furnaceofchildlove:

Disclaimer: I’m not interested in critiquing or judging anyone else’s decisions as a parent, and I know plenty of people have benefited from and look back fondly on growing up under a stern hand.  I think a stern hand can also be coupled with judicious parenting, and is often born of necessity, but that’s a whole other story that is not my story.

I can only speak for myself.  

And I will say that while I believe mental illness runs in both sides of my family (but lol Koreans don’t have mental illness so no one has ever been diagnosed—the irony being that my father is a mental health professional, but let’s save that for another day!) I attribute a huge amount of my anxiety and depression and abysmal self-esteem to the way I was raised by my Korean parents. 

Erratic physical punishment, being berated and told you’re ugly if you cry, the conditioning to believe you have no inherent or individual self-worth—only the worth ascribed to you by your parents or grades or teachers or other authority figures—the verbal affirmations that if you’re not the best at everything you’re not worth anything, the continued verbal affirmations that if you’re not living up to your parents’ improbable expectations you’re a failure—these things will have no place in my household if and when I have children.

My Korean parents carried a lot of their values and convictions with them when they immigrated to the US in the late 1970s.  Because of my father’s job, they couldn’t choose where to live and so were located in areas where they were one of very few families of color, let alone Asian families, let alone Korean families.  Where I grew up, it was lower middle class whites like corn fields as far as the eye could see.  The extent of families of color were: us, a nonagenarian Chinese doctor white people were always confusing with my (much, much younger) dad, his wife, a Black father with his Black-Japanese sons (they left to attend a prestigious boarding school for high school), and a Taiwanese family white people were always insisting much be “Chinese” because “it’s the same thing.”  My mother had to drive upwards of an hour to meet Korean friends.  Korea has changed dramatically since my parents left, but I think as a direct result of their isolation, in a lot of ways they were (and remain) frozen in a 1970s Korean mindset.

I, on the other hand, was a US-born-and-1990s-bred, card-carrying, assimilated-ass, model minority.  You know that gross, “I don’t even see you as Asian!  You’re like, a white person” thing white people love to do when, to their delight, they realize they can get along with you as though you were a like, a human person, or something?  Yeah, that was me.  And because I didn’t know any better, because I was alone, and because it was either go with that or actually listen to the background hum of “are you Chinese or Japanese?” “Are you North Korean?” “But, wait, you born here?” “Dragon-lady” eye-pulling taunts and the covert and sometimes overt judgements on my appearance my body my mental abilities the way our house smelled my mastery of the English language spiked with the child at Wal*Mart pointing at me and following me and saying “look, a Chinese lady.  Mom, a Chinese lady,” (I was like, 15 when this happened so I don’t know what that lady shit was about), I drank that kool-aid down.

And it was confusing for me, told by my parents to be as “normal” and “American” (white) as possible without being what they saw as too white—lazy, free, TV-watching, hobby-indulging, an individual, someone who spoke up for themselves etc. etc.—and simultaneously told by white people and the white TV and white American schooling that hitting your kids was wrong, that you should have self-worth as an individual, that you shouldn’t be afraid of emotional honesty, that you should pursue your own goals, etc.

And of course I don’t think that’s the homogenous “real” face of white American parenting.  And it’s not like every or really any white kid gets this, or should get that, or that overall, white American parenting isn’t too permissive.  I work around kids, and I see how disrespectful (rich) white parents can be to be when it comes to “defending” their child’s god-given “right” to trample all over public property and have the rules bent in deference to their specialness.  Frankly, it’s infuriating, and I can’t help but think: oh, that’s where like, Jonathan Franzen (or whichever privileged white dude I’m hating on in a given week) came from.

I should also clarify that my parents weren’t abusive by their standards, and I wouldn’t call them abusive—even to my ears, my complaints sounds indescribably whiney and needy and shameful.  I guess it’s hard to describe the true physic impact of this kind of parenting on a child, and then an adult.  And you know, I’m proud of a lot of what my parents believe in.  I appreciate the respect they instilled in me for shared property and community, the elderly, the family unit.  I think that last part really prevented me from making reckless choices as a teenager—the combination of “my mom will literally kill me if I die,” and “my parents will literally die if I die” being an extra-potent guardian angel on my shoulder.

But I think it is valuable for children to learn that they can say “no” to authority, and “yes” to their own autonomy. That authority isn’t always correct, and that often it is wrong, and unjust, and dangerous, and trusting it can get you hurt or abused or left in the dust.  And in order to do that, you have to be strong.  You have to believe you’re worth something because you say so, that you have any kind of mental, emotional, physical self, and that that self will be and should be respected and acknowledged by others.  And I think we can do that—create that ourselves, for our kids, and reject whiteness at the same time.  To be a POC and have autonomous self-worth is I believe, an act of defiance.

Ain’t got nothing to add but “Word to the bolded.”

(Source: anedumacation)