Growing up under an Asian Tiger Mom

You have probably heard of an “Asian Tiger Mom”. She expects you to get straight As, play piano, get into Harvard, and become a doctor or lawyer. There is no room for error and failure is not an option. As a child of an Asian Tiger Mom, everything in my life culminates to making me a successful, contributing member of society, and more importantly, finally making my mom proud.

I didn’t get straight As. I played piano for 6 months then quit. I didn’t go to Harvard. And I’m neither a doctor or a lawyer.

My family immigrated to America when I was 6 years old. At 6, I didn’t have an understanding of what it meant to hop on a plane with my entire life packed into suitcases and get out on the other side of the world. Everything looked different. What I saw, smelled, and heard that February morning at La Guardia Airport in New York was completely different than what I saw, smelled, and heard not 48 hours earlier back in rural Southern China where I grew up. I traded rice paddies and farm animals for snow and skyscrapers.

After our layover in New York, we landed in our destination of Greensboro, North Carolina – a predominately white town. At school, the teachers didn’t know how to interact with a foreign Chinese girl who spoke no English and the kids just stared at me…probably because I looked like a boy with the haircut my mom gave me. It didn’t register in my little 6-year old brain that I was different. I just thought they didn’t like me because I was new.

A year later, we moved to Wisconsin to be closer to relatives. A year after that, I no longer needed English as a Second Language classes. I assimilated very quickly from there on…which led to me noticing some disparities about my life and the lives of my American friends. My mom never let me go to my friends’ houses. Instead, I had to sit home and do math homework. No, not math homework from school…math homework assigned by my mom. I would recite the multiplication table as we grocery shopped and do speed rounds of math problems over and over again. Outside my window, I saw the neighborhood kids laughing and having fun.

Once I began high school, my mom started badgering me about what I wanted to do with my career. At 14 years old, I didn’t know what tomorrow would entail, much less what came after high school and college. I really enjoyed my science classes, so health care was a natural first option. I bounced around a couple of career ideas in my head – physical therapist, anesthesiologist, surgeon, and finally set my mind on neurosurgeon. A neurosurgeon was the best of the best; the most demanding profession in healthcare but also only the smartest got there and I wanted to be the smartest. At 16, I got my certified nurse aide license and started working with dementia patients to start gaining clinical experience for the many, many years of medical training that would lie ahead of me on my path to becoming the best and smartest. I took advanced science classes, advanced math classes, read medical memoirs, and spent my summers at medical camps and volunteering at the local hospital. When I got rejected from my top choice school, I cried.

I had failed. The best undergraduate medical program didn’t want me.

I wasn’t good enough…for them or for my mom.

That’s what I believed for many years. Janice Wu wasn’t good enough.

I ended up going to a small liberal arts school in Illinois and graduating with a bachelor’s in business. It was a completely different path than the one I had planned for myself when I was 14 but it has brought me on an entirely new adventure…to Microsoft. As I get older, and continue to get wiser, I’m starting to understand the “Asian Tiger Mom” in my mom. The relationship between my mom and I has changed now that I’m old enough to hear some of the stories of her youth. She work hard and sacrificed a lot to get to where she is today. Growing up in rural China in a poor family, her brain was all she had. The China my mom grew up in focused heavily on school grades and test scores, which determine one's career path…and consequently affects the rest of a person's life.

I think it’s universal that all moms – all parents – want the best for their kids. Each parent has their own way of helping their kid manifest their future. I’ll admit my mom didn’t do it in the warmest way possible, but she played a huge role in molding me into the person I am today. I used to say “I never want to be like my mom”. Now I say, “I’d be proud to be ¼ as strong as she is”. Her undying work ethic, reluctance to rely on anyone else but herself, and go-getter attitude helped her pick up her entire family, move to a new country, and raise her two kids. She moved here for me to have the best opportunities possible…to have the American dream. It is the least I can do.

Maybe that’s what “Asian Tiger Moms” want. They push and push and push you, even when you don't want to be pushed anymore. They push you to be your best because they see your potential, even when you can’t, especially when you can't. They push until you're capable of pushing yourself. Maybe all they want is for you to be the person you want to be. Failure, indeed, is not an option… failure to achieve your dreams, that is.

As I look at what it means to be an immigrant, to be Chinese, and to be American, so many things come to mind. For me, it means striving, every single day, to be the best version of me that I can be. Whether if that’s achieving the highest of heights in my career, in my education, or in my personal life, I’m here to shatter the glass ceiling. My immigrant parents have taught me to overcome obstacles with grace and resilience, by bringing my own chair if I’m not given a seat at the table. I honor my heritage through reflecting on what got me to where I am today while exploring my identity and shaping my own story about where I’m going tomorrow.