Amy Chua

Amy Chua at the 2007 Texas Book Festival

Amy L. Chua (simplified Chinese: 蔡美儿; traditional Chinese: 蔡美兒; pinyin: Cài Měi'ér, born 1962 in Champaign, Illinois) is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School. Prior to starting her teaching career, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. She specializes in the study of international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law. As of January 2011, she is most noted for her parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

Early life

Amy Chua's parents were academics and members of the Chinese ethnic minority in the Philippines before immigrating to the United States. Amy's father, Leon O. Chua, is an Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences professor at the University of California, Berkeley and is known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks. Amy was born in 1962 in Champaign, Illinois and lived in West Lafayette, Indiana. When she was eight years old, her family moved to Berkeley, California. Chua graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in Economics from Harvard College in 1984. She obtained her J.D. cum laude in 1987 from Harvard Law School, where she was an Executive Editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Books

Chua has written three books, the first two on international affairs and the third a memoir.

Her first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), explores the ethnic conflict caused in many societies by disproportionate economic and political influence of "market dominant minorities" and the resulting resentment in the less affluent majority. World on Fire examines how globalization and democratization since 1989 have affected the relationship between market dominant minorities and the wider population, including examining her own Filipino Chinese culture.

Her second book Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance – and Why They Fall (2007) examines seven major empires and posits that their success depended on their tolerance of minorities.

Her latest book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, published in January 2011, is a memoir relating her experience raising two daughters using strict parenting techniques.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Chua, whose ethnic Chinese parents emigrated to the United States from the Philippines, published her third book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in 2011. The book is a memoir in which Chua explains her views on parenting, specifically as it relates to her claims of being a typical Chinese parent. Chua, whose husband is Jewish, has stated that her children can speak Chinese, and they are "raised Jewish".

Wall Street Journal preview and controversy

An article entitled Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior in the Wall Street Journal on January 8, 2011 contained excerpts from her book, in which Chua detailed her views on parenting as a "Chinese Mother". This piece was controversial, primarily for the very strict child-rearing regime, but also because it appeared to advocate the "superiority" of a particular, ethnic approach. Chua listed a number of rules that she said she enforced on her two daughters. According to the article they were not allowed to:

• 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 No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.

Besides the list above (which was the focus of much of the subsequent criticism), Chua's main point, the wording of which she borrows from a study comparing the attitudes of Western American and immigrant Chinese mothers, was that "[One's] 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.'" This attitude, alternately (and sometimes confusingly) labeled "Chinese", "Tiger" or "immigrant" is contrasted favorably with the view she labels "Western" that a child's self-esteem is paramount. To illustrate this difference in approaches, Chua mentioned that she had, on at least one occasion, called one of her children "garbage", a translation of a term her own father called her on occasion in her family's native Hokkien dialect. She also described various threats used to ensure her children's compliance, for example threatening to burn her daughter's stuffed animals if she did not play a piano piece perfectly. In one incident she denied her younger daughter either water or bathroom breaks during hours of forced piano practice. Chua also explained that even though her native dialect is Hokkien, she made sure her children both learned to speak Mandarin by employing Mandarin-speaking babysitters.

General Response

The Wall Street Journal article generated a huge response, both positive and negative. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, for instance, argued that "large numbers of talented children everywhere would profit from Chua's approach, and instead are frittering away their gifts — they're nice kids, not brats, but they are also self-indulgent and inclined to make excuses for themselves." In a poll on the Wall Street Journal website regarding Chua's response to readers, two-thirds of respondents said the "Demanding Eastern" parenting model is better than the "Permissive Western" model. However despite the substantial acceptance of Amy Chua's points by the Wall Street Journal article readers, comments posted were predominantly negative and included charges of racism and cruelty to children.

Author Amy Gutman felt many have missed the point of Chua's book, which she described it as "coming of age", and states the controversial examples shown in the book "reflect where Chua started, not who she is today, and passing judgment on her based on them strikes me as a bit akin to passing judgment on Jane Austen's Emma for her churlish behavior to Miss Bates. Like Emma's, Chua's narrative has an arc. It's a coming-of-age story -- where the one to come of age is the parent."

According to Slate, almost a century earlier, Boris Sidis made a similar claim to excellent parenting, which his family eventually regretted. The Washington Post, while not as critical, did suggest that "ending a parenting story when one child is only 15 seems premature." MSNBC stated that the article '"reads alternately like a how-to guide, a satire or a lament." MSNBC's critical response goes on to state that "The article sounds so incredible to Western readers – and many Asian ones, too – that many people thought the whole thing was satire... [but] aspects of her essay resonated profoundly with many people, especially Chinese Americans – not necessarily in a good way", citing interviews with Chinese people who explain "'When I think about my teenage years, all I can remember is constant fear, fear that she would find out I had a crush on a boy, fear that I would fail in a test, fear that she would find out I had lied to her.'"

Taiwanese political CGI animators Next Media Animation responded with a CGI animation entitled "Western mom Vs. Chinese mom: Who is better?" The animation sums up some of the content of the article as well as the controversy.

A week later, David Brooks of the New York Times, in an op-ed piece entitled 'Amy Chua is a "Wimp"', stated that he "believe[s] she's coddling her children. She's protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn't understand what's cognitively difficult and what isn't.... Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.". He goes on to claim that "mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups... Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group are good at reading each others' emotions — when they take turns speaking, when the inputs from each member are managed fluidly, when they detect each others' inclinations and strengths. Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard.".

Charing Ball of The Atlanta Post however dismisses Chua's claim of "Chinese-style" parenting and states "Chua is far less the typical Chinese mother, which she asserts, and more the typical Americanized mother than is she is willing to give herself credit for," and writes "despite her argument, Chua’s parenting style has less to do with cultural difference and more to do with affluent class-ism." Ball felt all the cultural activities Chua insist on her children are "reflective of the classic cultural snobbery." Ball also noted that many struggling working-class Asian families could not afford to educate their children the same way that this "Asian-Jewish academic power couple" does.

Chua's Defense

Chua explained in a follow-up article in the Wall Street Journal that "my actual book is not a how-to guide; it's a memoir, the story of our family's journey in two cultures, and my own eventual transformation as a mother. Much of the book is about my decision to retreat from the strict "Chinese" approach, after my younger daughter rebelled at 13." Chua also claimed that "[t]he Journal basically strung together the most controversial sections of the book. And I had no idea they'd put that kind of a title on it." However, a spokeswoman for the Wall Street Journal told the Columbia Journalism Review that "[w]e worked extensively with Amy's publisher, as we always do with book excerpts, and they signed off on the chosen extract in advance."

Reaction by Chua's daughter Sophia

On January 17 an open letter from Chua's eldest daughter, Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, to her mother was published in the New York Post. Sophia's letter defends her parent's child-rearing methods and states that she and her sister were not oppressed by an "evil mother". She discusses some of the incidents that have been criticized as unduly harsh, and explains that they were not as bad as they sound out of context. She ends the letter saying, "If I died tomorrow, I would die feeling I've lived my whole life at 110 percent. And for that, Tiger Mom, thank you."

Personal life

Chua lives in New Haven, Connecticut and is married to Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld. She has two daughters, Sophia and Louisa ("Lulu"). She is the eldest of four sisters: Michelle, Katrin, and Cynthia. Katrin is a physician and a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. Cynthia, who has Down Syndrome, holds two International Special Olympics gold medals in swimming.

External links

• Yale Law School profile
• Leigh Bureau speaker profile