Amy Chua Update: Enter The Daughter

Wang also raises a key question – why did Chua feel the need to raise her kids as she was raised? As Wang points out, Chua calls this style “immigrant parenting,” yet she herself was born in the U.S.:

By the time she becomes a parent, Chua’s done very well for herself, as children parented “the Chinese way” often do, at least on paper. She has an undergraduate and law degree from Harvard, she’s on her way to getting a law professorship, her husband, whom she met at Harvard Law, is already a professor at Yale Law, and they have enough money to hire a Chinese nanny to teach Mandarin to the children. Eventually, Chua also gets a teaching job at Yale Law–where she and her husband both still teach and are tenured–and publishes two non-fiction books. By her own admission, Chua and her family have a comfortable life.

I’m not saying that people like Chua, who are successful, upper middle-class, and lead comfortable lives should be soft on their children, but I do think there’s less urgency and imperative to raise them the way Chua has chosen to raise her daughters. And without urgency and imperative, the Chinese parenting method–which Chua describes accurately as intolerant to failure–makes much less sense. At times it even seems cruelly unnecessary. When there isn’t a safety net, it’s easy for a child to grasp that one misstep has grave consequences. When there is a safety net, but someone’s insisting that even with one, a misstep has the same grave consequences, it’s confusing and breaks down trust.

Ms. 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. “All you do is think about writing your own books and your own future,” she says to him. “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. She concludes, “I didn’t understand what was so funny, but I was glad our fight was over.” Initially, Ms. Chua said, she wrote large chunks about her husband and their conflicts over child rearing. 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. “It’s more my story,” she said. “I was the one that in a very overconfident immigrant way thought I knew exactly how to raise my kids. My husband was much more typical. He had a lot of anxiety, he didn’t think he knew all the right choices.” And, she said, “I was the one willing to put in the hours.”

It’s not unreasonable at this point to suggest that highlighting more scenes like that – either in the finished product or that allegedly ill-prepared WSJ excerpt – might have helped “those people” see a more complete picture of the environment Chua-Rubenfeld took to The Post to defend. But neither is it unreasonable (though perhaps a bit cynical) to suggest that the ensuing controversy has helped Battle Hymn climb the sales charts. Still, it’s possible that none of this is good enough for somebody Angry Asian Man posted about this week. What do you say, Tiger Mom? Top image courtesy of The Wall Street Journal

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