I Wish My Chinese Mother Screamed at Me More OftenS

This weekend, I came across "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" by Amy Chua. Since I have a Chinese mother, I assembled my face into a self-righteous smirk and began to read. But—woe is me!—my Chinese mother's a fraud.

For Amy Chua revealed that my Chinese mother (maiden name: Lily Chua) failed her ethnicity by failing to slave-drive me with the "screaming, hair-tearing explosions" necessary for raising a superior child. Consequently, I am not a math genius who performs open heart surgery and violin concertos simultaneously, but a blogger who spends her days contemplating Katy Perry's breasts. I learned arithmetic not by "every day drilling," but the way every red-blooded American does, by typing equations into my TI-86 during marathon sessions of Drugwars. (Maybe I got the "sneaky Chinaman" gene instead of the "obedient Chinese daughter" one?) And my mother and I never had showdowns like this:


"The Little White Donkey," just like Amy Chua's husband, a stupid caucasian ass named Jed who lacks her superior Asian childrearing skills:


Reading Amy Chua's article, I am sad as a broken fortune cookie. If only my Chinese mother had humiliated me in newspaper articles that would plague my dating life forever—maybe I, too, could have performed piano solos in Carnegie Hall, like Amy Chua's daughter did, according to Amy Chua. How unlucky I am: I have never hated my mother.

My only solace: that Irish-American father's inferior academic genes came packaged with superior genes for drinking.

That said, Amy Chua appears to have absorbed a few American parenting skills, like the incessant upper-class need to one-up every other upper-class parent in the tri-state area. Mommy bragging: The virtue that unites us all. [WSJ]

Update, Part 1: Yes, commenters, I know Margaret Cho is Korean-American. Chua's strategy of "using the term 'Chinese mother' loosely" is similar to Cho's hard-ass Asian mom schtick, which uses stereotypes to comedic result.

Update, Part 2: Mean Chinese Mom Swears She is Nice Sometimes