Send Your Child to School Hungry

Sky in his game face

What report card?

It is so hard to not be my mother and almost impossible to not be my father sometimes.  I suppose it is a genetic tic that I inherited from dynasties ago that nowadays is referred to as the Tiger Mom.

A typical report card ritual:

me:  I got my report card.

my mom:  Ah, the moment we have been waiting for.  How many 100′s did you receive, Number 1 Daughter?

me:  Well, I got a 100 in almost every class… except math.

my dad:  (ominous silence)  You got an….86?  (aghast expression followed by shallow breathing, pale expression, doesn’t look good)

me:  Yes, father.  Forgive me.

my mom:  (sobbing, grinding her shoulders against the wall in despair)  We’re doomed.

my dad:  I….am….very…. disappointed.

me:  I am sorry.  I am a disgrace to the race.

my parents:  Go to your room.  You may not leave until you excel in something.

Looking back, there was no way I could win.  If I brought home an A, my parents would worry about the next one.  If I brought home any thing less than an A, they….would….be….disappointed.

For those of you who may not have known this about me, I must confess that I failed math in school.  Consistently.  My teachers refused to believe that a nice little Chinese girl could be so not-brilliant in math and scraped up points just to pass me on to the next teacher.

Now that I’m all grown up and past the era of math classes, thank God! I find myself in a disturbingly familiar situation, only this time I am the parent holding a report card at arm’s length, destined to be  worried and disappointed.

Do you want your kid to succeed?

Sky is a good student.  He always has been. He received several perfect scores in his classes and, shudder, what’s this?  Three grades in the 80′s.

I felt my DNA change.  I was no longer a nice little Chinese girl, but a steely eyed Tiger Mom.

me:  Sky?  I am so proud of you.  This is a fabulous report card.

sky:  Thanks, mom.

me:  What happened with those three grades?

sky:  Teacher’s stupid.  At least I didn’t fail.

me:  You are not in danger of failing.  You are in danger of not succeeding.

Here’s what you do

Do you know what it is like to be hungry for something?  To want something so much that you do everything you can to get it?

Welcome to the Asian Equation

Studying hard + lots of extra credit = bulletproof report card

We talked about what he needed to do to close the gap from 86 to 100, clearly something he can do if he is hungry enough.  The trick is to get hungry and to stay hungry.

sky:  I know I know.  I have to do better.

mom:  And?

sky:  And I have to let my teacher know I care about my grades so can I please do tons of extra credit?

mom:  And?

sky:  And I have to stay hungry.  Forever.

This is not an easy thing to tell your child.  It is even harder for them to understand especially if they are doing well in school.

“America’s leadership is rooted in creativity, inventiveness, the conceptualization of a new reality, and the ability to think beyond what our teachers tell us. But is our emphasis on free-thinking and self-esteem enough? Or are we marking time while the rest of the world races ahead?

At heart, this is our secret question for Amy Chua. Sure, she seems a little crazy, but she also represents a cultural system so unbelievably powerful that it’s impossible to ignore.”

This is an excerpt from a piece written by Kara Miller, an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.  My answer is the Asian Equation where there is no place for just doing well.

Only hunger and excellence.

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Style Notes from me, your artspy

Hoong Yee

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Year of the Poodle: Do I Look Fat?

Jerry and Seth in the Hong Kong Supermarket

Beware of Hairy Vegetables

We celebrated Chinese New Years with our friends at Joe Shanghai in Flushing, a few days late because of inconvenient snow storms.  Part of the charm of having dinner with friends in Flushing is that we can always drop by the Hong Kong Supermarket and pick up a few bags of frozen dumplings, smoked tofu and gunpowder tea.

I like stock up on the kinds of vegetables my mother cooks.

Seth and Jerry always have a good time in the produce section.  I make it a point to avoid cooking what they have been playing with.

Eat Stuff that Make You Feel Better

The vegetable that I am particularly wild about these days is daikon.  I think it is related to a radish but I am not sure.  I do know I can only eat it like I eat radishes – not too much of it and I prefer it with sliced red peppers in salads.

Eating daikon makes me feel great, in addition to the other healthy stuff I try to have each day.  But something about it gives me an extra bounce.

And the Hong Kong Supermarket has all kinds of daikon.

Year of Not Looking Fat

This is my second new year’s resolution to not look fat.  Seth and I are eating enormous amounts of salad, fresh vegetables, good things with an occasional lapse into Hershey kisses.   Mostly dark leafy vegetables, all types, fruits, lots of them and less things that have been processed.

And daikon.  Lots of it, just not the hairy kind.

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If you want style notes and more for people who change the world, please check out:

Getting to Wow! to feel good, do good and look good

Nonprofit Knitwear for all things knit and nonprofit

Style Notes from me, your artspy

Hoong Yee

– Subscribe and get a little Wow! every day

– Forward the link to someone you think would be interested

– Link to a post on Twitter (follow me @hylkrakauer)

– Put a link to the blog in your Facebook status update

Thanks so much! I really appreciate your help.

Word of mouth is the best way to share, don’t you agree?

The Secret Language of Sisters

This originally appeared as a guest post on the World’s Strongest Librarian.

Hoong Wei and Hoong Yee, ages 3 & 4

Way back when I wandered through hallways of English, understanding only Chinese and hearing Yiddish on my babysitter’s radio, she was there with me making sense, actually fun and nonsense, with all of those words.  My younger sister and I were two little button eyed girls growing up in Queens, New York,  trying to figure out the world around us as Number One Daughter and Number Two Daughter.  Hoong Yee and Hoong Wei.   I actually thought those were names like Jane or Sally from my Fun with Dick and Jane reader.

“Just a little.”

“Yi dian dian.”

“A bissel.”

A little?  Wait a minute, maybe we should ask for more!  Who needs yi dian dian when there’s all those cookies?  And wouldn’t it be great to get a Big Huge Bissel of Bosco Chocolate Milk?  You ask, you’re bigger than me, Hoong Wei would say.

And then she would smile sweetly and wait for me to get the goods.

Soon, we were running around the schoolyard and backyards with all of the kids on our block armed with street game English yelling,

“Tag, you’re it!”

“Lai, lai lai!”

“Holt din zocken!”

Of course, by this time we knew a bissel of a lot of languages and created our own code only we understood.  The other kids didn’t know who to tag, who to throw the ball to, or if one of us was going to steal a base.  The older generation who used to speak in Chinese amongst themselves so that we wouldn’t understand what they were saying now scratched the backs of their necks wondering what the hell we were babbling about.  Our Jewish bubbe babysitter Tante Lainie and her friends, Sylvia Immerkrank, remember her?, Betty and Rita peered curiously at us over their pince-nez perched on their noses as they played canasta.   Catching a word here and there, a familiar sounding phrase, rhythm, and Bam! crazy sounding words tumbled out like pots falling from a window.  Our secret language was the soundtrack of our childhood.

My sister and I thought in Cantonese and erupted in Yiddish.  The world lay before us, a wonderland to figure out, to reinvent in our own words.

Years passed.  We found ourselves living and studying piano in Salzburg, Austria, just the two of us clutching well worn manuscripts of Beethoven Sonaten, Brahms Klavierwerke and a Langenscheidt’s Deutsche Worterbuch.  Now, if you think for a moment that we had any command of German, especially the Salzburg dialect of German that sounds like you just swallowed an alpine yodel, we did not.  Once we were accepted into the Hochschule fur Musik und Darstellende Kunste Mozarteum, all of our classes and piano lessons were conducted in German.  It was sink or schwimm.

“Oy vey ist mir!  ”

“Ay yah!”

“Gott in himmel!”

Again, my sister and I recreated a farmisht, mixed up, cuisinart vocabulary for ourselves.  This time with a gesund Guten Tag’s worth of Oesterreichische Deutsch thrown in with some indignant Cantonese idioms.  Very useful when

“Hey, remember Mrs. Immerkrank who lived across the street from us?  Can you believe her name means always sick?  No wonder she was always kvetching about her arthritis.”

“Fabulous!”

“Fablehaft!”

Fei cheong fabelhaft!”

In the last years of her life, we spoke to each other in a different language.  There was no need to find other words to say chemotherapy or clinical trials.  We could not rewrite the reality of her cancer.  Silences and unanswered questions became inevitable parts of the landscape of our shrinking world.  In the secret language between sisters, there were no words for this time.  No funny double entendres, no joyful jumbling of jargon.

I stood on the edge of her life, feeling helpless and for the first time, speechless.

As the cancer took more of her breath away,  I did most of the talking when she could speak on the phone;  she tired easily from long and painful coughing and I could not bear the thought of her fighting for each breath for every word she tried to say.

Her last call to me was brief and painful, she was gasping for air and could barely speak.  I remember saying to her, “Rest.  We can talk later.”

That was the last time I would hear her voice.

Almost a year has passed since she is gone.  They say that when a language dies, people write poetry.  What my sister and I had created for ourselves was more than a language.  It was a universe of two, a work for two pianos, an endless duet.

I am standing on the stage by myself.  Just me, Number One Daughter.

Our secret language of sisters, now a song without words.

Hoong Yee runs five miles a day on the beach and writes style notes about artful living at www.hoongyee.com.

Are You as Smart as a Third Child?

Sky and Remy

Some of you may be the first child, like me, the one with the dents on your head.  Or you may be the middle child, caught between everything.  The third child is the clean up batter who has to knock in all of the players on base.

No pressure.

Welcome to the Year of the Poodle!

Sky is the wise third child of our family.  I wonder if it is because he lost all of his front teeth running amok in a library at the age of three and found it easier to listen than to speak.  He has an alter kop (Yiddish for wisdom) in a skinny thirteen year old body.

Here’s a recent conversation between Sky and his older brother Remy:

Sky:  If I don’t fast for holidays like Yom Kippur will I turn into a Catholic?

Remy: God doesn’t do stuff like that.  You are whatever you are unless you screw up or forget to go to your bar mitzvah.  Don’t worry about it.  You are what you’re supposed to be.

Sky:  What are you?

Remy:  Right now I’m kind of hungry but I guess you could say I’m a philosophy major.  I wanted to sign up for a class on comparative religions, like Hinduism which looks pretty cool, but those lectures are way too early.  Can’t do early morning classes.

Sky:  I’m going to be taking care of you forever, aren’t I?

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Style Notes from me, your artspy

Hoong Yee

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Word of mouth is the best way to share, don’t you agree?

Are You As Cool As An Eighth Grader?

Oh, to be young, cool and popular.

Who doesn’t dream of being all that, drinking from the Fountain of Youth and instantly becoming a newer and more youthful version of yourself?

I am fascinated by my son Sky’s world of thirteen year olds and in particular, what they are reading.

“Mom, I don’t like reading books.  I think it gives me acne.”  Sky says.  He shrugs his shoulders when I tell him literature can open up worlds for him.  With a quick flip he opens up his laptop and is into another kind of world, a digital universe where he is a player, friend, commenter, reviewer, lurker, shopper and cruiser.  For hours.

I decided to create a universe too.  It is a website for middle school writers to participate in creating a ghost story on line with me.  I think Sky and his friends actually do enjoy reading, but not in the same way I, or anyone else above the age of thirteen, read.  Maybe it would be more accurate to say that they enjoy the experience of literature.

So last night I was telling Sky about my ghost story.  “It’s about the ghost that lived in my grandfather’s house in China.  I am going to invite students to imagine themselves as characters in the story, like a live action role player video game.”

Sky looked at me curiously.  “You mean you could design a video game based on the plot?”

“Video games are all about plot.  It can get really interesting for the writer or player to experience the story as a character and in a game with others in real time.”

Thoughtful silence.  I held my breath.

“That could work.”  He nodded and Oh my God!  I think I saw a hint of a smile.  A you’re-pretty-cool-Mom smile.

I will keep you posted on my quest to be cool, as cool as an eighth grader who loves literature.

Get more Wow!

If you want style notes and more for people who change the world, please check out:

Getting to Wow! to feel good, do good and look good

Nonprofit Knitwear for all things knit and nonprofit

Style Notes from me, your artspy

Hoong Yee

– Subscribe and get a little Wow! every day

– Forward the link to someone you think would be interested

– Link to a post on Twitter (follow me @hylkrakauer)

– Put a link to the blog in your Facebook status update

Thanks so much! I really appreciate your help.

Word of mouth is the best way to share, don’t you agree?