Thank God Amy Chua’s memoir on Chinese tiger-mothering was so reviled by
so many who either don’t know how to read or just didn’t read the book:
I would not have picked it up if not to see what the fuss was about.
But I did pick it up, always curious to see what the moronic
literal-minded reading of some complicated event the media is in the
midst of perpetrating, and I devoured it in one sitting – it was a funny
hyper-achieving mom story of trying to carry the traditions of the old
country into the new and meeting with mixed success, narrated by an
insanely energetic, hyperbolic and studiedly “unself-conscious” voice.
As one trained in literature, I approach a memoir or autobiography as a
piece of fiction, or at least I judge it by the same sort of standards,
and this one was really pretty entertaining, like Mary Karr’s Lit. Both
Chua and Karr’s narrators are people I love to hate, self-destructive
but talented beings in love with themselves whose boundless sense of
entitlement (we should want to hear their stories why exactly?) I can
only envy and, bizarrely, admire.
But as is so often the case with American reviewers, the references
floating around the blogosphere demonstrate almost no understanding of
the actual genre of the book. If someone wants to say that this is a
lame memoir, okay, I’ll listen. But somehow it got turned into a guide
to parenting and was attacked on that basis, this after one of the
epigraphs states that “it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting
taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.” Sounds
like a memoir to me.
I responded to her immediately, this first generation Chinese woman who
worked “psychotically” hard and achieved and then tried to apply the
same techniques to her daughters that her parents had applied to her.
Her dad, immigrant, was a prof; she did Harvard/Harvard law school; her
first sister did Yale/Yale law school; second sister did Yale/Yale med
school. The last sister, who has Downs Syndrome, won two swimming
medals in the Special Olympics. Much of the story is in that poignant
detail, I think; the rest is just the development of it: each daughter
is encouraged to achieve and achieves according to her ability. The
rest of the story is in the way Chua's mother coped with her last
daughter. We are told that the Chinese generally reject disabled
children. But Chua’s mother, having absorbed some of the compassion of
her new home, devoted all her time to that fourth daughter. This the
rest of the story: one keeps the best of the old country and but
modifies it to include the good that American culture has to offer, in
this case, the value of compassion.
The book has been read as a harangue against western parenting, but this
is not the case. It is a harangue against the same elements of
American culture that we all harangue against: junk food, facebook. But
Chua's experience with parenting has been from an extremely privileged
perspective, both as a receiver and a giver of parenting, and her memoir
is not simply critical: it is an interrogation of herself as a person
trying to carry the torch to the next generation. She was very very
fortunate. First to have parents that promote a tradition of
intellectualism and achievement. That is hard to find – what I wouldn’t
give to have been born into such a situation. All my life I have
struggled to overcome my own backwards education: I still have not. And
I certainly have never overcome my sense of inferiority beside those
who were lucky enough to be properly educated. Second, to have married
even further up, cerebrally speaking. Of course she wanted to pass this
gift on.
The rest is just hyperbole, funny. She was pushy; most of us are lax.
We are all good enough at being mothers. But her kids have the huge
advantage of growing up in a tradition of overachieving, which is a
tradition that one can reject later, but that one cannot take on later
if one has missed it.
No comments:
Post a Comment