Housemates and I are screwwwwed!

For the last couple of days?

Heater's been blowing cold air.

Not a biggie, I have a teeny heater and if the girls upstairs don't like a hot house, that's their thing.

Turns out?

They HAVEN'T been turning the heat down, and are WIGGED OUT by this cool air from the heater. Came downstairs to see me. I report about the cool air. Neither of them like it. We check out the furnace. It's been clicking on and off intermittently, like it can't make up its own damn mind whether to be on or off.

We shut off the furnace breaker, which is in my apartment.

Then we turn it back on. The furnace is still clicking, and there's no warm air in the vents.

And.

There's the smell of gas.

WE SHUT IT OFF. We call the landlady, who tells us to call the furnace emergency line.

The lady on the hotline tells us that she can only book us for an appointment TOMORROW, between 4pm - 8pm. OH YEAH. THIS IS GREAT. We have NO furnace, I only have one little heater for all night long.

The landlady just told us she's sending someone from Union Gas over. Wish us luck.

ETA: Someome came to have a look at the furnace and got it running, but if it shuts off again (as it will when it hits the temp) we can't do anything. At the very least it's running for now and this might tide us over for until tomorrow when the repairman gets here.

Of possible interest

I know there are some of us who're having trouble sorting our ish re: our "Chinese mothers".

So, some links:

Sherry Thomas: Chinese Mothers My Ass (Ableist language)

... I have no arguments with how my grandmother raised me. But the thing is, she was a famously strict parental figure. Most of my classmates were not subjected to extra learning at home, neither were most of the kids in my apartment complex. They got to watch the TV programs which I only got to listen to, as I lay awake in my bed–I was widely pitied for my baby-ish bedtime. And when school was out, they played outside till the cows came home.

And you know what? My famously strict grandmother would have considered the lady who wrote the WSJ article nuts. Yes, children can and should be pushed. But the entire time I was growing up, I knew not a single Chinese mother who was anywhere near so fanatical.

Not That Kind of Asian Doctor: To Love In This Way

But what is scary isn’t that Chua makes culturally essentialist and dehistoricized assertions about what it means to be “Chinese” (or “Asian”) and “Western.” What is scary is that those of us who are Asian American recognize something of ourselves and our childhoods in this strictly regimented life of studying and music practice: the rules, the tunnel-vision, the shaming, the threats of disownment, the never-ending indebtedness, and the definitively laid-out future. Become what we want, what you owe to us, or you are nothing. We give you a past, you give us your future.

...

There’s a reason why our namesake plays off of being the “wrong” kind of Asian doctor. We did not become the kind of doctor that our immigrant families wanted, hoped for, needed. We could not follow that path to the American dream. Because we could not really believe that Chua’s kind of gamble pays off, either way. Because we see this game for what it is: a game that requires tremendous loss.

We could not ask ourselves to die. We could not discipline ourselves into what is necessary to “succeed” in this world. And we could not ask others to die, their bodies – poor, migrant, brown, criminalized, othered – forming the ladder for our climb to perfection, to the upper-middle class, to capitalist wealth and success, to whiteness. Because we now know the kinds of death that are required in this process of creating perfect model minorities. So it has become an impossible path.

We refuse to be loved in this way and to love in this way. If this is our way of loving, then our lives and our children’s lives are deeply impoverished. We must hope our imaginations help us to find other ways of loving and living. Because all our lives depend on it.

Quora.com thread: Long thread, lots of responses. Trigger warning for suicide in the first post of the thread.


xoericxo on Tumblr:

Researchers have proposed that this increasing rate of mental health problems in Asian American/Asian immigrant communities may be directly related to the model minority stereotype and pressure from peers and families to perform well academically. Chua even admits to her methods as “coercion”: she is aware that her tough love approach borders on abusive. Yet, she ends with this moment: “That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up.”

In other words, Chua justifies herself by claiming that her daughter has truly benefited from the abuse, and that she has learned to love her mother because of it. The statistics clearly show otherwise: many second generation Asian Americans become resentful of their parents, and any number of Asian American novels can attest to this (The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan definitely comes to mind). Not to bring anecdata into this, but I have close Asian friends (and myself included) who have strained relationships with their parents. We have developed inferiority complexes to varying degrees because we were subjected to “Chinese mothers.” My thesis piece for my B.F.A. documents my own struggles with my mother, because of the way she chose to raise me.

Pear on the piano piece Amy Chua talks about drilling her kid with:

Also you can watch and listen to the piece being played here and umm, I resent Chua’s idea that “the young player” would find it difficult because of the different rhythms. I am pretty sure that with enough training, seven year old children would be able to understand and play the rhythms - and honestly for a seven year old to play it, they’d have to have trained intensely or started very young in order to train enough - it’s not a matter of age, just time and experience. I would say this piece is about ABRSM grade 6 or 7 (highest is grade 8, minimum for entry into music schools/conservatoires at post-18 education in England). But you know, Super Asian Mama - I hate to think what it would be like to be taught by someone like that. It speaks more about Chua’s teaching methods than her daughter’s ability, I think!

So, turns out the Chua article was a poor reflection of the actual book, pieced together to form that utterly provocative thing:

Apparently, it had been edited without her input, and by the time she saw the version they intended to run, she was limited in what she could do to alter it.

"I was very surprised," she says. "The Journal basically strung together the most controversial sections of the book. And I had no idea they'd put that kind of a title on it. But the worst thing was, they didn't even hint that the book is about a journey, and that the person at beginning of the book is different from the person at the end -- that I get my comeuppance and retreat from this very strict Chinese parenting model."