My late and messy reaction to this whole ‘Chinese Mothers Are Superior’ Hubbub

These struggles that my mom and dad (YES, my dad, America! Asian men and Asian fathers DO EXIST) faced. How my father sewed designer labels onto handmade clothes so we could pretend we were more well-off than we really were. How a group of kids stood on one end of a block for an entire hour and relentlessly shouted racial slurs and taunts at my mother as she worked outside of our house, knowing she could do nothing to them, knowing she did not have the words to shout back. How my father had to deal with the contradictions of being a war veteran invisible because of his race, and see two of his sons enlist in the American military.

And yes, those dynamics, combined with my parents’ own personalities, effected how we were raised. There were days I was scared of my parents, days I felt guilty that I disappointed them, days when I had no idea what they wanted from me, days I tried to run away from home and days I wanted to kill myself.

I’d also write about joy – how my parents would take me to work and I would sit in their break room, drawing pictures and reading books for hours while waiting for their 15 minute break so they could come hang out with me. How my mom would bike around town with me clinging to her, how my dad would sew stuffed animals out of bargain bin fabric for me. I was going to write about the magic of going to a friend’s birthday party and playing his Atari, how my dad taught me to ride a bicycle in an empty parking lot, how a Black Panther saw me get bullied on my block and offered to teach me martial arts. And how our poverty led to my love of books and stories, because loaning books from the library was free.

In this essay, I’d own up to my own privilege – both as a male and as the youngest son, and while I went through struggles of race and class, I’ll admit that expectations were less for me than for my sisters and my older brothers. I will not dismiss patriarchy or make excuses for it – at the same time I’d assert that patriarchy and male privilege is far from just an Asian problem, it’s a problem and has been a problem in many cultures the world over. And the expectations and gender roles for Asian men are also limiting and damaging, albeit in a different way than for women.

I’d also write how, as I got older, I came to understand that a lot of the pressure I felt to pursue a white collar career came from my parents wanting me to escape the life of poverty and violence that they lived through. Around us was gang warfare, drugs, injustice, genocide – and all this to a family who just lost their country to war. I can understand why they would want me to pursue anything that would get me out of there.

I’d write about how my parents have come to understand that I can survive while working at something called a “nonprofit.” Though sometimes my dad does suggest to me that it’s still not too late for me to go to nursing school.

Then I’d write about my own struggles, and joys, of being a father to an amazing, hilarious daughter. That if Ms. Chua’s book, or any book, could contain the answers on being a good parent, I’d have read it 10 times over by now. I would write about how this process has been difficult, challenging, amazing. That I fear how my past, both as a child and as an adult, may have negative consequences on how I parent. And how nothing scares me more than the things I want to protect our child from, in this world. Sure, my partner and I have a say and choices to make, we have a duty to make informed choices about how to raise our child.

But there are some things we can only try to prepare her for. Homophobia, classism, sexism, racism. How can we, as Asian American parents, prepare her adequately for these things? How do we teach her about tragedies like the recent death of young father Jason Yang, and young son Fong Lee, both to police brutality – how can I teach her about these things when I barely know how to deal with them myself, how these things effect me on an emotional level so intense that I want to retreat entirely from the world when I think about them? Jason Yang’s kids will never see their father again. Or how it seems trivial to me to think about piano lessons and sleepovers when I try to imagine what it’s like to be Fong Lee’s parents, dealing with indescribable loss as well as continued systematic injustice. Then I’d apologize for making references to piano lessons.

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