Dear friend,
Have you read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? I know it’s like almost a decade old that book. When it was hot, the news around the author, Amy Chua, was such a mess that I buried my head in the sand. She made everyone mad in a different way. But I read it recently and was surprised to learn two things.
(1) Amy’s husband is white and Jewish.
This actually makes a lot of sense to me in retrospect. The book is not so much an offense as a defense, a vindication of strict, “Chinese-immigrant-style” parenting in a much laxer white American society. I imagine Amy exasperated from justifying every little parenting decision to her in-laws, neighbors and husband for decades.
Amy also talks about how raising her mixed kids in a strict style is an attempt to make them Chinese in the face of their light skin. Some quotes from Amy:
[W]hen I referred in passing to Sophia as being Chinese, she interrupted me: “Mommy–I’m not Chinese… You’re the only one who thinks so. No one in China things I’m Chinese. No one in America thinks I’m Chinese.” (page 63)
[My kids] were A students, and Sophia was two years ahead of her classmates in math. They were fluent in Mandarin. And everyone marveled at their classical music playing. In short, they were just like Chinese kids. (page 63)
I felt that something had come loose, like the unmooring of an anchor. I’d lost some control over Lulu. No Chinese daughter would ever act the way Lulu did. No Chinese mother would ever have allowed it to happen. (page 152)
What a heavy burden to be the only person in multiple countries who sees your children as Chinese, as belonging with you. I see Tiger Amy desperately clawing Chineseness into her children. She hopes discipline, volumes of practice and winning competitions will mark them with the skills and success of a model minority that no one can take away.
I’ve been mulling lately over how mothers I know have responded to their mixed kids identifying as only white. What that does to the mothers’ psyches, and the extremes they may go to cope with it.
I have a beloved who made an extreme choice in the opposite direction as Amy’s Chinese double-down. My beloved’s only child is disassociated from the Chineseness he inherited from her, and identifies as solely white. They say that when you have a child, half your heart lives in them. I think that the pain of this rejection makes my beloved wish and act like she’s white to fit in and belong with her child. I imagine she’s internalized that the problem is her–she’s the minority, the dirty immigrant, the outsider in her own family. If only she too were white, that would fix everything. Maybe this is how whiteness grows. What a painful choice.
(2) Despite not having tiger parents, Amy’s parenting still feels familiar and natural to me. I think there’s something core about the Confucian relationship between a parent and child that I internalized despite being raised less strictly.
Talk later?
– Rebecca