The 8Asians Talk About: Fake Tiger Mom on ABC

Our internal e-mail lists have us discussing all kinds of stuff: Asian American identity, representation in the media, the experiences of activism in an academia setting and its progression as we transition to the working, adult world. And sometimes, we talk about how ABC News did it all wrong on their “What Would You Do?” segment about a fake Tiger Mom ripping her daughter a new one over an A- grade. This lead to an interesting discussion about what a real Asian parent would (not) do in public, our own experiences growing up, the grades in the school system and waffle cut fries.

Susan: Why would she yell in the restaurant? I thought one of the things about Asian parenting was that discipline was done (mostly) privately?

Ben: I actually found it funny on so many levels. First, any one of us that has lived under stricter Asian parenting, would know that the child might respond in English, but the berating usually is in some sort of Asian language. Next off, I didn’t even see the stuff that most of my friends got while growing up. Miss a math problem, rap on the fingers with a ruler or worse… a bamboo cane (true story, a friend of mine got this one). If there was any public fiasco, most Americans wouldn’t know what they’d be saying considering you’d hear “[Asian language]A-! [Asian language] A!”

Amusingly, the stuff our gens went through was nothing compared to what Mom and Dad went through, from what I heard. 1 teacher, 60-100 students. I remember Dad telling a story about how they had to line up after tests were graded in accordance to how many percentage points they missed, and you got rapped on the head for every point missed. And we think we had it tough. It’s all so relative.

Personally, I sort of wished my parents pushed me harder in my younger age so I wouldn’t have screwed up so much later on. Would have turned out to be a better contributor to society instead of the Asian bum you see before you.

John: agree with Ben that a more realistic portrayal would have been the Mom yelling in an Asian language . I also agree with Ben on that most public Chinese “fighting” in restaurants is over who is going to pay. I always thought that was so stupid…Yeah, losing “face.” My parents were pretty lenient when compared to Amy Chua.

Tim: Wow, it’s super hard to watch that video and not take it personally because I know if it was a white woman, she would just be a bad mother, but since she’s an Asian, she’s a bad Asian mother, and I get to be guilty (or pitied) by association. What this makes me think of is the Better Luck Tomorrow Ebert comment, “You wouldn’t say that to a white filmmaker.”

it makes me think of when I was in college and doing martial arts and traditional Chinese dances, Asian American activists came up to me and said “why are you reinforcing the stereotypes?”

I guess this is our growing relationship with our own country, as we get to know each other, we’re not in that first date, first impression situation, even though we want so badly to be a “credit to our own people” and be that perfect addition to the American culture.

Joz: The entire Tiger Mother thing has had been thinking about how my parents reacted to “bad” grades and I honestly never remember being screamed at or berated for getting an A-. My parents would give me that look — not the look o’ death, but that look of disppointment so severe that I’d push myself to work harder on my own.

My parents would always tell me that I was lucky because supposedly all the other Asian kids got yelled at and I always assumed that was true. Was it? Did Asian parents REALLY yell at their kids like this over A-minuses? I don’t know because I only had my own experience to go on and like other people are saying, this scenario– if it did ever happen– would never be played out publicly and certainly not in English.

Moye: I never got yelled at for an A-. I got yelled at for getting an F. 🙁

Mike: YOU GOT AN F? WHAAT?! NO WAFFLE CUT FRIES FOR YOU!!1!

Moye: It was in fourth grade. I failed the grammar quiz about prepositions. It was like the worst day of my life.

Efren: I have plenty of F’s on my transcript. Don’t mean a damn thing, and it confuses the hell out of so-called Tiger Moms and Dads who realize that I got into such great schools despite my dubious transcript. 😉

Jeff: When I saw my son’s progress report, I asked him why he got all of those A- grades. His response was “Ha ha real funny, Dad.”

More seriously, my parents never hassled me about my grades, and as for my kids, I don’t hassle them about A- grades (as I said in my bad Asian post), but I do question them about the B grades. I certainly wouldn’t do it in public.

Koji: The funniest thing about this video is that in reality, a real Asian mom who would get mad at an A- grade would not go out to eat dinner alone with her child but if they did, they wouldn’t go to a restaurant full of non-Asians. Maybe it’s just the area I live in…

Tina: Grades are total BS anyways. No educational researcher in their right mind would use grades as a experimental variable in their research. It’s totally based on the whim of the teacher. I say stop making our kids kill themselves over false products (a.k.a. grades and test scores) and start supporting them in creating true products like writing for publication, researching local environmental issues, making films, or documenting local history…

*puts soap box away*

Susan: I can see where having tangible products or results could be better in some sense, but what about in strictly numerical or equation-based disciplines like chemistry, physics, or math? I think there needs to be some mix between the two types. Grades are arbitrary, but test scores can allow for comparison–at least for students within the same classroom.

That being said, I wish that college were more based on learning for the sake of learning. At least at Penn, many of the Wharton (business school) kids are just using school as a way to get networking contacts before they go off into the Real World. That Asian American History class they took? Not important. That same Asian American History class let me put my family’s history into perspective, sparking hours-long conversations with my dad: I could put dates to anecdotes that he had heard.

Moye: Okay, aside from the threat of waffle fries, I wish ABC had actually put other Asian Americans to the test in this scenario. It would have been interesting to see how other members of the APA community would have reacted to a Tiger Mom situation. Or maybe it’s good the producers didn’t because we probably would have figured out how fake the whole set-up was. But I’m uncomfortable with the juxtaposition with the mean Asian mom and the older/kinder white lady. Though I don’t worry about the potential backlash of the Tiger Mom phenomenon that depicts Asian mothers in a bad light, I can understand these concerns.