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A paper presented at the |
Reaction to the Reactions to Tiger Mom
Theodore Tin-Yee Hsieh
Department of Psychology
Judson University
thsieh@judsonU.edu
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On January 8, 2011, Yale Law Professor Amy Chua wrote an essay entitled, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Three days later, her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was released. Both the article and the book created an immediate storm and a wide range of reactions in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, including some death threats. This paper is a reaction from an intercultural perspective to the mostly critical comments in print and in the Internet about this Chinese-American mother and her child-rearing philosophy and practice. |
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When the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School was an eighth grader, she won second place in a history contest and invited her family to the awards ceremony. Somebody else won first prize. Afterwards, her father admonished her, “Never, never disgrace me like that again” (Chua, 2011a, 17). Thus began the making of a “Tiger Mother.”
The Tiger Mom The self-described “Tiger Mom,” Amy L. Chua, was born in Champaign, Illinois, in 1962, where her father, Leon O. Chua, was completing his PhD in electrical engineering. Her father taught electrical engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, between 1964 and 1970. He joined the department of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Dr. Leon Chua won numerous academic and professional awards, including nine U.S. patents and eight international honorary doctorates. He is known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks. The Chua family has four daughters. Amy is the oldest. After graduating from El Cerrito High School, she attended Harvard College and graduated magna cum laude in economics in 1984 and earned the J.D. cum laude in 1987 from Harvard Law School, where she served as an executive editor of the Harvard Law Review. The second Chua daughter, Michelle graduated from Yale and Yale Law School. Third daughter, Katrin, went to Harvard College and earned the M.D. /PhD from Harvard Medical School. The youngest daughter, Cynthia, was born with Downs Syndrome and won “two international Special Olympic gold medals in swimming” (Chua, 2011a, 18). Presently, Amy Chua is the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She is married to Jed Rubenfeld, a fellow Yale Law professor. They have two daughters. Sophia is 18 and Louisa (Lulu) is 15. The Controversy On January 8, 2011, The Wall Street Journal published its Saturday essay entitled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” by Amy Chua. The title of the article was like a challenge to “western mothers” with the content even more provocative. Penguin Press released her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother three days later. Within days, the online version was read more than one million times (Paul, 2011). Over 5,000 comments were posted online and nearly 100,000 responses noted on Facebook. The book vaulted to #4 on Amazon’s best-seller list (Kolbert, 2011). Chua appeared in numerous major talk media ranging from “All Things Considered” on National Public Radio to “NBC’s Nightly News” and “The Today Show.” She was featured in a Time Magazine cover story followed by special essays written by its star contributors Bill Powell (2011) from Shanghai and Nancy Gibbs (2011) from Washington, D.C. Reactions to The Wall Street Journal excerpt and the book are perhaps even more extreme in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. World Journal, the largest Chinese language newspaper in America, reported that within two days, there were more than 1770 reviews of the article and more than 85,000 forwards in Facebook in China alone (World Journal, January 11, 2011). What did “Tiger Mom” say that made her the center of such controversy? By now the public on both sides of the Pacific are pretty familiar with the way Amy Chua begins her memoir: “A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
In The Wall Street Journal article, Chua talked about how she favored coercion by forcing Lulu, 7 at the time, to play a piano piece called, “The Little White Donkey” by French composer Jacques Ibert. She used threats of “No lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents.” When her daughter tore the music score to shreds and announced that she was quitting, her mother “hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and threatened to donate it to the Salvation Army.” She then directed Lulu “to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.” Chua forced her to work “right through dinner into the night, and refused to let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go the bathroom.” When suddenly Lulu was able to put the piece together, she began “beaming …and wouldn’t leave the piano.” Chua concluded, “Western parents worry a lot about their children’s self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child’s self-esteem is to let them give up” (Chua, 2011b). With these rules and fighting words, Chua created a firestorm leading some critics to demonize her as a monster and harass her with death threats (Dolak, 2011; Fukami, 2011). However, “Tiger Mom” also garnered many supporters from Asia and America. Students in three psychology classes at Judson University were asked to write a short response after reading Chua’s WSJ’s article. The majority of them expressed concerns and even anger over her “dictatorial” parenting style. But one student wrote that her parenting should “not be classified as abuse and could ultimately still produce highly holistic and positive members of society. However, if there is one thing that Chua ought to change, it is not her parenting style but her exuding arrogance in the realm of parenting which permeates every single aspect of her article” (Ciochon, 2011). Another student, a varsity softball player, wrote that she appreciated the belief that “nothing is fun until you are good at it.” Then she compared the development of self-esteem in male baseball players to female softball players. She wrote, “Boys have to do well to feel good …and girls have to feel good to do well.” In any case, she believed in the delayed gratification that “Tiger Mom” supports. “Hard work first. . .fun comes later” (Talbot, 2011). To a certain extent, the Chinese Tiger Moms may be comparable to the American Little League Dads well documented in the film based on the book Fear Strikes Out: The Jimmy Piersall Story (Piersall and Hirshberg, 1955/1991). The Timing Controversy sells. The publication of Chua’s book coincides with the recent ascendancy of China, which has caused resentment and uneasiness in America. Last year, China surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy and is also the United States’ biggest creditor. The U.S. is still No.1. But are we losing ground to China with its more than 10% annual economic growth compared to our 2.6%? In December 2010, the influential Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published test results pitting teenage students around the world against each other in reading, science, and mathematics. Shanghai students took first place in all three categories. American students ranked 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in mathematics. President Obama highlighted these comparisons by labeling this a “Sputnik moment” for America (Banyan, 2011; Paul, 2011). Amy Chua’s contrast between the “pushy” Chinese parenting style and the “nonchalant” western parenting style may have increased fear and resentment. The cruel and inflammatory name-calling against “Tiger Mom” may be related to this anti-Chinese sentiment. For a slightly different reason, there may be resentment and uneasiness among a number of Chinese in China and Chinese-Americans in the United States. Many Chinese prefer the “western” style of parenting. They feel they have been “liberated” from the stuffy traditional Chinese parenting style and resent that Chua labels her particular parenting approach as “Chinese” in contrast to the western/American style. One blogger wrote that Amy Chua perpetuates the “Model Minority” myth of Chinese-Americans to sell her book. An American-born Chinese noted the similarity between Chinese and Jewish mothers in holding unrealistically high academic expectations for their children. The only difference between them was that the Jewish mothers at least accepted psychotherapy for their children. Literally, hundreds of bloggers expressed their concerns about the negative image that Chua created about Chinese in general and Chinese parents in particular. For example, one blogger blamed Chua for Jeremy Lin’s (a former Stanford basketball star) demotion to the developmental league in the NBA. Well-known Chinese commentator Wang Ting-Chun believes that this “tsunami-like reaction” to “Tiger Mom” has something to do with America’s unique sensitivity toward child abuse and the weakening of national strength (Wang, 2011). Wang believes that without these two concerns, Chua’s book would have been overlooked. So, not only is there a sense of perfect timing in the publication of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother but also an ingenious marketing strategy in publishing an excerpt with the provocative title “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” on the Saturday before the release of the book the following Tuesday. The timing was perfect for controversy. An Analysis Her parenting style may be controversial but her writing style is crisp and entertaining. How and why did she develop this parenting style? Although no one seems to have addressed this issue in all the blogs and interviews, the motivation for her parenting style can be clearly seen in her book. She introduces the chapter “On Generation Decline” with the statement, “One of my greatest fears is family decline.” (Chua, 2011, 20-24). She cites a familiar Chinese proverb to describe her fear: “Prosperity can never last for three generations.” This proverb is usually translated as “Wealth does not go beyond the third generation” because it is originally meant to be a warning against families of wealth (Hsieh, 2006)(Talk694). But Chua appropriately modifies the words to apply to her situation and sentiment. After a discussion of the way generations typically decline, she declares, “Well, not on my watch. From the moment Sophia was born and I looked into her cute and knowing face, I was determined not to let it happen to her, not to raise a soft, entitled child. . .not to let my family fall.” (Chua, 2011a, 22). Being the eldest girl in a family of four girls, Chua may have felt that she had to be the one to assume responsibility to carry on the tradition of a very successful clan. She was a successful student and is now a successfully academic, occupying an endowed chair in one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Her daughters by all accounts will be very successful in their own right. Just last week, it was reported by national media that both Yale and Harvard accepted Sophia. It is an event watched very closely by critics and supporters. For some, Sophia’s acceptance to Harvard is a test of the validity of her mother’s parenting style. In many ways, it is the test used by Chinese elites, according to one who should know (Hsieh, 2010). Tony Hsieh became famous at the age of twenty-four in 1999 when he sold the company he cofounded to Microsoft for $265 million. Later, he was the CEO of Zappos, a company he helped grow from almost nothing to over $1.2 billion in value on the day acquired by Amazon in 2009. Hsieh’s mother was not unlike the Tiger Mom who “had high hopes that [he] would eventually go the medical school or get a PhD” (Hsieh, 2010, 9). He was allowed to watch one hour TV every week and expected to get straight A’s in all his classes. His “parents had [him] take practice SAT tests throughout all of middle school and high school” (Hsieh, 2010, 8). He got accepted by all the colleges he applied, including Brown, UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Cornell, Yale, and Harvard from where he graduated. Like Amy Chua, Tony Hsieh was born in Champaign, Illinois, when his parents were graduate students. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult for Professor Chua or the third generation of the Chuas to measure up to Dr. Leon Chua, the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks. How can they? Well, perhaps one of them will be awarded the Nobel Prize. But then, Any Chua is doing very well by her book that has brought her fame and fortune and Dr. Leon Chua probably would not consider it a “disgrace” as he did when his daughter, Amy only won second place in the history competition in eighth grade. He is probably better known now as the father of the Tiger Mom than the father of nonlinear circuit theory. Reference Banyan (2011). Tiger cubs v precious lambs. The Economist, January 22, 2011, 54.
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