Amy Chua's hugely controversial guide to successful parenting, Chinese style, is a tick-list of rights and unacknowledged wrongs
"A menace to society", "an inhuman mother", or "a simply arrogant and insensitive show-off": to judge by the flurry of hostile reaction, Amy Chua's book has hit a nerve. Her daughters are straight-A students and music prodigies, with the older daughter playing at Carnegie Hall at 14. Anything less would be a disgrace to the Tiger Mother.
It's a familiar story. Chinese students do better in school than other nationalities, just about everywhere. This is not, of course, because we are innately cleverer than other people; we just work much, much harder. This is clear from the oppressively strict regime that Chua describes. She finds it strange that western parents cannot comprehend why her daughters should be required to devote every single afternoon, 365 days a year, to homework and music practice, with no sleepovers, no playdates, no TV or computer games. And when they refuse to obey her, she makes them stand in the freezing cold, or threatens to give their toys to the Salvation Army.
I remember my own upbringing in the city of Handan, in central China. Apart from seven hours' sleep, all my waking moments were consumed by study ? I did not even come to the table until my food was lukewarm, so I could gulp it down quickly and get back to work. It paid off: I came high enough in the National Exam to get a place at Beijing University, the best in China.
But Chua's Chinese parenting backfired when her younger daughter Lulu cracked under her mother's non-stop pressure. She simply refused to obey, a huge crime for Chinese kids. Worse, she openly challenged her mother in public, screaming: "I don't want to be Chinese. Why can't you get that through your head? I hate the violin. I hate my life. I hate you, and I hate this family!" Chua did not mind her daughters hating her; as she constantly reminds them, her job is "to prepare you for the future ? not to make you like me". Still, her defeat made her pause and take a step back.
Does she have regrets? She admits that she had moments of self-doubt, as when she suddenly felt a pang for Sophia, running home from school with an armful of books to have time for piano practice. But they were rare, and only moments. That was how Chua was brought up, and she was a great success ? getting into Yale Law School and becoming a professor there, with a clever and loving husband and two equally clever children. She simply cannot understand what was wrong. But then, as Chua admits herself, she rarely reflects. She sets the goals and goes for them: she even believed Coco, the family dog, had hidden talents and should be pushed to excel as a show dog ? even if she eventually concluded that it was "perfectly fine for most dogs not to have a profession".
Chua's book would have benefited from more reflection. She says she does not know why she adopted the approach she did? it is just what Chinese families do. In fact, it goes back to the 2,500-year-old Confucian belief that education is superior and all else is inferior. For over a millennium, Chinese emperors chose officials to run China, from the county clerk to prime minister, out of the successful candidates in the imperial exam. Doing well would change your life and that of your family.
Chua is tough with her children because, like many Chinese people, she thinks of childhood as an investment ? the most crucial one. But if we are indeed successful, are we happy? Tens of millions of children in China do nothing but study, and have extremely limited social, emotional and practical skills. On the first day of university, thousands of parents turn up with their quilts; they sleep in the gym, so they can help their 18-year-olds with the difficult tasks of signing up for their courses, acquiring their food coupons, even making their beds.
"The truth is I'm not good at enjoying life. It's not one of my strengths," Chua confesses. "Happiness is not a concept I tend to dwell on." Perhaps her daughters, and especially her husband, Jed, could teach her a thing or two. Successful, fun-loving, and sensitive to the moods and feelings of their daughters, but also tolerant of Chua's abusive regime, Jed comes across as the saint who provides the much-needed balance for the children and brings his wife back from her moments of sheer madness.
In helping to start a debate about what is good and what is missing in both Chinese and western parenting, this book has already served a purpose its author probably did not intend. Chua hammers western parenting, but she could learn from it too. And if she knew her Confucius, she would know that moderation in all things is the essence of Chinese culture.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/30/battle-hymn-tiger-mother-review
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