Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: review

Just as the January snows came down across America The Wall Street Journal created its own perfect storm with an excerpt from Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, under the red-rag title 'Why Chinese Mothers are Superior'. 5000 posts hit the paper's website within a week, and 7100 soon followed. 333,000 people shared the article on Facebook, which buzzed with comments about that Chinese-American mother who routinely thwarted her daughters by banning play-dates, sleepovers, and shopping malls, and by pushing them to excel in the most illiberal way. As if to defy the death of the book Chua's memoir promptly sold millions of copies.

Why should a story of an ambitious, middle-class, high-flying, second-generation Chinese woman who put her children's achievements before nearly everything else, be of interest to so many? A woman who never gave her daughters choices, openly treating them as extensions of herself. A woman who flouted the last 100 years of child development theory, which promotes independence, individual choice, creativity, and the questioning of authority. A woman who remains convinced, despite upheavals, that passing on to her daughters her own very personal vision of a valuable life is central to her role as a mother.

What then is all the hoo-ha really about, if it's not just about banning school plays, computer games, and junk food? The Wall Street Journal and Chua's publishers were canny. They chose an excerpt that reflects Amy Chua at her most cocky. 'I was the one', she admitted later, 'that in a very overconfident immigrant way thought I knew exactly how to raise my kids'. The 'Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior' excerpt, with its list of do's (A grades) and don'ts (no TV), worked. Overnight Amy Chua's book shot up the charts. However many of those baited by the excerpt never went on to read the memoir, and so never followed what Chua describes as 'the full arc of the story', which is all about 'how I was humbled by a 13-year old'.

Nonetheless Amy Chua does make a number of explicit attacks on what she calls Western parenting. Her sharpest accusation is that we're lazy - or permissive, as it's politely known. In her view we idolize our children's independence, and promote their free choice, because it suits us to do so. It takes the pressure off us to let them go their own way. It's much easier, she points out, than supporting them through the lengthy process that internalising self-discipline involves. And yet in failing our children in this way we rob them of their potential, which Chua believes can only blossom with our active, demanding, prodding support.

'All these Western parents', she writes, 'with the same party line about what's good for children and what's not – I'm not sure they're making choices at all. They just do what everyone else does. They're not questioning anything either, which is what Westerners are supposed to be so good at doing. They just keep repeating things like "You have to give your children the freedom to pursue their passion" when it's obvious that the "passion" is just going to turn out to be Facebook for ten hours and eating all that disgusting junk food' (p227).

'Miss Chua' has been criticized for joylessly coercing her daughters in the name of musical and academic excellence. In a way these critics are right. Amy Chua is relentless and at times manic in her worship of musical mastery and intellectual achievement, and her story does at times read more like a rant than a memoir - although a pretty marvellous rant in our oh-so politically correct era.

While the opening chapters of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother could be read as yet another stick to beat Western mothers' backs with - more fuel for the pyre of maternal guilt, continue reading and a more complex picture emerges. Ranting aside, Chua's memoir is a personal and fairly measured reply to two questions that beset mothers all over the world, regardless of their cultural background. How do we know what's best for our children? And how do we help bring this about for them? What's striking, even shocking, about Amy Chua's memoir is the complete confidence with which she answers these questions, as if with a snap of her fingers. We know what's best for our children, she says, from what we know about what's best for ourselves. And we know how to bring this about through an understanding of how our own parents helped to bring this about for ourselves - or failed to.

And then we look at Amy Chua, with her long glossy hair, attractive family, and professorship. And we ask ourselves, what if she's right? This is the aspect of Chua's memoir that has created a real stir, the idea that we ourselves might have fallen short of our promise because when we were young our parents held back from pushing us beyond our 'preferences'.

Chua's memoir is a stinging critique of the easy-way-out parenting that many of us end up adopting. The Chinese way, in contrast, is the path of greatest resistance, according to which you should never allow your child to give up, no matter what. True self-esteem arises out of mastering things that you don't think you can do - not from being praised, in the Western way, for things that you already knew you could do.

'Chinese parents', Chua writes, 'believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away'. None of us would argue with these qualities - who wouldn't want them for their children? It's the hardness with which Chua pursues them that recoils us.

Chua's choice of the violin for her younger daughter reflects her belief in the importance of embracing difficulty. But it's not just difficulty that she admires. 'The violin', she writes, 'symbolized excellence, refinement, and depth - the opposite of shopping malls, mega-sized Cokes, teenage clothes, and crass consumerism'. Obviously many Western mothers reject crass consumerism, too. This is hardly remarkable. What has unsettled the countless mothers who have read this memoir is something else. Chua's commitment to introducing her daughters to 'excellence, refinement, and depth' is unsettling, given that these are qualities that, as Western mothers, we often struggle to introduce our children to.

The violin is just as powerful a symbol for Amy Chua as for her daughter Lulu. 'Unlike listening to an iPod', she writes, 'playing the violin is difficult and requires concentration, precision, and interpretation. Even physically, everything about the violin - the burnished wood, the carved scroll, the horsehair, the delicate bridge, the sounding point - is subtle, exquisite, and precarious'. Above all she is drawn to the violin, and to classical music, because it symbolizes 'respect for hierarchy, standards, and expertise'. (It does seem ironic that in her quest to instil civilized values in her daughters Chua is drawn to, even seduced by, classical music, steeped as it is in Western culture.)

Could Amy Chua be right? Do we as Western mothers struggle to transmit deep values to our children because we're squeamishly reluctant to overide their 'preferences'? Perhaps, but it's not just this. It's also because we lack moral certainty, and with it the conviction - which Chua has in spades - that we know what's best for our children.

The other thing that we as Western mothers are hampered by is the amount of time we're able to give our children. And here it's not quality time that Chua is targeting, but something far more arduous. Given that children instinctively rebel against mastering anything difficult, what they need, if they're to overcome this resistance, is a mother (or father) with enough patience and energy to help them transcend it (homework at the kitchen table, and supervised music practice, that sort of thing). Amy Chua's memoir teams with descriptions of the hours she spent supervising her daughters, getting them to do things they didn't want to do, particularly things they didn't want to do, in order to equip them for 'life'.

Much of the tirade against 'that evil mother' which has swept across middle-class America in the last few months touches on Chua's tyrannical drive for perfection. What decent mother could possibly bin her children's birthday cards because they fell below the expected standard? Or refuse her daughter the bathroom until she has mastered a thorny piano piece? Amy Chua doesn't

even try to conceal her heartlessness in these situations, describing them in gloriously frank, un-Western detail.

Instead she mounts a different kind of defence which gets at the heart of the difference between Chinese and Western parenting (or at least her versions of them). 'Chinese parenting', Chua writes, 'is one of the most difficult things I can think of. You have to be hated sometimes by someone you love and who hopefully loves you, and there's no letting up, no point at which it suddenly becomes easy'. The difference is this. Chinese mothers are willing to be hated in the process of transferring deep values and life skills to their children, whereas by and large Western mothers aren't.

Chua's memoir, a refreshing rant against wishy-washy Western parenting, dovetails in a key and disturbing idea. Far from indulging our children, a common fear in Western society, her claim is that we neglect them. And she's not talking about spoiling them with too much Lego or foreign travel. In her opinion we neglect them by failing to help them develop the self-discipline and confidence they need in order to realize their full potential.

What then is Chua's secret in bringing up her two very talented daughters? What does she do to instil in them enough self-discipline and confidence to master the challenges that the world - and she - throws at them? Does she resort to tactics verging on emotional abuse, as critics suggest, or are her means more benign and transferable?

A vital part of her parenting philosophy is that of the virtuous circle. The more she encourages - forces even - her daughters to meet challenges, the more rewarded they feel, and the more they're motivated to rise to the next challenge. This principle runs directly counter to easy-way-out wishy-washy Western parenting.

There is however a further problem that Chua doesn't address, more complex than laziness or neglect, which explains why so many of us tip into easy-way-out parenting. This is the problem of ambition and devotion, which family life brings to the fore. It's the conflict between meeting our personal demands for a worthwhile life, or just a financially viable one, versus the desire to devote ourselves to our children.

Some of Amy Chua's strength, and she's clearly a formidable woman, comes from her willingness to be her daughters' taskmaster. She'd prefer that they took out their negativity on her than on their schoolwork or musical instrument. 'To be honest', she writes, 'I sometimes wonder if the question "Who are you really doing this for?" should be asked of Western parents too. Sometimes I wake up in the morning dreading what I have to do and thinking how easy it would be to say, "Sure Lulu, we can skip a day of violin practice." Unlike my Western friends, I can never say, "As much as it kills me, I just have to let my kids make their choices and follow their hearts. It's the hardest thing in the world, but I'm doing my best to hold back." Then they get to have a glass of wine and go to a yoga class, whereas I have to stay home and scream and have my kids hate me' (p148).

'What if', the unsettling thought goes, 'Amy Chua isn't nuts?' What if, even if she isn't right in some final sense, she's on to something important? What if what our children need from us most isn't praise, but something closer to supervision? What if the only way to counter a child's natural impulse to waste time is to have a mother (or father) who is willing not just to unplug technology, but to push him or her into picking up that musical instrument, or homework assignment, and to stay within earshot until they've finished?

There is however more to this memoir than parental self-help. As Amy Chua describes so well, she minds terribly when her younger daughter publicly turns on her - starting her memoir just days after this very cinematic outburst in Moscow's Red Square. But there's something else that complicates Chua's neat Western and Chinese parenting model, which is that Amy Chua lives in New York, not China, which makes her version of Chinese parenting closer to an ideal than a lived reality.

It's only when Chua's Chinese parenting ideal, and with it her conviction, starts to crumble that this memoir gets truly interesting. Her younger teenage daughter becomes depressed, a gloomy 'No' her only rejoinder. One night she hacks off her lovely hair, just on the one side. No longer under her mother's wing, she has become separate, critical, and subject to self-doubt. On top of this, one of Chua's sisters falls gravely ill. For the first time Amy Chua is forced to entertain doubt and uncertainty. The precariousness of life touches her too.

But not for long, her indominitable spirit soon reviving. After all the fuss with Lulu, her elder daughter Sophie feels left out. 'You're just like I was in my family', Amy tells her, 'the oldest, the one that everyone counts on and no one has to worry about. It's an honour to play that role. The problem is that Western culture doesn't see it that way. In Disney movies the "good daughter" always has to have a breakdown and realize that life is not all about following rules and winning prizes, and then take off her clothes and run into the ocean, or something like that. But that's just Disney's way of appealing to all the people who never win any prizes. Winning prizes gives you opportunities, and that's freedom – not running into the ocean.'

Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln would nod their heads in agreement with much of Chua's motherly advice. You can do anything, Chua urges, if you work hard enough. A foreign accent is a sign of bravery, not a prompt for mockery. You too can make the grade, if only you revise hard enough.

By the end of her memoir I found myself liking Amy Chua, less for her opinions than for her courage, her balls even. There's a charming frankness about her tone that is very appealing. Because she doesn't care a bit if the reader hates her, her text has a freedom and freshness which is missing from more guarded memoirs.

Yes, she received a big publishing advance, and probably had a lot of domestic support while writing the book. Nonetheless Amy Chua shows remarkable honesty about an experience that many of us remain cagey about, especially the teenage years.

Towards the end of her memoir Chua regains her footing. She believes in herself once more, is proud of what's she done, and would do it all again, with only a few revisions. But above all her book has got people talking about a tired subject in a new and interesting way - which must be a good thing.