A Free-Range Father in a Tiger Mom World

Reflections on Chinese and American Education

Listen to my narration of this essay in the embedded player below!

My wife and I will officially become empty-nesters this week. I’m driving my daughter and son — a junior and entering freshman, respectively, up to Madison, Wisconsin, and Bloomington, Indiana, to get them moved in. I won’t likely see them again until Thanksgiving, assuming I survive until then. I’m sure what I’m going through is par for the course: ambushed by bittersweet memories of them as adorable, laughing children, usually to the faint strains of Tevya and Golde singing “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof and, with periodic attacks of vertigo whenever I remember that I’m now on the hook for two out-of-state tuitions. (The other song from Fiddler that pops into my head unbidden? “If I Were a Rich Man.”)

My children were born in Beijing and were 12 and 10 years old when we moved to the States. Before my daughter was even born, we planned to send any kids we might have to the U.S. for college. That seemed at the time a no-brainer: American tertiary education was inarguably better. So, by 2010, we began arranging our lives — her green card, my employment situation, our lease in Beijing, our house-hunting stateside — around a June 2016 move date.

We figured that the kids would get a solid grounding in Chinese — something we both felt strongly about — and acquire good study habits to boot if they went to grade school in China. Beyond that, though, we weren’t so sure. After sixth grade, Chinese schools tended, after all, to teach with one specific purpose: for students to score well on the gaokao or College Entrance Exam. Seeing as neither of them would go to college in China and not wanting their schooling to be so exam-focused, we decided to move to the U.S. before they entered middle school. We enrolled them both in Fangcaodi International School, a venerable state-run primary school taught primarily in Chinese and open to foreign students. It was a favorite among a certain type of expatriate — people who couldn’t afford tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition per kid for Beijing’s fancy international schools.  

Lately, with my son now flying the nest, I’ve been thinking a lot about those decisions and about the road not taken. Despite four years of elementary school in China plus a year of kindergarten and two of preschool, all taught in Chinese, my son quickly lost the ability to read and write in that language; my daughter, on the other hand, who was just two years older when she came to the States, not only kept her Chinese literacy but has continued to improve on it, and added Japanese to boot. Fanfan, my wife, thinks we would have been wise to wait another couple of years before leaving China, but on balance, neither of us has major regrets: they’re good kids, moral, curious about the world, well-adjusted, and they actually seem to like their parents. They turned out just fine. They will, in all likelihood, go on to productive and happy lives until the permafrost melts, 50 gigatons of trapped methane escapes into the atmosphere, and the earth is transformed into a wretched hellscape. 

But in Beijing this summer — its record heat hinting at the Great Broiling to come — we caught up with some family friends with kids roughly their age. These were mostly kids who stayed in China through middle and high school, some of whom are staying in China while others are heading abroad, especially to the U.S. They turned out just fine, too. Would it have been so terrible to have stayed in China, had them suffer through gaokao prep and the ordeal of the grueling, two-day, 10-hour exam itself, and eventually attend university in China? 

We may have voted with our feet and rejected the gaokao path, but with U.S. citizenship and the advantages of being bilingual, an American college education was always there as a choice. We never even thought seriously about not sending them to the States for college. The vast majority of Chinese families don’t have that option open to them: sure, a good number go abroad for education and never bother with the gaokao, but they’re less than a tenth of the 8 to 10 million who enter college in China in any given recent year. 

On many occasions over the years, I’ve spoken with people about the gaokao and what they thought of that institution. To my surprise, they were pretty much uniformly ambivalent, often enumerating the same pros and cons. Their ambivalence reflected my own. On the one hand, the gaokao is insanely stressful, doubtless terrible for mental health, overemphasizes rote memorization, stifles creativity, is far too determinative of the future for any 17-year-old, and doesn’t encourage the formation of well-rounded young people. (They can also be a powerful tool for nationalist historical narratives and other ideologies, as this 2023 paper by Ying Wang, Zhou Song, and Ye Lu argues.)

On the other hand, it provides a path for social mobility, however imperfectly, in much the same way that the keju system of imperial China — the Civil Service Examination System — was The Ladder of Success in Imperial China, as Ping-ti Ho titled his classic work focused on the exams in Ming and Qing. Many Chinese people will remind you that there’s even an impoverished Gansu county, Huining County, that’s earned the nickname “Gaokao County” for the crazy numbers of students from there who pass with flying colors and score high enough to attend Tsinghua or Peking University. (Check out this 2010 paper by Yimin Huang and Heidi Ross, which looks at data from Huining County). They’ll also argue that the gaokao trains you for the real world, and especially for life in China, where high-pressure situations abound, the competition is truly cutthroat, and the ability to chi ku — to eat bitterness — is a basic survival skill. And besides, how else but by a standardized test are you going to sort 10 million applicants all gunning for the top-ranked schools?

The funny thing is that as much as parents grouse about the gaokao and about the need for their children to learn more critical reasoning and out-of-the-box thinking, they are the ones who most often stubbornly refuse to go along with schemes for reform — not the Ministry of Education, not the school administrators, and certainly not the teachers. It’s a forgivable conservatism rooted in not wanting to be the guinea pigs for experimental approaches: they fear, understandably, that anything short of the full-tilt, hardcore approach will put them at a disadvantage relative to people even just one year older. And so the gaokao endures, as does the whole pedagogical edifice atop it.

Americans perhaps recognize some similarities in the debate over our own standardized college entry tests, the SAT and ACT. Before COVID, when most universities dropped them as a requirement for admissions, they were often criticized for similar reasons — the stress, the element of rote (I remember studying lists of vocabulary words like “prolix” and “tyro” that I never thought I’d actually use), the outsize role of one exam in determining one’s academic and perhaps even professional life outcomes. But for college-bound students who’ve taken both types of exams, the SAT is a walk in the park. Gaokao is a form of torment that’s more all-consuming: At least American universities look at more than your standardized test scores in the admissions process.

Our own parenting style, which Fanfan always described as fàngyáng 放养 or “free-range,” was in many ways a direct reaction to the tiger parenting we saw all around us, not only in Beijing but also among Chinese families — and not by any means just Chinese families — in the Triangle area of North Carolina, where the children both spent their remaining years until graduating from high school. Here, just as we did in Beijing, we recoiled at the scheduled playdates, the seemingly endless after-school and weekend tutoring, the joyless music lessons, and the tight restrictions on games and other entertainment. Many Chinese parents I’ve known in the States bring with them the same or a still greater obsession with college admissions that they had in China: they know the approximate ranking of just about any “top 100” school — the only ones they’ll even consider — and they simply add to the cram schools and SAT prep courses all sorts of other pressure: to run for office in student government, to excel at a sport, to play an instrument virtuosically, to tick boxes for volunteer work. We basically did none of that, confident that we were raising independent, well-rounded kids; I’m sure our peers tutted disapprovingly behind our backs about how we coddled them — just like, I will confess, we tutted about their approach and how it doubtless created repressed, resentful, and fundamentally unhappy kids.

But they weren’t all unhappy, at least that I could see. I’ve read some great, highly relatable books like Little Soldiers by Lenora Chu and, more recently, Other Rivers by Peter Hessler and interviewed their authors, and I suppose I’m reassured that they seem to come away with the same ambivalence. Both books direct plenty of criticism toward the Chinese education system, but they’re also full of both anecdotes and thoughtful reflections about the indisputable merits of Chinese schools. In my podcast interview with Pete, he talked about his family’s experience with Chengdu Experimental Primary School, where he had enrolled his daughters Ariel and Natasha: “One thing I do like about it is there is a respect for intellectualism and for academics, which there often isn’t in America,” he said. “And I really like the fact that in China, you get status for being a good student. One of the reasons Ariel and Natasha were motivated to study was they got friends from that — I mean, people respect that, whereas in America, you’re always kind of trying to hide that if you’re in like a normal school, not if you’re in some kind of elite school. But the average American public school — like the kind of schools I went to in Missouri, the kind of school my kids are going to in Colorado — you lose status.” Granted, neither Pete nor Lenora kept their kids in Chinese schools through the gaokao, but the pedagogical flavor is there even in grade school.

I used to wonder whether, knowing what we now know, we’d raise them the same way we did or ride them a little harder if we could do it all over again. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the pressure to push my kids was always there. But this evening, as we pack up their things and I prepare emotionally for the big sendoff, I look at my wonderful children and know, with absolute certainty, that I wouldn’t change a thing.