Review by New York Times 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.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 13, 2011]
Review by 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
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
