The parent depicted in Amy Chua’s WSJ excerpt (apparently just a provocative excerpt intended to drive sales of the book; see Christine Lu’s answer) is the parental equivalent of a demanding, yet incompetent executive or manager. Such people understand that high standards and pushing your employees (or children) are necessary, but are totally at a loss about how to do it without breaking down human morale in the process. Such methods lead to short-term performance gains but no long-term success. I’ve known managers like this, who excoriate and belittle their underlings in an attempt to “motivate” them, and their people will certainly move forward, but always only to avoid further punishment. However, it never results in long-term greatness. Treating children in the same way has similar results.
I am also a child that is the envy of my parents’ friends – “Carnegie-Mellon! Director of Engineering at Facebook! He plays the piano so well! Two grandchildren!” By the time my parents’ friends got around to asking them if I was considering going to work for Google, the answer they got was that Google was already passé and I was on to the next great thing, a company they’d not yet heard of. By now I look like a genius, and when Facebook IPOs, there’s a possibility that I will do pretty well by Chinese parent standards.
I had similar experiences with my mother when I was learning piano. She would sit with me for hours, correcting every little mistake I would make and pressing me repeatedly to get the song right. It was terrible and oppressive. Eventually I would perform to her satisfaction, and after years passed I attained a near-concert-pianist level of piano skill. I was the envy of other Chinese parents, who would admiringly ask my mom who my piano teacher was. However, my talent can only be described as robotic – my ability to play the piano is restricted solely to pure technical mimicry, devoid of any emotion. At one point, I attended a “piano camp” with other equally talented white students, and what struck me is that those students actually practiced for hours because they loved music, and genuinely practiced for hour after exhausting hour because they couldn’t get enough of the emotional expression that piano afforded them. Piano held none of that for me – through rote practice, I had simply acquired the ability to simulate true talent – when I had to begin adding subtle pauses and fermatas to my playing to indicate emotional expression, I would simply do so as instructed – and enough to fool the judges in the various piano competitions into which I would occasionally be entered. I won some of those competitions, again to the envy of other Chinese parents.
The Homework on How important are parents in a child’s life?
Parents How important are parents in a child’s life? In my opinion, parents are extremely important in the raising of a child. Without the presence of a parent, a child will have a very difficult time growing up. There are essential things that a child has to be provided with. Those needs, I classified them into three important categories: Love Love is absolutely necessary in a good parent- ...
Today, the emotionally draining oppression of 11 years of piano training has had a remarkably tragic effect: I can no longer play the piano without almost immediately feeling a sensation of impotent rage and frustration every time I make a small error (which happens all the time when you are trying out something new).
Worse, the association of this feeling with music in general has made it so that I can’t enjoy music to any deep degree – my appreciation of music extends only to light listening of pop songs in the car – despite years of technical training and knowledge of classical forms. After coming to this realization consciously a year ago, I’ve tried to overcome this by purchasing a keyboard (see What is the best 88-key electronic piano available?) and allowing myself to play “without obligation to getting it correct.” I tried in vain for a few weeks and then the novelty of the keyboard wore off; today the keyboard sits unused in our living room.
The Essay on Chopin Music Piano Romantic
Chopin One of the most profoundly original composers in history, Frederic Chopin was not at all a traditional "Romantic" musician; in fact, most of his music defines a separate category all its own. Born in Zelazowa Wol a, a small city near Warsaw, Poland on February 22, 1810, Chopin first studied the piano at the Warsaw School of Music, and was quite proficient on that instrument by his early ...
My mother was similarly overbearing when it came to teaching me Chinese. Today my technical grounding in understanding spoken Chinese is pretty good, and in a pinch I can speak Mandarin without much of an accent. However, I have an extremely strong mental block against doing so – I will almost never do it voluntarily or for fun in conversation; when hanging out with other ethnic Chinese people I will speak in English and (perhaps more concerningly), I have a strange psychological aversion to speaking in Chinese to my own children, despite even the exhortations of my wife that doing so would be good for them.
