As we have now moved to the suburb and CC started pronouncing his first word, “dada dada”, people have started to ask me about if I will teach him Chinese.
“Yes and no.” I said. With Woz, our main communication language is English, since Woz only knows a few words of Chinese. Therefore, I seem to talk to CC in English most of the time as well. But once in a while, with words we all know together, we then all speak in Chinese.
Having spent my teenage years in the US, I have seen this movie way too many times. Parents insist the children learn Chinese or even Taiwanese, so they only strictly speak to the kids in those languages. Somehow the kids just ended up replying in English anyway. Parents also spend time commuting and sending the kids to weekend Chinese schools, so the little ones now have two sets of schools and homework. So instead of running outdoors and going to parks and museums and zoos and loving to learn from anything and everything, they learn to hate learning…at least Chinese. No, I really don’t want to send CC to Chinese weekend schools, if I can help it (or unless he requested it himself.)
I don’t remember who I heard it from, but a few months ago someone told me, “You should teach him to love to learn. If they love to learn, they will be able to learn what they love and be good at it. They will also keep improving themselves throughout their lives.”
What a wise advice!
In this world of Tiger Moms, I am not so sure if my son will be able to beat 95% of his schoolmates in getting more than 1600 on their SATs (Do they still take SAT? You know what I mean.) How do you beat perfection? You can’t. But a person can be unique. A person can be loving, fun, interesting, responsible (personally, financially, and socially), generous, and most importantly, understands oneself. I think having these common values will take my little CC much further in life than getting perfect scores on SAT/MCAT/LSAT, or be able to speak Chinese.
