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Essay / Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior By Amy Chua - 1485
Chua credits being Chinese as a means of producing successful children and through this accreditation, her article highlights one of the “8 conversations about race and ethnicity.” The conversation is titled: “It’s an Asian thing, you wouldn’t understand.” The conversation “proclaims a certain pride in their racial or ethnic identity while claiming an exclusive relationship with a wide range of experiences and cultural products typically associated with their racial group” (Moya 13). The whole idea of this conversation is to talk about how a person's life, due to racial stereotypes, is unique to themselves and their culture, and that people not belonging to a certain ethnic group would not understand not their struggle. For Chua, being a Chinese mother is something only other Chinese and Asians can understand, because they grew up in more or less the same environment. She makes her experiences and examples exclusive to the Chinese and she is proud to be Chinese, which allows her to live up to her stereotypes about raising successful children. Chua supports his exclusivity by saying: “The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable – or even legally actionable – to Westerners. Chua also adds, "Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't" to further support this conversation. It is difficult to argue against Chua in this case of conversation because Chua is indeed a Chinese mother and she has her tangible achievements in her living daughters to prove her success. However, "It's an Asian thing" is interchangeable, so even if a Western parent wanted to claim that their parenting method was superior, people would have to agree with their examples because their child-rearing method is unique to this culture. And not everything that is mentioned as an "Asian thing" is necessarily