A tiger mum’s recipe for academic success

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.