and railroads, etc.

The embedded videos with this post are of Harbin and previous festivals.

Learn of China’s Spring Festival, which comes in February.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

Leave a Comment » | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, environment | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Sex, Sex, Sex as Reported by “The China Law Blog”

January 3, 2011

The China Law Blog posted a piece in August 2009 that I became aware of recently titled “A Western Woman in China….Sex, Sex, Sex????!!!!

Dan of The China Law Blog mentions a post at Gina in Shanghai, another Blog. He summarizes Gina’s post with “Chinese view Western women to be like the women in “Sex in the city”.

Then he finishes his brief post with a question “How do you feel about attitudes toward sex in China?”

Actually, I don’t think I have an opinion on that topic.

After all, how others behave or think is not my problem to carry around like a burden, as Gina seems to be doing.


Does this episode of “Sexy Beijing” hosted by Sufei support the “Sex in the City” Stereotype Gina is talking about?

Then I clicked on the link that took me to Gina in Shanghai to read her longer post.

I discovered that Gina is from Palo Alto in the US, which isn’t far from where I live in the East Bay.

Reading her post, I sensed her frustration but also saw her inability to accept others for who they are and what they believe. From what I’ve learned, 85% of an individual’s personality is formed by the environment he or she grew up in and only 15% comes from genetics.

In fact, the multitude of environments in China are very different from the US, where most people grow up as if they live in a jar expecting the rest of the world outside the jar to learn how to act and think like them as if all Americans were the same–isn’t that a reverse stereotype?

In her conclusion, Gina wrote, “There are frustrations with the way we are treated differently, and that the way we look comes associated with really heavy assumptions about our personality, our behavior, our way of life, and even our country…”

When I finished reading Gina’s post, I thought how Americans do the same thing to the Chinese—stereotype them with heavy assumptions about their personalities, their behavior, their way of life and even their country.

Most of those assumptions are supported by American politicians and the Western media and of course maybe individuals such as Gina when she says, “At first, I found these statements funny, but this quickly became something that made me incredibly angry and defensive. As a woman who is quite proud of my independence and my personal choices, I hated being pigeonholed into this ‘morally degenerate’ category. But it seemed like a losing battle…”

That poses a question—is there a double standard when it comes to sex or is it because women and men are different genetically and they grow up in different individual environments?

Shatter your stereotype of China (if you have one) and learn about China’s Sexual Revolution

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

Leave a Comment » | American culture, astronomy, China, Chinese Culture, Chinese women, cultural differences, expatriates | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

New Year’s Recap

January 1, 2011

There’s much about China that I did not know when we started this journey on January 28, 2010. 

We visited China’s early dynasties (the Xia, Shang and Zhou) before Qin Shi Huangdi became the first emperor and unified China.

Then we visited the Han, Tang, Sung, Ming and Qing Dynasties while learning of the chaos and anarchy between the dynasties.

We met Confucius and Wu Zetian, China’s only woman emperor during the Tang Dynasty.

We discovered China’s music, art and opera while meeting one of China’s national treasures, Mao Wei-Tao.

Learning about the 19th century Opium Wars started by the British and French opened my eyes to evils I had not known of.

What shocked me most was how the West forced China to allow Christian missionaries into China along with opium.

One reader challenged me in a comment saying that couldn’t be true then didn’t respond when I provided links to the evidence that missionaries and opium were included in the same treaty, which forced the emperor to accept against his will.

Then I sat spellbound as I joined Mao and the Communists on the Long March where more than 80,000 started out and about 6,000 survived — the only choice was to fight or die.

Along the way, I learned that Sun Yat-sen was the father of China’s republic and how Chiang Kai-shek started the Civil War in 1925 when he ordered his army to slaughter the Chinese Communists.

I didn’t know that the Communist and Nationalist Parties were the two political parties of China’s first republic and how it was the US supported Nationalists that fired the first shot that shattered Sun Yat-sen’s dream for China.

After the Communists won the Civil War in 1949, I saw the suffering and death from Mao’s mistakes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976.

Then we learned how Deng Xiaoping saved China from the Revolutionary Maoists and launched the Capitalist Revolution, which led to the Tiananmen Square incident then China’s Sexual Revolution.

And there was my continued attempt to explain China’s Collective Culture. One comment basically said, “Yea, sure!” as if there were no such thing as cultural differences such as this.

We also were introduced to other Blogs about China such as the China Law Blog.

Of course, with more than a thousand posts in a year, what I have mentioned here is but a small part of the 2010 journey of China.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

Leave a Comment » | China, Chinese arts and music, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Communism, Confucianism, cultural differences, history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Living in an Egg House

December 27, 2010

Matt Hickman at Mother Nature Network reports on a young Beijing architect that built a solar-powered, egg-shaped hut and planted it on the streets of Beijing near where he worked.

I’ve been to Beijing several times and getting around is a challenge since there seems to be gridlock on the roads almost 24/7, so this was a smart move.

Hickman writes that the Egg House measured six feet at its highest point. The architect, Dai Haifei, built the wheeled home for $964 (US) using a bamboo frame clad with sack bags filled with sawdust and grass seeds.

Inside the egg house is a bed, water tank, washbasin and night table. Plug-in possessions, including a bedside lamp, were powered by a solar panel on top of the pod.

If you want to learn more of how Dai Haifei lived in his egg, click on the Mother Nature Network link above.

However, earlier this month Hickman reports that Haifei was forced to remove his egg from the sidewalk and is currently living with friends.

Tanto News powered by Xinhua, China’s state-run media, explains why Dai Haifei resorted to such an extreme.  The cost of living in Beijing or Shanghai is high.

A recent survey showed that 80% of college graduates start their careers in second tier cities instead of first tier cities such as Shanghai or Beijing.

It seems people may live comfortable in a second tier city with a monthly salary of 4,000 yuan (about $600 US dollars).

However, in Shanghai, people barely survive with monthly earnings of $750 US.  To live in Shanghai or Beijing would require at least $30,000 US annually.

Discover more about China Going Green

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

Leave a Comment » | China, Chinese Culture, economy | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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