Reading it is like secretly peering into the home of a controlling, obsessive yet compulsively honest mother - one who sometimes makes the rest of us look good, if less remarkable and with less impressive offspring. For a mother whose half-Chinese children played outside while the kids of stricter immigrant neighbors could be heard laboring over the violin and piano, the book can be wickedly gratifying. “What Chinese parents understand,” Chua writes, “is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it.” By day, I would tell my own two daughters about how Chua threw unimpressive birthday cards back at her young girls and ordered them to make better ones.
At night, I would nudge my husband awake to read him some of its more revealing passages, such as when author Amy Chua threatened to burn her older daughter’s stuffed animals if the child didn’t improve her piano playing. As a hopelessly Western mother married into a Chinese family living in an area that generates immigrant prodigies as reliably as clouds produce rain, I was eager to observe the comeuppance of a parent who thought she had all the answers.Īnd, in many ways, “Tiger Mother” did not disappoint. Although the memoir seems to have been written to prove that Chinese parents are better at raising children than Western ones, the cover text claims that instead it portrays “a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory” and the Tiger Mother’s humbling by a 13-year-old. The cover of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” was catnip to this average parent’s soul.
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