Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
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50books_poc12. Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
So, this is the book that the Wall Street Journal cherrypicked to create an inflammatory "excerpt", which then kicked off a media shitstorm of sexism, racism, and xenophobia.
There is a lot to be said about the social politics of that shitstorm (roughly chronological order):
Please note that pretty much EVERY article above is about the deliberately inflammatory cut-and-paste that the WSJ published, or the fallout, and not about the book itself. Those links are absolutely worth reading (especially read DeepaD and GK!), but they don't really answer the question: what did Chua say, or intend to say?
Here are some people who did get to read the book:
Before we go any farther, let me note: I am not Asian, and I very firmly feel that it is not my place to police Amy Chua (linked article was written before the WSJ cut-and-paste job was revealed) on whether she's contributing to Anti-Asian racism or not -- as far as I'm concerned, people who are safe from a particular oppression do not have the ethical right to criticize people who experience that oppression on how they're responding to that oppression wrong. (YMMV, of course, but for myself: I believe I should be spending my time criticizing up the kyrarchical lattice than down, and as a corollary, I belive the "What were you thinking!?" conversation should be left to peers.) However, others may discuss whether she's doing it wrong in the comments if they feel the need.
Additionally, there are intersections here with respect to racism, sexism, and classism (at the very least!): please make sure you're up on your 101s when commenting. Also, respect that other commenters may be coming from different places than you, especially concerning the question of whether or not Amy Chua had an abusive relationship with her children: when commenting, please leave space for other people's experiences.
So, my own impressions of the book:
One: I am certain that this book will be unreadable for some. If nothing else, it is definitely triggery for some kinds of parental-child emotional abuse. Chua tries to make the case that many things that "Western" parents judge her about (f'rex, being uncompromising in her criticism to her children, and being deliberately harsh with her language whie doing so) are not destructive in the "Chinese mother" context, because there's a bunch of other things in that context that let the child know that she is supported and loved. Leastways, she says, it's no worse than the "Western" (by which she appears to mean American liberal middle and upper-middle class) system. There are times when she says this that it smacks of truth; other times, it seems more like wishful thinking.
Additionally, the "Chinese mother" shitck may be a deal-breaker for some. At the beginning she discusses the stereotypes: how not all Chinese-American mothers are like this; how it might be an immigrant thing and not a Chinese thing; hey, you don't have to be Chinese (or even Asian) to parent like this; no, not all Asian parents raise their kids like this. Thereafter she uses the shorthands "Chinese mother" and "Asian mother" uncritically (which, unfortunately, left her wide open to WSJ cherrypicking). I am bothered that at one point late in the text she privileged "Western" parenting with a parenthetical "at least some kinds of", even though I never saw her extending that courtesy to Asian parents.
Also, trigger warning for transphobia: for the length of a half-page, she "humorously" uses "it" for someone whose gender she could not (nor tried to) determine.
So, after acknowledging that this book is legitimately going to be a non-starter for many...
Two: Assuming that none of the above is a deal-breaker, it is very readable. I blew through it in an evening, and yes, I laughed sometimes, too. It was tightly written, it was engaging, and it was always clear that she was going somewhere with all this.
Initially, her humor style wasn't working for me -- leastways, not until my partner asked how the book was, and I read a bit out loud to her. I then realized: it's a stand-up routine. The hyperbole, every story having mini-punchlines at regular intervals in the delivery -- it's a stand-up comedy monologue.
Which brings us to...
Three: If this is stand-up, is she punching up or punching down?
Racialicious has something of an ongoing analysis around POC stand-up comedians who do explicitly racial jokes. One of their critical questions is whether the jokes are hegemonic or not -- whether racialized people literally are the punchlines. (Chinese people exist! Hilarious!) To my eye, Chua is mostly making hegemonic jokes. A good many of her punchlines are "Chinese mothers, haha!" and she even makes those jokes while she's insisting that "Chinese parenting" is a respectable, coherent, and frequently mischaracterized parenting philosophy.
Excepting the transphobic shit mentioned above (why did you have to go there, whyyyy?), she didn't seem to engage in punching down. Whenever she encounters immigrant parents in the narrative, for example, she is absolutely respectful of the cultural and economic double-binds that they find themselves in, and she insists that the reader respect those double-binds, too.
She does punch up sometimes, but punching up is not a major part of what's going on.
Mostly she punches herself. And while a good chunk of it is the personal-folly style of humor that I find genuinely funny, another decent chunk is punching herself in hegemonically approved ways ("Asian mothers, haha, we're so ludicrous!"). That last is not something that I find funny. Maybe I'd find it funnier if I had an Asian mother -- it's entirely possible that those jokes aren't being made for me.
(It's also possible those jokes are being made for white people: a way of "softening" some of the other things she's saying.)
Four: For all that it begins as stand-up, there's a huge tone change halfway through the book, where it transforms into introspective memoir.
I wish the whole thing had been introspective memoir, frankly. The hyperbolic humor she uses in the first half of the book obscures the data -- did these things actually happen? or not? -- and has a way of overshadowing her points.
And she has good points: being a "Chinese mother" can be (among other things) a strategy used by desperate parents -- often immigrant parents -- to get their kids into the single seat on the rescue boat, so don't judge immigrant parents for doing their best in a broken system. Chua insists that there is a coherent, loving, respectful-of-the-child philosophical framework in this parenting style, which can make it appropriate even when there aren't "single seat on the boat" survival pressures at play. "Westerners" who judge "Chinese mothers" are often doing that unfairly and from a position of ignorance -- cherry picking data and considering it within their own cultural contexts. Because this parenting strategy is judged inappropriately, unfairly, and above all aggressively by "Western" parents, Asian parents who raise their kids this way are often socially isolated, and can't get support, feedback, or advice from other parents.
Anyway, when she switches to introspective memoir, it becomes clear that she's using an age-old plotline of parenting memoirs: "I thought I knew how to be an excellent parent. Then I met my kids and shit got real." Chua's struggles in that archetypal narrative are intensified by two factors: 1) her parenting model expected strong pushback from her kids, so it took her a while to realize that this wasn't merely "strong pushback", and 2) she was getting so much societal pushback, and had so deeply entrenched herself against it, that it took some doing to de-entrench herself and respond differently to what was going on with her younger kid.
Within the larger plotline, there are also occasional notes of "Everyone brings their own baggage to parenting, and it is damn difficult to figure out how to rise above your own baggage." Unfortunately, that's never really developed. One of the things that is driving Chua are the sacrifices her own parents made, and her desperate need to make sure that her own children don't fritter that all way (because if she allowed her children to do that, it would mean that Chua herself was a bad daughter). From what I can tell, that's her need, and not her parents', but it's hard for the reader to know for sure. There also seems to be some other psychological/personality issues coming into play -- she implies in spots during her stand-up bits that what she calls being an "intense Chinese mother" is just her own personality coming through, and not Chinese anything. (Take, for instance, the episode where she and her husband are fighting over whether she's too tough on the kids or whether he's selling the kids short. She challenges, "What are your dreams for Sophia [the older daughter]? What are your dreams for Lulu [the younger daughter]? What are your dreams for Coco [the dog]?" Um, the dog? That is not Chinese parenting -- that's personal shit coming through.) This is a personal memoir, about Amy Chua's desires for herself as a parent, for herself as the adult daughter of her own parents, of herself as an Asian-American mother in an aggressively mommy-judging society, and of her dreams for her children.
Five: The question everyone seems to have is, was she being abusive to her kids?
A lot of the incidents that have been quoted -- the bit about not letting her daughter have bathroom breaks during music practice, f'rex -- are misquotes. That particular instance was not usual procedure, but one epic showdown between mother and daughter about whether or not she had to do her piano practice. My mother and brother used to have the same kind of protracted battle about whether he'd do his homework: "I have to use the bathroom" was one of the strategies he would use in those battles. My mother's response would typically be to deny those requests -- he didn't need to use the bathroom, he was just trying to find a ploy that would let him leave the desk. In the media, that line from the book has been portrayed as if Chua was physically abusing her children. As I've said, the hyperbole in her humor tends to obscure the ability to know precisely what she did and didn't do, but "physically abusing her children by refusing to let them use the bathroom" is, to my eye, a misreading of the scene.
It is true that by the time Chua changed course with her younger daughter, she had begun to damage that relationship. It's similarly true that she took a long time to respond to her husband's and parents' concerns with respect to her younger daughter -- all three of them were urging her to back off, that the younger daughter was different than the older one. However, during that time, Chua was aware and concerned that her parenting appeared to be going awry with her younger daughter, and she was spending a good deal of time trying to problem solve what was going wrong and how to best fix it. It took Chua a long time to accept that the best way to fix the situation with her younger daughter was to completely change what she was doing with her, but in the end, she did accept it, and she did do it.
I am not going to pronounce upon whether that makes her a good parent or a bad parent: mothers are judged viciously and mercilessly, and I want no part of the rampant cultural sexism typically involved in that. But I do note this: she changed what she was doing. So many, many parents can't or don't.
Also, I am not convinced that her errors were much worse than those of many parents. That is not an excuse for her errors -- I certainly do not believe that everyone doing something makes it okay. But most people just get called bad parents when they fuck shit up. The way she's been villified as pure distilled evil doesn't seem commensurate with the apparent magnitude of her parenting errors.
And yes, I say that with full awareness that this book is fracking full of triggers for people who have had emotionally abusive parents.
Six: Disappointingly, in the final pages of the book, Chua goes back to the stand-up routine. By this point, her younger daughter had successfully fought for the right to play violin on her own terms -- her own terms alone -- and to take up an activity of her own choice, also on her own terms. Chua, for her part, was trying to learn how to stand back and not "help", not set the goals for Lulu, not do the things she had been doing in the first part of the book. However, in the last couple of pages of the book, she's again making "Chinese mother" jokes about how she just can't help it, that she's now secretively sending texts to Lulu's tennis coach and then deleting them after so Lulu wouldn't find out.
This is pretty clearly hyperbole -- both daughters have read, consulted on, and approved every page of the manuscript, so Lulu definitely knows that her mom is either doing this or wanting to do this or whatever it is that is the seed truth of behind that joke. It's not actually the case that Chua is trying to sneak something behind Lulu's back. And yet the joke made me growl at the page. SPYING ON YOUR DAUGHTER IS NOT FUNNY. IT IS CONTROLLING AND STALKERY. STOP IT NOW.
Which, ahem, remember what I said up top about this book legitimately being a non-starter for lots and lots of people? The huge, loud, overt guilt-tripping battles of will between Chua and her daughters don't phase me at all -- "Meh, sometimes families are like that," I shrug -- but Chua secretly texting the coach, even as a joke, got all up in my buttons.
And I wonder about that: if one part of the book doesn't hit your buttons, there are eight other parts that possibly will, and did she really not get that her humor would do that? I do believe her that this wasn't a cynical ploy to get onto the bestseller list. Instead, I wonder: did she decide that she was sick unto death of trying to duck the mommy-judging -- especially the "enlightened" "liberal" "we're totally not racist" mommy-judging -- and wrote these "humorous" passages as an emotional counterstrike? You want to judge me?? You want to try to intimidate me with your judging?? GO AHEAD, JUDGE THIS.
Sophia, I notice, did exactly the same thing in her New York Post response to the media backlash:
(In the book, when Chua is writing the memoir and running drafts past her family, Sophia worried that in one set of drafts Lulu was being made into the star -- so vivacious and rebellious! -- and that Sophia was just the boring good conventional daughter. I'm just going to state for the record here: I think Sophia kicks ass.)
...what am I up to now, seven? Random kyrarchical notes what I haven't covered yet.
In one of those endless comment threads I read about this book, someone made the charge that this style of parenting is ableist. Chua addresses that in the text, although briefly: yes, it's traditionally ableist, and when (someone in her family? I cannot find the passage again!)'s baby was born with Downs, this model of parenting turned out to be a horrendous roadblock to their being good parents. Chua doesn't go into it in great detail, and the passage is very parental-grief-centric in its viewpoint, but Chua explicitly names it as an issue that needs to be dealt with. Chua feels that this specific set of parents did successfully readjust their parenting style, and they did this by keeping the core "Chinese parenting" philosophy of not selling your kids short. Myself, I am not wholly convinced that the parents didn't just switch to Ableist Parenting Trope Two (short passage is short!), but I appreciate Chua acknowledging the existence of the issue.
Something that surprised me was the great big ginormous Elephant of Sexism in the book. Chua and her husband are both tenured at Yale Law, but Chua seems to be doing all, and I mean all, the heavy lifting of parenting. Now and then she briefly mentions the pressure that she herself was under -- at times early on in the girls' lives she was parenting solo in a different state from her husband (the two-academic problem); at another point she was teaching AND doing national speaking engagements AND catching the red-eye back so that she can make sure that the kids get their practice time done. She mentions often that Jed, her husband, was "totally supportive" and "always backed her up" in front of the kids, but I have the impression that one of the reasons Chua was fighting about the problem of his not having a dream for the dog was because she was doing three jobs (teaching, lecturing, and raising kids) at a "I will break this bamboo and glass ceiling for me and my daughters if I die trying" level of intensity. Why did this all fall to Chua? She hints in the book that there was something going on with Jed -- she deliberately mostly left him out of the book because whatever-it-was was "his story to tell" -- but I'm still fairly frustrated on her behalf.
A further note responding to things I've seen come up in comment threads: she jokes about "Chinese mothers" and not "Chinese parents" because she's making herself personally be the butt of the joke, but also because her white husband wasn't directly participating in this style of parenting. Whenever she talks about other Asian families that parent this way, she talks about parents, and she frequently mentions Asian fathers as active parents.
And coming back to class a little bit: she frequently mentions that class and inequity is a huge part of this parenting style, and it is clear that while she herself is living a comfortably upper-middle-class lifestyle now, her attempts to raise her children as she was raised is a holdover from the inequity-driven urgency of her childhood. However, she does almost no systemic analysis of anything, nor do we get any sense that structural change is possible or even desirable. The parenting philosophy put forth here is very bootstraps-only, and in fact, seems to deliberately eschew systemic critique in an attempt to make ensure that one's children are pulling on the bootstraps with everything they've got. (As she describes it, critiquing the system is equivalent to giving yourself a pre-emptive psychological out for not succeeding.)
...and yet one of her previous books is titled World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, so I presume that systemic analysis is something that she does in other contexts? Which suggests to me something of the magnitude of what immigrant parents (and by extension, Chua) see themselves as being up against: we're not even going to discuss that the system is stacked against our children, except to further emphasize why we believe that nothing less than perfection is acceptable. I keep coming back to Junot Diaz here: when a single mistake can keep you out of the too-few seats in the boat, nothing less than perfect is acceptable.
Which brings me to the surveys about Asian American suicide rates that were being brought up in many of the articles linked above, which were usually being cited as counter-evidence to Chua's assertion that "Chinese" parenting is no worse than "Western" parenting. Most people who were mentioning those surveys were laying the blame for the higher suicide rate of Asian American young people at the feet of Asian American parents, which grates on me. It's not as if this "anything less than perfection is unacceptable" attitude is some irrational conceit on the part of many of those parents. (I know it looks irrational on Chua, but she learned it from her own parents, for whom it was not irrational. And believe me, shit is harder to unlearn than a lot of people think.) These parents are often doing this as a focused survival strategy in response to a system of harsh racial and economic inequity. So I ask, is it mothers who are to blame for these suicides? Or is it the society who offers a single seat in the rowboat, and then treats those who don't make the cut as if they are a moral blight upon the earth?
...and I might maybe have run out of things to say?
It's hard for me to get a firm read on the book, especially with the way she drops in and out of hyperbolic style, but there is a lot that is worthwhile here (assuming that the potential deal-breakers aren't your personal deal-breakers). Also, Disgrasian is precisely right: the WSJ article doesn't tell you why you might want to read the book.
All that said, I'm not at all sure how widely I would recommend the book to non-Asians -- especially non-Asians who have already been primed to hate Chua. While Chua does have some good points about the systemic pressures around parenting as a hyphenate, especially as an immigrant hyphenate, I can't help but think that there probably are books that are clearer on that. And if someone has already got a prejudice against "Asian mothers", there's plenty of easy fuel for that here. (As the WSJ cherrypicking demonstrates!)
But I'll back up those who were protesting that the book that the media shitstorm was about doesn't actually exist. Because it doesn't. This is a different book.
ETA:
So, this is the book that the Wall Street Journal cherrypicked to create an inflammatory "excerpt", which then kicked off a media shitstorm of sexism, racism, and xenophobia.
There is a lot to be said about the social politics of that shitstorm (roughly chronological order):
- Julianne Hing at The Atlantic: Thoughts From the Daughter of a Chinese Mother
- Jeff Yang at SFGate: Mother, superior?
- DeepaD at Dreamwidth: On Parenting as a Hyphenate
- GK at guriaking.org: US model minorities
- Oliver Wang at The Atlantic: Notes of a Native Tiger Son, Part 1, Part 2.
- Julianne Hing at Colorlines: "Tiger Mothers" Are Driven by U.S. Inequity, Not Chinese Culture; follow-up
- Bao Phi at Racialicious: My late and messy reaction to this whole 'Chinese Mothers Are Superior' hubbub.
Please note that pretty much EVERY article above is about the deliberately inflammatory cut-and-paste that the WSJ published, or the fallout, and not about the book itself. Those links are absolutely worth reading (especially read DeepaD and GK!), but they don't really answer the question: what did Chua say, or intend to say?
Here are some people who did get to read the book:
- Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld at The New York Post: Why I love my strict Chinese mom (Yes, that's Chua's older daughter.)
- Jen Wang at Disgrasian: You Hated the Excerpt, Now Read the Book
Before we go any farther, let me note: I am not Asian, and I very firmly feel that it is not my place to police Amy Chua (linked article was written before the WSJ cut-and-paste job was revealed) on whether she's contributing to Anti-Asian racism or not -- as far as I'm concerned, people who are safe from a particular oppression do not have the ethical right to criticize people who experience that oppression on how they're responding to that oppression wrong. (YMMV, of course, but for myself: I believe I should be spending my time criticizing up the kyrarchical lattice than down, and as a corollary, I belive the "What were you thinking!?" conversation should be left to peers.) However, others may discuss whether she's doing it wrong in the comments if they feel the need.
Additionally, there are intersections here with respect to racism, sexism, and classism (at the very least!): please make sure you're up on your 101s when commenting. Also, respect that other commenters may be coming from different places than you, especially concerning the question of whether or not Amy Chua had an abusive relationship with her children: when commenting, please leave space for other people's experiences.
So, my own impressions of the book:
One: I am certain that this book will be unreadable for some. If nothing else, it is definitely triggery for some kinds of parental-child emotional abuse. Chua tries to make the case that many things that "Western" parents judge her about (f'rex, being uncompromising in her criticism to her children, and being deliberately harsh with her language whie doing so) are not destructive in the "Chinese mother" context, because there's a bunch of other things in that context that let the child know that she is supported and loved. Leastways, she says, it's no worse than the "Western" (by which she appears to mean American liberal middle and upper-middle class) system. There are times when she says this that it smacks of truth; other times, it seems more like wishful thinking.
Additionally, the "Chinese mother" shitck may be a deal-breaker for some. At the beginning she discusses the stereotypes: how not all Chinese-American mothers are like this; how it might be an immigrant thing and not a Chinese thing; hey, you don't have to be Chinese (or even Asian) to parent like this; no, not all Asian parents raise their kids like this. Thereafter she uses the shorthands "Chinese mother" and "Asian mother" uncritically (which, unfortunately, left her wide open to WSJ cherrypicking). I am bothered that at one point late in the text she privileged "Western" parenting with a parenthetical "at least some kinds of", even though I never saw her extending that courtesy to Asian parents.
Also, trigger warning for transphobia: for the length of a half-page, she "humorously" uses "it" for someone whose gender she could not (nor tried to) determine.
So, after acknowledging that this book is legitimately going to be a non-starter for many...
Two: Assuming that none of the above is a deal-breaker, it is very readable. I blew through it in an evening, and yes, I laughed sometimes, too. It was tightly written, it was engaging, and it was always clear that she was going somewhere with all this.
Initially, her humor style wasn't working for me -- leastways, not until my partner asked how the book was, and I read a bit out loud to her. I then realized: it's a stand-up routine. The hyperbole, every story having mini-punchlines at regular intervals in the delivery -- it's a stand-up comedy monologue.
Which brings us to...
Three: If this is stand-up, is she punching up or punching down?
Racialicious has something of an ongoing analysis around POC stand-up comedians who do explicitly racial jokes. One of their critical questions is whether the jokes are hegemonic or not -- whether racialized people literally are the punchlines. (Chinese people exist! Hilarious!) To my eye, Chua is mostly making hegemonic jokes. A good many of her punchlines are "Chinese mothers, haha!" and she even makes those jokes while she's insisting that "Chinese parenting" is a respectable, coherent, and frequently mischaracterized parenting philosophy.
Excepting the transphobic shit mentioned above (why did you have to go there, whyyyy?), she didn't seem to engage in punching down. Whenever she encounters immigrant parents in the narrative, for example, she is absolutely respectful of the cultural and economic double-binds that they find themselves in, and she insists that the reader respect those double-binds, too.
She does punch up sometimes, but punching up is not a major part of what's going on.
Mostly she punches herself. And while a good chunk of it is the personal-folly style of humor that I find genuinely funny, another decent chunk is punching herself in hegemonically approved ways ("Asian mothers, haha, we're so ludicrous!"). That last is not something that I find funny. Maybe I'd find it funnier if I had an Asian mother -- it's entirely possible that those jokes aren't being made for me.
(It's also possible those jokes are being made for white people: a way of "softening" some of the other things she's saying.)
Four: For all that it begins as stand-up, there's a huge tone change halfway through the book, where it transforms into introspective memoir.
I wish the whole thing had been introspective memoir, frankly. The hyperbolic humor she uses in the first half of the book obscures the data -- did these things actually happen? or not? -- and has a way of overshadowing her points.
And she has good points: being a "Chinese mother" can be (among other things) a strategy used by desperate parents -- often immigrant parents -- to get their kids into the single seat on the rescue boat, so don't judge immigrant parents for doing their best in a broken system. Chua insists that there is a coherent, loving, respectful-of-the-child philosophical framework in this parenting style, which can make it appropriate even when there aren't "single seat on the boat" survival pressures at play. "Westerners" who judge "Chinese mothers" are often doing that unfairly and from a position of ignorance -- cherry picking data and considering it within their own cultural contexts. Because this parenting strategy is judged inappropriately, unfairly, and above all aggressively by "Western" parents, Asian parents who raise their kids this way are often socially isolated, and can't get support, feedback, or advice from other parents.
Anyway, when she switches to introspective memoir, it becomes clear that she's using an age-old plotline of parenting memoirs: "I thought I knew how to be an excellent parent. Then I met my kids and shit got real." Chua's struggles in that archetypal narrative are intensified by two factors: 1) her parenting model expected strong pushback from her kids, so it took her a while to realize that this wasn't merely "strong pushback", and 2) she was getting so much societal pushback, and had so deeply entrenched herself against it, that it took some doing to de-entrench herself and respond differently to what was going on with her younger kid.
Within the larger plotline, there are also occasional notes of "Everyone brings their own baggage to parenting, and it is damn difficult to figure out how to rise above your own baggage." Unfortunately, that's never really developed. One of the things that is driving Chua are the sacrifices her own parents made, and her desperate need to make sure that her own children don't fritter that all way (because if she allowed her children to do that, it would mean that Chua herself was a bad daughter). From what I can tell, that's her need, and not her parents', but it's hard for the reader to know for sure. There also seems to be some other psychological/personality issues coming into play -- she implies in spots during her stand-up bits that what she calls being an "intense Chinese mother" is just her own personality coming through, and not Chinese anything. (Take, for instance, the episode where she and her husband are fighting over whether she's too tough on the kids or whether he's selling the kids short. She challenges, "What are your dreams for Sophia [the older daughter]? What are your dreams for Lulu [the younger daughter]? What are your dreams for Coco [the dog]?" Um, the dog? That is not Chinese parenting -- that's personal shit coming through.) This is a personal memoir, about Amy Chua's desires for herself as a parent, for herself as the adult daughter of her own parents, of herself as an Asian-American mother in an aggressively mommy-judging society, and of her dreams for her children.
Five: The question everyone seems to have is, was she being abusive to her kids?
A lot of the incidents that have been quoted -- the bit about not letting her daughter have bathroom breaks during music practice, f'rex -- are misquotes. That particular instance was not usual procedure, but one epic showdown between mother and daughter about whether or not she had to do her piano practice. My mother and brother used to have the same kind of protracted battle about whether he'd do his homework: "I have to use the bathroom" was one of the strategies he would use in those battles. My mother's response would typically be to deny those requests -- he didn't need to use the bathroom, he was just trying to find a ploy that would let him leave the desk. In the media, that line from the book has been portrayed as if Chua was physically abusing her children. As I've said, the hyperbole in her humor tends to obscure the ability to know precisely what she did and didn't do, but "physically abusing her children by refusing to let them use the bathroom" is, to my eye, a misreading of the scene.
It is true that by the time Chua changed course with her younger daughter, she had begun to damage that relationship. It's similarly true that she took a long time to respond to her husband's and parents' concerns with respect to her younger daughter -- all three of them were urging her to back off, that the younger daughter was different than the older one. However, during that time, Chua was aware and concerned that her parenting appeared to be going awry with her younger daughter, and she was spending a good deal of time trying to problem solve what was going wrong and how to best fix it. It took Chua a long time to accept that the best way to fix the situation with her younger daughter was to completely change what she was doing with her, but in the end, she did accept it, and she did do it.
I am not going to pronounce upon whether that makes her a good parent or a bad parent: mothers are judged viciously and mercilessly, and I want no part of the rampant cultural sexism typically involved in that. But I do note this: she changed what she was doing. So many, many parents can't or don't.
Also, I am not convinced that her errors were much worse than those of many parents. That is not an excuse for her errors -- I certainly do not believe that everyone doing something makes it okay. But most people just get called bad parents when they fuck shit up. The way she's been villified as pure distilled evil doesn't seem commensurate with the apparent magnitude of her parenting errors.
And yes, I say that with full awareness that this book is fracking full of triggers for people who have had emotionally abusive parents.
Six: Disappointingly, in the final pages of the book, Chua goes back to the stand-up routine. By this point, her younger daughter had successfully fought for the right to play violin on her own terms -- her own terms alone -- and to take up an activity of her own choice, also on her own terms. Chua, for her part, was trying to learn how to stand back and not "help", not set the goals for Lulu, not do the things she had been doing in the first part of the book. However, in the last couple of pages of the book, she's again making "Chinese mother" jokes about how she just can't help it, that she's now secretively sending texts to Lulu's tennis coach and then deleting them after so Lulu wouldn't find out.
This is pretty clearly hyperbole -- both daughters have read, consulted on, and approved every page of the manuscript, so Lulu definitely knows that her mom is either doing this or wanting to do this or whatever it is that is the seed truth of behind that joke. It's not actually the case that Chua is trying to sneak something behind Lulu's back. And yet the joke made me growl at the page. SPYING ON YOUR DAUGHTER IS NOT FUNNY. IT IS CONTROLLING AND STALKERY. STOP IT NOW.
Which, ahem, remember what I said up top about this book legitimately being a non-starter for lots and lots of people? The huge, loud, overt guilt-tripping battles of will between Chua and her daughters don't phase me at all -- "Meh, sometimes families are like that," I shrug -- but Chua secretly texting the coach, even as a joke, got all up in my buttons.
And I wonder about that: if one part of the book doesn't hit your buttons, there are eight other parts that possibly will, and did she really not get that her humor would do that? I do believe her that this wasn't a cynical ploy to get onto the bestseller list. Instead, I wonder: did she decide that she was sick unto death of trying to duck the mommy-judging -- especially the "enlightened" "liberal" "we're totally not racist" mommy-judging -- and wrote these "humorous" passages as an emotional counterstrike? You want to judge me?? You want to try to intimidate me with your judging?? GO AHEAD, JUDGE THIS.
Sophia, I notice, did exactly the same thing in her New York Post response to the media backlash:
Dear Tiger Mom,I pretty much can't help but read that as a loud and clear I don't have to explain to you, and fuck you for judging us anyway.
You’ve been criticized a lot since you published your memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” One problem is that some people don’t get your humor. They think you’re serious about all this, and they assume Lulu and I are oppressed by our evil mother. That is so not true. Every other Thursday, you take off our chains and let us play math games in the basement.
(In the book, when Chua is writing the memoir and running drafts past her family, Sophia worried that in one set of drafts Lulu was being made into the star -- so vivacious and rebellious! -- and that Sophia was just the boring good conventional daughter. I'm just going to state for the record here: I think Sophia kicks ass.)
...what am I up to now, seven? Random kyrarchical notes what I haven't covered yet.
In one of those endless comment threads I read about this book, someone made the charge that this style of parenting is ableist. Chua addresses that in the text, although briefly: yes, it's traditionally ableist, and when (someone in her family? I cannot find the passage again!)'s baby was born with Downs, this model of parenting turned out to be a horrendous roadblock to their being good parents. Chua doesn't go into it in great detail, and the passage is very parental-grief-centric in its viewpoint, but Chua explicitly names it as an issue that needs to be dealt with. Chua feels that this specific set of parents did successfully readjust their parenting style, and they did this by keeping the core "Chinese parenting" philosophy of not selling your kids short. Myself, I am not wholly convinced that the parents didn't just switch to Ableist Parenting Trope Two (short passage is short!), but I appreciate Chua acknowledging the existence of the issue.
Something that surprised me was the great big ginormous Elephant of Sexism in the book. Chua and her husband are both tenured at Yale Law, but Chua seems to be doing all, and I mean all, the heavy lifting of parenting. Now and then she briefly mentions the pressure that she herself was under -- at times early on in the girls' lives she was parenting solo in a different state from her husband (the two-academic problem); at another point she was teaching AND doing national speaking engagements AND catching the red-eye back so that she can make sure that the kids get their practice time done. She mentions often that Jed, her husband, was "totally supportive" and "always backed her up" in front of the kids, but I have the impression that one of the reasons Chua was fighting about the problem of his not having a dream for the dog was because she was doing three jobs (teaching, lecturing, and raising kids) at a "I will break this bamboo and glass ceiling for me and my daughters if I die trying" level of intensity. Why did this all fall to Chua? She hints in the book that there was something going on with Jed -- she deliberately mostly left him out of the book because whatever-it-was was "his story to tell" -- but I'm still fairly frustrated on her behalf.
A further note responding to things I've seen come up in comment threads: she jokes about "Chinese mothers" and not "Chinese parents" because she's making herself personally be the butt of the joke, but also because her white husband wasn't directly participating in this style of parenting. Whenever she talks about other Asian families that parent this way, she talks about parents, and she frequently mentions Asian fathers as active parents.
And coming back to class a little bit: she frequently mentions that class and inequity is a huge part of this parenting style, and it is clear that while she herself is living a comfortably upper-middle-class lifestyle now, her attempts to raise her children as she was raised is a holdover from the inequity-driven urgency of her childhood. However, she does almost no systemic analysis of anything, nor do we get any sense that structural change is possible or even desirable. The parenting philosophy put forth here is very bootstraps-only, and in fact, seems to deliberately eschew systemic critique in an attempt to make ensure that one's children are pulling on the bootstraps with everything they've got. (As she describes it, critiquing the system is equivalent to giving yourself a pre-emptive psychological out for not succeeding.)
...and yet one of her previous books is titled World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, so I presume that systemic analysis is something that she does in other contexts? Which suggests to me something of the magnitude of what immigrant parents (and by extension, Chua) see themselves as being up against: we're not even going to discuss that the system is stacked against our children, except to further emphasize why we believe that nothing less than perfection is acceptable. I keep coming back to Junot Diaz here: when a single mistake can keep you out of the too-few seats in the boat, nothing less than perfect is acceptable.
Which brings me to the surveys about Asian American suicide rates that were being brought up in many of the articles linked above, which were usually being cited as counter-evidence to Chua's assertion that "Chinese" parenting is no worse than "Western" parenting. Most people who were mentioning those surveys were laying the blame for the higher suicide rate of Asian American young people at the feet of Asian American parents, which grates on me. It's not as if this "anything less than perfection is unacceptable" attitude is some irrational conceit on the part of many of those parents. (I know it looks irrational on Chua, but she learned it from her own parents, for whom it was not irrational. And believe me, shit is harder to unlearn than a lot of people think.) These parents are often doing this as a focused survival strategy in response to a system of harsh racial and economic inequity. So I ask, is it mothers who are to blame for these suicides? Or is it the society who offers a single seat in the rowboat, and then treats those who don't make the cut as if they are a moral blight upon the earth?
...and I might maybe have run out of things to say?
It's hard for me to get a firm read on the book, especially with the way she drops in and out of hyperbolic style, but there is a lot that is worthwhile here (assuming that the potential deal-breakers aren't your personal deal-breakers). Also, Disgrasian is precisely right: the WSJ article doesn't tell you why you might want to read the book.
All that said, I'm not at all sure how widely I would recommend the book to non-Asians -- especially non-Asians who have already been primed to hate Chua. While Chua does have some good points about the systemic pressures around parenting as a hyphenate, especially as an immigrant hyphenate, I can't help but think that there probably are books that are clearer on that. And if someone has already got a prejudice against "Asian mothers", there's plenty of easy fuel for that here. (As the WSJ cherrypicking demonstrates!)
But I'll back up those who were protesting that the book that the media shitstorm was about doesn't actually exist. Because it doesn't. This is a different book.
ETA:
- Request for recs in the comments. (POC authors only, please.)
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buria_q points out the sensationalist "China rising" narrative in the media around the book.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-09 10:22 pm (UTC)