But she gave him approval on every page, and when he kept insisting she was putting words in his mouth, it became easier to leave him out. Chua said, she wrote large chunks about her husband and their conflicts over child rearing. She concludes, “I didn’t understand what was so funny, but I was glad our fight was over.” “What dreams do you have for Sophia or for Lulu? Do you ever think about that? What dreams do you have for Coco?” He bursts out laughing - Coco is their dog. “All you do is think about writing your own books and your own future,” she says to him. Chua’s husband appears only peripherally in “Tiger Mother” - though there is one battle in which she lashes out at him after he worries that she is pushing their daughters to the point that there is “no breathing room” in their home. At the turning point of the memoir, Lulu, then 13, begins smashing glasses in a Moscow restaurant and yelling at her mother, “I HATE my life, I HATE you.” By her account, her elder daughter, Sophia, complied, excelled and played piano at Carnegie Hall. She was determined to raise her daughters the way she and her three sisters had been raised - which, she said, left them adoring their parents. “I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.” She confesses in her book that she is “not good at enjoying life,” and that she wasn’t naturally curious or skeptical like other law students. Chua, 48, graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law, where she was an executive editor of the Law Review. “It’s not saying what people should do, it’s saying, ‘Here’s what I did, and boy did I learn a lesson.’ ” All this is captured, she said, in the book’s three-paragraph subtitle, which concludes with the words, “and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.”īorn to Chinese parents who were raised in the Philippines and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ms. “I’ve been forced to answer questions about a book I didn’t write,” she said. Chua uses to prevent the kind of decline that she thinks makes some third-generation Asian-Americans as soft and entitled as their teammates on suburban soccer teams where every child is declared Most Valuable Player. Her book is a memoir that ends with her relenting (sort of) when the younger of her two teenage daughters refuses to go along with the “extreme parenting” Ms. If she has one regret, she said, it is that the Journal excerpt, and particularly the headline, did not reflect the full arc of her story. Chua, herself the author of two previous books, was reported to have received an advance in the high six figures for “Tiger Mother.” Her husband is Jed Rubenfeld, also a Yale law professor, and the author of two successful mystery novels. Chua is one half of the kind of Asian-Jewish academic power couple that, as she notes, populates many university towns. Chua would not mind if her children grew up disturbed and rebellious, as long as she sold more books. Another post was titled “Parents like Amy Chua are the reason Asian-Americans like me are in therapy.” A Taiwanese video circulating on YouTube (subtitled in English) concluded that Ms. Chua a “monster” or “nuts” - and a very savvy provocateur.Ī law blog suggested a “Mommie Dearest” element to her tale (“No. The excerpt generated more than 5,000 comments on the newspaper’s Web site, and countless blog entries referring in shorthand to “that Tiger Mother.” Some argued that the parents of all those Asians among Harvard’s chosen few must be doing something right many called Ms. Chua has received death threats, she says, and “hundreds, hundreds” of e-mails. In the week since The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of the new book by Amy Chua, a Yale law professor, under the headline “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” Ms. That you threw the homemade birthday cards they gave you as 7- and 4-year-olds back in their faces, saying you expected more effort. Note that you once told your own hyper-successful Asian-American daughter that she was “garbage.” That you threatened to throw out your other daughter’s dollhouse and refused to let her go to the bathroom one evening until she mastered a difficult piano composition. TRY this at a dinner party in one of the hothouses of Ivy League aspiration - Cambridge, Scarsdale, Evanston, Marin County:ĭeclare that the way Asian-American parents succeed in raising such successful children is by denying them play dates and sleepovers, and demanding that they bring home straight A’s.
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