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Summary
Summary
"Courageous and thought-provoking." --David Brooks, The New York Times
"Breathtakingly personal . . . [Chua's] tale is as compelling as a good thriller." -- The Financial Times
"[F]ascinating. . . . the most stimulating book on the subject of child rearing since Dr. Spock." -- Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Chua's memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is a quick, easy read. It's smart, funny, honest and a little heartbreaking . . ." --Chicago Sun-Times
At once provocative and laugh-out-loud funny, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ignited a global parenting debate with its story of one mother's journey in strict parenting. Amy Chua argues that Western parenting tries to respect and nurture children's individuality, while Chinese parents typically believe that arming children with skills, strong work habits, and inner confidence prepares them best for the future. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother chronicles Chua's iron-willed decision to raise her daughters, Sophia and Lulu, the Chinese way - and the remarkable, sometimes heartbreaking results her choice inspires. Achingly honest and profoundly challenging, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is one of the most talked-about books of our times.
Author Notes
Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and lectures frequently on the effects of gloabalization to government, business, and academic groups around the world. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Her title Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012.
(Publisher Fact Sheets)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Considering the polarizing controversy her book has engendered, Chua comes across as surprisingly likable and engaging in her audiobook. Her narration and the text make it clear that while she vaunts her strict, "Chinese parenting," she is aware how and when she went too far. Her voice toggles between firm and self-righteous (this is her "earlier self" talking) and self-deprecation: she pokes fun at her extremism, muttering grumpily, "I didn't see what was so funny!" when her husband laughs at her insistence that he have big ambitions for not only their daughters but also the family dog. Chua's voice softens with doubt and questioning as she wonders how her daughters will look back at their childhoods, and she acknowledges that it's still a struggle for her to relinquish control. A thought-provoking and engaging listen. A Penguin Press hardcover. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The springboard for a million anguished articles about "what it really means" to be a modern parent, Chua's memoir isn't quite the work of the brood-devouring monster the media storm suggested. From the starting list of things her daughters were never allowed to do - including "not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama" - the manically over-achieving Yale law professor knowingly sets herself up for a fall. Comparing the insanely strict, results-fixated methods of traditional "Chinese" parenting to a "western" model that simpers "good work, buddy" every time a child eats some Play-doh, the book deals in extremes, but between Chua's battle lines lies a strong case for the middle ground. Despite the explosive backfiring of her methods, her daughters' successes might leave the CBeebies-dependent parent thinking they could push their children harder. Everybody muddles through, goes the parenting truism: it may not look like it, but even with her resources of time, money and to-do lists, Chua has done exactly the same. - Victoria Segal The springboard for a million anguished articles about "what it really means" to be a modern parent, Chua's memoir isn't quite the work of the brood-devouring monster the media storm suggested. - Victoria Segal.
Booklist Review
Chua's stated intent is to present the differences between Western and Chinese parenting styles by sharing experiences with her own children (now teenagers). As the daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is poised to contrast the two disparate styles, even as she points out that being a Chinese Mother can cross ethnic lines: it is more a state of mind than a genetic trait. Yet this is a deeply personal story about her two daughters and how their lives are shaped by such demands as Chua's relentless insistence on straight A's and daily hours of mandatory music practice, even while vacationing with grandparents. Readers may be stunned by Chua's explanations of her hard-line style, and her meant-to-be humorous depictions of screaming matches intended to force greatness from her girls. She insists that Western children are no happier than Chinese ones, and that her daughters are the envy of neighbors and friends, because of their poise and musical, athletic, and academic accomplishments. Ironically, this may be read as a cautionary tale that asks just what price should be paid for achievement.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
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." There is something of a narrative formula in Chua's book, the predictable eventual enlightenment about the things that count, insights gleaned when her own sister falls gravely ill and her younger daughter rebels with tell-tale troubling signs like chopping off her hair and flinging a glass to the ground in rage, in public no less. In fact, Chua does not seem so much to learn a lesson as simply to concede defeat in exhaustion. But she also seems to have perfected a fresher kind of formula, one we might expect to see replicated in the future: memoirs about parenting techniques that are just appalling enough to allow the reader to revel in self-righteousness, but tempered with insights just wise enough, and timely enough, that the reader has reason to refrain from chucking the book across the room. (Imagine this book proposal: the extremes one mother pursued in a misguided effort to instill healthy eating habits in her children.) MANY an indulgent, progressive parent would be likely to pause and reflect on the philosophy (as opposed to the execution of it) that Chua reiterates in various ways - that Chinese parents "assume strength, not fragility" in their children, and therefore demand more of them, setting higher standards, assuming they can handle more pressure in the name of high performance, or at least good behavior. In this regard, Chua is like some high-steroid version of Wendy Mogel, who wrote "The Blessing of a Skinned Knee," a very different book that struck a chord by advocating that parents indulge less, and expect more. If Mogel worried ultimately about children's well-being, Chua, predictably, touches on anxieties that take the stakes much higher, playing on fears on a global scale: "I'm telling you this country is going to go straight downhill!" she quotes herself telling her daughters, with a rare bit of italics in case anyone missed the bigger point. She brings to that comment all the authority of a law professor who has made a specialty of writing on the decline of superpowers. Having read the Wall Street Journal excerpt, and decided, like everyone else, that Chua was intimidating, impressive and Must Be Stopped, I sincerely hoped the book would be a bore, full of niggly detail about rehearsals, competitions and her ancestral origins. Sadly, I must inform you that "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" is entertaining, bracingly honest and, yes, thought-provoking. Many parents who revile Chua's conduct are probably, nonetheless, seriously considering Suzuki for the first time. The rare times Chua attempts to write about anything other than her extreme parenting, however, her digressions fail to impress. Even an effort to analyze Debussy's affection for the Indonesian instrument the gamelan turns into an excuse - however convoluted - for her to assure us that her husband dated no Asian women before her. The only truly transporting writing in the book belongs to Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, whose essay about performing "Juliet as a Young Girl," from Sergei Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet," Chua wisely includes. "An old mirror betrayed the contrast between my chalk-white face and my dark gown, and I wondered how many other musicians had stared into that same glass," Chua-Rubenfeld writes of her time backstage at Carnegie Hall. Of the music, she tells us, "The sweet, repetitive murmuring that accompanied Juliet was her nurse; the boisterous chords were Romeo's teasing friends. So much of me was manifested in this piece, in one way or another." She sat down to perform: "I said good-bye to Romeo and Juliet, then released them into the darkness." More than Chua's televised qualifiers, more than Chua-Rubenfeld's published letter, the essay makes one thing clear: Whatever Amy Chua stole from that daughter's childhood, she somehow left her soul intact. Chua's book has struck fury, envy or doubt in the hearts of tens of thousands of parents across the country. Susan Dominus is a staff writer for The Times Magazine.
Excerpts
Excerpts
This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. It's also about Mozart and Mendelssohn, the piano and the violin, and how we made it to Carnegie Hall. This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it's about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old. Part One The Tiger, the living symbol of strength and power, generally inspires fear and respect. The Chinese Mother A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do: attend a sleepover have a playdate be in a school play complain about not being in a school play watch TV or play computer games choose their own extracurricular activities get any grade less than an A not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama play any instrument other than the piano or violin not play the piano or violin. I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I recently met a super-successful white guy from South Dakota (you've seen him on television), and after comparing notes we decided that his working-class father had definitely been a Chinese mother. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish, and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that Westerners are far more diverse in their parenting styles than the Chinese. Some Western parents are strict; others are lax. There are same-sex parents, Orthodox Jewish parents, single parents, ex-hippie parents, investment banker parents, and military parents. None of these "Western" parents necessarily see eye to eye, so when I use the term "Western parents," of course I'm not referring to all Western parents--just as "Chinese mother" doesn't refer to all Chinese mothers. All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments thirty minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough. Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job." Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams. This brings me to my final point. Some might think that the American sports parent is an analog to the Chinese mother. This is so wrong. Unlike your typical Western over-scheduling soccer mom, the Chinese mother believes that (1) schoolwork always comes first; (2) an A-minus is a bad grade; (3) your children must be two years ahead of their classmates in math; (4) you must never compliment your children in public; (5) if your child ever disagrees with a teacher or coach, you must always take the side of the teacher or coach; (6) the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal; and (7) that medal must be gold. Excerpted from Ebk Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Chua All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
