TERESA

Teresa Wu is a newly minted New Yorker by way of the San Francisco Bay Area. As the daughter of a fobby mom and recently published coauthor of My Mom Is a Fob: Earnest Advice in Broken English from Your Asian American Mom, she is a certified Asian mom expert. For more, follow her on Twitter or visit her blog.

“But why?” friends always say, as I refuse to order anything at their beloved Californian fast food joint. Well, if you ate In-N-Out in the car ride to piano lessons on a weekly basis for 10+ years as your mother berated you all the way there and all the way home, you’d frankly be nauseated by just a whiff of it, too.

Being a kid of a Chinese mom can be pretty rough growing up. My mom tape-recorded my piano lessons so that she could later drive every point home as she sat next to me during three-hour practice sessions. I went through enough practice workbooks each summer to kill a small forest. I remember getting verbally abused in front of other kids on the drive back from school because I got a B in Geometry. And it wasn’t uncommon for her to shamelessly demean me at big family dinners by making comments about my body weight or voracious appetite.

My recently released book, My Mom Is a Fob: Earnest Advice in Broken English from Your Asian American Mom, based on the blog mymomisafob, is almost a light-hearted anthropology of the Asian parenting wisdom I grew up with. In many ways, it highlights the same relentless pressure and extreme expectations as Amy Chua does in her much-discussed WSJ article. Though playful in nature, the book nonetheless illustrates our Asian moms’ obsession with their children’s perfection, too.When Chua’s article first stirred a storm in the blogosphere, I panicked slightly: In publishing a humorous book that touched upon immigrant parent stereotypes, was my treatment of Asian moms overtly reckless, too? A friend told me my version was “merely a cuter, fluffier angle than the other” – not exactly what I wanted to hear.

I don’t believe that Chua intended for such sweeping generalizations to be made in her portrayal of Asian moms. As she’s mentioned in other interviews, the article strung together the most controversial parts of her book and doesn’t recognize that much of her book focuses on her retreat from the strict immigrant model.

It’s in that partial retreat from the strict immigrant model that I do believe Chinese moms can offer the best of both worlds.

In many ways, my mom was the crazy Chinese mom. She had mercilessly high expectations and little willingness to compromise them. Did I perform at Carnegie Hall at the age of 10? Yes. Did I make it to an Ivy League school? No. But overall, I turned out OK. Not everyone does.

Why did it work for me? And why do I believe it’s working (despite what others will say) for Amy Chua’s kids? Two words: Tough love — with an emphasis on love.

Ruling with an ironclad fist can lead to well-adjusted, high-achieving kids – but only if they’re pushed along with the realization that failure to excel in school, music, what have you — does not mean failure as a child or as a person. And that’s where I think My Mom Is a Fob drives a point home: Despite all their seemingly nutty unyielding ways, despite their inability to totally understand our generation vs. theirs, the moral of our story is that our Asian moms will still love us, and we them.

Despite her Chinese parenting tactics, my mom made it evident that her every move was made out of hopeful expectation for my future. Over the years it became clear to me that my parents had spent an entire lifetime devoted to sacrifice for us. And while my mom’s love was certainly never the coddly sort, neither was it conditional on my SAT scores or choice of profession. Even while she put me through what westernized parents would surely define as abuse, any anger I felt was tempered by the knowledge that she really, truly was not fighting me, but fighting for me to have a better life than she did.

And that’s where Chinese moms can be superior.