Unit 1Paper TigersWesley YangAdditional Background Information (About Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)What follows is a comment on Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Elizabeth Chang, an editor of The Washington Posts Sunday Magazine, which carried the article on January 8th, 2011.The cover of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was catnip to this average parents soul. Although the memoir seems to have been written to prove that Chinese parents are better at raising children than Western ones, the cover text claims that instead it portrays a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory and how the Tiger Mother “was humbled by a 13-year-old.” As a hopelessly Western mother married into a Chinese family living in an area that generates immigrant prodigies as reliably as clouds produce rain, I was eager to observe the comeuppance of a parent who thought she had all the answers. And, in many ways, Tiger Mother did not disappoint. At night, I would nudge my husband awake to read him some of its more revealing passages, such as when author Amy Chua threatened to burn her older daughters stuffed animals if the child didnt improve her piano playing. What Chinese parents understand, Chua writes, is that nothing is fun until youre good at it. By day, I would tell my own two daughters about how Chua threw unimpressive birthday cards back at her young girls and ordered them to make better ones. For a mother whose half-Chinese children played outside while the kids of stricter immigrant neighbors could be heard laboring over the violin and piano, the book can be wickedly gratifying. Reading it is like secretly peering into the home of a controlling, obsessive yet compulsively honest motherone who sometimes makes the rest of us look good, if less remarkable and with less impressive offspring. Does becoming super-accomplished make up for years of stress? Thats something my daughters and I will never find out. Chua is a law professor and author of two acclaimed books on international affairs, though readers of Tiger Mother get only a glimpse of that part of her life, with airy, tossed off-lines such as Meanwhile, I was still teaching my courses at Yale and finishing up my second book while also traveling continuously, giving lectures about democratization and ethnic conflict. Her third book abandons global concerns to focus intimately on Chuas attempt to raise her two daughters the way her immigrant parents raised her. There would be no play dates and no sleepovers: I dont really have time for anything fun, because Im Chinese, one of Chuas daughters told a friend. Instead, there would be a total commitment to academics and expertise at something, preferably an instrument. Though Chuas Jewish husband grew up with parents who encouraged him to imagineand to express himself, he nonetheless agreed to let her take the lead in rearing the children and mostly serves as the Greek chorus to Chuas crazed actions. In Chinese parenting theory, hard work produces accomplishment, which produces confidence and yet more accomplishment. As Chua notes, this style of parenting is found among other immigrant cultures, too, and Im sure many Washington-area readers have seen it, if they dont employ it themselves. Chuas older daughter, Sophia, a pianist, went along with, and blossomed, under this approach. The younger daughter, Lulu, whose instrument of Chuas choice was a violin, was a different story. The turning point came when, after years of practicing and performing, Lulu expressed her hatred of the violin, her mother and of being Chinese. Chua imagined a Western parents take on Lulus rebellion: Why torture yourself and your child? Whats the point? . I knew as a Chinese mother I could never give in to that way of thinking. But she nevertheless allowed Lulu to abandon the violin. Given that the worst Lulu ever did was cut her own hair and throw a glass, my reaction was that Chua got off easy in a society where some pressured children cut themselves, become anorexic, refuse to go to school or worse. No one but an obsessive Chinese mother would consider her healthy, engaging and accomplished daughter deficient because the girl prefers tennis to the violinbut thats exactly the point. And, oh, what Chua put herself and her daughters through before she got to her moment of reckoning. On weekends, they would spend hours getting to and from music lessons and then come home and practice for hours longer. At night, Chua would read up on violin technique and fret about the children in China who were practicing 10 hours a day. (Did this woman ever sleep?) She insisted that her daughters maintain top gradesBs, she notes, inspire a screaming, hair-tearing explosion among Chinese parents and the application of countless practice tests. She once refused to let a child leave the piano bench to use the bathroom. She slapped one daughter who was practicing poorly. She threatened her children not just with s