The Jean-Jacques of New Haven: Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

In the middle of the 18^th century, a cranky Swiss intellectual published a manual for child-rearing that became the talk of Europe.   As the childless bachelor Immanuel Kant figured out, Rousseau’s Emile was not really a parenting guide at all-it was a complex and subtle work of political and social theory.  Rousseau wanted to reach a more popular audience and have a wider influence than earlier political thinkers; to present the teaching of the Social Contract in the form of a self-help book for nannies and moms was a stroke of genius.   

If you bought Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother to help solve your own parenting challenges with her Chinese mothering recipe, consider Rousseau’s apparent response to a reader who used Emile to raise his own kids:  “so much the worse for you, and so much the worse for them.”

Amy Chua is not a child psychologist or social worker but a Yale Law professor and the author of one of the best books about globalization, World on Fire.    A suitable antidote to Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ triumphalism, World on Fire documents how rapidly-introduced capitalism and commerce can exacerbate social, cultural and political tensions in developing and transitional countries.    Chua’s analysis is driven by a fine appreciation of the interaction of politics, economics and culture; something rare among law professors and largely non-existent at the time among economists (exceptions: Dani Rodrik and Joe Stiglitz). 

World on Fire is reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s early counter-current writings about the corruption, decadence, alienation and social divisiveness wrought by modern commerce and modern morals.  Read carefully, Rousseau wasn’t really preaching a return to traditional, closed societies; but rather a correction and extension of modernity based upon the integration and synthesis of modern values and practices with older traditions re-interpreted in light of new pathologies.  Along similar lines, in World on Fire, Chua doesn’t  advocate the reversal of globalization, much less a return to command or corporatist economics in transitional countries, but instead sensitivity to social and cultural particulars.   World on Fire gives some useful clues to understanding the deeper truth in Chua’s new book.

The obvious and well-worn message of the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is “spare the rod, spoil the child.”  The novelty is that the message isn’t coming from the obvious sources, not from a neo-con or a Tea Partier or the Christian Right, but from a sophisticated well-turned out Ivy League academic.  And Chua plays the China Card.  The educated classes in America are fascinated by the rise of China, and Asia in general.  Strict child-rearing is not an Asian monopoly; but presenting it that way makes it a lot more palatable (or at least interesting) to today’s Sinophile elites.     But the more subtle and significant theme of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is one that is worthy of serious reflection:  the clash of cultures makes America stronger rather than weaker.   We shouldn’t be afraid of it or suppress it. 

Chua's point is that through immigration America has been renewed and revitalized as the values of older cultures have confronted American freedom and openness.  Immigrants and the children of immigrants should be proud not ashamed of the traditions in which they were raised, even if those traditions clash with the predominant atmosphere of permissiveness and choice in America-and even while they themselves take advantage of the opportunities that the new world has to offer. 

At the same time, Chua offers a lesson that will most certainly be lost on those who are charmed by the book’s more sensationalist claims on behalf of “Chinese” discipline.  Chua displays how a failure to compromise with and even embrace elements of Western permissiveness and choice can put the traditional family at risk, threatening that which one most wants to preserve.  The story of her coming to terms with the resistance and rebellion of one of her two daughters is as important and perhaps more important than Chua’s pitch for strictness.  In a (massive) concession to liberalism’s concern with individuality, Chua admits that traditional discipline just won’t work with some children, including members of her own family.      

Many of the most touching-and funny- scenes in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother make it clear that the Chua home is far from a household modeled on simple despotism.  There are endless debates about the value and justification of Chinese mothering; Chua, husband and children alike argue like law professors.    The Chua version of Chinese mothering embraces freedom of speech.   

  Like the great Rousseau, Chua sometimes argues tendentiously.  As with Rousseau’s praise for ‘noble savages” and virtuous Swiss villagers, Chua’s ode to the Chinese mother can descend into crude cultural stereotyping, junk social science or both (as with Rousseau, one needs to notice the subtle self-parody and self-doubt that accompany the posturing).   Chua implies that all successful Chinese or Chinese-American children are the product of strict traditional parenting, which refuses to spoil the child.  Growing up in Toronto, one of the great sites of the Chinese diaspora, the Chinese-Canadian kids I knew, especially in law school, were indeed very successful.  Contrary to Chua’s formula, they were often spoiled beyond my wildest adolescent dreams.  European sports cars, designer clothes, a frenetic social and dating life apparently weren’t at odds with academic and professional achievement. 

Chua can be as complex and paradoxical as Rousseau.  At the very center of her book is an admiring recollection of her mother-in-law, a fervent believer in the American way of independence, freedom and spontaneity.   That was the way that her husband Jed was raised, the fellow Yale Law professor husband and secular Jew that she adores:  namely, in almost total opposition to the “tiger mother” philosophy.     But the paradox contains a vital truth.  One of the very untraditional teachings of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is the richness and possibility of cross-cultural families.  In the home, disagreement and conflict-but also respect and mutual adjustment-between cultures and between generations provide the best education for a strong multicultural America.