Tiger Mom Takes It Back
Turns out the Chinese Mom From Hell whose book excerpt in the Wall Street Journal a week ago posited superiority over her Western counterparts (sending shock waves through the ranks of parent bloggers, who, in case you aren’t paying attention, are more numerous and more passionate than political bloggers) was something of a creation of the Journal. By dint of editing, the paper turned what Amy Chua says she wrote as a cautionary tale into a triumphalist screed. Or at least that’s what Chua, aka the Tiger Mom, tells Jeff Yang of the San Francisco Chronicle. She exaggerated, she says—of course the girls did go on playdates—and she didn’t intend people to take her storytelling quite so seriously or her advice literally. “I’m an unreliable narrator!” she protests, noting that her kids warned her that she’d be misunderstood.
The 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. But the worst thing was, they didn’t even hint that the book is about a journey, and that the person at beginning of the book is different from the person at the end—that I get my comeuppance and retreat from this very strict Chinese parenting model.
It’s pretty telling when the writer of a comic book about parenting has to shout, “Hello! I’m an unreliable narrator!” Over-the-top and ridiculously extreme are becoming so normal that we just assume she, Glenn Beck-like, is preaching her own personal, passionate, outrageous gospel. Jeff Yang, author of a Chronicle blog called Asian Pop, who noted that the piece “blazed a particularly fiery path across the extended network of digital Asian America,” interviewed a number of other survivors of what he calls “the Crazy Asian Mom phenomenon,” before actually reading the book himself.
Which, it turns out, is nothing like the excerpt. “Far from being strident, the book’s tone is slightly rueful, frequently self-deprecating and entirely aware of its author’s enormities,” he writes, and the subtitle says it all: “This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.”
All of which led him to call Chua. Which is good. Because who, as a parent, Asian or otherwise, can’t remember how fleeting the moments of glory are, and how frequent the humblings by 13-year-olds. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been humbled by a five-year-old.
