Tiger mom’s parenting memoir meets ferocious roar from critics

By LEANNE ITALIE

Associated Press

A new memoir of bad-a** parenting, Chinese style, from a self-proclaimed tiger mother has unleashed a ferocious roar.

Fallout was swift for Yale law professor Amy Chua after she published a stark essay in The Wall Street Journal describing the harsh words and heavy-handed methods she used with her two teen daughters.

Her “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” shot to No. 6 in the Amazon sales rankings Tuesday, the day it was released, likely fueled by angry buzz over the weekend column and a headline Chua had nothing to do with: “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.”

Adult offspring of Asian and Asian American immigrants are weighing in on Chua’s provocative description of Eastern-style parenting: No sleepovers or playdates. Grueling rote academics. Hours of piano and violin practice. Slurs such as “lazy” and “garbage,” and threats to burn stuffed animals when things don’t go Mom’s way.

Some see truth and a borderline abuser. Others see dangerous stereotype with the potential to feed China haters and xenophobes. Still others publicly thanked their moms online for similar, though less-extreme, methods.

Few had read the book themselves, missing out on more facetious nuances and details on Chua’s journey to a softer approach with Sophia, 18, and Louisa, nicknamed Lulu and about to celebrate her 15th birthday with — gasp — a sleepover party.

“It’s been tough on my kids,” Chua said Wednesday. “They want to speak out over the thing that has hurt me the most, when people say, ‘Oh, doesn’t that kind of strict parenting produce meek robots?’ My daughters could not be further from meek robots. They’re confident, funny, kind, generous, with very big personalities, and they’re always calling my bluff.”

Chua, 48 and the daughter of Filipino immigrants of Chinese descent, insists her tone in the book is self-deprecating. It’s a point she considers lost in the blogosphere, including heat from moms employing current Western philosophies she doesn’t consider better or worse, but more lax and undisciplined.

“My first reaction was, ‘Is this a joke?’ I kept waiting for the punch line,” said Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, 44, a second-generation Chinese American and mother of four in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had parents with high expectations but none of Chua’s histrionics. “Her methods are so crude. The humiliations and the shaming. The kids will hear that voice in their heads for the rest of their lives.”

Christine Lu’s memories of her tiger mom growing up in Los Angeles are laden with sorrow. Mom’s ramrod tactics failed on her (“life at home used to be horrible”) but they worked on her older sister. She hit 28 and spiraled into a depression that led to her suicide after the startup where she worked fizzled.

“She graduated from Harvard with an MBA. That was the first time she had ever experienced failure,” said the 34-year-old Lu, who was born in Taiwan and moved to LA with her parents and three siblings at age 2.

She stopped short of blaming her mom, adding: “It’s the culture. Amy is a product of the culture, too.”

It’s a book of extreme parenting, for sure, a memoir and not a how-to manual, Chua cautions. Her parenting choices were conscious and reflect her upbringing: No TV, no pets, no computer games, no grades under A, no parts in school plays, no complaints about not having parts in school plays, no choice of extracurricular activities, nothing less than top spots in any school class except gym and drama, no musical instruments except piano or violin.

When Lulu had trouble with a tricky piece of music, Chua denied her bathroom breaks and threatened to ship off her dollhouse to the Salvation Army, piece by piece, until she got it right — which she did with pride, mom at her side.

When she pushed back at age 13, rejecting the violin, mom allowed for tennis instead, keeping a keen eye on her game.

Betty Ming Liu, 54, grew up in New York City’s Chinatown, the oldest of two girls of Chinese immigrants with high expectations and abusive tactics.

“This is a topic so close to my heart,” she said. “It’s frightening to see that Amy Chua is still doing it. She’s young. She’s educated. She’s American-born. She’s not an immigrant and for her to perpetuate this ... is frightening.”

As a young adult, Chua said she rebelled in her own way. She married a white, American Orthodox Jew after hearing from her dad: “‘You’ll marry a non-Chinese over my dead body.’ Now my dad and my husband are the best of friends.”

Liu and Chua alike acknowledge that the tiger-mom-parenting approach isn’t uniquely Chinese, “but we’ve perfected it,” Liu said. “I got straight Ds in college. That was my only power over my father.”

Growing up in California’s Marin County, Tony Hsieh’s parents forced him to play four instruments. He’d sometimes cheat on practices by recording previous turns at the piano or violin and playing them back while his parents slept. Practice exams for the SAT began in middle school.

Hsieh graduated from Harvard in 1995, co-founded an Internet ad network sold to Microsoft and is now CEO of the online shoe retailer Zappos. He published a memoir of his road to success, “Delivering Happiness,” last year. What he didn’t do was become was a doctor, a top prize to his parents.

“For myself personally, I think I would have benefited from a less-strict parenting style, because a big part of being an entrepreneur is about being creative, thinking outside the box, defying conventional wisdom, taking risks, which runs counter to the values of many Asian parents,” he said.

Shay Fan, 26, in San Francisco, didn’t rip up sheets of music like one of Chua’s girls, but she once protested piano by playing with her feet and paid for it with a fierce spanking.

“I understand her motives,” she said of Chua. “Is there a limit to what parents should do? Absolutely. Chua’s method of parenting worked for her children, lucky for her, but you have to take things by a case-by-case basis. ... Overall, I’m glad that my mom taught me to be diligent and introspective.”