Why Minnesota Mothers Are Worse than Chinese Mothers
By David Anderson
Over the past few weeks there’s been much discussion of Amy Chua’s book and her Wall Street Journal article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” Frankly, I’ve been pretty nonplussed by the whole hullabaloo. Sure, Ms. Chua denied her kids sleepovers and playdates and even threatened to burn their stuffed animals if they did not play a piano piece perfectly. But to me it sounds like an idyllic childhood. Then again, I was raised by a Minnesota mother whose strict Minnesotan breeding regimen sent me straight to therapy and California as an adult. I know millions of Minnesota kids have endured such an upbringing, and I hope I can bring the dysfunction to light.
Here are some things my Minnesota mother forced me to do as a child:
-Attend every sleepover to which I was invited. To refuse an invite would be rude, even if the host kid was a social pariah and mentally unstable, and we spent the night looking through back issues of Ranger Rick for scantily clad animals.
-Be in a school play and play a non-speaking chorus part, such as Villager #4, so I would realize I am no better than anybody else and everyone in the audience would see that. I would also get good at standing for long periods of time and being quiet.
-Go to Lutheran church every Sunday. If God forbid I can’t make the service, I better get myself to the fellowship hall after the service for polite conversation and a donut hole.
-Watch every Vikings game, including preseason, with my horns and braids cap and never speak of Herschel Walker or Gary Anderson or 12 men on the field.
- Never play any instrument other than the accordion.
-Play only the accordion and smile while doing it.
You can see why I’m heavily medicated. Oh how I yearned to have a Wisconsin mother. Those mothers served milk and cheese and took their kids to Wisconsin Dells while mine forced us to eat Spam and take agonizing car rides to stare at giant balls of twine.
I’ll never forget the Christmas I gave my mom the knit cap I’d tirelessly made in my home economics class. She looked at it and threw it in the garbage, exclaiming, “What is this? You know we’re a Target family. Gifts come from Target—or Dayton’s, if you can afford it. And this hat, why it doesn’t even have 3M Thinsulate in it! What’s wrong with you? Do you want your mother to get frostbitten and lose an ear? Is that what you want? Here, take these scissors and just cut off my ear now, why don’t you?”
I have never cried so hard. I spent the rest of Christmas vacation writing a 10-page letter of apology to the Dayton family.
Then, of course, there was the time I didn’t properly “set the hook” and failed to reel in a 14-inch walleye on our annual family fishing trip to Lake Mille Lacs. As punishment for my poor fishing skills, my mother forbade me to eat any walleye the rest of the summer, explaining, “David can eat walleye when he stops practicing catch and release.”
I lost 30 pounds that summer because Mother saw to it that we had walleye with every meal.
But the day my mother drove her stake into my heart was when, as a college freshman, I told my father that his homemade birch-log birdhouses were kind of “simplistic and unimaginative” and suggested some design changes. My mother turned red in the face, screamed, “Have I taught you nothing?” and forced me to take a semester off of college. I spent the time grounded in my room, writing the following two sentences over and over again:
“Ohhh, isn’t that nice.” And, “Jeez, that must be nice.”
No son of hers would ever utter his true feelings again. No, I would be the pinnacle of Minnesota Nice.
Chinese kids have it good.
***
Note: If you want to see how I turned out as an adult, check out this video. Mother would not be too pleased. I'm hanging out with a lot of jackasses.
Here are some things my Minnesota mother forced me to do as a child:
-Attend every sleepover to which I was invited. To refuse an invite would be rude, even if the host kid was a social pariah and mentally unstable, and we spent the night looking through back issues of Ranger Rick for scantily clad animals.
-Be in a school play and play a non-speaking chorus part, such as Villager #4, so I would realize I am no better than anybody else and everyone in the audience would see that. I would also get good at standing for long periods of time and being quiet.
-Go to Lutheran church every Sunday. If God forbid I can’t make the service, I better get myself to the fellowship hall after the service for polite conversation and a donut hole.
-Watch every Vikings game, including preseason, with my horns and braids cap and never speak of Herschel Walker or Gary Anderson or 12 men on the field.
- Never play any instrument other than the accordion.
-Play only the accordion and smile while doing it.
You can see why I’m heavily medicated. Oh how I yearned to have a Wisconsin mother. Those mothers served milk and cheese and took their kids to Wisconsin Dells while mine forced us to eat Spam and take agonizing car rides to stare at giant balls of twine.
I’ll never forget the Christmas I gave my mom the knit cap I’d tirelessly made in my home economics class. She looked at it and threw it in the garbage, exclaiming, “What is this? You know we’re a Target family. Gifts come from Target—or Dayton’s, if you can afford it. And this hat, why it doesn’t even have 3M Thinsulate in it! What’s wrong with you? Do you want your mother to get frostbitten and lose an ear? Is that what you want? Here, take these scissors and just cut off my ear now, why don’t you?”
I have never cried so hard. I spent the rest of Christmas vacation writing a 10-page letter of apology to the Dayton family.
Then, of course, there was the time I didn’t properly “set the hook” and failed to reel in a 14-inch walleye on our annual family fishing trip to Lake Mille Lacs. As punishment for my poor fishing skills, my mother forbade me to eat any walleye the rest of the summer, explaining, “David can eat walleye when he stops practicing catch and release.”
I lost 30 pounds that summer because Mother saw to it that we had walleye with every meal.
But the day my mother drove her stake into my heart was when, as a college freshman, I told my father that his homemade birch-log birdhouses were kind of “simplistic and unimaginative” and suggested some design changes. My mother turned red in the face, screamed, “Have I taught you nothing?” and forced me to take a semester off of college. I spent the time grounded in my room, writing the following two sentences over and over again:
“Ohhh, isn’t that nice.” And, “Jeez, that must be nice.”
No son of hers would ever utter his true feelings again. No, I would be the pinnacle of Minnesota Nice.
Chinese kids have it good.
***
Note: If you want to see how I turned out as an adult, check out this video. Mother would not be too pleased. I'm hanging out with a lot of jackasses.
© 2008 MSP Communications, Inc. All rights reserved
I am not from Minnesota. I have never been to Minnesota, but I think I can give the Minnesota mothers a run for their money.
I am Chinese, and I am a mother. That makes me a Chinese mother, but the tiger mothers will not speak to me because I have my own ideas of what constitutes good parenting, and they are very different from theirs.
Here are a few examples.
My daughter did not like taking baths. I let her go without a bath for three days. I would have left her unwashed for a week, but she got so itchy, she begged for a bath!
She wanted to stay up until the wee hours of the morning to watch television, and I let her. Of course, she missed school the next day, and I refused to write an excuse letter. She had a long talk with her teacher, and we never argued about bed time again.
She also missed school to watch the Oscars, and her friends gave her a hard time for it. Their American mothers would not let them stay home. Gasp! Could there be American tiger mothers?
She had to learn Chinese characters, and instead of making her write them over and over, I ended up writing them over and over! I wrote little stories using the characters she had to learn for the day, and put them in her lunchbox to enjoy with her peanut butter sandwich.
By now, mothers of all stripes and breeds must be disowning me! But there is more.
I let her enjoy all the things my parents would not allow me, playdates, sleepovers, school plays, and yes, dating...in middle school...
Or should I still call it playdates?
We bonded regularly by watching television, and playing Super Mario...for hours...
She had piano lessons for years, but she will never play Chopin in Carnegie Hall. She can barely read music notes, but she plays The Carpenters to relax. It is a good thing I like Karen and Richard.
And surprise, surprise. She turned out all right. Near-perfect test scores, and offers of admission from Harvard, Yale and Princeton. You bet I am proud of her academic achievements, but because I am a not a tiger mother, what really matters to me is that she grew up to be warm and kind, with an easygoing, unassuming demeanor.
I never pushed. I encouraged. And I loved unconditionally.
www.thegoodchinesemother.wordp...
Posted by: good chinese mother on January 20, 2011 at 12:52 PM
I am from Minnesota and can attest to absolutely everything you said here. Especially the stuff about Dayton's, Target and 3M. Can you imagine not being able to buy tape that isn't Scotch or eating meat that didn't come in a can? I can't. At least your mother didn't make you eat Lutefisk for Christmas every year. No one likes it, except old men who live up north, but we all have to eat it so as not to offend Aunt Edna.
This is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time, but then I'm Minnesotan so that kinda explain it.
Posted by: Jen on March 15, 2011 at 12:54 PM
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