Did anyone read the recent article in the Wall Street Journal about Why Chinese mothers are better mothers? It was one of those topics that was sent to me by a friend and had me alternately cringing and laughing at the same time. In it the writer Amy Chua purports that raising children “the Chinese mother way” i.e. strictly and expecting better from them does them good in the long term.

The article was of course written to incite comment rather than reflect the tone of the actual book cherry picking the most controversial parts whereas the book discusses the mistakes and regerets that she had and that one of her children rebelled. One thing I remember having a chuckle about was when she tells us some things that her daughters were never allowed to do.

• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin

Let me go through that list for me and my parents:

• attend a sleepover (I held and attended lots of sleepovers)
• have a playdate (I definitely had these)
• be in a school play (we didn’t hold school plays, is that an American thing?)
• complain about not being in a school play (I wanted to be in one so I may have complained about the school not holding one)
• watch TV or play computer games (I was allowed to do both although bear in mind a computer game was Pac Man and Space Invaders when I was a kid)
• choose their own extracurricular activities (well apparently food blogging for children hadn’t developed what with the internet not being around so with nothing else at my disposal I was allowed to choose homework)
• get any grade less than an A (well I did really let them down consistently here)
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama (lol again I must have been a huge disappointment although I upheld the Chinese child tradition of failing in gym)
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin (I did a couple of years on the piano but they gave up soon after_i was not going to break out with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, I was more a Für Elise gal-the abridged aka simple version)
• not play the piano or violin (my lack of talent decided my fate here)

This list was interesting to me because I felt that my parents were incredibly strict with me growing up. Yet from having a look at this list my parents were utter slackers! I then spoke to a friend Buxom Wench who told us that her child Clone No. 1 said “Don’t worry, mum, you’re a failed Asian mother, I’m going to get you a t-shirt that says so. On the back it can say, ‘I forgot to ruin my kid’s life”. And she mused aloud and said “Maybe I can wear it to Chinese New Year…hahaha”.

I do recall wishing that my friend’s parents were mine though. Another aspect that my parents were strict was more from my father’s side. He only ate Chinese food so we never got to try anything different for the first decade of our lives unless it was bought from my pocket money or eaten at a friend’s house. I hated it back then, all I wanted was something different but now, if I don’t have Chinese food for a couple of weeks I start to crave it.

These Xiao Long Baos were actually something that we didn’t grow up eating. Instead for us dumplings were the Cantonese yum cha variety. But when my mother asked me what I would like to have to Chinese New Year I suggested these. Both of our interests were peaked at watching them being made at New Shanghai but the restaurant weren’t willing to share their secret recipe so I looked for a  recipe and found one at Steamy Kitchen which looked the part. It had the telltale gelatine broth that once steamed, turned into a lovely hot soup to be sipped from the dumpling.

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When I was young, I thought that the most sophisticated things were French. I loved those wobbly supermarket creme caramels where you would break off the tabs and the whole caramel would come shimmying and wobbling down the sides. I always thought that it was a marvellous feat that it was able to do that-it seemed almost magical or as if science were involved.

I was in my thirties before I tried a gougere at of all places Alain Ducasse at the Dorcester Hotel. I didn’t like a terribly sheltered existence at all, quite the opposite at least food-wise, but when I sat down to a bowl of gougeres I became hooked. I was all too familiar with choux buns as a sweet item but as a savoury item they were a wonderful revelation. I scoffed gougere after gougere, forgetting the fact that I was about to embark on the degustation meal to end all degustations.

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I was in the passenger seat of a car when I saw the girl walk past us at the intersection. I let out a gasp.“Is she topless?” I asked my father who was doing the fatherly thing and picking me up from the airport. He is partially deaf so all I got back in response was “Whaaat?” while flapping a hand at me to stop talking. He was too busy trying to negotiate the roundabout whilst I was distracted by errant and unexpected cleavage.

The girl was wearing a bustier top and she was much bustier than the bustier top itself so it meant that she was inevitably spilling out of it. I stared at her open mouthed wanting to warn her that she had indeed fallen out of her top before realising that:

a) falling out of her top was probably the look she was going for

b) I would sound like those exasperating people that used to tell me that very thing when I was younger

Had I in fact turned into someone’s mother or more correctly, someone’s grandmother?

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