Alysa Liu's Success is Another Shining Example of How Tiger Parenting Ultimately Fails Our Youths

After Chinese-American figure skater Alysa Liu scored a memorable gold medal in the Milano Winter Olympics, more details are emerging in her underdog-to-winner life story. The world is slowly putting together the reasons behind the sudden retirement at age 16, after failing to medal in multiple world championships that she competed in, and her insistence that her return to the skating world would be entirely done in her own terms, skating when and how she feels, eating what she wants, and looking how she desires. 

Sadly, the truth is turning out to be another one of those Asian tiger parent narratives that is slowly destroying the very fabric of Asian families through intergenerational conflict. In her various interviews in the days and weeks after her victory in Italy, Alysa spoke out about the absolute control her parents, coaches, and other stakeholders had over her athletic and personal life. By alluding to how she couldn't even drink water without permission, much less dictate the details of her skates, she made it clear that it isn't skating itself, but the authoritarianism over her relationship with it, that killed her passion.

In this emerging narrative, Alysa's dad, Arthur, has been transformed, however subtly, from a hero to a villain. He was supposed to be the embodiment of the American Dream: someone who had fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, settled in a land of freedom, and provided for a daughter who displayed her American patriotism by winning for the US. Her success is representative of the opportunities America provides for immigrants fleeing repressive homelands through meritocracy, as well as the talent and potential that only a free society can harness.

Instead, through Alysa, we are seeing that Arthur was, at the personal level, not so different from the country he fled from. Just as the Chinese government enforced a single vision of political orthodoxy that he opposed, he forced young Alysa to live through a single vision of skating orthodoxy that he enforced through controlling her everyday life. And just as the Chinese Communist Party opened fire on those who questioned how the country is run, Arthur killed off Alysa's routines that he believed were detrimental to her ultimate success on ice.

It is a case of "you can take a man out of China, but you cannot take China out of a man." It is all the more ironic that it came from a man who fought for a freer China, where each person has the agency to decide what to believe and how to act. Yet, within his own household, he denied those beliefs to his own daughter, coating the need to micromanage in the same paternalistic language of educating the next generation who don't yet know better, that the Chinese government used while gunning down students for their empty democratic ideals. 

Alysa becomes all the more worthy of our celebration after knowing this personal background. Yes, her gold medal and technical excellence no doubt deserve our applause. But much more is the manner in which she returned. By living and then winning on truly her own terms, and then going on record to speak her mind and share her story without any inhibition, she is giving her dad and the tiger parenting style he represents a big middle finger. No wonder her coaches and parents have been largely silent and absent as she takes a victory lap in her hometown of Oakland and across major media outlets.

I really wish the parents of the many high schoolers I work with as an educational consultant see Alysa, not for the gold medal hanging around her neck, but for her story of winning through defiance. Passion, joy, and success in an endeavor, whether athletic or academic, come not from top-down force or control, but giving the individual the room for self-discovery. Alysa may have been put on ice by her parents and coaches as a child, but ultimately, without those few years away from ice to reconsider why she skates, she wouldn't have made it to where she is today.

The same logic works for any youngster. It is one thing to open the doors: trialing classes, buying instruments, and signing up for hobbies. But at some point, the parents need to let go and have the kids steer themselves. Many will deviate from the parental intention. Surely Arthur wasn't happy with Alysa's retirement at 16, too. But when those hobbies become the basis for lifelong passions and achievement, it will be much more meaningful than the secret resentment of "I did it because my parents wanted me to."