The DadWagon dress code.

Just over six years ago, I decided I’d had enough of work. I saved some money, quit my job at New York Magazine, and decided to go traveling for a while. Then I got lucky—I made a contact at the New York Times travel section, and quickly found myself in freelance heaven. In the time since, there hasn’t been a day I haven’t had an assignment or deadline—and therefore an impending paycheck. I also haven’t needed to get out of bed, shower, or put on proper clothing unless I wanted to. Life has been good.

Now our dear friend Theodore is about to learn what this is like: As he wrote yesterday, he’s been laid off from Harper’s Magazine—freed from the corporate shackles of… Oh, wait, it’s Harper’s. Freed from the strident paleoliberal bonds of the nonprofit publishing world?

Well, whatever. He’s also worried about how his kids will view him. As a cool writer dad who’s always available for a midday trip to the ice cream shop? Or as a pajama-clad layabout—a bum?

Frankly, I don’t have an answer for him. Because after all these years in the wilderness, I’m starting to feel ambivalent about my own work status.

For me, though, it has little to do with how Sasha might view me. And it has nothing to do with how I viewed my father, a history professor whose daily schedule was only a thin degree more constrained than a freelance writer’s.

No, this has more to do with me—and with Jean. For me, the years of freelancing have gotten a bit, well, lonely. I’ve mitigated that somewhat by renting an office (which I now share with the estimable Mr. Ross), so that I get a little bit of that camaraderie without being required to show up or participate in company activities.

But beyond that, while freelancing has been fun, it’s hardly been lucrative. After roughly 15 years in the publishing industry, I’m making about what I did a decade ago, give or take. I’m enjoying myself much more, and I appreciate the freedom, but it’s also wearying.

At the same time, Jean has been advancing in her career. She’s the breadwinner in our family—the provider of cash, health insurance, stability. (As far as I can tell, this is the only requirement to join DadWagon: have an Asian wife with a better job than your own.) But Jean, too, is feeling what I felt years ago—the desire to break free of the corporate world and do her own thing. Neither of us, however, wants to sacrifice our stability for some risky shot at creative fulfillment.

But if Jean and I switched places… This might happen, actually. I’ve got a couple of potentially revenue-generating projects in the pipeline (book, TV, Web). If they succeed, we’ll be okay. And if they fail, well, then I might be looking at getting what the kids these days call a “real job.”

Yes, a job. I’m not sure they still exist anymore, but I hear occasional rumors from friends and friend of friends that publications, both print and online, are hiring people from time to time. (Apparently, Internet content is not yet entirely computer-generated.) And god dammit, if I have to—if I really, really have to—I guess I’ll lobby for one of those jobs.

Oh fuck, did I just write that?

A Chinese mother terrorizes her child.

There has been so much written about Amy Chua’s preposterous, boastful Wall Street Journal article, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” that I am loathe to simply pile on top of the discussion.

What I’d rather do is point to another Wall Street Journal article, this one from 1991, dateline San Francisco:

At age 17, Kio T. Konno seemed to fit the stereotype perfectly. Hard-charging, industrious and bright, she was destined for stardom, like so many of her Asian-American “whiz kid” peers.

A senior at this city’s prestigious Lowell High School, she pulled a B-plus average, spoke fluent Japanese and snagged national swimming awards. Her Japanese parents cared so much about her education that they moved closer to the school to ease her commute. Brown University was actively recruiting her.

But last October, a week before her 18th birthday, Miss Konno walked into her closet and hanged herself.

I still remember the day when “Miss Konno”, as the Journal put it, didn’t come to school. I didn’t know her–she was two or three years older than me and our high school was huge. But I knew people who knew her. And I remember her friends, huddled and distraught, in the hallways. I remember teachers hustling around, animated by some sort of bitter electrical current that the news of her death brought to the building. And I remember realizing that this was part of life at Lowell, a majority-Asian magnet public high school that was in many ways a laboratory for Amy Chua’s parenting style.

As my friend Grant reminded me on Facebook this week, he and his friends used to hang out near a plaque for another Asian-American student who had killed herself. And there were other such memorials on campus. As an article about a more recent Lowell suicide–that of a well-liked football player named Thomas Hoo–pointed out, Lowell was chosen to participate in a nationwide study of “suicide schools”.

The Journal article got one thing wrong about Kio. It listed her B-average as yet another sign of her success. But that B-average was itself a problem, not good enough, from what I remember. We can never know what went on in her home, but I remember the whispers: that she felt trapped under the constant pressure, not just to succeed, but to succeed on exactly her parents’ terms.

I briefly dated a girl at Lowell whose father had recently committed suicide. Her mother, already angry at her daughter for getting poor grades and for dating white boys, actively and aggressively blamed the daughter for the suicide. I remember sitting in their dining room in the Western Addition and listening to the mother scream at this girl for having killed her father. This, as much as the Confucian rigor that Ms. Chua boasts about, is also the true face of Asian pressure-parenting: vindictive, searing, selfish, broken. The flip side of the parent who sacrifices everything so their child can succeed in the United States is a raging egotism, a parental martyr complex in which parents heap their unhappiness on their children and call it traditional values.

This is not intended to call out Asian parents. I know from my wife’s family that Asian-Americans come in every flavor of overloving, permissiveness, overstrictness, gentle rigor. We are all just people. There is no model minority, no model majority, just different ways of being extraordinarily fucked up to ourselves and to our children.

Chua has feebly attempted to simultaneously defend her excesses and to claim that the Journal excerpt misrepresented her book. Time reminded us that she didn’t write the Journal headline about “superior” mothers. In a Globe and Mail interview she copped to having regrets and says that people may misunderstand her “deadpan” style. But she can’t have it both ways. She is accountable for the unretractable chauvinism of her claims that American children are a bunch of a slothful Wii-addicted whose biggest ambition is to be an extra in some crappy school play.

Indicting all non-immigrants is not just inflammatory, it’s misleading. There hasn’t been an immigrant in my family since the early 1900’s, but I didn’t wilt or whine or mope at Lowell. My father went to Lowell with his sisters back when it was the Jews, not the Asians, who were working their way up the ladder. And I’d like to think that as a parent, he had a better approach than Chua could even imagine. Success in school was non-negotiable for me, but as long as I got A’s, my free time was my own. Sometimes I used it go to seminars at the World Affairs Council. Sometimes I volunteered at the Holocaust Library (more fun than it sounds). I used to spend some afternoons sitting on the grass near Justin Herman Plaza with a homeless guy named Chef who told better stories than anyone I knew. Sometimes I used my free time to go sit in parks at night with friends and get drunk and try to get laid. Above all, I worked my ass off because that’s what it took to compete. I got a scholarship to study in Germany my senior year, and I left Lowell with a bucket of college credits and a 4.0+ GPA.

The beauty of my father’s approach is that he didn’t confuse one thing for another. He never confused a poorly-executed birthday card for a harbinger of academic doom (Chua has repeatedly defended the awesomeness of the time she rejected her young daughter’s birthday card because it wasn’t crafted with sufficient care). Not that he was a perfect parent–if my father was Amy Chua he’d have to write a bestseller saying how great it was that he beat me*. But he isn’t Chua. I like to think that he is  humbled by his mistakes as a father, as I am already by mine.

I know Chua’s article has caused a lot of pain and outrage among Asian-Americans, who know better than I what a perversion the model minority stereotype can be. For a much better description of the costs of the Asian drive to perfection, buy a book (recommended in Jeff Yang’s excellent SfGate.com take on Chua) called I Love Yous are for White People by Lac Su. But it’s important for those of us who aren’t Asians or immigrants to not be cowed or misled by Chua’s braggadocio. The Asian drive for success can have a terrible price. And the good parts of that drive are universal. Yang describes them well:

The desire for excellence. The need for delayed gratification. The direct connection between hard work and positive results.

Good old-fashioned Asian values. And American ones, too.

If you need any more proof of Chua’s unnecessary divisiveness, look at Chua’s new bedfellows. On the drive to the hotel from Obama’s Wednesday speech in Tucson, I listened to some Michael Savage on the radio. For a sense of Savage’s mindset, consider that he said on that same broadcast that journalists are “vicious little twerps [with] no mental discipline [who] are being laughed at around the country by people with a capacity for Aristotelian logic.”

Okay.

So Savage, of course, loves Chua. He read some of her excerpt and then interrupted himself. “Who IS this woman?” he asked. “I’m beginning to like her.” He explained that he was raised in the same belittling manner. Self-esteem, he said, is a trope “put out by the government.” Call your child a fatty, he said, because that’s the kind of talk that made him who he is today. “Look how far I’ve come,” he says.

He is, in a way, right: he has become exactly what you get when your parents call you garbage. You become an ambitious, perhaps successful, bag of hate. Hatred for yourself, for liberals, for conservatives, whatever. Those are Chua family values.

The Chua argument reminds me a bit of the story I was reporting on in Tucson. Hate speech didn’t pull the trigger on Gabby Giffords. And Amy Chua is not responsible for the suicides that will surely continue of battered young innocents like Kio Konno. But words do have consequences. And if you write careless, hurtful and misguided words just to sell a memoir, Mrs. Chua, then a pox on your perfect house.

*A footnote from Saturday: my father wishes to remind me (and you) that he doesn’t deserve the moniker of “child beater”, an archetype that has somewhat fallen out of fashion. I agree with him on the basics: unlike his parents, he never used implements or utensils (belts, rolling pins and the like). It was the 70’s and 80’s and spanking was still en vogue. So, in short, he was a hugely loving father who sometimes, particularly when I was younger, had to express himself with his hands (“without leverage” he says). We disagree on some of the environmentals, though, and I do believe there may be a future post about competing father-son narratives. Fun.

A Chinese mother terrorizes her child.

Some years back I attended a graduate school lecture with my then-girlfriend (whom I would later marry and have JP with) on Asian-American pyschology. To be clear: I don’t mean the mentality of Asian-Americans, but rather, the study of psychology in Asian-Americans and the development of ethnically specific treatments.

The lecturer, a prominent researcher, related an anecdote that has always stuck with me. He was trying to describe the nature of the Asian mind, and his example was of two students who had attempted to get into his class after the registration period. The first student, who was white, had somehow managed to call him at home; worse yet, this kid hadn’t asked if he could be included in the class, he had demanded it, somehow implying that he was doing the professor a favor by studying with him. The other student, an Asian-American, had politely showed up at the professor’s office hours and begged. The Asian-American student was accepted into the class, and the white kid wasn’t.

What this had to do with cognitive behavioral therapy in Asians is beyond me. But it always struck me that the professor had decided that being an asshole in the mode of the  white kid was an ethnically unsuccessful life tactic, while being polite (and successful) was Asian.

There is, of course, doubt as to whether the professor’s point holds water on its face: it seems to me that in many cases the more aggressive, pushier student often outdoes the polite beggar. If that’s true, then, the Asian kid succeeded only because the professor liked this sort of approach. Other professors—Asian ones, too—might have reacted differently. What’s more, when my ex was a teacher’s assistant in grad school, we got late-night, aggressive calls from students of every ethnic description. Similarly, you could imagine that being nice works better than being rude, even across ethnic lines. Regardless, the professor had asserted with a straight face that a pattern of behavior distributed pretty evenly throughout society was specific to a single social group.

I offer this in the context of Yale Law School professor Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” Not only does Chua believe that being awful to your children provides the greatest chance of their future success—she insists as well that doing so is inherently Asian. It’s a funny thing to lay claim to as an ethnic characteristic—we’re bigger dicks than you, white boy (and other colors and genders of boy)—but there it is.

I’d like to consider the efficacy of such an ethnic stereotype. Chua seems a fairly high-functioning sort. It’s not easy becoming a Yale Law School professor, I imagine. She must be smart and hard-working (her parents must have really thought she was garbage). As such, it’s not that much of a surprise that her children have wormed their way into the elite as well. Whether her success, and the success of her children, has anything to do with the fact that she’s a raving bitch (and her husband is a total pussy), is unclear. It could just be that she’s smart, the kids are smart, and dad is a pussy.

From time to time, a narrative of the United States falling behind emerges, in education, often, but also in economics, technology, business, military aggression, and any number of other realms. We Americans are always on the verge of extinction, these truly are the worst of times, and sooner rather than later, the U-S-of-A is going to be number two, and then where will we all be?

I don’t really know if any of that is true (except in the sense that all empires decline) but I will conclude with this statistic (from Harper’s Magazine) that explains a bit of the mentality of Chinese women currently. You decide if it could stand in for an ethnic stereotype that Ms. Chua would also claim:

• Date on which the Xinglong Big Family Mall in Shenyang, China, opened a “venting store” for women: 3/8/10
• Minimum amount of spending in the mall required to enter the store and destroy household furniture and electronics: $6

Be nice to your kids.

Okay, this has nothing to do with our debate over the issue, but it’s fucking awesome nonetheless: the Taiwanese animation version!