Still reeling from the strong reaction her memoir received, Amy Chua defends her parenting techniques, writes RONAN McGREEVY
YOU COULD call it a very public teenage strop. Faced with a strident rebellion by her 13-year-old daughter Louisa (Lulu), Amy Chua wrote a book that has made the front cover of TimeMagazine and fuelled a worldwide debate about the nature of parenting in the 21st century.
The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Motheris a memoir about how a fiercely intense parent was faced down by her rebellious daughter, but that is not how it came across in extracts that appeared in The Wall Street Journalwhich were later reprinted on this side of the Atlantic.
Why do the Chinese raise such stereotypically successful kids? Chua’s prognosis was emphatic; western parents were too indulgent, too lily-livered, too fretful about their children’s feelings. Chinese tiger mothers drove their kids. Feelings did not matter, accomplishment was everything, mediocrity was not to be tolerated, an A minus was failure.
The boastful, strident tone, compounded by the incendiary headline “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” enraged parents, but it was the confrontations with her daughters which rankled most.
There was one story where Lulu, Chua's youngest daughter, then aged seven, could not play a tricky piano piece called The Little White Donkey. Chua forced her daughter to forsake meals and toilet breaks until she got it right.
The response on the blogisphere and elsewhere was unequivocal. She was called “monster”, “child abuser” among a litany of epithets, and just plain barking mad.
“For the first two weeks when the book was misunderstood deeply across the world, I was getting some very nasty stuff,” she recalls.
“It was very personal. Some were even wishing ill on my family.”
Sitting in an ante-room of a boutique hotel in London’s Goodge Street, Chua, a professor of law at Yale University, is an unlikely ogre. She is 48, but could pass for 38 and even 28 at a push.
She is slim and petite and emits a nervous energy undiminished either by jetlag or a particularly testy interview she had done earlier on BBC breakfast television.
It turns out she is very familiar with Ireland, as her father (a renowned chaos theory expert, Prof Leon Chua) has had a long association with University College Cork.
Some of her biggest supporters “and I’m not just saying this” have come from Irish-Americans who believe in her philosophy of tough love.
She could talk for China. She wants to explain herself. She has a lot of explaining to do.
First of all, she says, her book is a memoir, not a parenting guide. “I didn’t write this book to judge other parents. I wrote this book in a moment of crisis when I thought, ‘Oh my God, have I done everything wrong?’”
She believes The Wall Street Journaltook the most provocative parts of the memoir without the denouement which made her re-examine her parenting.
I put it to her that the extract made her look demented. “And triumphalist too,” she replies.
The book, she maintains, has a streak of self-parody. “The hardest thing for me is discovering that irony is not one of Americans’ best strengths.”
The episodes with her daughters which caused outrage were “vaudeville”. She never did put her daughters out in the cold, burn their stuffed animals or give their doll’s house to the Salvation Army. “They have all the best lines, they always call my bluff.”
As for the now notorious Little White Donkeyincident, she explains: "It sounds like I put her in Guantanamo Bay. Any parent who practises with their children knows they are always looking for excuses to get out of it. I let her go to the bathroom once. A half-an-hour later she wanted to go again and I said, 'No, you don't need to go again'."
She is disappointed that everybody recalls the deprivations in that story and not the successful end result, which was a triumph of persistence and goes to the heart of her parenting philosophy.
Chinese parents assume strength, not fragility, in their children. On that basis, they know their children can take being pushed and even insulted. Accepting less than a child’s best is shortchanging them.
“I am of the school that if you just tell your child, ‘You are great, you are perfect, you don’t need to worry about grades and no pressure’, at some point they are going to go out in the real world and the real world is tough.”
Without prompting, she says it is a “false dichotomy” to say children cannot be successful and happy, but if push came to shove “and you gave me a magic button, one said happiness, the other success, I’d take happiness for my kids in a second”.
She admits in the book that she is not “good at enjoying life” and some have taken this as an indictment of her own hothouse upbringing as the child of immigrant Chinese parents in the US, but she retorts: “It does not mean I’m not happy. I’m not good at looking at a sunset or lying on a beach, but I’m happy because I have all these choices in my life.”
As for her daughters, Sophia (18) and Lulu (15), they have already made their choices and neither is going to be professional musicians. Both play for fun now despite hours of practise in their youth (three hours a day even on holidays).
Sophia is going to go to a liberal arts college and has designs on being a writer. She has already written an article for the New York Postdefending her mother.
As for Lulu – whose rebellion on holiday in Red Square two years ago prompted the book – Chua smiles ruefully and makes a pained noise to denote how her daughter’s technique has declined since she stopped practising for hours every day.
After a few days she left it to her daughters to surf the internet. “They see all the terrible words I’ve been called like being mentally ill and all that stuff. They say, ‘Hang on in there Mummy, we love you’.”
The book, currently at number two in the Amazon bestseller list, coincided with the recent visit of Chinese president Hu Jintao to Washington and an international study which showed Chinese schoolchildren were miles ahead of their international contemporaries in science and maths (Ireland was 28th).
There is a generalised anxiety that a rising China, which has bankrolled many of the excesses of the West, is taking over the world, and the book, with its ferociously competitive air, feeds into that anxiety.
As it transpires, the rise and falls of hyperpowers is precisely Chua’s area of academic expertise and she does not see it that way at all.
China, she believes, will always need the creativity and freedom of the West. “Ironically, it was the subject of my last book.”
With that she is off to another series of interviews. She is talking 90 to the dozen on her Blackberry as she walks out of the lobby and on to the street for a taxi, miles to go before she sleeps.
