Sunday, January 23, 2011

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother


Amy Chua, the 'Tiger Mother' author, is everywhere these days. It seems as if most people responding to her  read only the Wall Street Journal excerpt from her book, and even then they get some of the details wrong. After dipping into the buzz both for/against/alongside of Chua, I decided to pony up the $12.99 for the e-book, and see what she says in something greater than a snippet. To be fair, the WSJ piece is a cobbling together of her more extreme generalizations.

Chua gives more context in her book, but she didn't provide enough, or come to any conclusion about Western vs.Chinese parenting at the end. For all her protests that she drafted & drafted, maybe a little more thought and writing was necessary? Or she could have just learned from 'that time she put 3 year-old Lulu out in the cold because she wouldn't play piano properly' and been done with it.

I learned a few things from Battle Hymn. I didn't really get the visceral hatred that some Americans have for the East Coast well-educated elite until I analyzed my reactions to the book. Chua, a Yale law professor, brought it home to me in this passage, early on in the text:

[Lulu] didn't like the infant formula I fed her, and she was so outraged by the soy milk alternative suggested by our pediatrician that she went on a hunger strike. But unlike Mahatma Gandhi, who was selfless and meditative while he starved himself, Lulu had colic and screamed and clawed violently for hours every night. Jed and I were in ear-plugs and tearing our hair out when fortunately our Chinese nanny Grace came to the rescue. She prepared a silken tofu braised in a light abalone and shiitake sauce with a cilantro garnish, which Lulu ended up quite liking. (Locations 151-55: sorry no page numbers; I read it on an Kindle.)


I'm trying to think through exactly why this particular passage made me want to slap her. Here's what I came up with:
  • She had a nanny. I'm assuming for a substantial amount of the day. A motivated nanny who could make a troubling situation better. Grrr...I am so envious.
  • She wasn't breastfeeding, for which there is tons of proof as superior nutrition for your little ones. Parenting fail, Chua. You wanna tell me how to raise my children? Why didn't you breastfeed? Huh? Nanny, huh? You sound pretty damn wimpy to me.
  • She already seems a little resentful of Lulu & her fussiness.
  •  Ah-ha. She's trying to be funny! In that way that professors have that isn't really funny to others, it's funny to them!  One can't actually feed that combo to an infant, and tofu is made of soy, and few newborns act like Gandhi. Slightly funny, after one thinks the whole convoluted thing through. Funny in the 'heh' variety. And the whole text never really approaches being more than 'heh', because her deeply extreme earnestness in 'this is the one true way to raise a child' is always present.
I thought Chua was an entitled, spoiled, rich twit. I didn't quite hate her, but as someone who worked & went to school & ran a 2 child household with (some wonderful, some NOT) daycare providers to help me, the resentment just rises up. This feeling lasted for a little while, but by the end, I just felt sorry for her. Chua is a woman who has it all. Really. And she still felt the need to drive her younger daughter to the point of ruining her relationship with her. Let's hope that writing the book acts as therapy for Chua, and that she gets some of the real thing.

In my next post, the story of Lulu in the Cold. Also, why I am a Tigger Mother, not a Tiger Mother.