i know it's january but i need some sun stat before i lose my mind.

i am rapidly growing tired of the snow. i hate snow, quite a lot actually. i don't remember being a child who liked snow. i appreciated a snow day when they appeared but those were so infrequent i think i can remember all of them from my whole schooling career, kindergarten to college graduation. it is cold, wet and a general inconvenience and there is certainly no convincing me that there is a good reason for it. and the next person who says "but it's so pretty!" is probably going to get slapped. i probably should live somewhere less tundra-y than michigan but besides this rather annoying part, i do like it here. some day, i will be a snow bird and that will be truly lovely. i'm pretty sure that is one of my biggest motivating factors to go to work daily, the promise of wintering somewhere tropical and enjoying the rest of the year in my beloved mitten. it's nice to dream, right?

my friend maralyn sent me an article the other day written by a chinese mother about her parenting technique. this was published in the wall street journal and is an excerpt from her book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." the headline of the story in the wall street journal was "why chinese mothers are superior" so she automatically had my attention, considering i was raised by a japanese mother. i figured it was going to be interesting. i was met promptly by this list that caught my attention and got me to finish the rather lengthy piece.

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

now, my mom was quite strict when i was a kid. we had rules for everything and there were certainly times in growing up where i realized that my house was way different than my friends. most of those realizations happened in high school and early college when i realized that the way i processed information or choices and consequences was quite different than my peers. i am grateful now for the strong sense of right and wrong that my mother instilled in me no matter how difficult it has made relating to people sometimes. i know i am a stronger person because of it. what the tiger mother in the article failed to realize, that had me horrified at the end of her essay was that not allowing her children any kind of socializing was going to leave them kind of weird and using this strict "eastern" way of raising her children was going to make it really hard for them to adjust to living in the "western" world. another friend sent me an editorial from cnn that a different asian author wrote, discussing his growing up with "tiger parents" and i found myself agreeing with him easily. that author wrote a memoir titled "I Love Yous are for White People" and in his editorial, he said "I'm sure I appear successful and happy on the surface. I'm a published author, a successful executive, and I have a Ph.D. in psychology. In spite of this, my parents' approach failed. I'm torn to pieces on the inside."

i'm sure that if you gave most kids the chance to tell the stories of their childhood, they will come up with some stories that make you jump back and think "what were your parents doing." i know that the trials and tribulations of my own childhood weren't nearly as dramatic as these two writers. and in the same breath, i find myself relating with the sentence that the second author wrote when in a stand alone sentence he said "it was never enough." that is exactly how i feel with my parents and will forever be a part of who i am. i don't necessarily, hold it against my mom but i know if she didn't see the world as black and white and expect me to exist within it, i'd probably be a little better off. instead, she raised someone who has been fighting becoming that uptight for as long as i can remember.

maralyn and i were discussing this, because she is my only asian friend so truly one of the very few people i know that can relate to this. we discussed the way our parents were strict and what was wrong with the tiger mom's methods. then we traveled into a curious conversation about therapy and the way people cope. i mentioned that i have told every therapist i have ever had that my problem is that i feel like no matter what i do, it's not enough; she mentioned that she just keeps things suppressed where they belong so not to get into the messy business of going through them. my degree is in psychology so there is a little bit of buying into on my end that going through your problems is ultimately going to help you but not to the same degree that i would think most of my white friends seem to believe. i told maralyn that i have been told so many times by various white people that i'll feel better if i talk about it. that seems a curious bit of advice because who really knows how to deal with what you hear from people? are you prepared to hear a story, like the one i read earlier, of the young boy who was forced to eat cow brains in his parents' vain hope that would make him smarter?

all of these articles, i think, do a good job of pointing out how different "eastern" "tiger" cultures are from "western" culture, even when the kids in question are being raised in the west. some part of it is unavoidable. the adults we become are the result of the work our parents put in, for better or for worse. i feel like i'm pretty much as american as they come and i still found myself nodding along to these stories. maybe the point that should be taken away from all this conversation about strict asian parents is that the children of these parents should strive to find some kind of balance between the strict culture of the east and the "i love you" nurturing culture of the west.

from the half tiger girl

until next time...