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Our two daughters, Fanny
and Kathy, have two different
personalities and interests. But in 2008
and 2010 when they were applying for the
college admission, both of them had been
accepted by all the Ivy League colleges
they had applied. Including Harvard,
Yale, Princeton, Columbia and so on.
Finally they all went to Harvard. In our
new work, "THE CHINESE-AMERICAN METHOD:
RAISING OUR CHILDREN WITH THE BEST OF
BOTH WORLDS", published in both
Chinese and English, record of our
effort to combine the essence of two
cultures and helped them in advanced and
balanced development. We summed up our
long story in this short article to show
main stream American the different
aspect of Chinese family.
Do as they do in Romans
Much like a typical immigrant, when we first came to the United States, we had no idea about American education system, and had no idea how to raise our kids. Well as we had chosen to settle here, we felt we were obligated to love this land. So we should do what they do in Romans and tried to as much as possible exposure to mainstream American society and tried to integrate our selves into the main stream American. We moved several times, each time we chose to live in the white community. As a result, the problems came, for most whites, they are very friendly. There are also those of Man wearing colored glasses and made our children often feel helpless in the social activities.
We understood the situation. Should we ask others to change or simply adjust ourselves to adopt the new environment? We took the later approach and started emulated what our neighbor was doing. We had party one after another. To prepare our first party, we were very nervous. I remembered reading an article wrote by a black kid living in a white community. The article title was "Who will come my party?" In the article he described he invited his whole class to his party, but no one shown up. The kid was hurt a lot. In order to prevent similar incident, our family work together to set out a bunch of interesting projects, one by one written on the invitation card to attract children to participate. As the results of our efforts, all the students invited came to our house and had great fun in the party. Since then, as long as we have party, our house was always packed, thoroughly enjoyed themselves and dispersed. In this way, our kids made more and more friends. We also have frequently interacted with their parents.
Keep the essence of Chinese culture
Playing is fun, we enjoyed it. But as Chinese-American, we understood, after all, with yellow skin and black eyes, if we only posse same skills and abilities, how can we compete with others blond? We could not just let the kids playing! No mater whether you agree or not. This is the reality!
Therefore, we can not completely give up the Chinese culture and toss away the family values, an important essence in Chinese culture. We need to do something to help our kids. So we decided let kids playing one day during the weekend and do something decent on another day.
The question is, what is the decent thing? We did not have the answer either, and decided to follow the same suit as majority of Chinese families: learning piano, practicing painting, reading poems, doing small experiments, swimming, cycling and other sports. They were enough to kept us busy for a few years.
The first collision of two cultures
In a flash, these two sisters entering the junior high school. Although the town, pearl river, we are living is a small town, but has a dozen or more baseball fields. It seems every kid rushed to play baseball after school. Kathy joined them to play softball as well. We liked other parents acted as their cheer leader and never missed a game. But poor Kathy hit one and only one ball for the whole season, it was a high ball and was clutched. Fanny was tried to aim in high. She thrown her self in the campaign race for student leader at the school. Of course we were fully committed to help design propaganda flyers, modify campaign rhetoric meticulously. She failed too. She was very frustrated and complaint, "Why popularity defeated ability so poorly?" Well, in a community with 99% of the white, to play the game in popularity, this result was not surprise to us at all. Bad news continued to pour in, the worst would be the news that both of them were rejected from the prep program. Every felt we were falling to the hell. In one sentence, we fought again and failed again.
Failures sparkled new courage
Being rejected from prep program, it hurt us. But it marked a turning point for us too. As a result of these fails sparked the desire to avenge unanimously in our family. My husband fierce beating the war drums, to encourage the sisters to challenge the prep program and ultimately defeat them. I also joined the chorus to contribute my support. In our agitation, the two sisters were in high morale. To defeat a prep program is not an easy task. Yes! That was exactly what we need: a kind of unyielding fighting spirit. So we set out a three-year plan to develop one after another attack target. We first helped Fanny to achieve a breakout in math. After two weeks high efficient training during the summer, she receive a trophy in Math Olympiad at school. The next year, she redouble her efforts and became a math champion in the county and among the top scorer in New York State. Kathy closely followed Fanny's suit. These two sisters started to shine on their way.
Creativity pave the way to success
The experience to challenge the impossible had greatly encouraged the sister to aim in high. To find a way to further challenge these two sister1, we re-visited the new culture to looking for a new breakthrough. We noticed that the US culture puts more emphasis on creativity and leadership. They are not patented, why we can not learn from it? To try it out, we suggested two sisters to create a new club at school. Although the process of creating difficulties have arisen, such as equipment, location, school lack of funding and did not assign a teacher supervision, but the indomitable little sisters, get it done successfully. This success brought them greater self-confidence and opened a wide door for their future achievement. To achieve high academically, Fanny show great interesting in participate in the U.S. Biology Olympiad competition, unfortunately her school did not participate. She petitioned to her school to try get her school involved, without any success. After she finished Chemistry Honors class, she turned her attention to U.S. Chemistry Olympiad competition. This time it was a total different story. With the experience of creating a club, she no longer waste her energy to wrest with school bureaucratic system, but collected the information, contacted the program coordinator, and built a team for her school by herself. Finally, she became a national finalist. The creative skills she learn in creating a club helped her to meet more difficult challenge and create a new way to move to a higher platform.
Appreciation of new culture
After realizing the integration of two cultures offering huge advantage, we further added the different essences of American culture in their practicing: the team work spirit and volunteer service. It drove their self-motivation to an even higher level, they were very active in and out of school. They offered free tutoring, built community service group, initiated and organized information exchange program with students in China, ad led several school clubs. They contribution to the society finally was appreciated by our community. At the time when Kathy entering college, she was honored with more than 20 different scholarship, including Gates Millennium Scholar and MacDonald Scholarship.
With our exploring and practice, we deeply appreciate the advantages brought to these two sisters while combining the essence of these two cultures. We believe our experience will also be benefit to many other parents and kids as well.
THE CHINESE-AMERICAN METHOD: RAISING OUR CHILDREN WITH THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
In order to introduce our experience to the public and provide a reference for the needs of parents, we published a new book, "THE CHINESE-AMERICAN METHOD: RAISING OUR CHILDREN WITH THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS", currently in
both Chinese and English.
In this book we developed a complete family education strategy and methods which integrated the essence of both Chinese and U.S. cultures. With true stories developed about our two daughters to illustrate that how these two cultures can strength each other, how to use creativity to enhance the academic achievement, and finally to have children developed with advanced competitive edge.
In this book, we have also discus in great detail on how to use different strategy and set different and target at different ages of kids.
Scientifically speaking, a theory or a method is practical or not rely on the practical results under its guidance are repeatable or not. We proved that our success can be replicated! It has been tested for the kids in our family and the kids from other family as well. We believe, it can be used in a vast case scenario. We are expecting to see more and more successful results come from the practice of our methods.
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