Parenting Game: "Trust Me"

Every generation overcompensates for the preceding one.

A teacher at my kids' former school shared how, as a child, she used to challenge her parents' decisions by asking why. And she would be rewarded by their terse response "Because I said so".

She hated it. So much so that since then she has made it her mission (in line with the school's child-centered philosophy) to explain to her students in every situation the reasoning behind her requests.

I've seen this first-hand in the classroom. A couple years ago, my son's teacher (not the one above) would bring teaching to a halt for several minutes so she could explain to a disruptive student why his behavior was causing the class problems, ask him to consider other options, and then respectfully wait for him to come to a decision. It was maddening, for both me and my son.

John Rosemond has a solution that these teachers would hate. He advocates "because I said so" (BISS) because:

I have gone on record as saying that “Because I said so” affirms the authority of the parent, provides an honest answer to a child’s demand to know the reason behind the parent’s decision, and all but eliminates the possibility of mutually debilitating parent-child argument.

I don't want to argue with my 4-year old son. If he challenges my wife's or my decisions, it's often because he is short-sighted, tired, and thinking solely of himself. He's not really interested in the reasoning and he's looking for a chance to argue. That's not always the case for my older kids but sometimes the situation doesn't provide the opportunity to explain all the reasons and it's often they don't have the life experience to understand my perspective.

Rosemond goes even further to propose an even more concise alternative - "Trust me". It's beautiful, half as many words, and guaranteed to drive kids just as crazy. I recommend using it judiciously, as Rosemond suggests, and never in anger. He closes with this:

In the meantime, all one can do is ask the child to trust. To which someone might say, “But he won’t understand that either!” That’s all right. Faith is a long-term investment.

And that's when I realized why we get so angry with God. At a retreat recently, someone asked about discerning God's will. One of the teachers answered that often when we ask that question it's because we're unhappy with the direction of our life. We challenge God's decisions concerning our present and future. We ask Him "Why?" And God responds in silence with "Trust me". He's not interested in arguing with us (though we can continue to protest). Rather, He is providing an honest answer to his child, affirming His authority, and asking us to rely on a perspective and life experience that we will never have.

Jeremy Lin is an Ordinary NBA Player

 According to one source, Jeremy Lin is an average point guard in the National Basketball Association. His season stats are pretty good but not All-Star caliber. His scoring is down slightly from last season because he has a different team and a different role.

I couldn't be more ecstatic about this. It means that Jeremy is an ordinary NBA player. It means that he's not that big of a deal. It means that he's getting by at his job.

To be average in an elite cadre of 500 of the best basketball players and top athletes in the world is nothing short of extraordinary.

For overachieving Asian Americans, being average is garbage. Getting a "C" is failure. Getting a "satisfactory" is humiliating. Most of us won't attempt anything where we can only "get by". But the reality is there has never been an average Asian American NBA player.

Yao Ming is exceptional both in ability but also in height. Being 7'6" does not make you normal. His talent was cultivated at an early age in Chinese government sports schools. He's also not American.

Wat Misaka was the first Asian American to play in the NBA in 1947. He played in three games. That's barely a blip on the radar.

The fact that Jeremy has made it as an ordinary NBA player tells you how extraordinary his story is. But the beauty of it is that his success is becoming normal. Ordinary even.

When something becomes normal, it becomes commonplace. It's an accepted part of reality. You almost take it for granted.

That's what I always wanted - when an Asian American male can be "average" in an area where his presence up to that point was utterly non-existent. It means it's not a big deal but not a small deal either.

And that's the paradoxical nature of his success. On one hand, I want to celebrate his every achievement as the greatest thing in the world. On the other hand, I want to downplay his popularity and say, "Oh yeah, that's just how Asian guys roll. It's just whatever". As if Asian Americans playing in the NBA aren't that special. As if I'm accustomed to seeing unicorns everyday.

In a recent article, Jeremy decried how polarized people's view of him is:

"It seems like everybody’s perception of me is very bipolar, To one group, it’s overpaid, overrated; to another group, it’s underpaid, underrated, underdog. It’s funny to me because there’s no real balance. Why can’t I just be a young player who’s shown some potential and has a lot of learning to do?”

I went to a Warriors-Rockets game where I sat next to some vocal Warriors fans who heckled Jeremy whenever he got the ball. "He can't shoot" they cried. I was offended that there was some kind of racial innuendo in their remarks. But my sensitivity evaporated when I realized they were heckling all of the Rocket's players. They were treating him like an ordinary NBA player.

this is what an ordinary Asian American dad would say to
Jeremy after he scored 38 points against the Lakers last year

In response to Jeremy's comment, I might tell him that it's quite normal to want to be treated like an ordinary NBA player even if you're anything but. 

Asian American Divorce Rate

I can't find recent data. Most of the stuff is at least five years old but by these estimates, the Asian American divorce rate is about 5%. I've got research from 2002, 2008 for Asian Americans, and 2008 for Chinese Americans. The latest census data do not break out by race.

In any case, a 5% divorce rate is about half the national average. Less divorce is a good thing. I would imagine that divorce does not bode well for personal fulfillment and many studies have shown it has a negative impact on children (too lazy to cite all the sources here).

Of course, as one source argues, a lower divorce rate does not equate to a healthy marriage. There can be all kinds of abuse, dysfunction, and strife within marriage.

All in all though, a lower divorce rate is one advantage of late marriage for Asian American men (and women). However, I believe a lower divorce rate is correlated with later marriage and there is no causation between the two. People who tend to be conservative, traditional, and community-minded will marry later especially in a culture that emphasizes career and educational advancement.

Some other questions might be: What does marital satisfaction look like for Asian Americans vs. the rest of America? What does it look like based on age of marriage?

The Late Wind Blows Hardest

Some responses to my last posts about why Asian American men marry later: desire for comfort, preference and privilege, aging well (decision paralysis because of too many options?), perfectionism, poor parental models of marriage, screwed up idea of relationships, low emotional intelligence, and being the most unappealing men in America (more on this in a future post).

With the exception of us of being unappealing, I don't get how all these factors are unique to Asian American men but not women. I wonder if there's something unique about the way men respond to these factors that make marriage less accessible (or attractive) for us. For instance, low emotional intelligence may affect men more than women since men initiate and lead relationships. Similarly, having a conservative, risk-averse outlook is less attractive in a man than a woman. It will also keep a guy from asking girls out.

I told my brother about my suspicions. When I got to the one about us maturing later, he nodded his head sagely. He quoted an ancient Chinese proverb.

"The late wind blows hardest"*

Adolescent rebellion is the wind. He explained that the children of over-achieving immigrants tended to experience a repressive childhood. We were conditioned to perform well in school, control our emotions, sit still for long periods of time, finish every grain of rice in our bowl, not drink or smoke, and never spend money. Asian American girls manage okay with this (sure some go crazy in college) but repressed testosterone-fueled Asian American guys blossom later. And once we get out into the real world and finally have a chance to party, buy fashionable clothes, lift weights, make some money, and not have a bowl haircut,  then we really go crazy. So it takes us longer to work the wildness out of our system.

There must be some truth in this. Prolonged adolescence is easily accessible for all kinds of men today, at every echelon of the socio-economic ladder. I'm just not sure the late wind has to blow that hard, it probably just comes later for us.

*It's not an ancient Chinese proverb but it should be one

Why Do Asian Men Marry Late?

The National Marriage Project recently released a report called "Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America".

Many of us are aware that the average age of first marriage (27 for women and 29 for men) in the United States is at an all-time high. 

But for Asian American men (but not women), it's much higher. According to this 2010 study, white American men marry at age 28 while white women marry at age 26. Asian American men marry two years later at age 30 while Asian American women marry at the same age as white women - 26. This gender gap is the widest of all ethnic groups. In fact, the only ethnic group that marries later is African Americans (And we all know black people don't get hitched because marriage is for white people).

But if Asians are the model minority and the most assimilated to white culture, Asian American marriage patterns should more closely resemble that of white Americans.

So how come Asian American men wait so long to get married?  

Here are my suspicions:

1) We're more shy and passive: Our conservative upbringing and cultural background makes us risk averse and insecure. This may be especially true in high-tech areas where recent immigration patterns have attracted highly-educated book-smart Asian immigrants (engineers and programmers) who tend to be socially challenged and introverted. 

2) We take longer to mature: We want our freedom. We want our video games. We want our card nights. Many of my friends were late bloomers. I don't mean physically. Or maybe I do. Just late bloomers all the way around. We need to get all partying and independence out of our system. Perhaps we have more to overcome in terms of dysfunctional upbringing and overcoming our natural shyness. 

Also, we age well. I turn 38 this year and was carded for buying cough medicine. Maybe when you look young, you act young. 

3) We're more career-oriented: This seem to go against #2 but perhaps for many Asian guys, we're focused on our careers. Graduate school consumes a tremendous amount of time and energy and makes dating difficult. We're more ambitious and we don't have time for dating or marriage to tie us down. 

I'm writing these reasons and none of them feel very convincing to me.  I don't think  level of education is a contributing factor, since I believe among Asian Americans the education gap between men and women is minimal. Does someone have data on that?

Also, I wonder if the Asian mail order bride phenomenon skews the numbers for Asian American women. I can't imagine there are that many though and that they're so young that it brings down the average. But maybe I'm wrong.

There are also some less pleasant possibilities - like Asian men are more feminine and therefore less attractive and it takes us longer to find a mate. I'm having trouble coming up with reasons for late marriage that are positive. 

What do you think the reasons are? Any positive ones?

Koreans and School Shootings

I enjoy Jay Caspian Kang's writing at Grantland, a sports journalism website. But his recent NY Times article takes his craft to another level. Kang writes about the Oikos nursing school massacre in Oakland last April. He compares it with the Virginia Tech massacre five years earlier. Both involved Koreans. In an interview with Korean-American child psychiatrist, Winston Chung, Kang writes:

“In Korean culture,” Chung explained, “denial and avoidance are the status quo. Under all that suppression, emotional turmoil festers. When it’s not addressed, it can turn explosive. There’s this dark side that needs to be dealt with, but the Korean community as a whole will not acknowledge that               something is up. Nobody will say anything about anything. “I know this shooting had something to do with   han, with hwabyung, [two Korean terms meaning hopeless anger] Chung went on. “I feel almost guilty saying that, knowing how hurtful those words might be to other members of the Korean community. But all my training, everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve read and my own personal experiences all point to that. This guy was suffering from something that was very Korean.”

Two reactions:

1) Anger and passion go together: I went to a Korean church during my freshman year at Berkeley. I've never seen anything like the passion Korean Christians have. I saw it in this church - early morning prayer meetings, people shouting at God during singing, elaborate male bonding rituals, violent party games involving slapping, fervency in pretty much everything they did. Nothing I've experienced in other church cultures comes close. I saw it during the World Cup in Seoul when the entire stadium shook in unison. I see it whenever I travel abroad and meet Korean missionaries. The solidarity and intensity of Korean culture is unique throughout Asia. Unbridled anger and passion are two sides of the same coin. The passion I admire and want to emulate is, at another moment, the very same rage that I fear and detest. 

2) Every Asian culture stuffs negative emotions and events: We stuff. We don't talk about bad things. We don't want to face a tragic or sad event. We pretend like nothing happened. We hope by not talking about a shameful event it will go away. We fear heaping on further additional humiliation and shame. We hope that avoidance will dissipate the grace. Why disturb social harmony by revisiting an unpleasant situation? That's why we don't apologize. It brings up negative emotions. Why stir up something bad again? Shame kills. In every way.

Goodwill! Poppin' Tags

This post was inspired by the song "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and this post.

In a recent Toastmasters meeting, a woman said in reference to dressing well, "When you look good, you feel good."

I don't totally agree but I think I get it.

Style matters. The clothes you wear convey individuality and confidence. Individuality makes you stand out from everyone else. And confidence kills.

I know Asian guys that dress well. Too bad most of them aren't not Christians. We're taught in the church that substance trumps style. That's true. And yet it doesn't mean style is meaningless. Style can express substance.

Guys tend to shun vivid colors, outlandish looks, and clothes for young children (like footie pajamas). But if you're different and you know it, let it show. Let it shine.

I went shopping at Goodwill recently. One was bright yellow. Before buying it, I asked myself: "Is this me?"

I thought about it for a minute. I don't normally wear yellow but why not?

I wear the shirt, it doesn't wear me. It may hurt some people's eyes but it'll give them something to talk about it.

I bought the shirt. I wore it to a Contra dance event. Half the women I danced with commented on it. If I go back and see them again, they'll remember me as the guy wearing the yellow shirt. Whether I conveyed substance is determined by the quality of their memories. But the bright yellow is etched in.

It's somewhat important that other people see you as well-dressed. But it's far more important that you see yourself as looking good. And you carry yourself accordingly.