The contradiction has erupted once again.
In the cramped music room, Xiawei asked her daughter Sasa with a stern face, “What are you playing here with your left hand? It’s all messy.” After an hour of piano practice, there was another hour and a half of erhu practice. Exhausted, Sasa got up and went to complain to her grandmother. Xiawei walked out of the room and locked the door behind her.
Xiawei has two expectations for her nine-year-old daughter. One is to be accepted into the Singapore Youth Chinese Orchestra in the future, and the other is to be selected for the upcoming GEP exam (Gifted Education Program). Being a professional musician is Xiawei’s own unfulfilled dream, and the “Gifted Education Program” only accepts 1% of children of the same age each year.
This is the story of an ordinary Chinese mother in the documentary “Amazing Moms,” which was released on the eve of Mother’s Day a year ago. The director named this episode “How to Become a ‘Tiger Mom’ in Singapore”. It is well known that in the field of basic education, Singapore’s education system is at the pinnacle of competitiveness.
At the beginning of filming, director Jiang Youxi and the team interviewed over a hundred moms. In the end, the documentary showcased the stories of twelve women, including Xiawei, who is caught up in the streaming system of Singapore’s education, Li Qi, a mom from Haidian who wants to send her son to early enrichment classes, and Ah Pang, a mom who doesn’t want her child to attend a local school in Shanghai’s alleyways.
Each educational story cannot escape the topic of “mothers’ choices.” However, Jiang Youxi hopes that the audience will not seek the answer to “what is the best education,” but rather see the love and patience that mothers pour into the next generation. In fact, these three mothers with grand educational ideals for their children have all to some extent given up on their original ideas.
Another important question is why the term “mother” has always been associated with the noble meaning of love and sacrifice. But why is it that mothers bear the increasingly heavy burden of education?
