Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - new book about Chinese parenting

Parents Forum
941

<p>Chua admits in the WSJ article that some of what she considers normal Chinese parenting we Americans might consider legally actionable. She also recounts a social event in which friends were so appalled at her behavior toward her child that she needed to be defended or rehabilitated by her close girlfriend. Also, one woman actually cried over the fact that Chua had called her daughter garbage.</p>

<p>So, you can’t really say she was naive, culturally blind, or unaware of the reaction Americans might have to her book. She was aware how we’d view it, and published it anyway. Such a lack of concern for her family is shocking, really.</p>

<p>Think of the lowest, most hurtful, immoral, or criminal thing you’ve ever done in your life. Would you broadcast it now to people in your community to all who don’t know about it, so that your kids’ friends will find out and say to them “I can’t believe your mom/dad had an affair/used to be a heroin addict/killed someone in a hit and run/embezzled money from their company/told that awful lie/ whatever.” Why would you hurt your family that way? It doesn’t matter if Chua thinks she’s justified and in the right. She knew that many people would see her as a cruel and abusive person because of her book. Therefore, she had to know that people would feel sorry for her girls and see them as the poor kids with the monster of a mom. So why?</p>

942

<p>Revenge. The kid rebelled, so Mom used her power and wrote a book. This isn’t about the kids, it’s all about her. If the kid ends up a failure*, then at least everyone knows how hard Mom tried.</p>

<p>*normal?</p>

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<p>I’m not sure if she gave it that much thought. If you read the first chapter, which couldn’t have taken me more that 10 minutes and was free on Amazon, it doesn’t seem to be very insightful. It really did read like a stream of consciousness, like she had a bunch of points to make and she just wrote them down. It is quite disjointed.</p>

<p>How much time did she even take to write it? She must be so busy supervising her kids and keeping up with a professorship at Yale I couldn’t figure out how she had time to write a book that wasn’t related to her job. Maybe the answer is she just churned it out without much thought.</p>

944

<p>You know, I’ve never assumed that this book gave any insight into how typical parents in China raise their children. I’ve assumed that it characterized (or caricatured) only intense, professionally-educated emigrant families. Again, that’s why it is somewhat reminiscent of Jewish parenting of earlier generations–the immigrant strivers. But hers is such an extreme version of it that it begs for criticism.</p>

945

<p>I just read the excerpt available on Amazon too. I agree with the other posters that it is not written very well. Seems like high school level or less. What would she say about getting a B-? And that’s just for writing sophistication, not content.</p>

946

<p>Hunt-</p>

<p>I doubt very much Chua’s parenting style is indicative of how kids are raised in China, if for no reason then China from what I can tell isn’t one culture any more then the US is one culture, it is a large country, and I suspect the lives of an affluent couple living in Shanghai with their ‘little emperors and empresses’ lead very different lives then someone living in western China or in the Northern wheat producing regions. Some things of Chua’s ways might come from Chinese culture, for example the idea that the kid has to be “#1” at everything or on tests and such, because that is a part of traditional Chinese society vis a vis getting a job in the bureacracy and rising (even with all the rise of business in China and corporations and such, government is still a large employer, interestingly enough, and from I can tell getting in there is about going to the right school and getting the highest test scores, even today:). </p>

<p>I would argue that Chua is more what I would call ‘immigrant chic’ for lack of a better term (I use chic sardonically, since Chua and her husband are not the stereotype of the poor, socially segregated immigrant, but rather seem to be somewhat of a succesful power couple acting like immigrants are portrayed as acting). Talk to people who have immigrated and started with nothing, and you see the same kind of pressure Chua puts on, whether their last name was Goldberg or D’Italiano or Chou or whatever, it was people who had nothing and put all the hope of being ‘the best’,especially where prejudice and discrimination made getting ahead hard. And yes, sometimes it was over the top, if anyone wants proof see the movie “Shine” sometime, about the pianist David Helfgott, his father made Chua look like Mr. Rogers, and the kid paid the price for it, big time.</p>

<p>In the case of a country like China, there probably are parents like Chua, if for different reasons, it is a country rapidly industrializing but where opportunities to succeed are still rather limited, even when you do get an education, so competition is fierce for the kind of jobs you can advance in, and parents, desperate that their kids do well (among other things, China has relatively little safety nets for the aged, so parents depend on their kids a lot when they get old). Read the Chinese pianist Lang Lang’s biography and what his father did with him to see a dimension of this back in the old country…but is this true for everyone or a large number? I doubt at that extreme…</p>

<p>Some of that mentality I suspect comes with immigrants from countries like that, and is translated into things like being #1 is the only thing and so forth, or the emphasis on getting top grades and getting into top schools, because in the old country, getting into the right school often did decide what happened to you, which is not entirely true here, or even partially true. </p>

<p>What is interesting to me is how Chua chose to use what she saw as ‘Chinese Parenting’ in raising her daughters, why that extreme? Did she decide that she was raised that way, and she sees herself as being successful, and wanted to recreate that with her daughter? Did she get scared at what she saw as the failings of the lax, ‘liberal’ parents she saw around her at Yale (or what she perceived as failings) and decided to go the other way? What is interesting to me is that she took such an extreme tack, that she in effect decided it was all or nothing with ‘Chinese parenting’ method, and that to me is kind of weird for someone who grew up in the US and hopefully saw a lot of successful people who grew up and achieved with however they were raised.</p>

947

<p>Amy Chua and her daughters are going to be on The Today Show shortly to talk about her book.</p>

948

<p>“I have forbidden my sons to be in any videos that are uploaded to youtube. Am I crazy, or is Chua?”</p>

<p>LOL! I think you’re a little overly cautious but in terms of erring on the side of safety, you made the right choice. Her exposure of her children at such a difficult stage in life is beyond comprehension, especially when she was able to support her family without stooping to that level.</p>

<p>My guess is that she really, truly, does not realize just how shocking her book is, not only to mainstream Americans, but to pretty much the whole world, because she is in denial. I think she is not able to hear her words in the same way we hear them because that would require her to see herself in such a negative way she’d have a breakdown. So her brain is diverting all the relevant evidence into other categories, even if the arguments are fallacious (“They’re just jealous”, “They don’t understand”, “I wasn’t serious,” etc.).</p>

<p>So she truly thought she was showcasing this model family–not without its issues, but certainly not a dysfunctional mess, which is how most people see it.</p>

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<p>musicprnt - It’s been a while since I watched the movie “Shine” but I think your reference is quite valid; as I remember the movie there are actually many similarities to Chua, but in an economically depressed household without the gild of educational refinement. I recall the father ranting at his son about being strong in order to avoid being squashed like a bug - I think a version of that tirade must have played out at the Chua household more than once. </p>

<p>I’m sure it looked better in the Chua version - being in a big fancy house with a refined vocabulary to express in the most eloquent terms how unacceptable anything less than perfection truly is - but the message is still destructive, stifling and a form of child abuse IMO.</p>

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<p>I thought of this thread today while listening to a discussion about the book on German talk radio. My German is very poor but I know a hysterical angry mama when I hear one. When even the Germans think you are “krank”, you know you have a problem…</p>

951

<p>bchan-</p>

<p>Yeah, his family were immigrant Jews in Australia, the father I believe was a holocaust survivor, and he was very much like Chua, though the family was poor as you point out. He drove his son, who was a talented pianist and pushed the son when the teacher at the music school told him to back off, that he was pushing too fast and the kid cracked up completely, had a massive breakdown and ended up in a mental hospital and never really recovered (he does play concert dates , but they are more a spectacle then a real concert). </p>

<p>In that case, like Chua,when the movie came out there were people defending the father, that he only wanted what was best for the son, that his own experience made him behave like that, which frankly I found abhorrent, from what I can tell, between the movie and stuff I have read written about him, it was the same story, a parent pushing the child, totally controlling, because ‘he was the parent and knew best’, telling him what to do, controlling his life and so forth. There is a telling scene in the movie, David is living in a kind of halfway house or something, and has been showing up in a local bar/restaurant with a piano and playing…the father hears about it, shows up, probably in the hope that David is “better”, and basically, when he figures out he is still broken, walks away in disgust…</p>

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<p>looks like going to be on Colbert in a few minutes.</p>

953

<p>Just saw Chua on Colbert. She was inarticulate and a bad interview. All she kept saying was, this is a memoir not a manual, people aren’t reading this the right way, it’s all about how I backed off from the strict approach as the kids got older and rebelled. Her daughters were apparently in the audience.</p>

<p>Re YouTube: my kids have put up a couple of videos but have disabled comments.</p>

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<p>I confess I haven’t read through this whole thread, but I just finished reading Chua’s book, and (coming from a 40% “Chinese-style”* childhood, as Chua has defined it) I feel the reports of her child abuse and viciousness and vindictiveness are greatly exaggerated.</p>

<p>Definitely not a model-family showcase, although there’s the expected amount of good-natured bragging (all mothers do this! who wouldn’t?). The first few chapters are where the WSJ excerpts are mostly taken from, and those are largely “this is why my method is superior; it delivers results”. But the main plot of the story, such as it is (her battle of wills with her youngest daughter) makes it clear that she now believes her approach was, in certain senses, a failure. Her narration makes it pretty clear that she recognized how extreme and iron-fisted her approach was to parenting.</p>

<p>I’m not surprised she’s on the defensive, considering the outcry, but I think people are getting too wrapped up in the sensationalist, quotable moments of the book (aka all the parts of the WSJ article; the actual book displays a much more nuanced view of her parenting, but apparently very few have read it). There are things that she does that I believe are reprehensible and that I hope I wouldn’t ever do to my children (specifically: verbal backhanded insults and [de]motivational talks). But so much of it is being blown out of proportion.</p>

<p>** I actually think her description of Chinese parenting and its tenets might be more of a “successful immigrant parents (usually Asian) who live in a high-powered affluent area and push their children to success at almost all costs”. I don’t know many parents as extreme as Chua, but where I live, that kind of parenting culture is definitely present.*</p>

955

<p>So, for the Chua apologists out there:<br>
Teeth marks on the piano.
Real or a joke?
If real, Coco’s, the other dog’s, or a person’s?</p>

956

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<p>I have read and while it’s more nuanced, it’s not highly nuanced. She came to the conclusion that her method might not work for all after the younger D rebelled. That’s far different from coming to the conclusion that it was a mean and nasty method that shouldn’t be done EVEN IF THE RESULTS WERE THERE. Because, really, no “results” justify throwing a small child’s handmade birthday card to mommy back because it’s not good enough. No “results” justify making a 7 year old sit at the piano for hours on end without being allowed to go to the bathroom or go to bed on time.</p>

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<p>@@ That’s the whole point. Her actions were reprehensible and she really doesn’t come to the epiphany that it would be possible to expect and even demand excellence without being nasty, mean and abusive. She’s not bright enough to figure out the shades of gray between her style of parenting and stereotypical Western self-esteem-even-if-they-can’t-add-2+2.</p>

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<p>Sensationalism sells better, though. I’m curious to know precisely how much is deliberately hyped-up for sales/humor/shock value/press and how much is genuine, but it seems like a difficult thing to extrapolate about.</p>

<p>I’m not sure I entirely understand the negative reactions to the piano incident (where she didn’t allow her daughter to eat/drink/go to the bathroom). It sounds horrific when you put it in that context, but I could easily synopsize a similar incident with my own parents the same way, and in real life it was more of this: They knew I would sit down at the piano and then five minutes in go, “Oh, I’m hungry” or “I’m thirsty” or go to the bathroom and read a book I had secretly hidden in there for ten minutes. In real life it was more of “You’re not going anywhere until you’ve practiced for at least half an hour!” (nowhere near Chua-level devotion to music, I suppose) because they knew I was perfectly fine and I was just using my nine-year-old diversionary tactics.</p>

<p>I think forcing her daughter to sit there for 2 or 3+ hours (I can’t quite remember the precise number for that incident, but it seems reasonable, considering she often asked for 6+ hours of practice in one day) and verbally harassing that is tough. But denying food/water/going to the bathroom…I think I interpreted that detail differently than what others might have seen it as.</p>

<p>N.B./Edit: It’s interesting to note that the conclusion quotes her daughters as saying they were grateful that she pushed them so hard (even though I’m sure they wished she’d pulled back in quite a few situations). She mentioned also (either in the book or an interview) that products of such extreme upbringings, such as herself, do feel grateful for having “Chinese” mothers or fathers. We could extrapolate and say she forced her children into following the party line. But that’s still oversimplifying things.</p>

<p>As to the epiphany…you’re right that it didn’t happen. I’m not surprised. She regrets certain, specific actions (aka her execution in some circumstances), but not her parenting philosophy as a whole. From her standpoint it makes sense; she raised two successful children.</p>

<p>The valuable thing I got out of the book was not Chua’s specific applications of the “Chinese mother” mindset, but the idea of assuming resilience, and the idea that you have to work hard before you can enjoy something. I definitely feel that, culturally, there’s this trend towards thinking that you’ll find a dream major/job/career/hobby and you’re going to be fired-up and passionate about it right away and it’s going to be always fun pursuing this dream. There’s some middle ground between the diametrically-opposed parenting mindsets that Chua describes that I’d like to inhabit.</p>

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<p>One thing I’ve never heard Amy Chua address, and this is the reason I’m pretty unimpressed with her epiphany when her daughter is 13, is that the damage is done. It’s almost like who cares if Amy Chua has an epiphany now? It’s too little too late. She can’t go back in time and give her daughters the play dates they should have had. But in her mind the important point is that she had this epiphany, (I’ve heard her say this).</p>

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<p>Interesting idea but I don’t get the impression this was the type of temperament her oldest daughter had. Sophia tries very hard not to give her mother any trouble, she has never been described by anyone as acting agreeable and then doing something else behind the scene.</p>

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<p>Greekfire, the wording about the piano incident (“The Little White Donkey”) in the Wall Street Journal excerpt is “we worked right through dinner and into the night.” This sounds to me like more than three hours, from that point, although I admit it’s quite subjective. Also, it sounds to me as though they postponed dinner until the piece was mastered (although the other two family members may have eaten on schedule). I doubt that Louisa was eating while playing. How did you interpret it?</p>

<p>Louisa had already been working on the piece to the point of utter frustration before that stage. I can’t guess how many hours straight this took. How did you see it?</p>

<p>This is an entirely different scenario from the one where a child wants a water/food/bathroom break 5 or 15 minutes into a practice session.</p>

960

<p>For what end? A stupid, unimportant, trivial piano piece for a 7 yo. Whose ego was being fed?</p>

<p>Why couldn’t she get the distinction between “make sure to do your piano practice well, so you’re prepared for next week’s lesson – trying your best at something and working hard is a good value to have” and “you must master this NOW or else”? </p>

<p>It’s so unimpressive. And it’s so UN-“elite.”</p>