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237 pages, Hardcover
First published January 11, 2011
This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones.
But instead, it's about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.
I love being able to count on Sophia. She has wells of inner strength. Even more than me, she can take anything: exclusion, excoriation, humiliation, loneliness.
One jarring thing that many Chinese people do is openly compare their children. I never thought this was so bad when I was growing up, because I always came off well in the comparison.
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I felt that [my mother-in-law] was generating sibling rivalry by looking for it. There are all kinds of psychological disorders in the West that don't exist in Asia.
Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out.
”You can’t do what Daddy and I did,” my mother replied. “Things are different now. Lulu’s not you-and she’s not Sophia. She has a different personality, and you can’t force her.”
Like every Asian American woman in her late twenties, I had the idea of writing an epic novel about mother-daughter relationships spanning several generations, based loosely on my own family’s story.
… Unfortunately, I had no talent for novel writing …