1 Bringing Up Children
My Excellency & Our 3 Kids
The following abstract is adapted from Time Magazine U.S. dated January 20, 2011:
“It was the “Little White Donkey” incident that pushed many readers over the edge. That’s the name of the piano tune that Amy Chua, Yale law professor and self-described “tiger mother,” forced her 7-year-old daughter Lulu to practice for hours on end — “right through dinner into the night,” with no breaks for water or even the bathroom, until at last Lulu learned to play the piece.
Even before Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chua’s proudly politically incorrect account of raising her children “the Chinese way,” arrived in bookstores Jan. 11, her parenting methods were the incredulous, indignant talk of every playground, supermarket and coffee shop. A prepublication excerpt in the Wall Street Journal (titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”) started the ferocious buzz; the online version has been read more than 1 million times and attracted more than 7,000 comments so far. When Chua appeared Jan. 11 on the Today show, the usually sunny host Meredith Vieira could hardly contain her contempt as she read aloud a sample of viewer comments: “She’s a monster”; “The way she raised her kids is outrageous”; “Where is the love, the acceptance?””
Read more on the above article here.
I too have my own stories to tell on how we brought up our children……..first some background.
My Excellency sired 3 children, all in the space of 2 ½ years after we got married. The eldest was a girl followed by two boys. When the girl was about 3 years of age we thought of calling them Do Re Mi because of their narrow age gap but we dropped the idea as My Excellency thought that a bad nick name would dodge them for the rest of their lives.
While my wife was a small time accountant in a small trading firm in a city, I was working abroad in Indo-China (namely Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam) with a big title and an equally big Public Listed Company, heading some new business ventures for a consortium group attempting to set up businesses in the last frontier of some newly untested markets that were just emerging from hundreds of years of civil war, courtesy of the power brokers from the USA, Russia and China. Hence, I would only be at home for very short period of time when I had to fly off again.
My Parents With The 3 Kids
So the 3 kids as well as my aged parents were left in the care of My Excellency. She still continued to work hard for the money and for the family, while at the same time juggled her time raising the kids and tended to my parents when they were sick.
Moreover, she too had to worry on my welfare and safety for Cambodia was ‘bandit’ country at that time with land mines strewn all around and where an AK47 sub-machine gun cost only US$70. The UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia) was going to hold the first democratic election for the war-torn country of Cambodia and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, where as many as 2 over million Cambodians died under the Communist regime of Pol Pot, the Commander in Chief of the Khmer Rouge, were still fresh in the minds of most Cambodians.
On my part I too kept some of my little adventures from her, like on one occasion when I was shot at while going back late in the night and were way-laid by two bandits with bandannas round the heads and their sinewy bodies criss-crossed by a long row of bullets and each holding 2 SMGs, like some kind of Rambo. Or one hot afternoon when our office next door just exploded with two hand grenades and the force took out our Generator Set and shook our building to the core. The hand grenades were set off by a Khmer woman who thought that her husband was two-timing her and was sleeping with a Vietnamese woman. The 3 of them were blown to smithereens and it was later discovered that the 3rd woman was actually the long lost sister of the man.
Yet on another occasion when a sultry hot summer night was punctuated by the raking of AKs machine gun. I was in-country for some time already and could distinguish the sound of the bust of AKs. I was at home in my villa watching a wide selection of international TV channels on our satellite dish when it rained bullets on our roof top. The displaced soldiers were firing at the sky for fear that the ‘dog’ would swallow up the moon. It was just an eclipse and it happened on a full moon’s night. These loony former Khmer soldiers were just as superstitious and ignorant as when the Khmers were building the fame Angkor Wat one thousand over years ago in the Province of Siem Reap, north of Cambodia.
So all these harrowing experiences that I had gone through, I had kept my own council and would later tell them with some flourish and a certain braggadocio though I did not have any war wounds or scars to show as a hero’s badge of honor.
The kids are now grown up and two of them are residing in the Big Apple in the good old US of A, while the second son, in a way following his Old Man’s footsteps, is jet setting around looking for some good deals in diamonds and jade.
More of how we brought up our children will come in later post.
Category: 1 Bringing Up Children
Would be interested to know how you raise your kids with your wife. You write interesting articles and I follow it closely. At times you stop writing and I always want to look forward to your style in presenting your story. thank you arthur
You got cute kids, Arthur. Would like to hear from you more. thanks