There is a fundamental mismatch between Asian culture and American culture. This mismatch is even greater than it is between European culture and Asian culture. Americans are extraordinarily individualist. Asians are extraordinarily communitarian. Family is, in a very real way, the economic and social basis of survival in most of Asia. And yes, filial piety is a big part of that. I will also say that my wife can't stand the US because of the cultural gap, so she took the opposite direction than many of these writers, and instead of wondering about Asian values, rejected entirely the American ones. We now live in Indonesia.
Asian culture works for the most part, even as strict and harsh as it is. Many of my Asian-American friends in the US have been able to retire early. And yes, Asians do dominate some industries. And later in life, having children who will care for you in your old age is far better than the American way. There is much that mainstream American culture can learn from Asian culture as we must find more sustainable ways to live.
But there are costs too. At least here among the Chinese-Indonesians, very little or no value is placed on childhood play. It's just a waste of time when one could be learning how to be an adult. What is vitally missing in my view is a recognition that kids learn extremely important lessons through play, and that these lessons are no less important to success than learning math or science in school. This has been a challenge for our kids because cultivating a sense of play goes against the culture.
What disappoints me about the article is the fact that it seems very much like a one-sided self-critique. Immigrants generally have the potential to disrupt existing cultural ways of thinking by offering a different sort of critique. But here what I see is "I want to stop being Asian and be just American."
But instead if we had a dialog, we'd see that there are things we can learn from eachother, and that is a far better way forward than lamenting Asian values.