Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry tweets:
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
@pegobry_en
Ok, here’s a story about the Great Asian Grindset Debate.
A couple years ago we put our kid in a piano school run by a Korean woman living in France.
There’s a recital at the end of the year where all of the kids play; half Asian, which is very unusual for France, half White.
The Asian kids were all excellent. They were all an 8 or a 9.
The White kids were all over the place. There were 1s. There were 2s. There were 3s. There were also 10s.
The Asian kids all played, sorry but it’s true, somewhat robotically (which is no shame for a kid!).
The best White kids played with that extra dimension of soul and emotion that made them touch greatness.
The Asian kids were *all* 8 or 9. The White kids were all over the place from 1 to 10.
At the end the lady who runs the school gave a little speech, which was full of nice things, but had as a big throughline chiding the parents of the White kids for not making their kids practice more. At the end, she made a joke: “Remember, make your kids work, because no matter how hard they work, there’s an Asian kid next door who’s working twice as hard.” We all laughed, myself included.
Do I think that the culture that produced those 8-9 kids is healthy, or one that I would like to see dominant in my country? Hell no.
Do I also wish that the White kids who were below an 8 had worked, say, at least 10% harder? Some 50% harder? Hell yes.
The Chinese director Chen Kaige (Farewell, My Concubine) made a 2002 film Together about a rare 13-year-old Chinese violin prodigy with the depths of passion to play Europe’s 19th Century Romantic repertoire as they deserve.
[Remember a quarter of a century ago when China (and Taiwan and Hong Kong) were making several of the most interesting movies each year (e.g., the jaw-dropping Hero)? Whatever happened to Chinese movies, anyway?]
I reviewed Together for The American Conservative. Chen, an extremely cultivated artist, had a lot of interesting things to say about the differences between Chinese and European high culture:
Paywall here.
