It is fitting that Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the Yale law professor Amy Chua’s defence of the “Chinese” style of child-rearing, should have arrived in bookstores just as Hu Jintao, China’s president, was arriving in Washington. The US champions democratic capitalism, but Mr Hu’s more authoritarian variant has produced higher growth and left him in command of trillions of dollars of American debt. The US educational culture is built around boosting children’s self-esteem, but Ms Chua argues that “the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish, and shame the child”, as her immigrant parents did her. She once rejected a card from her own daughter reading, “I love you! Happy Birthday to the Best Mommy in the World!”, calling it “not good enough”. That daughter gets straight A’s and gave a piano concert in Carnegie Hall in her early teens. Mr Hu and Ms Chua are two faces of the same anxiety. Each argues for a system that Americans once considered repugnant, ineffective and anachronistic, but now seems to be yielding better results than their own.
US pedagogues and parents certainly have a lot to learn from Ms Chua. Westerners underrate the effectiveness of rote learning, and underestimate the amount of material their children can absorb. “Nothing is fun until you’re good at it,” Ms Chua insists (wrongly), adding (rightly) that “to get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences”. The Chinese system leaves children armed “with skills, work habits, and inner confidence that no one can ever take away”. The alleged compensating virtue of the American system, that it leaves children happier, strikes Ms Chua as illusory, given the tendency of western children to drift away from parents after leaving the household.
And yet there is an underside to Ms Chua’s child-rearing style, and laying it out takes up the second half of the book. Ms Chua does not want either of her daughters “to end up like one of those weird Asian automatons who feel so much pressure from their parents that they kill themselves after coming in second on the national civil service exam”. But that is not Ms Chua’s problem at all. Her problem is rather that she confuses her own Promethean egotism with an ambition for her daughters. They – with good reason – have a hard time distinguishing it from rivalry, bullying or even enmity. They call Ms Chua “insane” and compare her to Voldemort. Her own mother tells her she is going too far. The problem is not Chinese and cultural, it is American and personal. Ms Chua is trying to protect her immoderate ambition from scrutiny and judgment by misrepresenting it as an ethnic peculiarity.