Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua (365 Books, Day 224)

[rushthatspeaks]

There has been a lot of controversy over this book, which is fair, because it is tangled up with very complex issues about race, class, gender, power, parenting, immigration and assimilation... there is a great deal going on below the surface of a text which also has a great deal going on on the surface, and it's also a deceptively quick and easy read.

On the surface, it's infuriating. This is a memoir, though possibly not a manifesto, describing Amy Chua's methods of parenting her two daughters. She describes her parenting as typical Chinese parenting, and continually contrasts it with a style of parenting she tags as typically Western. One thing that I have not seen many reviews mention is that within the first three pages of the book she states that she has seen parents of extremely diverse ethnic backgrounds following both models, but I for one am leery at the tagging of, well, anything as typical, most of the time. Especially when the things being described as typical are identical to the stereotypes about the subject.

Because Chua was incredibly strict. An A- was not an acceptable grade. Three hours of daily music practice was barely considered sufficient. Her daughters chose none of their own activities, did not do slumber parties, were called worthless and lazy and stupid when they didn't obey. Chua tells stories here about wrestling with her younger daughter at the piano, not letting her up for hours until the piece was perfect; she excerpts her notes for her daughters in which she tells them measure-by-measure what they are doing wrong in each piece of music and insists that the errors be gone the next time she hears it. This is very, very stereotypical stuff.

And yet, what is infuriating to me is not, entirely, the literal content of this book, the way Chua parents, though I am mad as hell about the language she considers acceptable to use to her children. What is infuriating to me is that she clings to the insistence that there is something uniquely Chinese about her parenting style every time she thinks she's gone too far. Because she knows perfectly well there are times she goes too far. She describes the feeling of sitting there, knowing her daughters at occasional moments outright hate her despite a usually loving relationship, and not knowing if that will continue, and knowing it is justified. But every time she thinks that sort of thing, she literally accuses herself of betraying her culture, of letting the side down. At one point she thinks something along the lines of 'my daughters disobeying me makes a mockery of four thousand years of civilization'. However, it is European composers she insists her girls study. She says outright that she thinks that Chinese culture has produced nothing to equal Beethoven's Ninth. The Chinese she insists her daughters learn is Mandarin, which is not what her family speaks.

This is an example of what stereotypes can do, when mixed with the dilemma of degree of assimilation. Because Chua has, obviously, a standard of success, and a clear and distinct definition of what success is. Success is, for example, playing at Carnegie Hall. Success is being successful at American things (there is a thing she says about gamelan players that is fucking insulting to the entire Indonesian concept of music, when she's trying to explain why she picked violin and piano for her girls). But she has to make them successful in a way she sees as Chinese. So whenever she's going too far, and things aren't working, and relationships are fraying, and it's obvious that she's wrong about something somewhere because they got a dog even though she could see no utilitarian value in it whatsoever and now not only does she love it but they have a second and are considering a third-- then she tells herself, this set of things is what Chinese parents do, and so it is what I am supposed to be doing. The stereotype is part of her own justification for the way she parents.

As she says outright, because this is an intelligent and occasionally introspective woman, she is the most stubborn at defending the things she knows to be most problematic.

That's why this book is called the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It's not meant to call anyone else to battle. It's a reassurance to herself, an attempt to answer the eternal question: did I do the right thing by my children? It is her own anthem.

And the thing is, the question of whether she did the right thing by her children is incredibly complex. Those measure-by-measure criticism notes? Are funny as hell. Loving, charming, and sweet. Her girls are by current standards incredibly high achievers, and in interviews state that they are happy, that they love her. She learned some flexibility with her younger daughter, when it was do so or break the relationship. And I remember, myself, very clearly how difficult it was for me when I hit college and no one had ever taught me how to do work I did not enjoy doing but that needed to be done. I still have trouble with that. I can't say that isn't a life skill you should teach your children.

But I am saddened and distressed that she sets up and uses this Chinese/Western dichotomy to help her maintain her confidence, because what kind of fucking world do we live in where that is a defense mechanism people reach for? Let alone a useful one? And the media and reviewers have run with it, absolutely run with it, a lot of them unquestioningly.

So that's my surface level of infuriated. There are others under that, but I don't feel like writing a screed about the entire concept of success and achievement as defined in popular culture, or one about the relations of class and gender, at this precise moment.

I highly recommend actually reading the book, because it will make you think about all those things, and because apart from sanguinity over at 50books_poc I have not read a single review of this yet that bore much relationship to the book I read. Also, as I said, it is occasionally funny, well-composed on a sentence-by-sentence level, and deceptively, simply, readable.

Comments

[potted_music]

Thta's a very insightful and thought-provoking review, thank you!

[kate_nepveu]

I feel vaguely that I ought to, but I'm pretty sure I would find it so upsetting that I have more healthful things to do with my time.

[rushthatspeaks]

That is completely fair. I do not think I could have gotten all the way through if I were a parent. I was annoyed enough as a prospective eventual parent.

[enleve]

This reminds me of a book Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid by Evelyn Lau, written by a young woman who ran away from parents with just such a parenting style. She became an underage prostitute, and all the terrible stuff that happened to her she considered to be better than living with her parents.

It also reminds me a bit of Banana Boys by Terry Woo, banana being a term used to describe some Chinese Canadians because bananas are "white on the inside, yellow on the outside".

[sanguinity]

:: But every time she thinks that sort of thing, she literally accuses herself of betraying her culture, of letting the side down. At one point she thinks something along the lines of 'my daughters disobeying me makes a mockery of four thousand years of civilization'. However, it is European composers she insists her girls study. She says outright that she thinks that Chinese culture has produced nothing to equal Beethoven's Ninth. The Chinese she insists her daughters learn is Mandarin, which is not what her family speaks. ::

There was a discussion I saw somewhere that pointed out some hard things about how she is second generation and clings to stereotypes of Chinese identity, as if those stereotypes are her identity.

Which is a pretty painful thing to contemplate.

[cahn]

(Got here from kate_nepveu.)

Huh. While I agree with your review, I found the book absolutely hilarious rather than infuriating (though I completely understand your fury at the Chinese/Western dichotomy -- I had not thought about that in those terms but it did rather disturb me). The entire thing I found hilarious, not just occasional spots.

...I guess it's because I got the impression she was exceedingly conscious (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) of the fact that she was being defensive. (For example, the epilogue, where she is extremely defensive to her kids, who point out all (manifold and extreme) flaws in her reasoning.)

I suppose I contrast with my own mom, who is unselfconscious about her many and varied self-defense mechanisms and need for validation about raising us in a similar way. When I compare talking to my mom (who recently told me, completely seriously, it was time to start teaching my 14-month-old how to read, not that she can TALK yet) it seems obvious to me that Chua is poking fun at her own blind spots and need for justification. But apparently YMMV.

[trinker]

Thank you for your review.

I cannot yet bring myself, as the survivor of a spectacularly dysfunctional Asian family, and relataively new mother (and single!) of two, to read this book.

(Being accused of whitewashing my children because I'm not raising them on an authoritarian model is infuriating on levels I find difficult to verbalize.)

[whatistigerbalm]

As a fan of gamelan, do you mind sharing what it is she says? I don't know why I'm in the mood for reading something I know will anger me, but there you go.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

This review is so much more interesting and nuanced than I think any of the others I've seen. Thank you! I think I am going to pick the book up.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It will make you want to throw things, but it was very provocative of thought in a whole huge set of directions. I came out of it not much liking her but glad she'd written it, if that makes sense.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

See, I am particularly skeptical of this method of teaching kids to do things they don't want to do for a good purpose because my parents' method was the complete opposite, and it worked. And my parents' method also taught me that as long as I'm willing to take the consequences, I get to decide which work is worth doing, not them and not whatever boy I would meet along the line and not my grad school adviser, but me.

My parents' method was to point out when I started taking lessons and never again that if I did not practice the piano, I would not learn to play the piano. So did I want to learn to play the piano or not? I did. Same thing a year later with the flute: they made it clear that it was my choice to pick up a second instrument, and they were not going to nag me any more than they had with the first. And if I didn't develop the technical and critical skills to play either of them well, that was on me. Possibly this worked because I had an early-developing frontal lobe? But it did work; I practiced when I didn't want to, because I wanted the larger goal. And I spent this last weekend doing hideously boring home and financial chores, because, again: larger goal.

I do wish I'd figured out sooner that they did actually want me to play musical instruments, though; they were so determinedly hands-off about it that I thought Mom didn't want me to play the piano for years.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

See, my parents actually tried what yours did, but the problem was that things I cared about wanting to do mostly came very easily to me, which was sheer coincidence. Like, I wanted to play the flute also, and my school did not participate in state-level flute stuff, so I was first chair in my school at flute on, literally, half an hour of practice a week, which was as much as I enjoyed. My schools did foreign languages via immersion, so I didn't wind up studying vocab lists. That sort of thing.

So it wasn't until college that I hit something I really wanted to do and that needed work for me to be good at it-- Ancient Greek-- and I had no idea how to do the work. It was horrible trying to learn to do that on the fly.

I have been seriously wondering ever since whether kids ought to be pushed to do something that has a competency threshold and that they are not naturally talented in until they reach the point of competent enjoyment. Because if my parents had done that it would have solved ninety percent of the problems I had in college.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it was my parents' solution or my own personality, but I didn't want to do something to first-chair school level, I wanted to do it like an adult who was good at it. Languages the same: I ended up skipping a year of French class because I kept trying to teach myself more French, because I wanted to speak French, and it got to the point where taking the year would have been pointless. This caused problems with my school.

Possibly with a child who's insanely driven on her own in that particular way, anything will work, and I should defer to the experience of people who are not like that.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The thing I was driven about like that was writing, and anything I saw as contributory to that. So I did get French fluency out of my elementary school immersion classes, when most everybody else didn't, but it didn't require any work, it required paying attention. I could see how being competent to a point at music would make me a better novelist, but not beyond that point, so it didn't matter except as a personal-enjoyment thing, which doesn't need an extremely high level.

No one ever managed to explain to me how, say, algebra could make me a better writer, so I simply never paid any attention. It was obvious that, say, history was necessary, so I drove myself to adult competency in that, but that involved reading a lot, which was easy and the thing I loved most in the world. You see the pattern?

Then I hit something which would make me a better writer and required actual study skills, and ouch.

And also there turn out to be a lot of life skills like taxes that are irrelevant to whether or not you are a novelist, and I couldn't be arsed to pay attention to those as a kid, either.

With me it was more like, everything has to relate back to my obsession, and no one ever pushed me to do anything outside my obsession, and my obsession was a comfort zone. I am not sure what is best to do with a kid like that, honestly, except that nobody ever tried to understand my obsession, or relate anything back to it for me that wasn't obvious.

I have no idea what one ought to do with a kid who isn't self-motivated at all.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I figured I was right to add "in that particular way," because the odds that you weren't driven in some way of your own seemed...very low to me. Even not knowing you as a kid.

I never intended to be just a writer. I intended to be a writer and a physicist and a mom. (Have not given up on the mom part. Physicist is gone for good, though I do miss the math.) It's absolutely amazing how many skills can be seen as contributing to one or more of those three things. But what I don't quite recall is how I got there, whether it was my father's blithe assumptions of my competence or what.

[issen4.livejournal.com]

Hm, I've blocked most out of the episodes of Asian Mother Pride from my childhood, so this book was rather funny for me, as while I know of mothers (and fathers) that are sickeningly strict, use language to their kids that anyone of us would blush to use in front of a stranger, and have weird neuroses about their kids' accomplishments, Amy Chua's opinions and actions are just a level beyond my understanding. It's like reading a really melodramatic novel. And the outpouring of, um, ethnic pride is really embarrassing, especially as you mentioned:

However, it is European composers she insists her girls study. She says outright that she thinks that Chinese culture has produced nothing to equal Beethoven's Ninth.

And did you notice that of the music pieces that her younger daughter performed, only the Chinese one is not named?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I did notice that with the music pieces, yes.

I would not call it ethnic pride. I would actually call it the exact opposite: ethnic uncertainty. She both feels that she has to feel pride and has that undercurrent of 'I'm as good as you are' that means that a person on some level thinks they aren't.

[issen4.livejournal.com]

Hm, maybe I have a different conception of ethnic pride, because that tone reminds me a bit of my mum, and she used to be pretty conscious about that as a Chinese, her kids would be less successful than those of others'... so perhaps it's uncertainty too. >_>

[sorenlundi.livejournal.com]

She talks shit on gamelon? Seriously? That's just uncalled for.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I know, right? It was extremely uncalled for. It was also interesting because it was in the context of why she was not choosing Asian instruments for her daughters, and so it was like, why are you ragging on Indonesian music when you have not explained why you have not selected, say, the erhu for them?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Fascinating review, thanks!

[nidea.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your review! I'm not sure I want to read the book because I cringe at that style of parenting. My daughter is nearly 2, and I really just want her to be happy. But, I can tell she's bright, and I want to expose her a lot of things, and then help her do whatever she's into, be that soccer, piano, foreign language, cooking, math, whatever.

However, your point about pushing kids to do something outside their comfort zone is well noted. Everything up through high school came relatively easy for me, so college was an eye-opener -- I really had to struggle for some bits, and experienced actual academic failure for the first time. It was a good but unhappy lesson.

[nipernaadiagain.livejournal.com]

I remembered your recommendation, so I picked the book when I saw it in library.

The most fascinating part, though, happened outside the book.

My half-Asian (but not Chinese) children assumed that I am and SHOULD feel guilty for not raising them more like Chua. My daughter was nice : "We were not rich Americans, we were just too poor - you were NOT a bad mother, failing us."