http://www.thenation.com/article/158285/tiger-mama-syndrome
February 3, 2011 (The February 21, 2011 edition) The Nation.
Diary of a Mad Law Professor Patricia J. Williams
The Tiger Mama Syndrome
Amy Chua does not hold the patent on prejudice. There are lots of ways
to spin a stereotype, and that she calls herself a "Chinese" mother in
her hotly debated book on parenting, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,
plays well against cultural anxieties about American economic status.
But for heaven's sake--the woman was born in Illinois!
No doubt that Chua and her daughters have put in the requisite 10,000
hours it takes to be fluent in any subject, but the Ivy League is
chock-full of accomplished people who put in such hours. They come from
all over the United States and all over the world. Some growing
percentage of them are the products of yuppie, buppie, narcissistic
helicopter parents--hockey dads, stage moms, the kind of people who
would rather see their child drop dead of heatstroke while running a
race than see that child give up. Like Chua, they do so in the name of
all sorts of higher values--family honor, Catholic guilt, team spirit,
Texan bragging rights, Jamaican superiority, Jewish destiny, women's
equality, Norwegian sang-froid, black pride, Hindu nationalism,
immigrant striving, Protestant ethic, true grit. The world is a queasy,
uncertain place right now, and what it takes to compete in the rat race
exposes our kids to ever-increasing rates of depression, mental illness
and substance abuse.
That said, the Ivy League is also home to a much larger group of people
who work hard, who love their chosen pursuits, who are happily
well-adjusted, yet who did not acquire their highly effective study
habits by being turned out into the snow when they were 2 years old--a
form of "discipline" Chua brags about. Some of them are even Chinese.
Likewise, there are many Ivy Leaguers who do not believe that their
accomplishment makes them less "American" or "Western." They don't
spend time worrying, as Chua does, that if they "feel that they have
individual rights guaranteed by the US Constitution" they will be "much
more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice."
So let's not spend too much time wondering why Chua assigns her
neurosis to her Chinese-ness rather than to her aspirational American
upper-middle-class-ness. What I find more intriguing is not so much her
obsession with academic success but her pathological yearning for
dominance, control, standing and respect. Chua does not just want
perfect scores; she is desperately afraid that she and her daughters
will be drowned in the cold goop of what she endlessly refers to as
"decline."
Chua's fears are not confined by race, ethnicity or personal effort
alone. After all, in Greece and France students have been rioting
because of the rising costs of a good education and the paucity of
jobs. In Akron, Ohio, an African-American tiger mother named Kelley
Williams-Bolar was recently prosecuted for lying about where she lived
so she could get her children into a decent school district. In
California, immigrant kids of Mexican parents are battling for the
right to pay in-state tuition at public universities. In Memphis there
are fights about whether integrating a poor school district with a
wealthier suburban one would constitute a "theft" of education. In
London, a woman named Mrinal Patel was accused of fraud for
misrepresenting her address so as to qualify her child for a better
school. There are few places, in other words, where people are not
worried about the quality of life and distribution of resources on a
crowded planet.
At the same time, if Singapore, China and Hong Kong are producing a
greater number of students with musical proficiency and excellent test
scores, it's because they have made huge public investments in
education. They make musical instruments available to students--as the
United States once did in the first part of the twentieth century. They
have teachers certified in the subjects they teach--as was the case in
Russian schools during the Sputnik era. "Westerners" are not nearly as
lacking in work ethic as Chua maintains; but you don't get to Yale if
your elementary school has no books. You don't rank first in the world
in science if, as in the United States, 60 percent of your biology
teachers are reluctant to teach evolution--and 13 percent teach
creationism instead.
It would be so deliciously convenient if calling your kids
"garbage"--another parenting trick Chua boasts about--actually turned
them into little engines that could. But our larger educational crisis
will involve a public investment that simply does not correlate with
shooting down the self-esteem of children or disrespecting the
"Western-ness" of the parents who struggle to raise them.
Finally, Amy Chua exhibits an excruciating self-consciousness about how
she is seen in a racialized public imagination. She is riddled with
angst about not betraying her status as a "model minority" who's
"supposed" to be smart in music, math and science. She even
"disciplines" one of her daughters by threatening to adopt a "real"
Chinese kid. Even as her narrative is swaddled in Dragon Lady
analogies, every line is inflected by very American prejudices and
divisive ethnic generalizations. Indeed, if you take away the
peculiarly manic quality that is Chua's alone, her anxieties are no
different from a lot of "buffer" groups whose inroads on the edges of
assimilation mark them, and whose successes are watched reproachfully,
jealously by the larger society. The Kennedys walked this walk for the
Irish. Fiorello La Guardia complained of it when he was the
"breakthrough" Italian. Condoleezza Rice's and Michelle Obama's parents
toiled and pushed for them in ways typical of a generation of civil
rights babies. In other words, this tensely, needily overachieving
mentality is hardly unique. It is not necessarily or even probably
generated from Chua's romanticized motherland. Our collective dilemma,
and the most poignant challenge presented by her book, is how to
survive in a world where the slightest nonconformity risks landing you
outside--of a home, of a job, of a life--and left to stand by yourself,
alone in the freezing cold.
Patricia J. Williams