The Mamas and the Papas

First day of classes at SVES has parents bringing children to campus, with kindergarten parents tending to mother their kids the most since the pangs of separation are visibly acute. My eldest went to pre-school at barely 2 years old as part of a well-defined care structure in Uptown Chicago while her Papa and Mama went elsewhere.

Daughter Kristina was all tears when she became aware of the impending separation from Dad to an “unknown” environment. Sullen and teary-eyed, she entered a waiting room full of toys. Other children were evidently in a similar situation, dropped off by parents and guardians, received by waiting caretakers. Outside was a one-way mirror where adults can watch the children. I saw my daughter rub the tears off her eyes, scan the room, check out the children and the toys, and immediately parcel the toys to each of the children, reserving the largest and most intriguing one for herself. I had no doubt at that moment that my daughter was instinctively prepared to take care of herself.

Here at Shenyang Aerospace University on the first day of school three weeks ago, the school roads were congested with private cars belonging to parents accompanying their child to the university. A lot are urban dwelling families who followed the government’s injunction for them to have only one child.

The phenomenon of a sole child getting the attention of an average of five people has created the image of the tyrant child with the quality of a “brat.” A self-centered privileged generation doted on by grannies, parents, an uncle or an aunt, is on center stage, we are warned.

Folks walking around campus on the first week of school included obedient children who allowed Mama and Papa to hold their hands through the process of university reentry. It is the second semester so most had been through the process before but the first-day ritual functioned to allay parents’ fears before anything else.

In fact, after sundown, once the parents were gone, classmates who had not seen each other for more than a month eagerly reunited. Dorms shorn of privacy, they turned the low-lit cafeteria after 9pm into coves of tangled embraces where socially acceptable expressions of affection were uninhibitedly displayed!

We run a professional colloquy for teachers where in a survey they expressed topics we might include in our repertoire of conversational offerings. “Parenting” came in as one of the top five preferences.

This did not come as a surprise following Amy Chua’s Tiger Mama controversy in the Wall Street Journal. Also, there is emerging a realization that the nature of filial relationship is undergoing a rather radical paradigm shift. A recent celebrated case is of a parent suing his son for failing to exercise his filial responsibility of periodic visits!

University teachers are treated as surrogate parents. In our current incarnation, we sport an ash grey longish hairdo affecting a grandfatherly posture, but our wavy Malay mane when coiffed looks too Mozart-y, and when wind-ruffled, approximates Einstein’s wiry electrified “Eureka!” hair day. Hardly posing a traditional lao ye ye, a student thought we symbolize the free spirit that ordinary folks do not normally display, which we as a foreigner could, and ardently advised that we keep the hair when I hinted that I might bring it to the trimming ministration of the barber’s shears.

With a box hat or a cap over a wrap-around golden caftan, we are alarmingly a look-alike to the renegade Libyan Colonel Moammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi who has yet to be located in the northern deserts of Africa! Will consider the barber’s seat!

More importantly, though, is the lesson I learned early that the instinctive capacity to survive and be self-sustaining, self-reliant, and self-confident is born in everyone. The “social face” Zhongguoren make, or the “personality” that individuals wear, is our creation in the process of our unfolding, not as an act of attainment. The scientific data shows that at the moment of conception, a person is the ONE out of 200 million sperms embraced by the ovum, which chose out of 200 million possibilities. At life’s go-signal, we are already a winner in the biggest lottery of our life, and have exercised a considerable freedom of choice to boot.

In nine months, the sperm-ovum cell creates a sophisticated organism whose depth of mystery, breath of consciousness, and height of greatness we are now just beginning to scratch. Where and when was it that we got the notion that we live life to measure to someone’s shallow social norm, to climb into an artificially graded station, or to pass a prejudiced test/exam level? We suffer stratified imposition that requires us to “ascend” in order to matter, when our birth already spelled the fullness of our glory!

But if like a seed, we take the organic view that children are born to grow and bloom out of their nature, we would not be too anxious about nurture save to let everyone grow naturally, for there is immensely too much of our nature to nurture before we even need to worry about what else to add. Mamas and Papas, take heed!