You might have seen ‘Asian dad’ memes on the internet, poking fun at the famously high expectations of fathers from my part of the world. ‘You Asian, not B-sian,’ he says in one version. Or: ‘After homework, you can play… the piano.’ My personal favourite is a picture of a crying Chinese girl saying: ‘I only got 99 per cent in test. What do I tell my parents?’ Her father’s reply: ‘What parents?’
Much of Asian parenting is laser-targeted at getting into a top-tier university: Peking or Tsinghua would do in China; Ivy League or Oxbridge abroad. The last certainly brings its own challenges: how is an Asian teenager to penetrate Oxbridge, with its eccentric interviews, idiosyncratic pronunciations (Magdalen College) and other traps? The self-made educationist Monica Yang MBE has written a book (in Chinese) about how she did it. She migrated from Inner Mongolia to a council house in Belfast in the 1990s.
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