Lifestyle

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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So remember that Facebook Hiatus that I went on? I went off of the Hiatus and back on Facebook a few days ago. The 68-day ban came to a close. Rather than a hiatus, I felt the experience was more like a detox – much like when people go on spa vacations or yoga retreats. It was good to remember what life BF – before Facebook – was like.  The first few days were rather strange, but like all changes in life – whether it’s getting used to life without running water, lack of stable electricity or lack of Facebook, you get used to it after a while and life carries on. Over the 2-ish months, I did notice some positive aspect about the Facebook and also some great reasons to go on a detox once in a while.

Reasons to go on Detox

• If you need a bit of personal space from someone or from the extended social circle, but don’t want to take the dramatic route of cutting them out of your life, i.e., unfriending them, then taking a detox break is good to take a step back, gain some perspective, and save a lot of drama.
• If you are going through exams, or writing a dissertation/essay, and your classmates have a problem with posting every exam study habit or word count of their essay, and that either stresses you out, makes you want to punch someone, or both, then it’s good to step back until the period of high stress is over and people go back to post regular mundane life happenings.
• If you are spending all day playing Farmville and god knows what else on Facebook, or spending all of your time stalking people and not getting anything productive done, taking some time away is helpful to remember how you can survive life sans Facebook. I found that there are still plenty of other ways to procrastinate. Twitter was my big Facebook alternative. However, nothing is as mindless and easy to do as Facebook.

Realization during hiatus

• Your real friends will check in even when you randomly fall off the face of the earth, i.e., Facebook.
• You focus more on your immediate social circle when you aren’t connected to your extended social network. You are much more at present with what is going on in your physical life, rather than keeping in touch/lingering with a virtual life from the past.
• Your life will go on without Facebook. You may not remember people’s birthdays, but your life doesn’t crumble into nothingness when the plug is pulled between you and all you “friends” – in which 80% of them you don’t mind not seeing.

Realization post hiatus

• Facebook really is a good tool to connect people. I got back and my elementary class from Taiwan, circa 1998, has created a reunion group. I’ve reconnected with all these people whom I have only a vague memory. But so cool! My Taiwanese cousins and I are also now connected and they get a much better sense of what my life is like.
• There really are some people you are okay to never see again, and let’s be honest, we all have those people who are “friends” with us on Facebook. I took this chance to clean up that “friends list” a bit.
• Nothing terribly important actually happens on Facebook when you are away on detox.
• You remember how much you enjoy stalking people. It’s a guilty pleasure.
• You realize who from your past you really want to be in touch with, and you send them messages.

Facebook is a part of our society now whether you like it or not, much like oh… television or telephone. Like the two Ts, you have the option to not own one, but they definitely help you integrate into our modern society. I’m all for occasional detox sessions to find balance in life. But if you are still one of those “I’m too cool for social media”, then you are really missing out and in danger of being left behind – much like the elders who can’t use the Internet.  Like all things in life, in moderation is key.

PS – this cartoon describes perfect how I feel when people complain about new Facebook changes. EVERY single time a new change rolls out, people complain. Come on, how difficult is it to check a box? I know it’s annoying that Facebook don’t make it default, but you either deal with it or get off. People ALWAYS complain, then get used to it, then complain again. Don’t you see the pattern?

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I love these So you want to… videos on YouTube, and I just came across this one that is amazing: So you want to close your Facebook Account. I thought this is highly appropriate given my current Facebook Hiatus.

I’ve lost track of how many days it’s been, but I do know there is 41 days to go. I haven’t signed in bar from removing an ad on the Books For Cameroon page, but even then I resisted myself from checking updates. To be honest, it hasn’t been that hard, and I went pretty much cold turkey. It is possible, and actually quite an interesting experiment.

Enjoy the video, and perhaps you would also think about going on a Facebook Hiatus!

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Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms in the world, and most of all to my own mama. I have neglected this blog as I prepare for my exams, in an attempt to not fail my classes. There is much that I want to write about: my trip to Bologna, to Ibiza, and a variety of of other things, but all will need to wait until I emerge from exams purgatory. Yet for this mother’s day, I decided to emerge just a little to write about my mom.

Rose Kennedy, the matriarch or the Kennedy Family, once said in an interview that there is no other work more important than being a mother. My mom is both an ordinary and an extraordinary woman. Growing up in 1950′s Taiwan, when the country was yet developed, she has stories about walking to school bare footed as to not ruin her shoes, studying by candlelight when there is no power. My experience in the Peace Corps gave me a glimpse of what that life may have been like. From a poor village life to middle class America, that is a no ordinary journey. During my childhood in Taiwan, mom had a jet-setting career. That was my first inspiration to have an internationally mobile life.

Yet when we decided to move to the US, mom turned down a lucrative offer in order to be with the family. Family is the center of my mom’s life, and that, while an ordinary feature of being a mom, requires extraordinary sacrifices. As an immigrant with limited English abilities, finding a job and adjusting to a life in America is no easy feat. The culture, mentality and every way of life is different. It also didn’t help that we moved into a very “white” neighborhood where people were not very accustomed to diversity. These are the sacrifices every immigrant parent makes for their children, in hope of better opportunities and bigger and better things.

Now that my sister and I are both living relatively successful and also internationally mobile lives, much more so than what my mom had, I would say that my parents’ struggles were worthwhile. Yet having kids who can rarely come home is difficult.  Going home is no longer just about me, but also for my parents. Thankfully via Skype, email and the like, keeping in touch is easier now. But no matter how easy, it doesn’t compare to being able to take mom out for lunch on Mother’s day.

This year, with my limited funding as a student, I decided to honor my mom via my blog and also through To Mama With Love. I created a heartspace for my mom and donated $10 to Suraya Pakzad, an Afghan activist recently named as TIMES most influential people, she is fighting for rights of women and girls. Every year, we spent billions buying stuff for various holidays. Yet at the end of the days, it’s the thought that counts. This year, I am pronouncing my thought and love for mom very publicly, while making a tiny contribution in making the world just a little bit better.

Happy Mother’s Day to my mama and all the incredible women out there who are responsible for creating and raising amazing people!

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