Summary of “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” was written by Professor Amy Chua who is a Chinese mother of two. This article was published January 8th, 2011 in the Wall Street Journal. This article is mainly intended for what Chua refers to as “Western parents.” Amy Chua’s opinion is that these “Western” mothers fail at having successful children unlike Chinese mothers such as herself. According to Chua, Chinese mothers believe that if their child fails it is directed towards their parenting and that they have failed as a parent. Chua listed all the things she doesn’t allow her children to do, and she believes that it is correlated to how successful her children will be.
Conflict in Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” Amy Tan’s, “Two Kinds”, is a short story of a Chinese immigrant mother’s conflict with her daughter Jing-Mei. In this story, Jing-Mei tells of how she resisted her mother’s overbearing efforts to inspire her to reach her fullest potential twenty years ago. Jing Mei’s mother only wanted her daughter to be a prodigy in some way. So she dominated and controlled her daughter’s life. When these traits did not surface, Jing-Mei began to realize she did not have these traits and started to feel internally inferior.
Amy Chua talks about the focus thats lately been on the Asian mothers about their way of being parents. “There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, indifferent people indifferent to their kids’ true interest.” This is a bad focus on Asian mothers, and together with the title, that makes the reason for the pause for the many western parents. It will definitely cause some anger that the asian mothers “relate” in the form of this article, and then it will draw them in and engage them in the debate, if they can disprove the article’s theories to themselves by disbelieving it. The author uses provocation to make the reader notice and be interested in the topic and make the readers relate to their own parenting. Once she has make the reader interested she engages them more by gaining their credibility by using herself as an example.
This is the first time that Kingston explicitly tells which additions to the story are her own. Not only is she referencing the story at hand, but she is also alluding to her life. While her mother very much colored her childhood, Kingston will be dictating the direction of the rest of her life. Kingston tells the story of Ts’ai Yen, a poetess captured and made to live with barbarians. Towards the end of the tale, Kingston tells of a song Ts’ai Yen sings: “Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger…her children did not laugh, but eventually sang along” (209).
To make her point clear she uses a lot of pathos and a lot of examples from experiences with herself and her two daughters, Louisa and Sofia. At the beginning when she tells the stories about her daughters trying to fight back you think ’what a terrible mother’, but she uses this feeling to support the view the readers have on the Chinese mothers as being mean to their kids so that afterwards she can tell how it turned out good and therefor the way she raises her kids is the best. Amy Chua has a high ethos because she is a professor at Yale which is a very respected job, and as a parent it makes her more reliable because she tells the reader that her parents treated her the same way that she treats her daughters, and as we can see she has been very successful. Also she uses loghos: ”In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70 % of the Western mothers said either that ”stressing academic success is not good for children” or that ”parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun”. By contrast,
The first difference is that Western parents worries a lot of their children’s wellbeing in the form of their self-esteem than Asian parents does. Asian mothers believe that the worst possible thing you could do to a child’s self-esteem is to let them give up and fail. The second difference Lu Chin displays is that Asian parents believe that their children owe them everything and must use their lives to repay and obey them. The third difference originates in Asian parents who put up very strict and firm rules for their children to follow. The rules are not made to harm the children’s childhood, for an example like Chinese daughters who can't have boyfriends in high school and can’t participate in sleep-away camps, but it simply
However, the tone quickly changes as Song begins to miss and need China. After describing an unfriendly run in with a landlord Song says “You find you need China: your one fragile identification, a jade link handcuffed to your wrist” (Song). Here we see Song relating to the sister across seas and knowing that she needs to be back with her family and the people that love her, like her mother. These two contrasting section of the poem are used to show that even though life may be tough and strenuous in China, the life lived in America can also be not as forgiving. Family and culture seem to always win the battle against rebellion to a new land, resulting in the speaker’s sister’s
The people of China have been most influenced by Confucian ideas, and during the Han Dynasty Confucianism became part of the official education. Since Confucianism was being taught widespread it influenced the minds of the Chinese people enormously. Something the Confucian ideals taught was that women must hold a position that has less power than men, lowering the status of women. The only way a women could gain any type of respect was by birthing a son. It was taught that women should not have any type of rule and no one should care about a women’s ideas.
She also described her learning Chinese like the most boring thing in the word by using some words as: “kowtow”, “chant”, “sing-san-ho” and ideographs letters. When she became ten years old, Wong “had better things to learn”, she started to study American culture, learn science subjects and read American literature. Her regard that was better than Chinese culture. She considered Chinese was “source of embarrassment”, that sounds “pedestrian”, “chaotic” and “frenzied” and that’s the reason she tried to separate herself from the family members when she “nearby American super marker outside the Chinatown”. Moreover, her brother exasperated her Chinese learning by mocking it with a pidgin speech.
Why Chinese Mothers are Superior There are numerous different ways to raise your child, and the “Western” parents often wonder how the Chinese can get so successful kids and in this article Amy Chua, who is a professor at Yale Law School and author of “Day of Empire” and "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability." explains how the difference in the Chinese and Western methods of raising your child. When I write Chinese- and Western parents it’s in a very loose way, just like Amy Chua writes in the article. Amy Chua has two girls, Louisa and Sophia, they live in New Haven. She comes with examples throughout the book on how she raised her two girls.