"Tiger Mother," Another Cultural Revolution?

Two things struck me about Amy Chua’s article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” (WSJ 1/8/11) One is how severe and uncompromising her approach to childrearing seems and the other is how familiar. Not that I was raised in a similar way, I wasn’t. The closest my mother came to being Chinese was playing Mah Jong. What rang a bell (or gong) with me was how Ms. Chua places social goals above personal ones. How she thinks raising the next class of high-achieving professionals is more important than helping individuals develop their full potential. Add extreme forms of coercion, put it in a Chinese context and you’ve got - The Cultural Revolution of the late sixties and early seventies. (The Red Guard? The Gang of Four? No? “The Sayings of Chairman Mao?” Anyone?)

Simply put, Mao Ze Dong was afraid that China was becoming a capitalist country (yeah, yeah, I know) so he organized millions of young people into Red Guards who took their elders (sometimes their parents) to task for acting bourgeois. A nice way of saying they tortured them. They didn’t call it torture (or waterboarding.) Instead, they called it, “Re-education.” Dragging the high-achieving professionals of their day out of the cities, the Red Guards put them on farms, where they broke their spirits with humilation and their backs with manual labor. Then, when the subjects were nice and pliable, they were brainwashed – or re-educated –with party doctrine. All described in horrific detail by William Hinton (a sympathetic observer, no less) in Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (1966, Monthly Review Press.)

Compare that with the way Amy Chua raised her daughters, Sophia and Luisa. “If a Chinese child gets a B - which would never happen – there would first be screaming, hair-tearing, explosion.” “. . . the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.” In practice (piano practice, in fact) this means “. . . I hauled Lulu’s (Louisa’s) dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have “The Little White Donkey” perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, “I thought you were going to the Salvation Army? Why are you still here?” I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hannukah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong , I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn’t do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.” Luisa was seven at the time. Sophia had it relatively easy. If she acted disrespectfully, her mother would simply call her, “Garbage.”

A week later, in the article, “Retreat of the ‘Tiger Mother’” (NYT 1/14/11) Amy Chua tells Kate Zernike, that she wanted to “clarify some misunder-standings” about her book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” (of which the WSJ article is an excerpt.) “Her narration, she said, was meant to be ironic and self mocking – ‘I find it very funny, almost obtuse.’” That would put her more in line with the French model of revolution than the Chinese. I’m thinking of those ironic self-mockers, Danton (“No, I meant reign of terroir. Like wine, get it? Things should taste better.”) and Robespierre, who was fond of whistling, Allez Les Bon Temps Roulez, and was famously misunderstood by Dr. Guillotine.

The idea of “revolution” is mine, though. Hewing to her real profession, professor of law at Yale, Ms. Chua may be one of those funny, almost obtuse Ivy League law professors portrayed by Holland Taylor in Legally Blonde (2001) and John Houseman in Paper Chase (1973) You know, the kind that teach classes in “Irony and Contracts.”

Okay, I’m skeptical. I doubt that her intention was primarily humorous. If, however, it was and Amy Chua thinks of her book as one, long jape at the expense of Chinese parenting, then she was poorly served by the publisher who titled her book, Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother. It’s a bad title for two reasons: first, comparing mothers to predators (“Grizzly Moms”) is far from the sure-fire gimmick that Sarah Palin makes it seem and, second, taking your title from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” does not guarantee humorous content - look at The Grapes of Wrath. It doesn’t even guarantee success - look at John Updike. He wrote a book called, “In the Beauty of the Lily” and no one read it. (You did?!) Offhand, I can think of several better titles. How about, The Great Earth or The Joy Skill Club? Better yet, East is Eden