(sorry if this is going to be rather reactionary and offensive)

All day I've been getting emails and IM's from my East Asian friends about this article. As somebody who grew up in and around kids with parents like this I have to call hooey on it.

All of my East Asian friends were miserable, tired, sad kids. A couple committed suicide, most had health problems, alcoholism, severe depression, drug additions, and the rest are today broken people on the inside who can't get through a simple phone call with their parents without breaking into sobbing tears after hanging up. All of them have spoken outwardly and quite vocally a wish for a Western upbringing, one that fostered creativity and the genesis of ideas - not conformance to a meaningless system of symbolic but useless achievements that have provided nothing in particular for their lives except the ability to get their parents to back off for a few minutes.

Where this woman makes a mistake is in assuming that outward, public success (yes, all of them work good jobs, and have fine educations) is the most important thing in life.

The question she has never thought to ask herself is "so what?" So what if little Xiao Yan or Jin Ho or Akiko can perform some dastardly complex piece on the violin on command? Congratulations, you've raised a music box. Can they write music of the same complexity? Can they create? Or was all of that destroyed when their soul was crushed just so they could perform that one more Caprice?

So what if they land a decent job in some field they don't care for? None of my dozen or so friends excel in the professional jobs. In fact, most are mediocre, and stay quiet and keep their heads down. They stand unrecognized, and are considered nothing more than solid, reliable employees, but nothing particularly special. They're a dime a dozen, replaceable cogs in a corporate machine. They don't make team lead, department head, business unit manager or any other mark of a successful corporate career. They toil away for 20 years in some anonymous cube, counting the minutes until quitting time everyday and then leaving for the day with nobody to say goodbye to.

This woman, while making good points about the need to push children to excellence (and the softness of modern Western concepts about child rearing and the overemphasis on false-self esteem), treats her kids like a psychopath.

Reasonable statements like "What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it" are then blasted into cookoo-land by a list of rules that are sure to turn her kids into social misfits, unfit to navigate a complex personal or professional life and succeed in it.

This part really stood out to me:
"If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A."

She makes the ignorant mistake of assuming test taking = knowing. I wish Feynman was still alive to explain this to her http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05WS0WN7zMQ

What she should really be asking herself is this -- how come Westerners, with their wishy washy parents, still end up producing an incredible number of successful people (by any measure of the word)? I mean, she has her kids learning Violin and Piano, not a Pipa and Guzheng -- is the vast irony of that not lost on her?