New York Times Sunday Book Review
February 13, 2011
BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER
By Amy Chua
Illustrated. 237 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95
I cannot be the only person who read, with something of a sinking heart, the undeniably likable letter defending her mother that 18-year-old Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld published last month in The New York Post.
Her mother, for anyone who has sworn off media for all these weeks of coverage, is Amy Chua, the author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” a hair-raising child-rearing memoir that has struck fury, envy or doubt in the hearts of tens of thousands of parents across the country — a high percentage of whom have been moved to express their precise reactions in blog posts and articles and essays and online comments since an excerpt of the book first appeared in The Wall Street Journal in early January.
So many parenting memoirs capture the various ways the authors’ children have taken them to hell and back. Refreshingly, and perhaps uniquely, Chua instead catalogs the various ways she tortured her two young daughters, all in the name of Chinese tradition and the goal of reaching Carnegie Hall (or at least the Juilliard precollege program).
Once primarily known for her work as a professor at Yale Law School and for studies on empire and ethnicity, Chua now seems destined to go to her grave identified as the Tiger Mother, a woman whose memoir sarcastically savages a host of American values, all the while relying on that quintessentially American format, the family tell-all.
Here is a book to thrill any parent who has felt moments of guilt about a harsh word or a carelessly flung insult. On virtually every page, that parent can cringe in dismay (and luxuriate in a safe sense of superiority), as Chua exposes her own outrageous tactics: there are the by now notorious threats to burn one young daughter’s stuffed animals if she could not master a certain piece of piano music, or to give away, piece by piece, the furniture in her other daughter’s dollhouse on grounds of nonperfection. When the younger girl, Lulu, turned 13 and started resisting in force, her mother told her, “I was thinking of adopting a third child from China, one who would practice when I told her to, and maybe even play the cello in addition to the violin and piano.”
In the case of Chua’s older daughter, those kinds of tactics got results: as a teenager, Sophia was a first-prize winner in an international competition that gave her the opportunity to play Carnegie Hall. But so what? Surely that enviable prize came at the cost of a healthy relationship . . . didn’t it? The last thing the reader wants to hear is that Chua-Rubenfeld, as she wrote in that charming letter to her mother that ran in The Post, is “glad you and Daddy raised me the way you did.”
Read the full review.
And comment in the New Zealand Herald - Tapu Misa: There's much to learn from Tiger Mothers
And lots more at pukeko.com
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