EPISODE 46: SEND YOUR KIDS TO A HIPPIE SCHOOL
SHOW NOTES
In this episode, I cover how my Asian parents don’t understand why I’d send my young daughter to a hippie school where grades don’t matter. They’re concerned that the Waldorf education won’t get her into a good college, and when I challenge them, I share how essential I believe it is to have social-emotional skills. A lot of this podcast is designed to help someone else who's going through the things that I went through growing up — or just anyone having that shared human experience of challenges and trials and heartache and disappointment. Hopefully, this episodes will remind you of whatever it is you need to know that you are a remarkable human being with so much more capacity than you may give yourself credit for, especially when straight A’s aren’t attached.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast. I'm your host, Judy Tsuei, and together we'll explore mental and emotional health for Asian Americans, especially breaking through any taboo topics. Life may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Let's make your story beautiful today.
You may not know this, but one of the reasons that I started this podcast was because I was having a conversation with the man who I'm dating and he is in the public school system and he happens to work in a district that is predominantly Asian Americans.
So when I was sharing some of the experiences that I had growing up. He looked at me and he said, you know, I really wish that my students could have access to you, to your insights, and your learning, and just your journey because they struggle with so many of the things that you've struggled with. And that you've told me about including, and especially young Asian American girls.
And when I was working on my book proposal for my memoir, my book coach asked, who's your muse? Who are you writing to? And when we had a conversation about it, it became clear that the person that I was writing to was a younger version of myself. I wanted to be able to tell myself that little girl who was so scared, who was so concerned and so stressed, that things would turn out okay.
And life would not always be the way that she thought. In fact, it oftentimes was not that. But that she has this resilience and tenacity and resourcefulness that would get her far in life. And that there would be so many remarkable experiences that would come her way, that she could never have planned or predicted, but that through her healing journey, she would not only create a life much more beautiful than she could have, kind of planned out for herself, given her limited consciousness at the time.
But that also would be filled with connection, and love, and learning and giving back to others who were also going along this year. So a lot of this podcast is designed to help someone else who's, you know, going through the things that I went through growing up, or just having that shared human experience of challenges and trials and heartache and disappointment, whatever it is to know that you are a remarkable human being with so much more capacity than you may give yourself credit for.
And that in the here and now, if you are going through a challenging time, it is one slice of your life that, you know, there might be such beauty that comes out of it, such wisdom, such purpose, and the ability to help somebody else. And if we are all in the shared humanity together, I feel like the thing that makes our lives, the richest and the most fulfilling are those connections that we can really open up our hearts and be vulnerable and authentic with the other people around us.
And ultimately, I genuinely thought that, you know, the kind of trauma that I experienced growing up, being raised by tiger parents would have stopped with my generation. So I was really surprised to hear from this man that it hadn't, that there are still parents who are parenting in authoritarian or authoritative ways that may not best suit the child, who they are aiming to coach into adulthood.
Maybe there's a young person experiencing challenges that I didn't experience, but perhaps feel the same way. So for example, maybe there's someone who wants to come out or someone who wants to pursue a completely different path for their purpose in life and their career. Or who simply has feelings that they want to express, that they're built more sensitively than somebody else.
And to be able to give people the words and the recognition so that they can express themselves. And so they can identify themselves in these stories and feel less alone in whatever it is that they're going through.
Ultimately, I hope this podcast provides you a bit of that favorite saying of mine from The Test Exotic Marigold Hotel, which is “Everything will be all right in the end. And if it's not. It's not the end.”.
So keep writing your beautiful story and know that you're not alone. And even in the hardest of times that you can get through it. And there can be beauty on the other side.
This week on the podcast, we'll be speaking with Marie Begum. Who's the founder and executive director of accept admissions community cultivating equity and peace today, which is an advocacy group and community that centers racial justice in the college admissions process and profession.
For some reason, I am continually around educators. My ex-husband was an educator. The person who I'm dating now happens to be an education. And I happened to be really passionate about teaching and learning and finding innovative ways to acquire the lessons that we thought maybe used to just have one way of accessing.
What I loved about speaking with Marie is that she's this national leader in college admission, redesign and reform. And so she took a lot of the experiences she had growing up, biracial, growing up in predominantly white communities to navigate that cultural landscape, and then to better understand the students that she was working with and to truly create more equitable access to higher education and to different potential paths for learning and growth.
It just so happens that the majority of the guests who I've interviewed on the show thus far have also grown up in predominantly white neighborhoods like I did. And they've been that quote unquote “token person” who's different or who did what they could to fit in and then potentially internalized a lot of messaging, a lot of aggression, microaggressions. And then had to navigate a healing journey to get to where they are now.
So today's essay is a bit about how it was for me growing up in west Los Angeles as one of the few Asian kids in my elementary school, and then proceeding to be integrated in somewhat more diverse environments, but then also perpetually having to straddle these two often opposing cultures.
Also, you know, what education means in my family of origin and how I'm redefining, what education means for my young daughter. When I brought seaweed as a snack, growing up to Overland Avenue Elementary School, my friends would wrinkle their noses. “Ew. What's that?”. Now see we is a hippy trendy thing sold at trader Joe's packed and all the lunches that I see of my daughter's friends at the private school.
She attend. By the time I got to junior high at palms junior high in LA, there was a little bit more diversity because students were being bused in from all over Los Angeles county. And now I had an entire group of Asian friends from all different backgrounds. There was a shared understanding with my Korean American friends, my Chinese American friends, my Japanese American friends, my Filipino American friends that I hadn't experienced up until that time. But yet there were also differences.
Then I was plucked for my junior high to attend Beverly Hills high school because they literally needed more Chinese kids. So they came to our junior high and asked me Victor, Helene, Terrance to see if we would want to go to this illustrious school. So they could up their minority quota.
And you better believe that my Chinese parents said, oh, hell yes, we're going to send you to a better school. Even though I begged for every single day, day of my sophomore year at Beverley, because my junior high went up to ninth grade. I would cry to my mom and dad, just asking them to, please, please, please send me to Hamilton High School, the school that was in our district, the school that often got shut down for gang violence, because that's where all my friends were and that public school environment with the diversity of groups of African-American students, Latin next students, that we would all somehow meld together.
Even if there were challenges, it felt more fitting. I didn't belong at Beverly Hills High School. I didn't belong at their levels of class and their levels of wealth. I didn't belong and would often eat lunch by myself in front of my locker. I hated it academically. We were a great school and I could see that I knew that, but also when you pulled up to the rolling Hills of the front lawn, it looked like a Regal Academy.
Monica Lewinsky went to school there. Nicholas cage, children of celebrities, children of wealthy, Persian families, children of Beverly Hills doctors and lawyers. I had never seen such wealth streaming around the halls with these rail fan model, looking teens, holding Gucci bags, driving Beamers, and pulling out of the parking lot in Range Rovers.
This was also the time when my parents were struggling financially in such devastating ways that there were still holes in the floor that my parents didn't have the money to repair. Even though my dad had a construction business. Our swim gym at Beverly Hills High was literally a gymnasium with a floor that would open up into a pool.
It's the actual pool that was used in the movie “It's A Wonderful Life”. There was an oil rig pumping oil on campus 24 7. When they later painted in pastel colors. After I graduated, I would stand at the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Marino Boulevard to wait for the Santa Monica blue bus to take me home.
I'd even have to transfer at Westwood Boulevard. I would have to take this bus when I was on crutches because I dislocated my knee from turning around too fast. My body was growing quicker than it could have. And my parents weren't home to help me once it happened, they were working 45 minutes away. So I had to crawl my way back up the concrete stairs to reach my hand through the window pane, unlock the door, then hop over to sit in a chair until hours later, my cousins and aunt could take me to Kaiser to get my knee checked out.
When I was on crutches, an elderly lady actually got up from her seat to offer it to me. There was a giant board against one wall of the main hallway of the school that showed where the previous graduating class now attend to college, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, UCLA, Georgetown, and on and on. It seemed that the stats were divided between either elite schools or 200 plus students going to the local Santa Monica community college.
When I applied for college are scary slash intense AP English teacher, Mrs. Balm read every single one of our essays. She and her professional writer, husband offered feedback. One day, she came over to me at my desk, leaned in and whispered yours. What's the best, best daily read. I can't find that essay. I don't know what I wrote, except for the fact that I know I shared from the heart that I was the first of four children in my family to apply and hopefully attend college in the United States.
That I had a hard time straddling two opposing cultures that I needed to demonstrate to myself, to my parents, that I could do this. I use my ethnicity as a quote unquote, minority to get in, to get scholarships, to get grants, to do what Beverly Hills high school did, which was to leverage my Chinese-ness in an attempt at equity and equality.
I didn't know at the time that that wasn't right. Really equity, that was just some kind of favorable advantage to access for a short period of time. Equity is aiming to make things fair for all. And access is definitely a first step, but it's absolutely not the end. I was so far at the beginning of this journey that I didn't even know what I didn't know.
I was just aiming to survive and truly at the time I think my mentality was, fuck everyone else who was going to try to take my spot. I was going to do whatever I could to get out of the house that I grew up in and to secure my place in a world where I wouldn't have to hustle the way that my parents did, where I could actually feel like I could finally believe.
My daughter goes to a Waldorf school. That's this alternative method of education that focuses on social, emotional learning and a hands head, heart approach. In fact, when I met my ex-husband and we started dating, I remember being profoundly impressed by the philosophy of his education that he implemented as his life's work.
Where he was teaching kids, how to use their hands in experiential learning and use their heads and conscious, thoughtful communication, and then using their hearts to truly drive what is meaningful to them. When I met the students at his school, these kids who are in second grade in third grade, I remember just seeing how encouraging audibly alive they were, how bright and brilliant. And I thought it was so impressive.
When my parents and I talk about the fact that my daughter goes to a Waldorf school, they immediately challenged me. How is she ever going to get into college? Are you sure she's going to learn what she needs to learn? And then my retort is always, have you seen the college scandals lately where you can buy your way into education?
I care about my daughter being a good human, a contributing citizens of this planet. She's going to learn she's smart, but that's not the only thing that's most important. I believe that being a good person is also essential. I may not say it was such eloquence all the time. Usually I'm saying in an extremely frustrated tone of “She’s gonna be fine!”.
And one of the core tenants of Wilder philosophy is to avoid using too much technology, which if you've done the research and Googled this fact, it seems that the Gates family, the Zuckerberg family, Steve jobs’ family, all had strict limits on how much technology they used at home. So it's interesting that even though these tech moguls create a whole world around what it is that they offer, they apparently have chosen to put their children in a different style of education.
My daughter is six and she doesn't yet read like her friends who are in public school education. But not because she can't it's because there's a key tenant in Waldorf education that they don't teach them to read until they're older. They want children to focus on building the foundation as a human being first.
These early childhood classrooms feel like home, rhythm and movement and play are such a huge part of their day. Every time I've walked into my daughter's classroom with her teacher. I just wish that I could have gone to a school like that. I would have felt so nourished with the snacks that they prepare and just with the loving environment that's created.
As the children in Waldorf education, age into elementary school years, the lessons are taught in these lively ways. A lot based in pictorial storytelling, because the philosophy is that children learn best through imaginative. And then in high school, the learning focuses more on analysis.
Students also remained with the same teacher from grades one through eight, so that they can develop this strong bond between the teacher, the student and the classmates, and the whole entire philosophy focuses on developing the whole child to think clearly to have a heart that feels, and then to have a body that acts purpose.
I went to an orientation at my daughter's school for the older grades and started feeling math anxiety in the classroom. When I saw that the teacher had all these equations on the board and she actually clearly addressed it, that many students do suffer from that. And yet the way that they teach the approach that they have enables these students to grasp these big, complex ideas in their minds, and then adapt to it really, really quickly.
I know that it is a privilege for my daughter to go to a school like this. And thankfully her school offers in access to all programs so that students of every socioeconomic level can apply, but it does require a different kind of progressive thinking to even know that this option exists. And the only reason that I was exposed to it was because I happened to marry a Waldorf teacher where then I learned about all the other methods that she could learn from such as the Montessori school that I put her in when we were living abroad in Taiwan or the Reggio Emilia method that we put her in.
When we were living in Austin, Texas. Albert Einstein says that imagination is more important than knowledge for knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand while imagination embraces the entire world and all there ever will be to know and understand that similar to the growth mindset that we've explored in this podcast before.
In a recent quote. I found when doing a bit more research about Waldorf education, when approached by the news media and asked the question, what did Waldorf education do for you? Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg replied. It encouraged me to always strive to become a better human being. I understand why education was so key for my parents, why we were always expected to get straight a pluses education.
Is this safe and previously proven track to achieve more success in life. That the more knowledge that you have and the better that you do in school, then it hopefully anchors this opportunity for you to create the kind of success that often immigrant parents are hoping for their child. But what happens if you learn differently or what happens if you live in neighborhoods and communities where access to a certain level of education isn't available?
What happens when the things that truly could positively and beneficially impact the world for future generations? Doesn't come from just book learning. How do you change these tried and true models of what we've thought of as success when it comes to education and learning? And how do you start to create environments where each individual is truly taught to thrive in the ways that would not only benefit them the most, but benefit the greater good.
As I mentioned this week on Wednesday, I interviewed Marie Beckham whose lifelong commitment to racial justice has really informed her professional path. And you'll hear that it's not just Asian parents who put all this pressure on their kids. She's seen it in all different cultures and ethnic groups, especially when there's elite wealthy environments involved.
You'll hear her passion come out for why she does the work that she does to create new pathways and greater access and opportunities for all. With almost 25 years in the college admissions ecosystem, Marie is bringing this wealth of knowledge and really insider insight into how we can look at higher education differently and how we can all be a part of reframing.
What getting into college actually means. And given how deeply my family valued education. This status symbol or an opportunity for a greater life. I really wanted to bring someone on who shares what higher education is and isn't and how we can have more meaningful conversations, especially when it comes to creating real equity.
I hope that you enjoy this week's episodes and all the conversations that we've been having thus far as always, I would love to hear from you. So feel free to hit me up on social media at fuck saving face or send an email to hello effect, saving face. Stop. Please break my mom's podcast. Give her five stars.
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