Rant of the Exiles

Re-enacting the Jonestown Massacre Last week, my family and I spent seven days with seven young adults from our church doing a program called Subversive Life. I stole the idea from a pastor friend who did something similar. During the day, people either went to work or helped out with a week-long youth program. In the evenings, we cooked together and then had some kind of activity.  We stayed at my parents' house while they were of town and we had a blast. We cooked together, had group devotional times, went contra dancing, attended an open mic together (along with a spontaneous jam session outside afterwards), solicited prayer requests from people at Oakridge Mall, volunteered at Cityteam, hosted a Board Game Night at church, attended an art showcase, played lots of Just Dance 4 and hung out together in community.  It was an awesome yet exhausting time.  One goal of Subversive Life was to subvert individualism. So much of my life is spent on my own, ...

I never would have predicted we'd be reading Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg's new book about women's leadership, in our men's group at church but here we are. I told my co-leader that I have strong opinions about feminism and though my views aren't completely negative, I'm skeptical on the claims of the self-empowerment movement. I'm simply not buying all of the gender equality argument. However when my co-leader suggested the book as a way of getting to know women better, I couldn't back down on the challenge of a dissenting viewpoint. We have a neat group of guys in this club. They have made unique parenting decisions. Two of the men spent two years full-time at home each raising his young son. They felt it made a positive impact on their sons and had no regrets about the experience. One dad was unemployed so it wasn't voluntary. But the other chose to stay home from work and the women in his office were incredulous. They asked him why he wanted to...

Getting guys to want to marry early is a tough sell. It's kind of like being in a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in the 21st century. You're marketing a product that is antiquated, over-priced, and irrelevant. It's an almost impossible proposition for non-Christian men since our hook-up culture sells sex cheap and our divorce culture makes marriage expensive. It's a better bargain for women since early marriage avoids unique disadvantages (subject of a future post). It's somewhat more attractive to devout Christians since we don't consider sex outside of marriage as a viable option. I'm also guessing there are some cultural obstacles that make marriage unappealing to Asian American Christian men. I'm not sure what exactly those are but I've hinted at some possibilities .  Given all this, I do believe marrying early is a good thing for men. I got married a month after I turned 23. It hasn't always been fun or easy but ove...

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 ha...

 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....

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, ...

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, h...