Build Agency for Yourself, Not for Your Country
Why the American educational approach helps career development, Part 2
“What’s the use of something like this?” A half-exasperated mom threw up her hands in front of me. She had just shared how her teenage son was spending hours and hours every week putting together a Model UN conference in Beijing and accommodating hundreds of high school students across China. “How is this going to help him get into college in China?” She asked, more of the room than of anyone in particular.
While the other moms around us murmured polite disagreements (“But it sounds like a really good experience for him, you know” “Well, I think it can definitely be useful!”), I found myself at an absolute loss for words in front of someone who had such a different, black and white world view.
This was the result of my trip to China this past fall, where I came face to face with a diametrically different worldview regarding education, careers, and life in general. I want to share my experience speaking to Chinese parents, the message that I was trying to send, and the message that I ended up walking away with. This is still an experience I’m struggling to categorize and put into words, but this is where I am now.
As a career coach for young adults, I believe it is tremendously important to help people build agency, which is something that will always benefit you. The key is to recognize that it may not always be rewarded by the economic system and the culture around you, and to adjust accordingly.
For me, this view on agency explains why the US and China are vastly different places to work and live, but I steadfastly believe that building agency is good for people themselves. Even if you are immersed in an environment that does not believe in it, you should persist, because your development is not dictated by your environment.
Build agency for yourself, not for your country.
How did I end up in Beijing, anyway?
In October 2024, my family was planning our first trip to China since 2019, before the pandemic. Although originally conceived as a trip to see family, I found myself wondering if I could learn more about the perspective of parents in Beijing. So I reached out to my cousin Tina who runs an English library-cum-tutoring center, and Tina suggested that I do a simple experience sharing talk about my time growing up as a child in China and attending school and living in the US.
The idea was this: many of the parents she knew were interested in sending their kids abroad to a western country like the US for high school or college if not graduate school. So from my personal experience, I could share with them what was in store for their kids. I could also share my current work in career coaching, which includes some lessons and tips they could take away to help their children be successful. After learning about my work in career coaching, Tina suggested weaving these different stories together with the theme of internal motivation (內驅力), which is the hot parenting buzzword in China right now, very reminiscent of how people in the US embraced “grit” in the 2010s. At the end of our discussion, Tina delicately mentioned to me that though I might want to see how this could be inspirational to parents, it could also seem like advice coming from an alien on how to parent your kids. Spoiler alert: Tina was pretty spot-on, but the experience helped me crystallize something important about why I believe what I believe.
My Experience Could Be Your Kid’s Experience
At Tina’s center, I ended up meeting with seven mothers, whose children ran from 2 years to 16 years old, the majority of them on the cusp of middle school. To them, I told a story that I’ve told a thousand times and heard a thousand times from people I knew in high school and college.
Born in Beijing, I attended kindergarten in China, but the summer before I turned seven, my parents interrupted my schooling to fly us halfway around the world. We landed in Boston, where I would grow up, and I started the arduous process of learning English as a second language at school. At home however, I continued my study of Chinese with my parents, who used copies of elementary school textbooks sent to us by our relatives. If it was an attempt to help me identify with my roots, it had the opposite effect. I hated attending my own personal cram school, and it wasn’t until college that I felt like I wanted to learn Chinese on my own and derive some meaning from that (getting closer to extended family, watching Chinese TV shows).
What do I think about the way I was educated now, between East and West? As an adult and a mother, I am sympathetic to how my parents tried to instill Chinese language skills and an appreciation for Chinese sensibilities and ideals, but as an educator, I subscribe to the Western approach, where we motivate children by helping them understand the why of things, rather than the Eastern approach which is far more top down and “Because I said so”. As an educator, I believe the essential goal of education is to prepare individuals to be independent, productive, and a responsible member of a free society. In Asia, the educational system emphasizes group conformity and the importance of community (which is good) but suppresses the individual initiative (detrimental in the long term). So that, among other reasons, is why the American approach to education is valuable.
Building Agency: The Work of Coaches AND Parents
So as a career coach, what do I think about internal motivation (內驅力)? As a career coach for young adults, I interpret internal motivation as agency, more broadly speaking, and I firmly believe that my work is building agency. How do I know I’ve succeeded? What does having agency mean, anyway? A young adult who has agency will believe these things:
They have their own opinions and priorities (about what they want to do with their life)
They can make decisions for themselves
They can influence their own environment and others’ as well
As a result of that agency, young adults believe what they want to do with their time matters. They see themselves as a great source of potential, someone who can learn, grow, develop skills and strengths. Growing awareness in their own agency often comes with real responsibility: they should be able to enjoy the fruits of their own labor but also face up to the consequences of their actions.
In essence, they become the driver, not the passenger of their own lives.
To that end, as a coach (which is not unlike the role of a parent here), I cannot tell people what to do, but instead guide them towards establishing their own goals, defining what that success looks like, helping them think through how they might get there, and understand how this work contributes to their development. If I just tell my students to do something like apply to a job or go to an interview, or hand them a solution to a problem they’re wrestling with, they will do whatever I say, and as a result, learn whether I am trustworthy or not (“Wow, Ms. Ma’s advice was great” or “Ms. Ma was entirely wrong about this”), but they won’t learn anything about their own decision-making ability and critical thinking process. If it’s true that someone is always the best judge of decisions for their own life, then it follows that it is most powerful to help others mediate their own thinking and let them come up with their own actions. Once you accept that, you can bring curiosity to the table and instead explore the fascinating world of who your children actually are.
That’s the theory, anyway.
If you search "internal motivation” or 內驅力, you’re going to find a bunch of Chinese parents asking things like: “How can I internally motivate my children to apply themselves to the piano classes I signed them up for?” or “How can I help my son find the internal motivation he needs to actually do his homework?” I wish I was exaggerating!
The obvious problem is that parents, just like coaches, cannot give their children internal motivation or agency or purpose. In the US, we’re quite familiar now with several terms of parenting styles: helicopter parents, snowplow parents, even free-range parents. While helicopter parents hover over their children, not letting them do anything alone, snowplow parents want to make the road as smooth as possible and remove all obstacles or challenges for their children. More than tiger parenting now, helicopter and snow plow parents are prevalent in Asia, leading to some very scary outcomes here. A study-abroad admissions consultant in South Korea I spoke to begins working with students in Grade 3 to prepare them for boarding schools abroad and continues to help them through high school, college, and even graduate school. Some of those young adults have been so accustomed to having their paths planned out for them that as a result, they abdicate all responsibility for their life and expect their parents to suggest and in fact furnishing jobs for them as grown-ups. Which the parents then do! Because at that point, they have no other choice.
So say you want to avoid this path. What can you do to help them foster a purpose and find their own internal motivation? As Belle Liang and Tim Klein say in their book “How to Navigate Life,” you can’t just give someone a purpose, but if they develop their own, it can guide them through school, work, and life. The great thing about building agency is that it is like exercising a muscle: the more that agency grow successfully, the more they will be able to do with it. So Liang and Klein start small with easy wins that everyone can get behind, to which I added my own examples:
Let children do their own thing within safe limits. Walking through the park to get to preschool and daycare, I always let my children roam freely, a good fifteen or twenty paces behind and in front of me. Every other parent and grandparent I see in Taipei have their children in a firm grasp, never chancing the possibility of letting them wander onto the road, but also never giving them the freedom to walk where they want. Also important, I begin to understand how much leeway I can reasonably give them.
Let them make decisions that actually impact their life or others’ lives. If you want them to enrich their lives, what sorts of activities could they choose between? Maybe they pick one or two out of a set of choices you give them: swimming, ballet, soccer, badminton. And you respect that choice once they make it. Where do they want to go on the weekend? Older kids can pick a destination for a family outing like a museum or park or day trip, as long as it’s not based around a screen.
Really talk to them, and listen and get to know them. This is the most implicit way you can value a child’s own thoughts and opinions. They are worth your time and attention. Every parent knows there will be a period in your child’s life when they will not be interested in talking and sharing with you. Make this a good habit before you get to this age.
Be a good role model in exercising your own agency. Show that you can attend to your own career strategically - finding jobs that fulfill you while also paying the bills. Make time for our own hobbies, because doing what you actually want is important. Exploring new things and things that you’re not skillful or good at is a part of being human - as long as you enjoy it, it is not wasted time. And of course, not spending too much time in front of a screen - life is more than just what is lived in front of a smartphone or computer.
Why My Talk Failed Horribly
Did you find it inspirational and impactful to read the content of my talk? Did you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it? Rereading what I shared with people in this talk, I felt like nodding along in every single paragraph. These were all important points I believed in, garnered from well-known speakers, friends’ anecdotes, and more importantly, my own life experience.
How could these Chinese parents not love it?
Pretty easily, as it turns out. When I concluded the talk, a few parents made polite comments and thanked me for my stories, but they seemed fundamentally unmoved. Some made sweeping responses of the sort that I started off by illustrating. Others moved onto talking about how their children do have a lot of agency because they get to choose which cram school activities they do afterschool. My questions aimed at stirring debate and self-reflection among parents fell flat, with no one willing to share. During a lull, I got up to use the bathroom upstairs, and when I came back, ready to reengage, I found that everyone had unceremoniously left early for school pick-up. I didn’t really take that personally, but I felt it was a bit emblematic of how the talk had panned out in general.
I walked away from this talk feeling fairly deflated. How did people who were so dedicated to their children not see the gigantic blind spot the size of their own ego? Why were they so interested in internal motivation, but not want to give their children any freedom to explore that? Why was I so naive and optimistic as to think that my 30 minute talk could be that mind-blowing?
As I mentioned at the beginning, I’m still chewing on these questions, but here’s the answer that I have come to so far: those parents are just being realistic about what life is like in China and what this country requires of them, which is very, very different from what’s required in the US. Buckle up for some gross generalizations, which are generalizations but contain some truth nonetheless:
What are we looking for in the US? The economy depends on people’s agency, running small and medium sized enterprises, creating start-ups, and inventing new technology. Companies want employees they don’t have to micromanage, who can be trusted to execute basic tasks but also innovate and make processes smoother and faster. The government knows all this, and we reward agency as a matter of fact. China doesn’t need that. Or the government doesn’t believe it needs that, which is basically the same thing. Economic growth has been driven by government investment over the last few decades, which the way that central planning works. The government decides what will flourish, and it is up to the people to carry it out. So they reward those who will follow orders, not even asking “How high?” when told to jump, but anticipating it in the first place.
When looking at a job seeker’s resume, a US supervisor might ask, “What are your greatest failures?” We don’t just want to know your proudest accomplishments; we want to know your weakest points and what you learned from confronting those, because you’re going to have to pull yourself back together when you mess up, as you inevitably will sometimes in a job. When looking at a job seeker’s resume, a Chinese supervisor might ask, “What prizes have you won? What class rank did you graduate with?” They want to know how good you are at doing your job, especially compared to other people, because that’s what you’re going to be responsible for.
Those parents were like any other parents in any other country: they’re just doing their best for their children. To use a metaphor, those parents are helping their children exercise their gills to process their oxygen, knowing that they will live a life underwater in China. If those kids ever decide to go to the US, then sure, they’ll need to learn how to use their wings and fly, but meanwhile, that’s at odds with directing limited resources to develop their gills and fins. So why raise them to believe that they can influence their environment? That their opinions and priorities truly matter? Why do all this work of nurturing their agency just to have it be squashed by the government and economy? Why raise a bird to live underwater? I came away from that talk with parents feeling like I had been very politely received by people who were curious about education and life in a different star system that ticked along with its own logic and elegance but could yield in no way lessons to apply to their own lives.
I now see all the Internet articles written about 內驅力, all the parenting videos that people have made, as a result of the contortions that Chinese culture, and indeed China itself, has to perform on a daily basis to maintain the fiction of self-determination and freedom and human flourishing in the midst of a centrally-planned, top-down system. Of course you can have your cake and eat it too. They love to sling around Western quotes and anecdotes: yes, even the American scientist Einstein was panned as an idiot by his own teachers, and the Irish poet Yates called education not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. Parents want to take those pearls of wisdom from Western education to help their children go farther and excel higher than others, but they don’t have the true conviction of those beliefs and more importantly, the affirming environment around them to help their children actually develop their agency.
Internal motivation is the hot thing right now, but these parents could really subscribe to anything that might be effective as a means to an end. With the intensification of the rat race and mental health crisis in China (the suicide rate of children ages 5 to 14 quadrupled between 2010 to 2021, according to a 2023 study published in the Chinese CDC Weekly), parents are anxious to find a way to help their children survive the grueling educational system in China and thrive just as they have made it themselves in the capital city. Things will shift one day, and this search for internal motivation is a harbinger of that shift, because this central contradiction cannot hold forever. But for now, I don’t blame those parents: this is just the reality they live in.
What now?
Do I still believe agency is important? Absolutely for all the reasons I stated above. When you go through life feeling like you have no agency, it can be a really destructive thing, because low-level existential angst has a way of affecting your entire life. And agency can still play an important role in places like China: my cousin Tina was born in a provincial city and graduated from a third-rate college. But she learned Korean and worked for a Korean company in China before pivoting to becoming an entrepreneur with her own clothing store and now education center. Who knows which of her ventures will be the most profitable? The only thing I know is that Tina will be successful, no matter what, because she’s a nimble, savvy businesswoman with flexibility and emotional intelligence and a boatload of agency.
But Tina also saw an important lesson that I didn’t know already: agency is not rewarded in Asia. It is not a part of the tacit agreement that Americans make. In American education, decision-making skills and critical thinking are old hat. People may well disagree on how much critical thinking schools are now teaching and bemoan the state of the world today, but you won’t find anyone who believes that’s an outdated or useless skill. In that Western environment, the importance of teaching the individual to make independent decisions is taken for granted, because we live in a society that values individual contributions. Even the youngest students in the US in the lowest ranked public schools understand they’re expected to say or write something they think about what they read, because that’s what the teacher wants to hear. It’s a part of the air we breathe.
What does it mean to go to a different country and breathe air that’s different? For me, it means that I can see just how superficial government initiatives can be, when they fund start-up accelerators and create entrepreneurship grants. What are those meager incentives against decades of structured education? It helps me understand why even being a part of a start-up organization with an average age of 25 felt so stifling and rigid. It helps me see why local workers will smile and nod along when Western bosses talk about transparency and accountability, and then refuse to ever say how they really feel. I recently talked to a Western friend who works at Google in Taiwan, who reflected on how impossible it was to get his Taiwanese employees and co-workers to actually talk to him about problems before they got to a critical stage.
As I mentioned in my other post about education and career development approaches, there are a lot of things I’ve learned that are essential and important about my home country, and I could only learn them because I left the US.
Will I stop talking about agency? My thinking on this is definitely evolving. I certainly don’t plan to go to another gathering of Asian parents and tell them that they absolutely have to trust their children to decide their own futures. I also won’t be going to young adults in Asia and telling them they just need to learn to speak up to their Western bosses. Dealing with reality requires a different mindset, one that acknowledges people have spent a lifetime learning how to breathe underwater for a reason.
At the same time, if you choose to live up in the sky, people will expect you to fly and ask you why you don’t have wings. I’ve seen many Asian students heading to the US and other western countries struggle with the adjustment, unaware that this new environment, school, and workplace asks fundamentally different things of individuals. I hope that whether you plan to work and live in the US or not, you will build your own agency (and those of your children) anyway, because you’ll be happier that way, but know what you’re up against, because it can be everywhere in the schools you attend, the workplaces you clock in at, and in the air that you breathe.
What do you think about agency, and how it is rewarded in the US versus in Asia? Leave a comment or email me directly.