So, are Chinese mothers superior? New book creates big catfightBy Bruce Newman
[email protected]In China, the tiger -- not the lion -- is the king of beasts. So perhaps it was inevitable that when Yale law professor Amy Chua published her new memoir this week, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," describing what she apparently views as the martial art of Chinese motherhood, the claws came out.
An excerpt from the book, which recently ran under the headline "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" in the Wall Street Journal, drew more than 5,000 online comments -- most of them angry -- and Chua almost immediately began receiving death threats.
The loudest roar came not from "Western mothers," whom Chua characterized as self-esteem saps and disciplinary pushovers, but from the Asian-American matriarchy. Their outrage spilled onto Facebook and across mommy blogs nationwide.
The book excerpt was being argued about all week at Santa Rita Elementary School in Los Altos, where Minnie Ho's two boys -- 8 and 11 -- are students. Ho, 43, is a principal engineer at Intel and an accomplished classical pianist, both the result of being pushed by a tireless "Tiger Mom" when she was growing up.
Now, Ho and her husband are trying to prod their sons toward the same academic rigors that she endured as a girl. But she can't quite bring herself to buy Chua's maxim that "the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child."
Ho was "harassed" by her first-generation immigrant Chinese mother to excel at the piano, and when she was in elementary school, she practiced eight hours a day -- longer than she slept at night.
"I was exhausted a lot of the time," Ho recalled. "I don't do that to my kids, but I certainly like the idea of forcing them to do stuff."
She sees herself less as a Tiger Mom than as someone admiring the stuffed cats at a natural history museum. "It's not easy for me to do the kind of hard-ass things to our kids that my parents used to do," Ho said wistfully. "I wish I was harder on them, but I can't bring myself to be."
Garbage fight
Chua, who will have a chance to defend her tough-love techniques when she appears at a book signing Wednesday at Booksmith in San Francisco, won at least the grudging respect of Irene Lin Iwasaki, a family practice physician from Sunnyvale, who was encouraged to succeed -- relentlessly -- by her Chinese mother until she graduated from Stanford Medical School.
"There are certain aspects of the article that sort of ring true," said Iwasaki, now the mother of three small girls. "There was always an expectation that you would excel. I felt it when I was very young. If you didn't succeed, it was implied that you didn't try your best."
Chua's assertion that it was her custom -- and completely acceptable -- in her role as a Tiger Mom to call her daughters "garbage" when they displeased her, drew a sharp rebuke from Iwasaki's own Tiger Mother, however. Her reaction? "That woman is crazy!" Whei Mei Lin said.
But name-calling that might go unnoticed in China has often raised eyebrows in this country. "People in my generation definitely heard their parents say those kinds of comments to their kids," said Nancy Tsai, who says she grew up with a Tiger Great-Aunt. "They would degrade the kids at a party in front of other people."
Growing up in China, Tsai was one of five children. "At one point, we were all kind of chubby," she said, "so we became No. 1 Chubby, No. 2 Chubby, No. 3 Chubby." Those nicknames were handed down based not on relative weight, but by order of birth.
As "Battle Hymn" rose to the No. 7 spot on Amazon's best-seller list, Chua tried to distance herself from some of her book's more inflammatory ideas, saying the Journal excerpt represented a cobbling together of her memoir's most controversial fragments. This reminded some book lovers of the time NBA star Charles Barkley, tired of answering questions about some of the outrageous parts of his memoir, claimed he had been misquoted in his own autobiography.
Western influences
Although few Asian-American mothers seemed eager to align themselves with Chua, many did acknowledge a fear that living in America will be the ruin of their children. "I do have some concern that maybe I spoil my children a bit much," said Iwasaki. "It's hard because you want the best for your children, and I don't want to deprive them of things. But I worry that what enabled me to succeed might be lacking in the way I'm raising my kids."
Chua disparages the emphasis placed on the children's self-esteem in Western parenting, and on that point there seemed to be little disagreement among local parents of Asian ancestry.
"Chinese say, 'Whatever grows up in a greenhouse can't tolerate the weather,'" noted Albert Wang, a Fremont physician raised in Taiwan. "The Western style is parents wanting to be the best friend with their kids. Never discipline, never say no. Too much pampering, too much 'everything is great,' and they will have a hard time getting out in the real world."
At Renaissance Academy, a middle school in San Jose's Alum Rock district, classmates Kathy Lam, 14, and Chris Dang, 13, each religiously spend three hours a night on homework. Chris recently completed two math courses at a community college (A-pluses in both), and spends another hour and a half a day practicing piano. Both are expected to bring home straight A's, and they do. Chris said he does this to make his father and mother -- a custodian and a barber -- proud.
"Whatever they tell me to do," he acknowledged, "I just do."
Kathy is not allowed to go out except with members of her family. No sleepovers with schoolmates. "Among my friends, I'm probably one of the most stressed," she said. Her mother, a Vietnamese immigrant who speaks little English, listened silently to this.
"People think Asian parents push their kids all the time to get straight A's," Kathy said. "And of course I do get straight A's. My parents lecture me a lot, and like most stereotypical Asian families, they want me to become a doctor."
With that, her mother broke into a smile. The woman never said a word, but you could hear a mighty roar.
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Hmmm. Chinese fathers don't say a word?
