Illustration: LiuIt is always tough to get used to a culture different from your own. The task is even tougher for Chinese immigrants in the US, where the stakes are often high.
For example, wearing skin tight boxer shorts on the beach, as most men do in China, could get you some dirty looks here. Hanging preserved meat on hooks in the window, as many restaurants have been doing for thousands of years in China, could get you hefty fines from the Department of Health because of hygiene and food temperature questions. And being quiet and staying under the radar at work, as many Chinese have been advised to do over the years, could cost you the opportunity of promotion.
But these are all dwarfed by the pitfalls in child rearing. Sometimes the traditional Chinese ways of parenting could leave the parents with complex legal troubles, shattered families and permanent emotional wounds.
I am not even talking about tough love.
Parents' physical punishment of children is widely accepted in China and is rooted in the traditional belief that if you "spare the rod, you spoil the child." But even treating a sick child can lead to problems.
This was reflected in the 2001 Chinese movie The Treatment. Based on a real story, the movie tells a Chinese immigrant family's nightmarish battle with the child protection system in the US after a grandpa left some red marks on his grandson's back by applying traditional Chinese rubbing treatments in an attempt to cure the child's cold. But except for extreme cases like this, it is not hard for parents to understand and abide by the unconditional iron rule.
But nowadays, most new immigrant parents understand that beating a child is not allowed in the US under any circumstances.
Indeed, it is the custom of soft love that is more ambiguous and more dangerous.
This could be best shown by a recent case reported by the Chinese language newspapers in New York. Under a spotlight is a new immigrant family whose six-year-old daughter wrote in class that she didn't like her father "touching" her. Further questioned by the teacher, the girl said the father often "touched" her bottom when she was in bed. The case was reported to Child Protective Services and the girl was taken away from her home. The father was prohibited from seeing his daughter and was charged with sexual abuse.
But the mother told a different story.
She said the father likes to pat the daughter to sleep, but that was only done out of parental love and all Chinese parents do that to their children. But the American-born girl was sent to China to be taken care of by her grandparents for years and only just came back to the US a year ago for school.
The long-term separation had distanced her from her parents, especially her father. The mother said the daughter doesn't even like her father to pick her up at school, worried she'd be laughed at by friends for having a father so old. And the mother doubted whether her daughter really understands her own words in the school essay.
Chinese immigrants can find the social norms and the taboos in the US very difficult to understand.
Growing up in a culture that traditionally considers skin contact between unwed men and women a taboo, Chinese people can find it very difficult to embrace Western hugging and kissing in public. But at home, touching that is considered perfectly normal in China, especially of children, is suddenly considered inappropriate.
Of course, US authorities have plenty of reasons to take the kid's words seriously. This is a country where there are 700,000 children who are victims of abuse every year, and 80 percent of the abusers are a parent. Among the victims, about 10 percent suffer from sexual abuse. And it would be too much to think that there aren't some child abusers within the Chinese community.
But it is also sad to think that innocent behavior could also be criminalized, destroying families and lives for no good reason.
The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com