As an Asian-American, I’ve spent the majority of my primary and secondary education indoors.  This, of course, is partially due to my distaste for most forms of social interaction, but it is also due to (yes, you guessed it) studying. My youth was haunted by the stereotype of some instinctive intelligence that was practically given to me as birthright into the Asian race. According to my then-six-year-old classmates, my “smartness” wasn’t due to all the time I spent doing my homework instead of watching TV, but instead due to my being “Asian”. But is it true?

Well, to a certain extent, yes. Not only am I lucky to have inherited the good genes from my parents, but I was raised in a bi-lingual environment, I didn’t listen to anything but classical music until the age of twelve, and my parents read me books since before I could talk, let alone walk (apparently that was the one thing I wasn’t very good at). According to all the developmental scientists and researchers out there, I did it right. There was no way I couldn’t end up smart. I was that Asian. The one who managed to win a trophy at the middle school science fair two years in a row, the one who got a 2250 on the SAT (my highest score was math…big surprise there), the one who practically got straight As all the way through middle school, the one who played piano and then violin. The one with a mom who wouldn’t let me leave the house until I finished all my homework…a week in advance. I was the one with a “Tiger Mom”.

So what exactly is a Tiger Mom? The term gained wide-spread use after Amy Chua’s controversial book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Basically, a Tiger Mom can be described as a mother who is strict in order to nurture a competitive academic spirit. While my mother wasn’t quite as Spartan-like as the feral creature described in Chua’s book, she was certainly not afraid to bare her fangs. To be blunt, the reason I am smart isn’t because I am Asian, but because my mother is. When I was two, my mother would sit me down and play something akin to “Hooked on Phonics” every morning in addition to the numerous picture books and math flashcards I would go through with her every day. In my preschool and kindergarten years, I would spend every morning before I went to school doing two reading comprehension passages and another four pages of math problems. Did I have a choice in this? Absolutely not.

Some mornings would start off with me finishing my work fifteen minutes early, which meant 15 more minutes of Dragon Tales. Some mornings would end in tears as my mother was unable to understand why my seven year old self couldn’t multiply 12×7. By the time I took the Gifted and Talented placement test in third grade, I knew how to divide 16578 by 1342 by hand (which is approximately 12.35320) and could pronounce words most kids couldn’t even spell out phonetically. By the time I got to middle school, I had learned up to Algebra I, and had read most of the books that I ended up reading in my freshman English class. Now, I am a successful college student enrolled in a top 15 internationally ranked university, and on the fast track to graduating with a double major as well as a minor in no more than four years. That isn’t to say that it was all fun and games. While I may have been on the academic fast track, there were numerous times in my life where I wondered if my social life would be any different if I went on that one group movie date, or if I would still talk to my best friend from elementary school if I had never cancelled that trip to the neighborhood playground.

While many claim high school to be the best years of their life, I would say that they were some of my worst. I see social connections more like business transactions rather than emotional contracts, I find myself constantly comparing myself to others, and there is this fear somewhere deep inside of me that while I may be good, I may never be good enough. But despite all of my regrets and struggles, I wouldn’t change a single thing. My mother spent the last nineteen years of her life making sure that I had all the options for success, and she did it for my sake, not hers. By the time I graduated high school, I realized that I had the knowledge and the skill set to do almost anything I wanted to do. By the time I went to college, I was able to study what I wanted, not what I was good at. I’m even more thankful now in college, an environment where success is defined by effort rather than intelligence. Not only was I taught that I was capable of achieving anything I wanted, so far I’ve achieved pretty much everything I wanted. Thank you mother, for your all your kind words and all your not-so-kind ones. And let me formally apologize to my future children; because while I may still be a Tiger Cub, one day I’ll be your mom.

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