Parenting: Not That Kind of Asian
Ever since my eldest daughter—now a high school junior—was in sixth grade, she has referred to herself as “not that kind of Asian” kid. By extension, she also means that my husband and I are “not that kind of Asian” parents; that we are not “scary” or ultra-strict about social mores and demanding about academic and extracurricular performance.
I must proceed carefully here, knowing that I’m coming up against all sorts of cultural landmines. As an Asian American academic who teaches within the field of ethnic studies and whose classes foster critiques of “tribalism,” I want to avoid trafficking in stereotypes.
But as a second-generation Indian-American married to another second-generation Indian-American, I must admit to being quite bewildered by these patterns of self-identification in which we all take part—my daughters, my husband, myself—all of us wanting to avoid certain images associated with in-flexible standards.
As a member of a cultural community, I am also fascinated by the extent to which my parent peers share the assumption that they too are “not that kind of Asian.” How correct is this assumption? How productive is this type of self-labeling? What are we gaining and losing within our broader South Asian community by employing these categories?
At an audition for middle school Honors orchestra, my daughter saw many East Asian students diligently rehearsing together with such precision-based zeal that she was emotionally done with the audition even before it had started. For her, this experience was an eye-opener. Not all Asian kids are the same, she realized. Months later, this notion had transmogrified to mean that not all Asian parents are the same.
The subtext was clear, accurate or not: those Asian kids with the dizzying bow skills were pushed to superior performance by their parents. The kind of parents who had not let their kids participate in chorus as opposed to orchestra because chorus was too “easy;” who had erupted into cries of alarm when their children were found fraternizing with members of the opposite sex; who closely monitored their school’s parent portal and regulated their social and extracurricular freedom based on their grades.
When I first moved to the suburbs, my children were entering the public education system. I was initially concerned about the high expectations of my peers—immigrant parents—versus the more down-to-earth expectations of American-born ones. For example, majority of immigrant parents sent their children to Kumon and extra classes, just like the “tuition” system in the Indian subcontinent—a pattern that then contributed to the creation of more and more “accelerated” classes at the elementary level within privileged American public school districts. It was a trend that would have seemed laughable just a generation prior. “What’s going to happen to our kids?!” I had cried in alarm to my unflappable husband.
For some useful context here, consider that “about three-fourths of the India-born population in the United States arrived after the mid-1990s,” according to Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh’s acclaimed study The Other One Percent: Indians in America (Oxford UP, 2017). The mid-90s is when most of my American-born desi peers and I were entering college and beginning our adult lives. While my friends scrambled to compete as parents in their school districts, I worried about possibilities I could not control—like the educational ethos tilting towards unstinting standards of excellence based on one-upmanship.
Even when we were years away from being parents of teenagers, my husband and I had decided to pick our battles. We would strive for the stewardship of children who were happy, bright, and able to steer their own course without trying to dominate the seas in an increasingly global world. This was difficult to do then and still not easy today, but one of the perks of a more organic parenting philosophy is not seeming “scary” to one’s children.
In case you’re wondering, my eldest daughter still plays the violin with the orchestra in high school, years after she stopped trying to advance to the highest level. On her own, she decided that she liked the camaraderie of playing together. She has, thus, decided to stick with it in high school, even though this means one less accelerated academic elective that might pad her GPA, and even though, as she puts it, she does not think she would be winning any contests.
Even though we don’t feel comfortable talking about it openly, we contemporary South Asians see ourselves and each other as having shared histories and values that have some truth to them but whose maintenance, at times, might be more divisive and unproductive than we might imagine. “It’s the South Indians,” one friend once said to me (perhaps forgetting that I am a South Indian too) to point to some people she felt were responsible for her increased competitive anxieties on behalf of her child. “It’s those FOBs!” whispered another to me after overhearing ambitious desi parenting chatter at the bus stop.
Though my ABCD peers may flatter themselves—as I do—that they are not “that kind of Asian” parents, many have sent their children to Kumon or other similar programs to keep up with the other Asian parents. I have had friends who have become emotional to the point of tears over supposed weaknesses in their children’s academic abilities, like when a child did not get into a gifted program in the first grade, or when a child was not enrolled in more than two “accelerated” classes in middle school. Such behavior contradicts the collective image we share of ourselves as cool and calm American parents. (I also have ABCD friends who do not allow their kids to date and others who do not allow their children to attend sleepovers. I am thus aware that even in the camps that I have attempted to subdivide here, there are divergent beliefs and values.)
I think that we Asian parents, across a generational divide, may be missing opportunities to reach our children more effectively through collaboration. If American-born parents teamed up for dialoguing with parents who were immigrants, we might learn from each other and stump our children’s chances of thinking they have us figured out. Speaking in generalizing terms, we might learn the more American value of being understanding about the trials of youth while also learning how to better instill in our children our cultural ability to do things that are not always comfortable or easy. I would hope to move in this direction someday casting off the images and labels and working towards intercultural, intergenerational exchange.
In the meantime, I acknowledge that all my critical awareness doesn’t mean that my behavior cannot veer most unwittingly towards the “scary” side. During a dinner conversation just this week with my family, when my youngest daughter was looking for advice about her course schedule from next year, I suddenly found myself saying, “What’s going to be your AP class, then? You can’t not have an AP!” My husband and daughters started laughing, my eldest pointing out that my husband never took any APs. Though an engineer at a leading tech company today, he wasn’t “that kind of Asian.”
I hope my children would grow to be more understanding about the contexts informing different parents’ values systems, the gross under-enfranchisement and systemic lack of opportunity some parents might have seen as children in a different land—or even in this land—that would make them more aggressive about securing opportunities for the next generation. Though there may not be any philharmonic orchestras or CEO positions in our future, I take it as a win that being more approachable and managing our parental expectations will foster the type of relationship with them that keeps the stories coming.
Reshmi Hebbar (@reshmijhebbar) is an Associate Professor of English at Oglethorpe University specializing in multicultural literature. In 2006, she wrote a monthly column, “Confessions of a Grown-up ABCD” for Khabar. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Slate and her fiction has been published in several literary journals. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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