Tiger Mother: What a character!

The most meaningful time Amy Chua (the much reviled and read "Tiger Mother" of recent controversy to the tune of over 7,000 comments on her book's first published excerpt) makes a person cry in her latest book, it is not either of her daughters being raised by Chua's iron fist who are spilling the tears. It's a stranger at a party, who leaves after hearing Chua tell a story about calling one of her daughters "garbage." After seeing that reaction and otherwise receiving information on how offensive her behavior can come off (she hurts other mothers' feelings repeatedly as she denies invitations for playdates on behalf of her girls), I have no doubt that she knew that Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was the book she had to write. With dark humor and Ann Coulter-like provocation, Chua plays up her own ghoulishness on every page. In addition to the countless things that by Western eyes look like terrible things to say to one's child, she informs us that she knows how to use a chainsaw (a product of obeying her father strictly!) and probably caused the death of a pair of rabbits her husband bought her daughters that she never had interest in caring for ("Eventually, the rabbits mysteriously escaped," is how she ominously concludes that story). She describes her intonation as vicious and herself as "compulsively cruel" in a book whose surface objective is to defend her take on the "Chinese way" of parenting (readers should obviously beware of any cultural study that limits itself to one subject). For someone who claims that she's "not very good at enjoying life," she sounds like she's having a blast.

Chua is very, very good at talking about herself, but somewhat deficient in understanding her effect on people. In this way, her personality is pure reality star: all the self-consciousness in the world, not enough self-awareness to save her life (sometimes this is not an issue to her, as at one point she explains that she "was too anxious to care about being annoying" -- not that she ever does, anyway!). She says she feels deeply moved by her own nonsense speech that has no awareness of the cinema it purports to contrast with real life: “In Disney movies, the ‘good daughter’ always has to have a breakdown and realize that life is not all about following rules and winning prizes, and then take off her clothes and run into the ocean or something like that. But that’s just Disney’s way of appealing to all the people who never win any prizes. Winning prizes gives you opportunities, and that’s freedom – not running into the ocean.” I can't think of any such Disney movie, let alone multiple, let alone one ever with teenage nudity. Chua supports the supposed closeness of her daughter Lulu and her mother by explaining "they were e-mail penpals," suggesting that the computer monitor gave off more warmth in her house than any human interaction. She doesn't just shun every invitation to a playdate, she bemoans the very concept ("Why why why this terrible Western institution?"). In a particularly over-the-top (hence, much-discused) scene, her daughter gives her a birthday card that doesn't live up to her expectations and she tells that daughter to redo it with more effort ("I reject this"). She doesn't for a moment consider that her daughter's insincere rush job might be stemming from the brutal way her mother treats her. Maybe she can't stand Amy's ass, and "Here you go! Blah! Happy birthday!" is the only thing the little girl's soul can muster.

There's a similar push behind repeated demands that her daughters write speeches (eulogies for their grandmother's funeral, toasts for their father's birthday party) -- in short, she wants her daughters to emote without feeling. It may be her most challenging in a laundry list of demands. It has everything to do with how Chua views the world and may have a little something to do with how she herself was raised (with a similar iron fist that pushed her toward academics and away from socialization). Above all else, she is not here to make friends: "You have to be hated sometimes by someone you love and who hopefully loves you," she writes. Granted, it's the most sophisticated take on that cliche we've seen thus far, but not here to make friends is not here to make friends.

There is no doubt, either, that she is here to win. Chua swears her daughter Lulu (her second born and main adversary -- Sophia, the elder, is a relative breeze in that she submits to her mother's demands to overachieve) loves the violin she's forced to play because "I’d see her joking around and laughing spiritedly at rehearsals." Yeah, or maybe Lulu was just trying to make the best of hell. So much of the book is dedicated to relaying the hours of rehearsing and traveling to rehearse and traveling to perform in Europe and Carnegie Hall and blah blah blah blah that it sooner or later should emerge to the reader that Chua is nothing if not a high-brow stage mom. What seals it is a passage toward the end of the book, as she copes with Lulu's diminishing involvement in the violin and her own need to let go: "I had to force myself not to rock and back forth [sic] and hum robotically, which is what I usually do when the girls perform a difficult piece.” Chua is the most articulate Toddlers & Tiaras mother ever and this book is her stage at last. She goes above and beyond vicarious living through her daughters. Overachieving runs deep in her family.

And that is to say that Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is fantastically entertaining, specifically for someone like me, who doesn't want kids of his own and is never particularly excited to be around others'. This is extreme human behavior rendered in print and full of scenes that will be impossible to take seriously when they're inevitably blown up on the big screen (imagine Chua running through the Red Square in sandals crying, or the fight that leads up to that fleeing, which includes the sentences, "We’re in Russia, and you refuse to try caviar! You’re like a barbarian.”). Chua has a very dry sense of humor ("The summer after Florence’s passing was a difficult one. To begin with, I ran over Sophia’s foot.") and an extremely nuanced sense of villany -- she knows that what is not revealed is exponentially more ominious than the horrors that she shares ("I was mortified and disciplined Lulu severely at home," is how she concludes one story, pausing from her own word vomit for effect). At times her descriptions are enviable in their precision (on her husband's ailing mother: "I remember how small she looked against the white hospital pillows, like a 75% photocopy reduction of herself"). At other times, the very absurdity of her nature seems unbeknown to her -- when she finds out her Samoyed ranks average on a scale of dog breeds' intelligence, she describes herself as "nauseated." It takes her 30 pages to admit: "I had finally come to see that Coco was an animal, with intrinsically far less potential than Sophia and Lulu." There's even a very nice reversal of power in the book's coda, when Chua talks about getting Sophia's and Lulu's approval for the book, and the headache it was to negotiate two sets of notes. She seems at the mercy of her daughters and at last human.

But that's a brief flash -- it's mostly just melodrama and grand proclamations. Instead of clutching my pearls reading about her boorish mothering, I held my stomach in laughter while reading this book as camp. (Knowing that at least one of Chua's daughters is whip-smart, hilarious and still alive helps keep even the heaviest passages light.) Simply put, "If the next time’s not PERFECT, I’m going to TAKE ALL YOUR STUFFED ANIMALS AND BURN THEM!” is the new "NO WIRE HANGERS!" ("You already have a pet. Your violin is your pet," is a close runner-up.) Chua has effectively written her own Mommie Dearest from the other side's point of view. It's impossible to say whether she felt the need to beat her daughters to it or if she just wanted to brag, and I wouldn't want it any other way. Were there easy answers, this book wouldn't be anywhere nearly as fascinating, and it damn sure wouldn't be the work of a Tiger Mother.

 

Comments

[Miss Lisa]

Thank you to my Mexican-American mom for being the opposite of this woman. Well, not entirely. I call her a perfectionist with a heart. And tortillas. Always a full pack of tortillas in the 'fridge. Love.

[huhwhat]

i can't help but think the furor over this book is largely fueld by our view of big bad China and it's evil ways... This chick is way over the top but I certainly prefer discipline over the currently popular Let's Be Friends style of parenting.

[scorzi]

While I do feel in some ways the U.S' idea of parenting has gotten soft and helicopter-like, hearing the way she talks to her children in some scenes is nauseating. While I was never beaten or starved, our family has a long and dubious history of verbal abuse of children, and I feel that can be just as damaging as slapping a kid in the face. There is a happy medium in every culture and the East and West should be trying to find it. Calling children dumb/stupid/idiots/imbeciles/etc is not encouraging anything.

[K]

Wonderful

[Katie]

You got it. To borrow from Sontag, "Pure Camp is always naive." Chua is nothing less than that.

[laura]

Love your point of view. Of course you would see her in terms of reality TV...
The Disney movie she describes sounds like Little Mermaid 2 to me lol

[RP]

Chua is the most articulate Toddlers & Tiaras mother ever

Oh my goodness, thank you. Now I have an example to point to when I hear, "We don't do that to our kids here!"

[Tati]

Although I don't agree with the overly lax style of American parenting, I definitely do not approve of the traditional Chinese style of parenting depicted in this book. I've known many Asians who were perfectionists and won accolades in their own right while growing up, only to end up with severe depression, anxiety disorders and other ailments. They resent their parents and look at them with contempt for how they treated them. Heck, my non-Asian parents had a similar style of parenting as Chua, and although I have enough childhood trophies, awards and diplomas to fill an office, I suffer from panic attacks and have pretty much limited any and all contact with my parents to a minimum.

If I could read this book from your detached point of view Rich, I would enjoy it almost as much as you did. However, this farce hits too close to home for me to find it funny.

[Rebecca]

Her kids are still kids; fifteen and eighteen, right? She's counting her eggs before they graduate college.

[Gen]

One of my colleagues is Chinese, and she tells me that at the age of 6, when she wanted to quit violin lessons, her mom told her : 'Daughter, you are breaking my heart, but if that is your choice, go on and find yourself other parents because I cannot accept your choice.' Of course she had to continue, ridden with guilt (and unable to find other parents at the mere age of 6!).

This girl is 25 today and still fears her mother's reaction if she doesn't eat her home-made lunches at work. When she is sick, her mom makes her 'potions' to drink and the girl wouldn't DARE not drinking them, even if they are brownish black and do smell terrible.

I don't even know her mom but I'm afraid of her! This is what your Tiger Mother post reminds me of. I don't think I could read this book and still sleep at night ;)

[Robert]

I still can't believe people mistook Chua's tone as "deathly serious" in that WSJ excerpt. As a white kid forced to go to an abusive private clarinet teacher for years, I damn near pissed my pants reading about the piano lesson. Nothing she wrote there was any more offensive than a "black people walk like this, and white people walk like this joke." She just didn't give people the obvious joke lead-ins.

In other words, I think this is intended to be a campy memoir. It's not a serious study on parenting. Believe me, I've read enough "my children are perfect because I raised them right" memoirs to know when someone is poking fun at the genre.

[john]

She is crazy. No one should suffer what she's put her kids through, no matter how okay they were. The world's greatest are often screwed up though.

[yggie]

I watch the Biggest Loser and last season they had a chinese american girl on riddled with guilt over her brother's death (also one of the reasons she was obese from over eating) because her parents blamed her for his death her entire life. How can anyone do that to another person, let alone a child? Coming right out and saying, "this is your fault adn now you're also fat, which is a disgrace". She confronted them with her feelings in the end and everything is probably better now, so it all turned out ok but damn, it's not cultural thing I agree with. Like someone else said, look at asian adults and see how content they are with themselves and their life. They may be successful on the surface but what is their inner life like?

Balance in all things. Discipline combined with kindness and love goes a long way.

[asian adult]

"look at asian adults and see how content they are with themselves and their life. They may be successful on the surface but what is their inner life like?"

Generalizing much?

[southwer]

I love this review. I was actually feeling kind of horrified by Amy Chua and now I'm kind of amused by her. Thank you Rich!

NO WIRE HANGERS!

[whatwhat]

I remember my best friends in middle school were all chinese, and all of their mothers were like this. I never saw most of them weeknights, and they were never allowed to sleep over. Two girls played the piano, the other a violin.
One of those girls went nuts in highschool though, really got into drug culture and other weirdly alternative things ~ tripping on E and shrooms at school etc etc. Yet she got into universities I didn't, because she somehow managed to keep her grades impeccable in spite of all her extracurriculars. Still, though, she's such a hippie and it was quite a change at the time it happened.

[yggie]

No offense intended, asian adult. That was in response to the thread and what someone else said here. I would say that about anyone, not just asians.

[YEP]

My parents ignored my intelligence in a particular way (I was forced to find a different clarinet tutor at age 12, despite having the best in the state, because my mother wanted one that was a 10 minute drive away instead of a 20 minute drive away... I guess that is not exactly ignoring; I don't even know what it is) and then divorced because my mother was bored with my father. I am scarred for a variety of reasons, and I can only dream that I was as happy at 18 as Sophia seems to be. I would much rather have grown up with a Tiger Mom, personally!

[K]

Wow, I think you captured her psyche perfectly here: "Chua is very, very good at talking about herself, but somewhat deficient in understanding her effect on people."

I know several highly educated, highly successful people like Chua who have exactly the same M.O.

My hunch is that she wrote this in full belief that she was showing something to be proud of, then the furor over her book appeared, and she realized "Oh crap, this could actually affect my career and how my colleagues perceive me." And thus she's now backpedalling.

[Mary Backstayge]

I for one can't wait to see what happens to these girls, particularly the older one, when they get to college. Yikes!

[Eve]

How many of the people geeking out over this womans' parenting have ever had their young daughter play Carnegie Hall?

Just sayin'.

[captain america]

yep..........THIS IS AMERICAN HUMOR.
sorry!!

[Dru]

I kind of love this woman-- the book was rather enjoyable to read. Coming from strict European parents, none of her "shocking" parenting methods really phased me: my mother to this day won't accept a gift from me unless it's "the best I could possibly give". You learn to roll with the punches.

[Viagra Generic]

You are too intelligent? How do you come across such topics and how do you go about, that you do not miss out on any angle or
even the intricate factors of this subject. I am quite a fan of yours now

[First time reader]

And that is to say that Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is fantastically entertaining, specifically for someone like me, who doesn't want kids of his own and is never particularly excited to be around others'.

This is EXACTLY what I was thinking as I read about the book and read the article for the first time! I'm Childfree and I have a sort of... freaky interest in this book that I can't explain, even though I'll never be a Tiger Mother or any sort of mother.

Thanks for your review