Well that escalated quickly: Asian parents again

I have to thank my reader Xing for helping me come up with the theme for this post. In my previous post, I shared a personal story from my childhood about my mother going absolutely apeshit when she discovered that my 15 year old sister was playing with make up (I was about 11 then, which makes this incident about 27 years ago). My readers responded with similar stories about their mothers reacting in a similar manner to them using make up and perfume or hanging out with their friends. Xing asked me, Do you ever wonder, where is this fear coming form? Why are our parents (Mums? I feel like my Dad is pretty cool) so afraid? That's an excellent question Xing, thanks for that. I tried to answer it in the comments section to my last post but I felt that I didn't do it justice and I shall now try to organize my thoughts in a more coherent manner now to offer you a better answer! So why do our Asian parents make this link between 'vanity' ("how dare you use perfume?!") and sexual immorality? #thatescalatedquickly

1. Mind the cultural gap

There is a huge gulf between the cultural identities of our parents and people of our generation. You have the strange situation in Singapore: you have kids who are living in a country with one of the strictest laws (mandatory death penalty for drugs-related offences, super strict laws to deal with vandals, practically no freedom of speech or press), they probably have conservative Asian parents but because of the education system and modern media, most of their cultural references and hence values are taken from the West. Now maybe some of our parents do speak English well, some may have even been educated abroad - but then you have those like my dad who can't speak English, won't speak English and won't even try. So my dad's culture is completely different from mine because his inability to speak English means he has completely cut himself off from all the English-language media I consume. Hence over the years, I drew cultural values from a range of sources from my peers to my education to the media I consumed: and no, I didn't simply inherit my father's culture or values the same way I inherited my skin colour or shape of my eyes. 

My relationship to Chinese culture is very different from my parents'

Hence this sets us up for a situation where the child's definition of what is 'normal' or 'acceptable' is completely different from the parents' definition. Let's take the example of premarital sex - this is still a huge taboo for the very conservative Asian parents in Singapore who believe that it is absolutely immoral to even contemplate having sex outside the context of marriage, whilst a lot of the younger, most Westernized generation probably think that it is no big deal at all and that it is unrealistic in this day and age to wait till one's wedding night to lose one's virginity. Who is right? Who gets to decide what is normal or acceptable?

2. My house, my rules? 

The parents would usually put their foot down and say, "my house, my rules - I get to decide what is right and acceptable," However, Singaporean children do not just live in their parents' house like a pet goldfish who just swims around the fish tank; no they go to school, they have friends, they are connected to the internet, they have an online presence, they consume modern media and take part in social media. They are part of a much bigger society than their nuclear family unit. So it is overly simplistic for the parents to think that they get to define what is "normal" in their children's world in this context: now the wise parents will acknowledge that and work with their children to make sense of this confusing world. The stubborn and old fashioned ones will stick to the default stance of "my house, my rules."

This is how "my house, my rules" felt like to me.

So as you can see, there is a huge potential for conflict here if parent and child cannot even agree on what is the definition of normal, or where the line in the sand should be drawn when it comes to issues like how much freedom should a 16 year old daughter have? Should she be allowed to hang out with her friends after school? Should her parents have access to her emails, text messages and all her social media accounts? How much trust should the parents give this 16 year old daughter? Would the 16 year old simply accept her parents' rules or would she be more susceptible to the opinions of her peers and others in the media? There is so much potential for conflict if the parents simply refuse to accept the fact that they are competing with so many people and sources for their daughter's attention and respect and that with each passing year, the amount of influence they have on her dwindles. Thus when Asian parents do not get their way, they throw a tantrum and would start exaggerating the impact of their children's transgressions. Cue: "well, that escalated quickly".

3. Our parents grew up in a very different Singapore

Many of our parents grew up in a time when Singapore wasn't think fabulously wealthy superstate - my dad was born before WW2 and my mother was born during WW2. My mother had a very tough childhood as my grandfather died of tuberculosis soon after WW2, leaving my grandmother a widow with seven children to care for. They were awfully poor and my mother spent most of her childhood painfully thin. She suffered from severe malnutrition as they couldn't even afford three meals a day. So when she first got a job, all her income was spent taking care of her younger siblings and feeding the family. It would have been unthinkable to spend money on frivolous things like make up, perfume or pretty dresses - no that would have been a sinful waste of money. My mother was conditioned by her early experience with poverty to be extremely pragmatic and very careful with money even after we became reasonable comfortable.

So even if we had the money to spend on things like make up, perfume and nice clothes, all these things were considered a complete waste of money by my mother. She didn't have any of those things as a young adult and she thinks we don't need them either. Heck, she was once aghast at me when I spent money on very nice socks - look, I know I am vain, I like wearing very fine socks but my mother couldn't understand why I would indulge myself with nice socks as "nobody can see your socks, when you walk into the room and meet people, is anyone looking at your feet? No they look at your face, not your feet, so what are you buying expensive socks for?"  Thus such actions like buying fine, expensive socks are deemed not just irrational, but immoral and vain by my mother. I can appreciate the fact that she grew up in a very poor family, but she just doesn't accept the fact that I do earn enough to treat myself to expensive shoes and socks if that's what I like and it's my money to spend: but she cannot see things from my point of view, so she defaults to thinking that I must be immoral and corrupted. Like it wasn't even about the cost of the socks - the fact that I cared about what kind of socks I wore was enough to make her think I was vain and immoral.

4. Being confronted with an unknown culture sends them into a frenzy

Oh boy, I remember the first time my parents saw the music video for Madonna's Open Your Heart. It was shown on TV in 1987 and I had already become a huge fan of Madonna by then. Let's enjoy this classic music video:

Okay, so she wasn't wearing much, she was trying to be sexy and provocative. My parents were quite used to me and my siblings listening to Angmoh music - my eldest sister was into ABBA and the Carpenters, both of whom were very wholesome and suited for the entire family. But to see Madonna romp around the stage gyrating in her underwear, my parents thought that if my sisters liked the video, they would soon be running around Geylang in their underwear (or even do a Dr Eng, running around Holland Village naked) to emulate Madonna. Well, that never happened and I still love the song Open Your Heart along all of her hits from that era. But that's the thing: they didn't know how to react to this alien culture that they were totally unfamiliar with, so their default response was fear and rejection. They assumed that Angmoh culture would corrupt their children and turn us into drug addicts and prostitutes.

Is their reaction ridiculous? Yes, but many people fear the unknown and their first reaction when confronted with something unfamiliar would be outright hostility. People become scared when they are forced to deal with a culture they don't understand (and for my dad, it was all in a language he barely understood: English) and Madonna's music videos couldn't have been more unfamiliar to my parents. Like they didn't even understand the concept of a music video, I remember trying to explain it to my father who thought like it was a scene out of a movie or part of a TV programme. Thus this alein Angmoh culture becomes the scapegoat, the boogeyman who has arrived to turn their children into sluts, drug addicts and whores. Thus when they see their teenage daughter experiment with make up or use a little perfume, that just confirms their fears that their Chinese daughter has been corrupted by Angmoh culture after watching all those music videos. Imagine if he saw the music video for Miley Cyrus' Wrecking Ball.

It is necessary to understand that our parents felt threatened by Angmoh culture in a way that we never did - I grew up speaking English, watching American TV programmes, reading English books and magazines, listening to pop music and most importantly, I was educated in English. My father did none of the above: he grew up speaking Hakka, Cantonese, Hokkien and Mandarin and he gave up trying to learn English at a very young age: thus he never watched any English-language TV or films, never listened to any English-language pop music and as he went to a Chinese-medium school, he was educated in Chinese. So for his children not to speak the same first language, my dad had always felt very suspicious of what kind of influence Western culture may have on his children and he would always assume the very worse: hence the tendency to jump to the worst conclusion.

5. The rituals of Asian parents

When faced with a threat they can't handle, people have always turned to rituals to make themselves feel better about the situation. This is why people carry good luck charms or say a prayer, believing that this little action could give them a better outcome say at an important exam or a job interview. The fact is, it is hard to accept that sometimes we have simply no control over a situation, but we still want to do something to give us the impression that we are somehow improving our luck and somehow having more influence over the outcome. This is especially true when it comes to parenting: parents have got to learn to let go and realize that as their child gets older, you cannot control every aspect of your child's life and there will be times when you cannot even help your child even if you really want to.

Parents resort to rituals to feel in control of their children.

I have written a full length blog post on this but it is a story worth retelling: I have a reader whose mother made him promise not to have any girlfriends during his time at university as if that would guarantee that he would get perfect results at university. And I'm like, oh pullease auntie, get real. There are so many reasons why a student can struggle at university, but she obviously has chosen to create a boogeyman - she has created an imaginary threat in her head, the slutty girlfriend who will distract her son from his studies, so in 'protecting' her son from this threat, she has saved the day and guaranteed her son's good grades at university. Yeah right. She is totally delusional of course, but a lot of Asian parents prefer to give in to delusion than accept the fact that they simply have to relinquish control over their children as they become young adults.

People who are insecure, nervous and lack confidence often resort to such rituals to reassure themselves - thus in the case of my mother, she isn't confident that her parenting skills could turn her children into responsible, decent adults: so she starts fixating on certain little things like perfume or make up, she creates rituals by banning certain things which she declares are 'distractions' from the most important thing in our lives: studying to get straight-As or working hard for that next promotion. It simplifies the complexities of life for someone like my mother - it breaks down a complex problem into simpler, manageable bite-sized chunks for her to deal with. Whether or not these bite-sized chunks actually solve the problem or not is irrelevant, my mother just need to feel as if she is doing something about the situation: these rituals help her sleep better at night, even if they do little or nothing to address the situation. 

For better or for worse, humans believe in rituals.

6. Different beauty standards for different generations

Now this is purely a function of the generation gap. For our parents who grew up in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, they may be oblivious to just how much beauty standards have changed a lot since. Let's face it, unless you have a very trendy parent or one who works in fashion/media, your parents' taste in clothes and beauty are likely to be frozen in time from when they were young adults. This is why when I see men in their 40s and 50s wearing painfully 1980s looking clothes, I just shake my head in despair - they're not making an ironic fashion statement, oh no. They are merely telling the world, "1989 was the last time I actually gave any thought about what was fashionable and looked good to the rest of the world - I haven't given a thought about that since." Thus what may be totally normal in 2014 would come across as outlandish, over the top or even downright indecent by 1984 standards and therefore this is another potential cause of conflict.

Take something as basic as perfume for example. When my mother was a young woman, perfume was something you used for special occasions and considered a luxury. She would never wear perfume to go to work as that would be a waste of money and a sign of vanity. In 2014, even the the washing up liquid I use comes with a lovely perfumed scent so that even my plates can smell good after the wash. When I go to the supermarket and look at the selection of washing detergents available, they all seem to have some kind of perfumed scent with flavours like "Rose Blush & Peony" and "Lavender & Jasmine". Perfumes and scents have crept into our every area of our lives - even an ordinary office would spend money on air fresheners just to make the room smell nice for the office workers. So within this context, perfumes/colognes/fragrances (including deodorants and antiperspirants) are treated as normal, even essential - contrast this to my mum's world, they are a waste of money (and by implication that means yes she acutally thinks it is completely normal to stink of sweat, especially in a tropical country like Singapore). Eugh. That's gross.

So there you go, those are six suggestions as to why Singaporean parents often jump to the worst conclusions when confronted with their children's behaviour. What can we do about this? Not much really, the only piece of good news is that the generation gap will narrow a bit after having been stretched to its maximum with my generation. Few Singaporeans today will have parents who don't speak any English at all (like my dad) - younger parents today would have grown up in the 1970s and 1980s and wouldn't be as alien to Western culture and modern technology like my parents who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. Maybe this kind of over-the-top overreaction would soon become something us who grew up in Singapore in the 1970s and 1980s remember and as our generation become parents ourselves, we would not make the same silly mistakes that our parents made. 

And as for my sister who was the inspiration for his story after she played with make up at the age of 15, she is a mother herself today. Not only is she extremely high tech, she is totally understands the culture of her son and the world in which he inhabits. They speak the same language, are part of the same culture and certainly, for her the generation gap is a lot smaller compared to what I had to face with my parents. Things can only get better. So let me know what you think and what your experiences are - do leave me a comment below please. Many thanks for reading.