Lifestyle

Before I get into this post, let me just preface by saying that I’ve always been a huge skeptic on any type of relationship advice that appears in any publication. I’m the girl who reads women magazines and think they are a load of BS. When I was 18, I read He’s Just Not That Into You and thought it was the biggest load of crap ever.

I thought I had a pretty good grasp on understanding the male psyche, until my friend told me about this book written by a comedian, Steve Harvey. He keeps it real, and tell it like it is in a refreshingly no-nonsense way. Individually, each of the take away seems to make sense, but there is something about the way he just lays them out there that really hit home. Not sure if this applies to European men, or men of various cultures, but it sure seem to be spot on for our American counterparts.

If a guy is telling me all these, they must be pretty true, no?

1.Let men be men. Men know that we the women possess some sort of super power that allow us to put on different hats. From the beginning of the time, men have been the provider of the family and the protector. Meanwhile, women have always had an important role in a family and society. This sociological makeup does not suddenly vanish in the 21st century, where women now have crazy degrees, jobs, etc. The secret is maintaining a woman’s power in a society (and relationship) by playing in a man’s language.

2.Three things define a man: Who he is, What he does, and How much he makes. Until what defines a man is on track and they feel like they have control over these things, a woman has no significant place in a man’s life. That’s not to say a man can’t feel like a man being a stay-at-home dad. But that dad has to be very comfortable with who he is (a dad), what he does (care for his children) and how much he makes (nothing).

3. Contrary to all the chick-flicks in the world, a man loves very simply. They profess, provide, and protect. Men probably won’t sit around and gaze into our eyes and tell us they love us all day long, while stroking our hair. But they are likely to tell their friends that we are his girl, lady, woman, etc (profess), pay for things when he can afford it (provide), and make sure no one disrespects you, make sure you are warm enough, and do things around that house that he deems too “dangerous” for you (protect).

4. Be a lady. We often complain how men today aren’t chivalrous as men once were. Yet we are too busy proving we are super women to let men pay for us, fix our plumbing, or open our doors. Of course we can afford to pay for our own meals, read a DYI book and fix our own toilet, and open our own doors. We are capable of doing anything that men can. But let men be men. Let them protect and provide for us, and just sit back, relax, and be a lady.

5. Men need support, loyalty and “the cookie”. Men aren’t just gonna fix your toilets, pay for your outings, and open doors all day for nothing. Men is out there being men all day, sizing up against others, fighting in the modern jungle to be more successful. He just wants someone to ask how his day was and show some appreciation (support). They don’t need flowers or presents, or whatever that we women need. Fighting out there in the modern jungle is hard, and a man just wants to know that you’ll be there if he doesn’t win a battle and gets laid off, gets sicks, etc. He just needs to know we aren’t gonna run to the next successful men who can bring home the bacon when he can’t (loyalty). Finally, don’t be stingy in the bedroom (the cookie). Men are men. They have needs (as do women).

6. Don’t pull “We Need to Talk” and leave girl talk with the girls. This is a classic mistake that we do. We get frustrated and want to over-analyze the hell out of everything. Men do not. They want to FIX-IT and move on. If there is a problem, just sit down and discuss it. Don’t give them a warming saying “we need to talk”, because they’ll run around wondering what they did wrong and freak out. If you want to complain just for the sake of complaining and over-analyzing, go to the girls. If men can’t fix what you are complaining about, then they will be annoyed at you.

There are a lot more to the book, but these are the main points that really stood out to me. When our boyfriend becomes our best friend, they are still a boy. We can’t treat them like our girl best friend! I’ve been incredibly independent my entire life, and I lost sight of the fact that men just want to be men. I can still be highly independent and successful, but to keep the man around, I just gotta chill out sometimes and be a lady.

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10 days into 2012, and already, New Year’s Eve feels like a long time ago. These first 10 days of the year are probably rather indicative of what the rest of year will shape to be: a year full of surprises, changes, personal challenges that will require me to find my inner balance. In the past 18 months or so, I’ve always thought back to my life in Cameroon for perspective and some zen when things get a little out of control in the “real life”. As that experience fades a little more into memory each day, I am in need of some other forms of perspective.

A good friend dragged me to yoga this past week as I was struggling to find inner peace. I’ve practiced yoga on and off for many years now, but have resorted to audio and video recordings ever since I moved to Cameroon. I haven’t attended a studio class in well over three years. Yoga in a place like New York city is more of a fad than actual practice. The studios often charge an arm and a leg for classes that I often cannot afford.

As such, when I learned about Yoga to the People, I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a donation-based studio scatter across NYC. Unfortunately a location doesn’t exist in the Upper West Side. I love this studio because every time you go, the energy and dynamic is entirely different, depending on the personalities that are in your class. It may sound strange, and although no one speaks except for the teacher, the energy in the room is different each time. The classes that I’ve attended are Power Vinyasa, so a pretty good work out on top of some much needed zen.

I know they tell you to leave you thoughts at the door as you begin your practice, but today, I had so much on my mind that my thoughts followed me into the studio. Strangely, while I was contorted on my mat, and then flowed into my downward-facing-dog, a sense of clarity glossed over my confused thoughts. Who knew?

Life is about to pick up speed again here in a few days. I am hoping this will be a good excuse to get me out of my Columbia bubble and allow me to find peace among chaos of life.

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Holiday Season in NYC!

Merry Christmas!! Finally had time to take in the holiday season after weeks of finals projects, papers and exams. I didn’t get to enjoy as much of the Christmas spirit this year, but I still sneak in some pretty nice moments around the City. A trick for all: walking around New York City while listening to Christmas music on your iPod gives this surreal movie-like feeling!

This IS the most wonderful time of the year. Despite the commercialism of it all, I really love it! New York City is especially magical during the season. Hope everyone is able to find a piece of this magic wherever you are and can be with loved ones today!

Christmas lights at Columbia

Christmas Shopping Frenzy

Rockefeller Center

Macy's fancy display

Christmas Market at Bryant Park

Ice Skating at Bryant Park

Didn’t actually go skating, but it looked like a lot of fun! Walked by it on a random Tuesday night and it was pretty happening!

Nutcracker @ Lincoln Center

After my last final, I unwind with a showing of the Nutcracker at Lincoln Center! It was every bit as amazing as I remembered. I think I was just as excited as the 5-year-old girl sitting near me! Oldie but a goodie, never gets old!

Columbus Circle

lights inside of Columbus Circle

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This afternoon, on my way home from Trader Joe’s, a strange vintage train approached the 2/3 train platform. I was confused, but people were getting on, so I joined as well. Turns out it’s a train HBO is running on weekends to promote Boardwalk Empire. That is some serious marketing strategy. I know nothing about the show nor how it relates to vintage NYC train, but now I sure want to google and find out. Whomever came up with this idea is pretty genius!

It was cool to be able to ride in an old train and imagine what life is like back then. I am a sucker for historical things, and being able to experience it makes it that much more exciting than seeing it in the museum!

let's hope there won't be any emergencies on this train

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During my French Riviera vacation, I polished off Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother by Amy Chua. I first heard about this book from Amy’s WSJ article, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” and literally laughed out loud while alone in my dorm room. I told myself the day after exams were over, I’d indulge in this book.

I finished the book in just a few days, in between eating gelato and soaking up the sun (which my tiger mom does not approve of). I loved the book. It’s a quick read and highly entertaining. Parts of it really resonated with me and my upbringing, but in other parts, I did think, “this lady is crazy” – particularly the part where she made her kids practice on vacation. I do think it’s a must read for all the kids in America who thinks their tiger mother is insane.

The book, as Amy has stated many times, is a memoir of her own parenting journey and is meant to be more of an entertainment than anything. I find it rather preposterous that people took this as a parenting guide and criticized it to no end. The parenting style aside, circumstances and resources differ greatly between Chinese families, and try as a tiger mom might, there are still plenty of Chinese kids who do not achieve as a Tiger mom would expect. We can’t all be concert pianist, violinist, have perfect score on SATs and go to Ivy League universities. Tiger Mom parenting comes in different variation, and the important thing is the values that a Tiger Mom upbringing instill in a child that ultimately allow them to craft their own path in life.

I am glad to have been brought up by a Tigher Mom, and this is my own Battle Hymn from the other side.

Before reaching the legal age of 18, I spent half of those years in Taiwan – the natural habitat for Tiger mom- and the other half in the USA. My mom is a classic Tiger Mom, although I am the one who was born in the year of Tiger.

This picture of me at the piano always makes me laugh

I do not remember my first piano lesson – because that’s how young I was. I guess I was 3. My life in the following 8 years went something like this: 7:30am – school. Depending on the day, school finished between 3:30 and 5:30pm. Then, time after school and evenings were filled with: piano lesson, piano practice, art class, writing class, abacus class (not kidding), math tutoring (I was bad at math), calligraphy class, speed-reading class, English school, etc. Basically, any lesson that you can think of, I did it at one point or another in my life. Then after these lessons – homework and studying and bedtime at 10pm.

My mother worked from home when I was young, but when she had appointments to attend to, she dropped me off at the local children’s library – my favorite! I was an avid reader and hated the 3-book per check out rule at the library. When we took vacations, everything had an educational purpose of some sort – museums, exhibitions, historical something or another. We did not go lay on the beach and hang out, thus why my sister and I are now making up for lost time. My birthday presents were also educational – in second grade, I got a pink pencil sharpener that shaped like a dog, and in 3rd grade I received a Children’s English dictionary.

I came home one day in 1st grade with a 89% on my math test and my mother went ballistic. I had math tutoring from then on until I moved to the US, where I became a math genius relative to my American classmates. We had screaming matches at home regarding playing the piano, but unlike Amy, my mother gave up the fight when I was 11. I stopped piano for one year, but took it up again when I moved to the US, where I became a piano genius relative to my American classmates. The virtuous circle worked when I moved to the US.

At age 10, two years before moving to the US, I read this series of books about a Taiwanese girl’s journey to Harvard Kennedy School. I wanted to just be like her. My busy life in Taiwan as a child didn’t render me unhappy, it gave me the motivation to dream big and aspire to great things in life. My friends and I used to talk about our dream of going to an Ivy and various vocations that we may pursue.

And then, I moved to the American suburb.  No one cares about school. It is uncool to talk about academics, much less dreams of Ivy and changing the world. American teenagers are brutal beasts. They make fun of people for the way the dress, the way they talk, the way the stand, the way they sit. My ability to speak Chinese was met with curiosity that I did not know how to handle at 12. “Say my name in Chinese, say xyz in Chinese” – my classmates would hassle me. I felt less like a talented bilingual student, but more like a circus monkey. In addition, mandated uniform in Taiwanese schools gave me an awkward fashion sense, top with bad English and the desire to talk about school – I’ll leave it to your  imagination on how my first year in the USA went.

The home front was also less than rosy. Unlike Amy Chua and her parents, my parents were clueless on how the educational system works in the US and all the steps to get me to an Ivy. Working as hard as you can only takes you so far in a crappy public school system in suburbia America. Case in point: first day of my 6th grade math class, the teacher did a drill on the time table. My reaction? wait, WHAT? My mother had drilled this time table in me since I was in 1st grade. I did the whole drill in barely 20 seconds. The teacher came over and asked me why I wasn’t doing mine, in which I responded, “I’m done”, and then proceeded to wonder how these kids don’t know the time table in 6th grade.

My own tiger mom didn’t understand how I had so much free time, yet she didn’t know how to fill my time with activities. Haunted with the first year of my time in the US, I was determined to have a social life and not be a weirdo. The culture divide created tension and confusion. My tiger mom didn’t know how to be one anymore in the foreign land. She went soft because she didn’t know what to do, and I took advantage of it and participated in musicals, attended sleepovers and had a social life that in retrospect was a lot of time wasted. Though I realized the Ivy dream may not happen, I did as much as I could to get ahead given limited guidance and resources. It took a few years of detour, but I am finally fulfilling that Ivy dream I had as a 10-year-old girl. side note: I am well aware that non-Ivy institutions can provide just as good of an education. I had a decent one from my undergraduate university.

Although the path I took is most likely not what my tiger mom had planned for me (no tiger mom in their right mind would encourage their kids to join the Peace Corps), the intrinsic value that came from a tiger-mother upbringing stayed with me. I strive for my best in any situation given resources at hand. I took challenging classes instead of ones that would boost my GPA, I did interesting work that enriches me as a person rather than a cookie-cutter life. I choose to live life off of the beaten path, and wouldn’t be able to do it without values & discipline instilled by my tiger mom.

I love my parents and appreciate their tiger parenting style. If anything, I wish they hadn’t gone soft in my high school years. I did not have an unhappy childhood, instead, a productive and enriching one. And you can bet anything that I will be a fierce Tiger Mom myself!

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