East Meets West: Parenting from the Best of Both Worlds

By Kim Parker MSW LCSW

Parenting can be the toughest journey a person ever makes. The author transparently addresses the difficult parts of this role while pointing us to some practical ways of thinking and relating with children to lighten the responsibility. This book is as fascinating as Amy Chuas Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother memoir, as relatable as Jen Hatmakers Christian foibles, as uplifting as Iyanla Vanzants inspirational messages, and backed by solid research of the likes of Brene Brown. By deftly combining four of Americas favorite genres into one enjoyable read, the author does not force us to compare and choose one world view over another, but honors all.

Kim understands the unique challenges and opportunities that arise when youre parenting in a culture different than the one in which you were raised. Her words are wise and just what you need to figure out what is best for your family!

Jill Savage, author of Better Together: Because Youre Not Meant to Mom Alone

This is an insightful book, full of sound and practical advice. I highly reccommend it.

Dr. Helen Mendes Love, MSW, author of Reflections on the Upsides of Aging

Kim gives invaluable insight on the intricacies of parenting in a more globalized and culturally-relevant world, while respecting tradition and heritage.

Sam Louie, M.A., LMHC, author of Asian Shame and Addiction: Suffering in Silence

Humorous, yet educational, this book is a must read for any parent.

Erika Olivares Sumner, Life & Wellness Coach, Mother of Three

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781512750935

Kim Parker MSW LCSW

Kim Parker is an American social worker and therapist of Chinese Vietnamese descent. A young refugee from the fallout of the Vietnam War who was sponsored by a Christian church to come to America in 1979, Kim has journeyed through identity crisis, adopted the culture of her new homeland, found Christian faith, and years later even married Philip--a white Southerner from her sponsoring church. She is now sharing her personal story to honor the sacrifice of her amazing parents and glean from the wisdom of ancient eastern religions and philosophies as it relates to parenting. Together, Kim and her husband are parenting three precious boys from the best of both Eastern and Western traditions.

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Copyright © 2016 Kim Parker, MSW, LCSW.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-5094-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-5095-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-5093-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016912864

WestBow Press rev. date: 9/6/2016

CONTENTS

Prologue

Introduction

Chapter 1 Open Your Eyes!—Be Patient

Chapter 2 Eggs, Bananas, and Filial Piety—Be True

Chapter 3 Supple Hands, Burnt Rice, and Sandwich Crusts—Be Sacrificial

Chapter 4 Trời Thấy Hết —Be Spiritual

Chapter 5 Build Strong Foundations—Be Trustworthy

Chapter 6 From Tiger Mom to Therapeutic Mom—Be Kind

Chapter 7 Promoting Self-Esteem with Family-Centric Values—Be Affirming

Chapter 8 Hierarchy, Order, and Family Structure—Be Respectful

Chapter 9 Family Honor and Saving Face—Be Wise

Chapter 10 The Figure-Outer Mode—Be Emotionally Intelligent

Chapter 11 Play Offense Instead of Defense—Be Strong

Chapter 12 Thank Your Way Out—Be Humble

Chapter 13 Being Little—Inspire with Authenticity

Appendix A—Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Appendix B—API’s Eight Principles of Parenting

Appendix C—Statistics & Facts on Family Structure

Appendix D—Figure Outer Mode

Endnotes

About the Author

To Mom and Dad, for your longsuffering sacrifices.

(Kính tặng Ba Má với sự hy sinh nuôi dưỡng chúng con.)

To my other Mom and Dad, for your role in allowing East to meet West

many years ago, and even today.

PROLOGUE

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.

–OSCAR WILDE

I’ll be honest with you—this book seems all over the place, somewhat scattered like me. But it is a peak behind my mask, so that I can tell you the truth. I’ve shared with a number of clients at my private practice about my undiagnosed ADD (attention deficit disorder, sometimes with hyperactivity). I have learned to sit still and listen quite well, but I have not lost what people call the nervous energy or tendency to fidget relentlessly. Do you know that nosophobia is just a fancy word meaning a tendency to over-identify with the pathology that you are studying, aka medical students’ disease? The funny thing is that I never went to medical school, although I did obtain a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology. Looking back, that must have been because my minors, Psychology and Philosophy, were actually my majors, even though I did not officially pursue any minor degrees. To make a long story short, I ended up with a master’s in social work and have been working in the field since.

I’ll be even more frank with you. At one time, I thought that working as a mental health counselor gave me the credentials to write a how-to book. So, at first, that’s exactly what I set out to do. My colleague and mentor, an older African American woman, encouraged me to share from my personal experience as an Asian American mom. The former college professor and now life coach said that she saw me with my three young boys (that was four years ago) and was impressed with how well they behaved while we were visiting her home. A few years later, I invited my mentor and her husband to dine with my family. Really, I was checking to see if she would still be impressed after seeing all the children in our natural setting. Amazingly, she did not change her mind!

So I decided to share what I’ve learned. Motivated by the untold story of my aging parents, I weave a memoir into this book. Really, I prefer to ramble about nonpersonal topics, like science, religion, world history, current affairs, and philosophies because those subjects are often on my mind. As I did research for this book, trying to keep up with my perfectionist and authoritative tendencies, I soon realized what I had known for a long time. Numerous great works have been produced before me, by so many experts from various fields of study with more credentials than I have, or as Asians would say, whose shoes I am not fit to shine.

Yet my eighty-year-old black friend and fellow social worker kept insisting that I had some wisdom to share. After all, I help my husband by making a living as a therapist in private practice. But I don’t feel like an expert. My clients just get encouragement from me, along with a little bit of psycho-education. Although it seemed that everything I wanted to write about had already been written by other people, I heard in the back of my head the unique voice of my amazing parents. I was also reminded of how my husband and I found each other and continue to meet each other in life and love, which is nothing short of a marvelous mystery. But this will not be a clinical resource book on great parenting, because as all helping professionals know, we are only experts to a limited degree—and oftentimes not even in our own lives.

In the four years that I’ve taken the plunge to go public with my story, quietly writing away doubts, fears, and questions, I’ve read more books and researched more articles than all the previous years combined. I was trying to play offense and prepare for the critics. Shortly after deciding to go for it, I discussed my writing plans with my family. When I told my brother, Tim, that I was writing a book on parenting, he initially responded, Are you ready for the criticism? You’ve got to be able to take the criticisms because lots of people have strong feelings about these things. Then his next question to me was, How do you do this [write about parenting] and avoid being judgmental? Two very good questions posed by my loving, thoughtful brother.

I am blessed to have him (and all my siblings) and to be challenged in every way by numerous people like him who love and care for me. I am deeply grateful for the prayerful support of my CFBC church family, Jonathan Lee’s Carpenter’s Crew and Steve Taylor’s United life group, all my Titus moms, the YMC ladies, and for the many colleagues, clients, and friends who’ve encouraged me as I tackle this controversial topic of best parenting practices. How can I leave out my patient husband and precious children who’ve graced me with the title of wife and mom?

Maybe this self-help memoir is about growing up as a minority, an Asian American in a majority white country. But what about the journey of finding myself, of reconnecting with my roots in Eastern culture while branching out to a more mature identity that includes so many things American? One of those Western things that I embrace is pop psychology. What makes my field of clinical social work pop, and what grounds it to a more significant scientific study of human behavior and biological nature? Frankly, I have gone through a dozen possible titles in an endeavor to centralize my writing. To help me be more succinct in my writing, my social work mentor, Dr. Helen Mendes Love asked me to answer the question, Who is your target audience?

I want to tell her that my target is outside the range. It is like my private practice—serving everyone and their aunts with just about the full gamut of issues that life brings. I work with clients as young as three years old and as old as senior citizens. I’ve enjoyed working with my clients’ parents who are single, married, remarried, cohabitating, divorced and co-parenting, and step, foster, kin and adoptive parents. I commonly address concerns of single women, couples, and especially families. It encourages me to be able to empathize with people from diverse religions and races. How can I not mention the Muslim families I’ve had long working relationships with over the years, who come to seek treatment for their children’s various mental health issues? Or the Mexican American girls who, while getting validated for their feelings and thoughts, teach me what the term wetback means. I love hearing when my black clients say to me, Ms. Kim, are you from the South? Because you talk like us. I don’t want to leave other people out, like the mixed race kids or the Asian teens who struggle with identity, self-esteem, stress coping, and cultural and generational gap issues.

Truly connecting with humans of diverse backgrounds and identities gives my life meaning. Of course there are some mental health diagnoses that I do not feel competent treating and will refer these clients to other specialists. As a matter of practice identity, I will name a few client groups and common therapeutic issues I’ve addressed. But I have a hard time answering what I specialize in because I’m not sure that I can pick one client population over the other. Everyone’s story contributes to the tapestry of life that is so interwoven and deeply fascinating. This is so true of middle-class, American parents.

INTRODUCTION

Besides a few lessons learned, I don’t have anything juicy to reveal in this book, except what a funny character I am, trying to be the best version of me possible. You will not read about drug use, cheating scandals, lurid sexual affairs, or broken hearts. Instead, you will find just plain brokenness, the kind that inflicts every human being. There were a few close calls with one of my sons attempting to run away a few times when he was eight, another one threatening to call CPS when he was acting like a teenager, and an occasion of one son accusing me of being the "worst mom ever when he was five years old. Thankfully, my children have learned to keep these passionate expressions reserved mostly for me when no one is watching. Yep, these are the same children who other parents have raved about since they were babies. Friends have often remarked about how calm, joyful, and smart they are. The childcare workers find them a joy to be in class and delightful! The teachers have given these three boys straight Es for excellent conduct. Storeowners have told me that they have such good behavior and that I have taught them right. These are my imperfect kids, and I am their imperfect mom. Along with my sweet but imperfect husband, we have endeavored to parent them in the best way possible. We call doing our thing putting on a show" because at home, behind closed doors, we are rehearsing. And we are living to tell about our story of how East continues to meet West and what we have learned about parenting from the best of both worlds.

At one time, I was going to title this book Therapeutic Mom: Everything I needed to learn about parenting I learned as a therapist. I started out in the helping profession twenty years ago, still an idealistic dreamer working at a community mental health clinic in the California Bay Area. As a young, part-time case manager intern, just starting social work graduate school, I was shocked and worried to find out that several of my coworkers, middle-aged Caucasian ladies, were either already divorced or in the process of getting a divorce. A few were chain smoking during their work breaks and revealed that they were seeing their therapists after work. Coming from a very sheltered upbringing, I quietly wondered, What did I get myself into? I honestly pondered this phenomenon—does the helping profession attract troubled people with messed-up lives? Or do men and women tend to become more dysfunctional as they work in this stressful field of helping clients with serious problems? At the ripe age of twenty-two, I could not relate because I was naïve and clueless in many areas of life, so I privately thought that it was hypocritical for people with personal problems themselves to help others. How wrong I was! Gradually over the next twenty years, I experienced my fair share of painful scrapes, lessons in self-reflection, humility, longsuffering, compassion, perseverance, and maturity. I wrote this book to share about the scars.

Yes, therapists can be joyful and have relatively normal, functional family lives, so enjoy those yearly holiday photo-cards! And yes, we can raise children who manage to appear happy, smart, and well adjusted, who earn wonderful accolades at school. Yet, it has not been an easy road to get to this point of daring to tell about it. Even after numerous humbling moments, I choose to believe in me, and you can be equipped to do the same. But the therapeutic approach to parenting encapsulates only a portion of this book. At one point, I thought about the title How to Raise Smart, Confident, Resilient Children. Then I remembered that I’m still not out of the woods yet, as my kids have not reached high school age, and what if one or two of them become a complete dysfunctional rebel the year I’m ready to finally publish my book? I would be a total fool of a mother to think that I have the secret codes and know what I’m doing. Besides, do parents ever get to a point where we are really out of the woods?

So, I treaded lightly on the how-to part of this book, all the while aware that if I waited too long to see how this parenting journey unfolded, I would not be the courageous, inspiring, helping professional that I aspire to be. Also, I realized that I would never be done writing on this subject, as there is always more to learn. So, I thought maybe the title should be Everything I Ever Needed to Learn, I Did Not Learn in Kindergarten just to emphasize that I have always been a slow learner, so there is hope for you. At one point (probably just after being called the worst mom ever by my then kindergartener), I thought the best title was God Is Great, and I Am Not! But that seems quite obvious.

If you’re looking for a book on how to become super mom, then you picked up the wrong one. Or, if you would like to learn skills on how to raise obedient, intelligent, well-mannered kids inside and outside the home, then I cannot indulge your imagination here either. However, if you want the next best thing, then please allow me to share my perspectives with you. This is a story of how East meets West and what I have learned about parenting from the best of both worlds.

CHAPTER 1

Open Your Eyes!—Be Patient

To deceive is bad, to deceive yourself is worse, to deceive yourself about your soul is the worst of all.

—BISHOP BROWNING

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong … Because someday in life, you will have been all of these.

—GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER

I was born with really big eyes. At least this appears to be the case from examining the few pictures in a family album that my dad had managed to sneak onto the boat while escaping South Vietnam in October 1978. My forehead seemed to be protruding a bit forward in these baby photos, I think. Even so, I’m glad that my parents saved some precious mementos of our life in the former South Vietnam. I was six when we escaped the Communist country by way of the South China Sea. My dad was the coordinator of the trip. He was also the captain when the captain he hired for the escape journey took the money and bailed out at the last minute. Along with seventy-eight other relatives and friends, my dad took me, my older brother, and my three younger siblings on his boat, three meters wide by ten meters long. My parents had arranged for their trusted friend, a middle-aged lady with grown children, to take care of us while on the vo yage.

After a couple of storms at sea, our boat miraculously made it to Malaysia a wreck. The adult men who knew how to swim swam their children to shore. I was carried on the back of my father to the shore of Malaysia. We settled at a refugee camp set up by the International Humanitarian Aid organization. There, we lived on rationed foods while waiting eleven months to get sponsored by a country. I was almost seven by the time we arrived in the United States in September 1979. At a camp on Pulau Bidong Island (one square kilometer in area), there were no photography studios, so the only glamour shot we each got consisted of a small passport-size square photo that looked somewhat like a Hollywood movie screening. In the souvenir photo, we each had an identification chalkboard sign held in front of us that included the date of arrival, boat number, and date of birth. It appeared somewhat like an old filming sign before the director says, Ready, cut, action! Even in this single black-and-white photo, you can see that my eyes were opened wide. It seems that I’m always staring straight at people, whether kin or strangers. So, you can imagine my surprise when years later, in my twenties, I heard my wise father earnestly admonishing me, Kim, open your eyes! My mother gave me a weary look that she thought I was too unaware to catch.

refugeecamp.jpg

My eyes are opened wide.

The first time I heard this plea as a teenager, I thought, What on Earth is Dad talking about? I have big eyes and can’t open them any wider! Then gradually, months and years later, it hit me that my dad was worried that I could not see through people. I was missing the subtle nuances of nonverbal communication—tones, facial expressions, body language, and even motives of the heart. My parents were right to be concerned. I have always been a little naive and appear clueless often. It isn’t that my mind cannot perceive external stimuli. It’s just that I’ve always been a very slow processor. You can tell me a funny joke, and I’ll meekly smile while everyone else is laughing. Days or sometimes weeks later, make no doubt, it usually happens that I’ll finally get it in the middle of the night. I console myself by saying that at least I got the last laugh! Tragically, by then it’s too late for me to go back and let you know that I did laugh because your attempt at humor was indeed funny, because that would clue you in on my personality deficit … (big sigh).

Movies with complicated plots seem to go over my head in much the same way. At our meager rented home in Southern California, my three brothers, two sisters, and I used TV shows and movies as our primary form of entertainment. My brothers used to get annoyed that I would ask a lot of questions during the movies, but I needed to ensure that I was following along correctly. Don’t even ask me if I fully understood all the layers of dreams in the 2011 hit movie Inception. In my thirties, I’ve begun to realize that I’m just a late bloomer. I can probably write a book about what I learned at each age, many years post-kindergarten.

Let’s start with what I learned in first grade—that you were supposed to wear underwear to school underneath your outer clothing. It was our first year in the United States, and the pastor of the little Lutheran church congregation in Plainview, Texas, that had so graciously sponsored my family, was taking us clothing shopping for school. Even though I was embarrassed to learn that school-aged kids needed to wear underwear, I didn’t beat myself up for it because my parents learned it at the same time. I guess you can say it’s a Southeast Asian immigrant thing (in Vietnam, as in various poor Asian countries, children go without undergarments). So, we six kids quickly got assimilated to American fashion with Hanes Her Way and Fruit of the Loom. And I am proud to say that I have carried on this Western practice with my young children! Here is a picture of our family of eight in our first apartment, wearing all American hand-me-down clothes, ready to attend St. Paul’s Lutheran Church with the Parkers during our first year in America.

1styearfam1980.jpg

Ready for church Western style

In ninth grade, I was embarrassed to learn in Spanish class that I was supposed to wear a bra. Senora Cid was asking each of the girls in class, De qué color es tu bracier? What color is your bra? We each had to answer in Spanish, Mi bracier es [fill in the color]. Thank God she asked me last, so I had time to come up with the most non-embarrassing answer I could think of, Blanco. That day, I went home and asked my mom to take me bra shopping, which she promptly did. I would reveal other late-blooming lessons, but then you might not believe that I have anything of value to share as a helping professional.

So the last example I will share has nothing to do with dress. Despite my woeful deficits in social grooming and etiquette, I made good enough grades to be offered admission to Stanford University, which I attended for four years. I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college freshman biking around campus when it finally occurred to me, Hi! How are you? really just meant, Hi! Here I was, ready to really have meaningful conversations with my peers who seemed interested in connecting when suddenly, as I paused to answer their question thoughtfully, they had already biked off. After several times of literally being left standing in the dust, bewildered as to why people say things they don’t really mean, I finally learned that this was what bright, articulate college students with good social skills do—they know how to evade probing questions.

In fact, in my mid-twenties, I learned that it’s okay to not share all your private thoughts with friends. Social settings were not for meaningful discussions of any kind, and definitely not for deep thoughts, unless they were the Saturday Night Live satirical variety. I had not mastered the art of chitchatting over superficial topics, question dodging, or distracting skills as a twenty-something. Back then, to read between the lines meant to search for some fine print with a magnifying glass. It took me a long time to learn the finer nuances of communication. In psychology classes, we learned that grasping figurative language is a developmental skill that some grown-ups who are inflicted with schizophrenia never quite master. Maybe, I thought, in addition to my self-diagnosed ADD, I was also schizophrenic! Thank heavens that a slow-processing mind was all I had to struggle with, rather than delusions of grandeur or hearing voices.

After a few incidents of social mishaps in college that are too embarrassing to recount, I was given the tongue-in-cheek McFly award by my dorm mates at the end of freshman year (I’m guessing that he’s the goofy dad from the 1980s hit movie Back to the Future). I began thinking that maybe God did make me with some screws loose. Though I was quite sharp in some areas, such as knowing the difference between lose and loose, my social skills were quite rudimentary and my tact even more blunt. I didn’t know who God was at the time, but I thought that if it was true that there was a great Creator out there somewhere, He might have formed me with disconnecting or missing parts! I just didn’t pick up on social norms as easily as my peers. Even my younger brothers and sisters didn’t seem so hopelessly awkward in social situations.

Yet, even though it appeared that loads of things were going over my little head, I was really trying to catch larger matters with my probing mind. As a young girl, I would often ponder weighty topics such as, What was this person really thinking inside his head? Or, what is the purpose of life? Or, do Isaac Newton’s three laws of physics apply to human behavior also? Thank goodness for my neighbor at the time, a Caucasian American English school teacher named Mrs. Mahoney, who helped me see things from a more mature and Western angle. I visited her often because she would patiently and respectfully listen to me talk while allowing me to sample her delicious homemade chocolate chip cookies. Mrs. Mahoney used to shake her head at me. Kim, she said with a big frown on her forehead, you are fifteen going on thirty-five! I quietly wondered if this was a compliment.

Fortunately or unfortunately, this remark did not deter me from being me. In college, after hearing about chaos theory from a notable professor during one of my neurobiology courses, I considered the enigma of supposed randomness. If a butterfly flapping its wings in China can affect the velocity of the wind in Texas, then does that mean that every human behavior on Earth or natural event that occurs in the universe can be explained by scientific or mathematical laws? I often wondered, while appearing as clueless as McFly, If the intricate complex functioning of the human brain within the human body can be explained on a cellular level, then how did pure chaos of non-directed evolution result in such an ordered system as the human body? This would defy the second law of thermodynamics regarding entropy. Looking even more pensive, I wondered, If all macro-systems can be illuminated by micro-systems, then surely micro-systems can be explained at the cellular and atomic levels still incomprehensible fully to the human brain.

To put the icing on my aloof time machine, I mused, wouldn’t it be dandy to have a master mind to see all the behind the scenes work? How sweet it would be to have the mind of a higher being who is responsible for this intelligent design that to the human eye looks merely like chaos. After all, it is only in an artificially controlled, structured setting that scientists can observe all the variables to factor into their hypothesis to produce accurate findings. In the natural world setting of animals or humans, no scientific observer can surmount the various small differences in initial conditions. The study of any living organisms in their natural settings, when replicated, would yield widely diverging outcomes because even minute differences in initial conditions can over time result in dynamic changes. This means that their scientific findings are at best estimates. Random chaos only appears to be that way to the human eye that cannot surmount the entire landscape.

My tendency to dwell on deep thoughts did not help me to be fully aware of other people and their needs. Yet I still had a need to feel like I belonged somewhere, so as a single twenty-something, I tried to get in touch with my ethnic roots by hanging out with Vietnamese American friends. I even took a Vietnamese language class my sophomore year in college. But soon I found out that my foot-in-mouth disease was not because I was an immigrant learning English in America. This character trait also infected me across language barriers! I had endeavored to brush up on my Americanized Vietnamese