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The mother of controversy
By Susan Dominus |
February 13, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
FOR anyone who has sworn off media for all these weeks of coverage, Amy Chua is the author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," a hair-raising child-rearing memoir that has struck fury, envy or doubt in the hearts of tens of thousands of parents across the United States since an excerpt of the book first appeared in The Wall Street Journal early last month.
So many parenting memoirs capture the various ways the authors' children have taken them to hell and back. Refreshingly, and perhaps uniquely, Chua instead catalogs the various ways she tortured her two young daughters, all in the name of Chinese tradition and the goal of reaching Carnegie Hall (or at least the Juilliard precollege program).
Once primarily known for her work as a professor at Yale Law School and for studies on empire and ethnicity, Chua now seems destined to go to her grave identified as the Tiger Mother, a woman whose memoir sarcastically savages a host of American values, all the while relying on that quintessentially American format, the family tell-all.
Here is a book to thrill any parent who has felt moments of guilt about a harsh word or a carelessly flung insult. On virtually every page, that parent can cringe in dismay (and luxuriate in a safe sense of superiority), as Chua exposes her own outrageous tactics: there are the by now notorious threats to burn one young daughter's stuffed animals if she could not master a certain piece of piano music, or to give away, piece by piece, the furniture in her other daughter's dollhouse on grounds of nonperfection. When the younger girl, Lulu, turned 13 and started resisting in force, her mother told her, "I was thinking of adopting a third child from China, one who would practice when I told her to, and maybe even play the cello in addition to the violin and piano."
In the case of Chua's older daughter, those kinds of tactics got results: as a teenager, Sophia was a first-prize winner in a competition that gave her the opportunity to play Carnegie Hall.
There is something of a narrative formula in Chua's book, the predictable eventual enlightenment about the things that count, insights gleaned when her own sister falls gravely ill and her younger daughter rebels with tell-tale troubling signs like chopping off her hair and flinging a glass to the ground in rage, in public no less. In fact, Chua does not seem so much to learn a lesson as simply to concede defeat in exhaustion. But she also seems to have perfected a fresher kind of formula, one we might expect to see replicated in the future: memoirs about parenting techniques that are just appalling enough to allow the reader to revel in self-righteousness, but tempered with insights just wise enough, and timely enough, that the reader has reason to refrain from chucking the book across the room. (Imagine this book proposal: the extremes one mother pursued in a misguided effort to instill healthy eating habits in her children.)
Many an indulgent, progressive parent would be likely to pause and reflect on the philosophy (as opposed to the execution of it) that Chua reiterates in various ways - that Chinese parents "assume strength, not fragility" in their children, and therefore demand more of them, setting higher standards, assuming they can handle more pressure in the name of high performance, or at least good behavior. In this regard, Chua is like some high-steroid version of Wendy Mogel, who wrote "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee," a very different book that struck a chord by advocating that parents indulge less, and expect more.
Having read the Wall Street Journal excerpt, and decided, like everyone else, that Chua was intimidating, impressive and Must Be Stopped, I sincerely hoped the book would be a bore, full of niggly detail about rehearsals, competitions and her ancestral origins. Sadly, I must inform you that "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" is entertaining, bracingly honest and, yes, thought-provoking. Many parents who revile Chua's conduct are probably, nonetheless, seriously considering Suzuki for the first time.
So many parenting memoirs capture the various ways the authors' children have taken them to hell and back. Refreshingly, and perhaps uniquely, Chua instead catalogs the various ways she tortured her two young daughters, all in the name of Chinese tradition and the goal of reaching Carnegie Hall (or at least the Juilliard precollege program).
Once primarily known for her work as a professor at Yale Law School and for studies on empire and ethnicity, Chua now seems destined to go to her grave identified as the Tiger Mother, a woman whose memoir sarcastically savages a host of American values, all the while relying on that quintessentially American format, the family tell-all.
Here is a book to thrill any parent who has felt moments of guilt about a harsh word or a carelessly flung insult. On virtually every page, that parent can cringe in dismay (and luxuriate in a safe sense of superiority), as Chua exposes her own outrageous tactics: there are the by now notorious threats to burn one young daughter's stuffed animals if she could not master a certain piece of piano music, or to give away, piece by piece, the furniture in her other daughter's dollhouse on grounds of nonperfection. When the younger girl, Lulu, turned 13 and started resisting in force, her mother told her, "I was thinking of adopting a third child from China, one who would practice when I told her to, and maybe even play the cello in addition to the violin and piano."
In the case of Chua's older daughter, those kinds of tactics got results: as a teenager, Sophia was a first-prize winner in a competition that gave her the opportunity to play Carnegie Hall.
There is something of a narrative formula in Chua's book, the predictable eventual enlightenment about the things that count, insights gleaned when her own sister falls gravely ill and her younger daughter rebels with tell-tale troubling signs like chopping off her hair and flinging a glass to the ground in rage, in public no less. In fact, Chua does not seem so much to learn a lesson as simply to concede defeat in exhaustion. But she also seems to have perfected a fresher kind of formula, one we might expect to see replicated in the future: memoirs about parenting techniques that are just appalling enough to allow the reader to revel in self-righteousness, but tempered with insights just wise enough, and timely enough, that the reader has reason to refrain from chucking the book across the room. (Imagine this book proposal: the extremes one mother pursued in a misguided effort to instill healthy eating habits in her children.)
Many an indulgent, progressive parent would be likely to pause and reflect on the philosophy (as opposed to the execution of it) that Chua reiterates in various ways - that Chinese parents "assume strength, not fragility" in their children, and therefore demand more of them, setting higher standards, assuming they can handle more pressure in the name of high performance, or at least good behavior. In this regard, Chua is like some high-steroid version of Wendy Mogel, who wrote "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee," a very different book that struck a chord by advocating that parents indulge less, and expect more.
Having read the Wall Street Journal excerpt, and decided, like everyone else, that Chua was intimidating, impressive and Must Be Stopped, I sincerely hoped the book would be a bore, full of niggly detail about rehearsals, competitions and her ancestral origins. Sadly, I must inform you that "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" is entertaining, bracingly honest and, yes, thought-provoking. Many parents who revile Chua's conduct are probably, nonetheless, seriously considering Suzuki for the first time.
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