The Tiger Mom Debate

A Yale professor’s tough-love parenting memoir has stirred up America, what with Ivy Leaguers backing the Chinese approach. A report from Yale

Amy Chua poses alongside her story, ‘Why Chinese Mothers are Superior’ in the 8 January 2011 edition of TheWall Street Journal—the proud mother of a violin-playing and a piano-playing daughter who could also be mistaken for a slightly older cousin of the two girls. “Western parents are concerned about their children’s psyches. Chinese parents aren’t. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently,” Chua is quoted as saying.

Chua, a Yale law professor, has since qualified that erroneous portrayal (the ‘superior’ bit) of an excerpt of her new book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, saying it’s just an account of her own ambiguous experience of practising the Asian parenting norms she inherited from her Chinese parents in multicultural America.

Yet, a teen daughter made to toil on the piano has become the focus of an internet battle. In an interview to Yale Daily News, Chua said: “I see the book as a love story: it is all about my love for my daughters. At the end of the book, I’m saying you really have to listen to your kids, and the happiness of your child must come first. It’s been a bit frustrating because a lot of the hatred [directed at me] is based on a complete misunderstanding. But I’ve also had many lovely emails of support. My colleagues have been extremely supportive and nice. Students have been incredibly understanding, at least the ones who’ve reached out to me. Anyone who knows me would know I would not write an article called ‘Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior’… I don’t think like that.”

Chua’s daughter, meanwhile, has written in The New York Post that it is this Chinese hardcore upbringing that has equipped her to take on life’s challenges with great gusto.

What did you think of your parental regimen while growing up? I ask my friend Min Lieskovsky, of Chinese-Hungarian descent, educated at two of the Ivy Leagues. Lieskovsky turns the Chua debate on its head, saying that depriving kids of stereotypically fun activities doesn’t mean that kids don’t manage fun for themselves: “The roads to my elementary school were lined with the smiling real estate agent faces of my classmates’ parents. ‘When we die, we have nothing to give to you,’ my mother would gesture to the grins, ‘you have to earn it all yourself. That starts with an Ivy league college.’ Chua’s philosophy is right, but she misunderstands the experience of her tyranBOOKSny. Chinese moms don’t outlaw fun—they enable far more interesting and dangerous kinds of fun: class warfare, vengeance, smoking, and older boys. Maybe Chinese childhoods begin as fascist regimes, but some are able to turn gracefully into libertarian meritocracies. ”

Indian graduate students in the US who compete with their East Asian counterparts also have their share of achievers who’ve scored points and moved on to other things. One such graduate student at a social science department in the US acknowledges the benefits of the obvious signifiers of success, recalling the suppression of any creative streaks within oneself to pursue secure professions with a business-like shrug: “Even now, when I have moved far, far away from the domain of engineering, people seem to automatically credit me with some intelligence and competence because about ten years ago, I went to IIT. Well, I won’t complain.”

Another friend who was also at IIT displays a self-deprecatory brazenness typical of those who’ve been there, done that and moved on: “I live a life that is the intellectual equivalent of the idle rich, which is to say I am a PhD student, nicely over-educated, with all the right brand names, and disciplined enough to turn in a solid 20 hour work week in my relatively productive spells. To get here, of course, you need the right kind of parenting—in my case, a Tamil Brahmin insistence on not getting my hands dirty with anything that has even the vaguest connotations of what’s termed ‘business’. That, and the rigorous training in maximising output while minimising effort that the Indian Institutes of Technology give you.”

Even as Chua describes the book as a testament to a difficult journey as a mother, American internet users go back and forth in their reactions to Chua and associated agonies. The second wave of responses to Chua’s script includes voices of regret and confusion about bad, wishy-washy American parenting. Jim Taylor of Huffington Post went back on his earlier condemnation to applaud Chua’s guts in showing her children the values that she stood for, in contrast with regular White American parents who in their utter flexibility forget to demonstrate strength and conviction. This is America suddenly talking to itself. This is America worried about kids no longer being very good at math. This is America so devoted to choice and freedom that it is both outraged and awed by Chua’s conviction. This is, perhaps, America in awe of Asia.

Darryl Li, a Chinese American YLS alumnus, says, “The ‘model minority’ myth has always been double-edged: admiration at purported Asian diligence, with a hint of White self-consolation that it is merely diligence without joy or creativity. Contrast this with the stereotyping of African-Americans as successful in the arts and sports but not in academics. Between these two—the industrious, over-feminised, Asian drone, and the creative, over-masculinised, Black rogue—is an imaginary golden mean that marks the place of an invisible Whiteness.” Asia, as a corpus of economic power, political aggression, drone-like perseverance and an inscrutable moral fibre, is the new Orient, albeit a daunting and materially threatening one. America struggles to decode its strange ways.

Professor Helen Siu, a Yale anthropologist, argues that this debate is best situated at a historical juncture when China is nakedly on the rise and America acutely conscious of its decline. The obsession with Chua’s parenting spectre and endless debate over the ‘Asian mind’—amply evident in assorted high-profile professions and universities in the US—Siu says, are instructive of the peculiar political and economic crisis that the US is confronted with at this time.

Siu also points out that the spectacle of American internet users switching their position back and forth on Chua’s parenting formula is illustrative of an American modernity that valorises introspection. An aggressive attack to vanquish an opponent doesn’t quite cut it in America (well, at least not in any field beyond foreign policy); even talk shows are designed to showcase failure and resultant reflections.

This brings us back to Chua’s very telling mockery of the American cliché ‘Everyone is special’ (losers too), a peculiarly American phenomenon of laying it bare and making it cool and consumable. The loser in the Asian-American stereotype that Chua unpacks is not worth talking about, whereas it is the non-winner who makes columns and talk shows in America. American bloggers who took Chua’s provocation as an opportunity to mull over American notions of care and social support systems do not seem invested in coming out as ‘winners’ in a battle to trounce Chua and the Chinese way.

Why should a US law professor’s soul-baring account of how she made a toughie pianist out of her teen daughter interest us—a somewhat transnational desi audience? Because the Asian question is perplexing America in a way that its own inner anxieties are brought forth in its chiding of Amy Chua for being a tyrant with her daughter’s piano routine. Freedom is the last bastion of America. The last good that it can sell these days—considering most things are now manufactured in Bangladesh or Ukraine—is the fragrance of an abstract thing called freedom.

In the toil of piano lessons, America makes peace with the Asian tiger, even as an Asian American tigress peddles the very American notion of a soul-cleansing journey towards the greater good of humanity.

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