Amy Chua

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January 25, 2011 | 1:03 PM | By

Art of the Tiger Mother: Five spoofs, rap song included

Screen shot from tigermomsays.tumblr.com

It’s been more than two weeks now since author Amy Chua’s essay titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” appeared in the Wall Street Journal, prompting an uncountable number of news stories, columns, blog posts, essays and assorted reflections on the take that Chua, author of the memoir “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” presented on raising her two daughters.

Her description of extreme-tough-love child rearing, which she associated with her Chinese American background, was meant to be self-mocking, Chua has said in interviews, but no matter. In the past couple of weeks, parenting experts have excoriated Chua while others have defended her, while others still have cannily pointed to what lurks behind the racial stereotyping of Asian parents and successful Asian American students.

In the end, part of the Tiger Mother controversy’s legacy will be the voluminous amount of work it has spawned: some of it forgettable, some of it quite good, and as with similar media phenoms, a torrent of comic art to help take the edge off.

Among what’s appeared since Chua’s essay was published:

  • An alternately funny and cringe-inducing animated video with English subtitles (there’s also an English version), replete with a frying pan vs. rolling pin battle of the mommies and a girl playing violin while standing on hot coals.
  • A Twitter hashtag, #yourtigermomhatesthis, which appeared last week and produced these gems:

    YOUR COLLEGE (IF IT IS NOT NAMED HARVARD) (from @jazzagold)

    PRIVACY (which is why she read your diary) (from @disgrasian)

    staying out past 11pm, even though you are in your thirties (from @MissAsiaAmerica)

    YOU GETTING A TAN (which makes you looks like “a peasant”) (from @disgrasian)

    • The Tiger Mom Rap from New York comic Jen Kwok, which begins:

    Yo, I’m the tiger mother
    Hardcore parenting like no other
    But I’m also a professor at Yale
    And I got a crazy ass new book on sale
    Talkin bout how Chinese mothers are superior
    Rest of ya’ll with Montessori are inferior

    After years of rigorous near attention, I come downstairs each morning and Bob has surrendered his day’s consciousness to Failblog. Cathy is typically IM-ing mash notes to the guy in Hyderabad who writes her term papers, or pining for a career in reality television. Our government, in cooperation with the Zynga company, recently awarded them price subsidies to slow their production in Farmville. Both plan to study Law.

    • And of course, the memes. There’s the Tumblr Tiger Mom Says (“Ignorance is bliss? Not in this household”), along with another Tumblr that was around before the controversy, High Expectations Asian Father, which has received new attention after getting a mention on the former.

    The women’s blog Jezebel recently criticized some of the phrases on Tiger Mom Says, a few of which mimic an accent, as occasionally racist; it’s hard to know who is generating them, though at least a couple of known Asian American writers have posted some.

    No word on whether Amy Chua is laughing over any of the Tiger Mother-inspired comedy, but I would guess she’s gotten a few snickers out of it. Meanwhile, she’s packing book signings, comfort enough.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Health/Education, Amy Chua, Tiger Mother
January 20, 2011 | 2:13 PM | By

Quote of the moment: A different perspective on ‘Tiger Mother’ parenting

“Certainly, the idea of a traditional Chinese parenting style would surprise the billion inhabitants of mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, few of whom attended Harvard, became a doctor, lawyer, or banker, or ever completed a Scantron.”

- Ken Chen, executive director of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, in a CNN opinion piece

Photo by Laurie Pink/Flickr (Creative Commons)

In the wake of the controversy over author Amy Chua’s memoir “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Chen puts the Asian-vs.-Western-parenting furor sparked by the book and a related essay in perspective, calling out the stereotyping, the fear, and the immigration history behind the story. He points out that U.S. immigration policies in recent decades have welcomed skilled professionals from Taiwan and Hong Kong, creating a bourgeois class of immigrants who, not surprisingly, bring up their children to do well academically, just as their affluent white counterparts do.

Chen also writes:

What I find more threatening than Chua’s parenting style is the typical reader’s response to Chua’s piece, seeing her and her children as hypercompetitive robots instead of people who have their own joys and sorrows.

This reaction leads to withholding empathy from teenagers often driven to suicide because of pressures and expectations, and to colleges rejecting Asian-Americans for being uncreative “grinds.” This dehumanization extends as far back as the 1800s, when Mark Twain referred to coolie laborers as “The Gentle, Inoffensive Chinese,” and is as contemporaneous as our current insecurities about a rising China, which is often characterized as an authoritarian parent overseeing brainwashed children.

It’s a good read, an interesting take on a complicated subject.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Health/Education, Amy Chua, Ken Chen, Tiger Mother
January 18, 2011 | 11:38 PM | By

‘Tiger Mother’ author on child rearing, her immigrant parents, and why raising her kids as she was ‘just did not work out the same way’

Photo by Laurie Pink/Flickr (Creative Commons)

“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” author Amy Chua joined AirTalk’s Larry Mantle on KPCC today to discuss the controversy that has arisen surrounding her newly-published memoir, especially after an excerpted essay ran in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month with her description of some extremely tough love used in raising her two daughters.

In his introduction, Mantle said he’d seen the book as “tongue-in-cheek exaggeration” rather than as a manifesto of how to raise a child without play dates, sleepovers or other small pleasures of Western childhood. Chua, a Yale law professor, said the book “is intended to be just full of deadpan humor. It is self-mocking.” The book was written after her youngest daughter, fed up with her overly strict mother, finally rebelled and Chua learned to soften her approach.

“I was raised myself by extremely strict but also extremeley loving Chinese immigrant parents,” said Chua, who was born in the United States. “I tried to do the same thing with my own two daughters, and boy, it just did not work out the same way.”

A female caller who described herself as Latina sympathized with Chua’s no-sleepovers rule, saying these were also forbidden in her family, and the idea still doesn’t sit right with her when her children suggest it; others, including some of those posting comments on the website, objected heartily to the methods Chua described even if in self-mockery, including a man who wrote in to the show to say that a friend raised similarly had ultimately killed himself.

The audio from the interview can be found here.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Health/Education, Air Talk, Amy Chua, Tiger Mother
January 18, 2011 | 10:07 AM | By

The roar of the Tiger Mother

Screen shot from tigermomsays.tumblr.com

This has been the week of the Tiger Mother, and it’s not over yet. Since last weekend, when the Wall Street Journal published an essay by author and Yale law professor Amy Chua titled “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” Chua has become perhaps the most notorious parent in America, setting off a firestorm of controversy over the parenting techniques she described in the essay and in her memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.”

It’s not suprising given some of the content: Among other things, Chua described a parenting regimen that deprived her two daughters of play dates, sleepovers, television and computer games in favor of piano and violin practice, along with incidents like once calling one of the girls “garbage” and rejecting the children’s homemade birthday cards.

After receiving what she described as “hundreds, hundreds” of e-mails and even death threats, Chua defended herself in an interview with The New York Times that ran this weekend, explaining that her sense of irony and self-mockery was misunderstood. In the meantime, a series of spoof sites have emerged, from an alternately hilarious and painful to watch animated video to a “Tiger Mom Says” Tumblr.

Beyond Chua’s story, though, is the greater conversation that the Tiger Mother controversy has led to. Various explorations of Asian-style parenting (and whether Chua, a second-generation Chinese American, presents an accurate example) versus Western-style parenting have appeared in countless articles and, most interestingly, in the comments sections of just about every piece that has run on the subject since Chua’s Wall Street Journal essay appeared Jan. 8.

On Friday, KPCC’s Patt Morrison interviewed a parenting expert about the controversy, drawing a string of opinionated callers and many more to post comments online. Several were Asian Americans who weighed in with their own experiences, some of whom defended the thinking that goes into the sort of tough love parenting espoused by Chua, even if they weren’t a hundred percent behind it. A sample:

From Lou:

As an Asian-American, I’ve seen plenty of kids raised in this manner. Yes, they are very book smart and talented at playing piano but at the cost of no personality, no creativity, and most likely emotional damage.

I’ve known plenty of Asian kids who can play Mozart and Bach beautifully but wouldn’t know where to start if asked to create a piece on their own.

And sadly, that birthday card story may sound harsh to people, but I can totally understand it.

We need to take this into consideration when the pols keep comparing us to other countries. We don’t want to produce robots. And not all Asians support this way of parenting. There is a large percentage of Asians who feel Asian education produces robots and send their kids overseas to get a Western education.

But that is not to say Western parenting is better. All this coddling has led to an entire genration elongating adolescence into their 30s.

Like everything, there’s probably a happy medium.

From JC:

I’m Chinese. When I was in high school and my report card showed all A’s but one B, my mother would only focus on “why did you get the B”, I would here about it until I get an A in that class. The rest of the A’s I recieved was not mentioned of or praised. But I understood that means she approved of it. It didn’t hurt my self esteem. It pushes me to work harder.

From May:

The goals in parenting seem different. As a Chinese American I can see both sides. Generally speaking, as primary goals, Asian parents want a successful future for their children that can lead to happiness. American parents want happiness for their children that can lead them to success.

And from Lori, of “Danish and German descent:”

I think the success of this apprach depends on the personality of the child, as well! I am 48, and of Danish and German descent. In my home, anything less than first place, first chair in orchestra, president of student council, or an A was absolutely UNacceptable. Even when we excelled, my father would gives us “notes” on how we could still have “improved” on what we had done. The message I took away from my family was that I could NEVER be good enough.

My older sister is a wildly successful physician. However, although I graduated college with a 3.95 GPA, I have been marginally employed and have struggled with self-esteem issues my entire life.

I was the cub that the tiger would have eaten…

One thing I may have missed is comments on Latina mothers (Jaguar Mothers?) like my own, a tough cookie who taught me to speak my mind, yet never to be punctual.

Amy Chua is scheduled to be a guest on this morning’s AirTalk with Larry Mantle.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Health/Education, AirTalk, Amy Chua, Tiger Mother