Post 4

About six months ago, an interesting book came to my eyes. The author, a Chinese American mother, in a mocking but somewhat interesting tone, told her American fellows how to educate their children into outstanding by a Asian-traditional way.

This book is called “tiger mother’s battle song”,  a child-raised autobiography by the Yale University law professor Amy Chua, whose two girls, Sophia and Lulu, both are excellent in instrument playing and have superior academic performances.

In the book,Amy described the way how she trained her daughters, which are different from what she saw as indulgent and permissive of Western parents: stressing academic performance, never accepting a mediocre grade, prohibiting sleepovers and school plays, insisting on drilling and practice, and instilling respect for authority.

She gave more details on her parenting: when her daughter showed disrespect to her, she would call her daughter “garbage”. And she thought it worked very well, because when her daughter got this, she would feel terrible and ashamed of what she had done. At the same time Amy believed there was no big harm to girls' self-esteem.

According to our Chinese culture, she didn’t feel anxious about children’s self-esteem. She required her kids that all the modules should get an ‘A’. When they were not able to get a good mark, she would say:”You’re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you.” Like ordinary Chinese mother, she would grasp in horror, and ask her girl what went wrong. Also when her girls did wrong, she would called them ”stupid”,”worthless” or “a disgrace”.

Miss Chua’s book triggered a fierce discussion by suggesting that her tough approach to parenting. In United States, most comments accused her parenting way as “unhealthy, incomprehensible and incredible“which they thought are detrimental to the development of kids' independent personalities.

However, this book was quickly translated into Chinese and became one of the best-sellers. Most buyers of Chinese mothers said Amy Chua was their role model to follow. they were confident that their children could be as “excellent” as Amy’s when they followed her methods.

This is one scenario of culture gap: the mother admirable oriental became being accused in the west. One more example should be Chinese medicine: acupuncture，”qi” are considered to be anti-science in the west.

Just like what we discussed in the class last week, culture can be defined as thinking manner which a certain group of people contains. Thus, when an idea is encouraged in China, it just means this idea is corresponding to the thinking way most Chinese has, but this thinking way may not be accepted in United States.

Although culture is not passed through gene biologically, it must be created by one great mind of the ethnic, is able to pass from one generation to another. For example, the Chinese culture is based on Confucius’s philosophy. Although it was modified several times during long history, you can still find the similarities between the Confucius ideas and Chinese’s thinking manner. Moreover, the freedom and democracy which modern Americans advocate, do not have essentially different with the idea of Thomas Jefferson raised 400 years ago.

There is a metaphor that you have jumped into a color vat since you began to be educated, that color is your culture. you kept absorbing the ideas of your own culture from every person in the surroundings: your friends, parents, teachers,  And you would reflect it on your attitudes and behaviors. This is why, when cultures conflict, hard for others to convert you and in your side you may think his painstaking persuading as a severe offense.

Therefore, I don’t think there is a possible way to carry real inter-culture communications. If there is, that could be applied and most of wars would be avoided.  So when different culture conflict, ones would show strong disapproval to others even if some are a very good persuader. Culture is pre-installed into every individual’s system, cannot be significantly, easily changed just after one or two times short talks.

My advise is when we try to communicate with individuals from different cultures, we should show respect to other’s culture, though you may not agree; When we travel to another country, do as Romans do; When we talk with ones who have different culture backgrounds, we tend to find some topics in common instead of something may cause a culture debate.