Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

by Amy Chua

  “Wow,” I said to Alexis that evening over drinks. “I can’t believe Millie and Bascha got themselves water by turning on our garden hose. That’s impressive.”

  “Australian shepherds are like Border collies,” Alexis said. “Maybe because of their herding background, they’re supposed to be really smart, at least according to the rankings on those Web sites, which I’m not sure I buy.”

  “Rankings? What rankings?” I poured myself another glass of wine. “How do Samoyeds rank?”

  “Oh . . . I can’t remember,” Alexis said uncomfortably. “I think the whole idea of rating dogs by intelligence is silly anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  The moment Alexis and Jordan left, I rushed to my computer and did an Internet search for “dog intelligence rankings.” The most hits were for a list of the “10 Brightest Dogs,” produced by Dr. Stanley Coren, a neuropsychologist at the University of British Columbia. I scrolled down the list, frantically looking for “Samoyed” to appear. It didn’t. I found an expanded list. Samoyeds were ranked #33 out of 79—not the dumbest dog (that honor went to the Afghan hound) but definitely average.

  I felt nauseated. I did further research, more targeted. To my enormous relief, I discovered it was all a mistake. According to every Web site about Samoyeds by Samoyed experts, they were extremely intelligent. The reason they didn’t tend to do well on dog IQ tests is because those tests were all based on trainability, and Samoyeds are notoriously difficult to train. Why? Precisely because they are exceptionally bright and therefore can be obstinate. Here’s a very clarifying explanation by Michael D. Jones: Their intelligence and strong independent nature make them a challenge to train; where a Golden Retriever, for instance, may work for his master, a Samoyed works with his master or not at all. Holding the dog’s respect is a prerequisite to training. They learn quickly; the trick is teaching the dog to behave reliably without hitting his boredom threshold. It is these characteristics that have earned Samoyeds . . . the appellation “nontraditional obedience dogs.”

  I discovered something else. Fridtjof Nansen, the famous Norwegian explorer—and Nobel Peace Prize winner—who almost made it to the North Pole, had conducted extensive comparative dog research before his 1895 expedition. His findings showed that “the Samoyed surpassed other breeds in determination, focus, endurance, and the instinctive drive to work in any condition.”

  In other words, contrary to “Dr.” Stanley Coren’s “study,” Samoyeds were in fact unusually intelligent and hardworking, with more focus and determination than other breeds. My spirits soared. For me, this was the perfect combination of qualities. If the only issue was a stubborn, disobedient streak, that was nothing I couldn’t handle.

  One evening, after another shouting match with the girls over music, I had an argument with Jed. While he’s always supported me in every way, he was worried that I was pushing too hard and that there was too much tension and no breathing space in the house. In return, I accused him of being selfish and thinking only of himself. “All you think about is writing your own books and your own future,” I attacked. “What dreams do you have for Sophia, or for Lulu? Do you ever even think about that? What are your dreams for Coco?”

  A funny look came over Jed’s face, and a second later he burst into laughter. He came over and kissed the top of my head. “Dreams for Coco—that’s really funny, Amy,” he said affectionately. “Don’t worry. We’ll work things out.”

  I didn’t understand what was so funny, but I was glad our fight was over.

  14

  London, Athens, Barcelona, Bombay

  I guess I have a tendency to be a little preachy. And like many preachers, I have a few favorite themes I return to over and over. For example, there’s my Anti-Provincialism Lecture Series. Just thinking about this subject makes me mad.

  Whenever I hear Sophia or Lulu giggle at a foreign name—whether it’s Freek de Groot or Kwok Gum—I go wild. “Do you know how ignorant and close-minded you sound?” I’ll blow up at them. “Jasminder and Parminder are popular names in India. And coming from this family! What a disgrace. My mother’s father’s name was Go Ga Yong—do you think that’s funny? I should have named one of you that. Never judge people by their names.”

  I don’t believe my girls would ever make fun of someone’s foreign accent, but maybe they would have if I hadn’t preempted it. Children can be terribly cruel. “Never ever make fun of foreign accents,” I’ve exhorted them on many occasions. “Do you know what a foreign accent is? It’s a sign of bravery. Those are people who crossed an ocean to come to this country. My parents had accents—I had an accent. I was thrown into nursery school not speaking a word of English. Even in third grade, classmates made fun of me. Do you know where those people are now? They’re janitors, that’s where.”

  “How do you know?” Sophia asked.

  “I think it’s more important, Sophia, for you to ask yourself what it would be like if you moved to China. How perfect do you think your accent would be? I don’t want you to be a provincial American. Do you know how fat Americans are? And now after 3000 years of being skinny, the Chinese in China are suddenly getting fat too, and it’s because they’re eating Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

  “But wait,” said Sophia. “Didn’t you say you were so fat when you were little you couldn’t fit into anything in stores and your mom had to sew you clothes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you were so fat because you stuffed yourself with your mom’s noodles and dumplings,” Sophia continued. “Didn’t you once eat forty-five sio mai?”

  “I sure did,” I replied. “My dad was so proud of me. That was ten more than he could eat. And three times as many as my sister Michelle could eat. She was skinny.”

  “So Chinese food can make you fat too,” pressed Sophia.

  Maybe my logic wasn’t airtight. But I was trying to make a point. I value cosmopolitanism, and to make sure the girls are exposed to different cultures, Jed and I have always taken them with us everywhere we traveled—even though, when the girls were little, we sometimes had to sleep in one bed to make it affordable. As a result, by the time they were twelve and nine, the girls had been to London, Paris, Nice, Rome,Venice, Milan, Amsterdam, the Hague, Barcelona, Madrid, Málaga, Lichtenstein, Monaco, Munich, Dublin, Brussels, Bruges, Strasbourg, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manila, Istanbul, Mexico City, Cancún, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, São Paolo, La Paz, Sucre, Cochabamba, Jamaica, Tangier, Fez, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and the Rock of Gibraltar.

  The four of us looked forward to our vacations all year. Often, we’d time our trips to coincide with my parents and Cindy’s trips abroad, and the seven of us would travel around together in a giant rental van driven by Jed. We’d giggle as passersby stared at us, trying to figure out our weird racial combination. (Was Jed the adopted white son of an Asian family? Or a human trafficker selling the rest of us into slavery?) Sophia and Lulu adored their grandparents, who doted on them and acted ridiculously unstrict in a way completely inconsistent with the way they’d raised me.

  The girls were especially fascinated by my father, who was unlike anyone they’d ever met. He was constantly disappearing into alleys, returning with his arms full of local specialties like soup dumplings in Shanghai or socca in Nice. (My dad likes to try everything; at Western restaurants he often orders two main meals.) We’d always find ourselves in nutty situations: out of gas at the top of a mountain pass or sharing a train car with Moroccan smugglers. We had great adventures, and those are memories we all cherish.

  There was just one problem: practicing.

  At home, the girls never missed a single day at the piano and violin, not even on their birthdays or on days when they were sick (Advil) or had just had dental surgery (Tylenol-3, with codeine). I didn’t see why we should miss a day when we were traveling. Even my parents were disapproving. “That’s crazy,” they’d say, shaking their heads. “Let the girls enjoy their vacation. A few days of not pr
acticing won’t make a difference.” But serious musicians don’t see it that way. In the words of Lulu’s violin teacher Mr. Shugart, “Every day that you don’t practice is a day that you’re getting worse.” Also, as I pointed out to my girls, “Do you know what the Kims will be doing while we’re on vacation? Practicing. The Kims don’t take vacation. Do we want them to get ahead of us?”

  In Lulu’s case, the logistics were easy. The violin was Lulu’s airplane carry-on and fit nicely into the overhead compartment. Things were more complicated with Sophia. If we were going somewhere in the United States, a couple of long-distance phone calls usually did the trick. It turns out that American hotels are overflowing with pianos. There’s typically one in the lobby bar and at least two in the various conference reception rooms. I’d just call the concierge in advance and book the Grand Ballroom at the Chicago Marriott from 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M. or The Went-worth Room at the Pasadena Langham Hotel from 10:00 P.M. to midnight. Occasionally, there were glitches. In Maui, the concierge at the Grand Wailea hotel set Sophia up at an electric keyboard in the Volcano Bar. But the keyboard was two octaves too short for Chopin’s Polonaise in C-sharp Minor, and there was a distracting snorkeling class going on at the same time, so Sophia ended up practicing in a basement storage room, where they were refurbishing the hotel’s baby grand.

  It was much harder to find pianos for Sophia in foreign countries, and ingenuity was often required. London, of all places, proved surprisingly difficult. We were there for four days, because Jed was receiving an award for his book The Interpretation of Murder, a historical thriller based on Sigmund Freud’s one and only visit to the United States in 1909. Jed’s book was the #1 best seller in the UK for a while, and he was treated as something of a celebrity. This didn’t help me one bit on the music front. When I asked the concierge at our boutique Chelsea hotel (courtesy of Jed’s publisher) if we might find a time to practice on the piano in their library, she looked horrified, as if I’d asked to turn the hotel into a Laotian refugee camp.

  “The library? Oh my goodness, no. I’m afraid not.”

  Later that day, a maid evidently reported to her superiors that Lulu was practicing violin in our room, and she was asked to stop. Fortunately, through the Internet I found a place in London that rented piano practice rooms for a small hourly fee. Every day, while Jed was doing his radio and television interviews, the girls and I would march out of the hotel and take a bus to the store, which resembled a funeral parlor and was squeezed between two falafel shops. After ninety minutes of practicing, we’d take a bus back to the hotel.

  We did this kind of thing all over the place. In Leuven, Belgium, we practiced in a former convent. In another city, which I no longer recall, I found a Spanish restaurant with a piano that allowed Sophia to practice between 3:00 P.M. and 5:00 P.M., while the staff mopped the floor and set the tables for dinner. Occasionally, Jed got annoyed at me for making our vacations tense. “So, shall we see the Colosseum this afternoon,” he’d say sardonically, “or go to that piano store again?”

  Sophia got mad at me too. She hated it when I told hotel people she was a “concert pianist.” “Don’t say that, Mommy! It’s not true and it’s embarrassing.”

  I totally disagreed. “You’re a pianist, and you give concerts, Sophia. That’s makes you a concert pianist.”

  Finally, all too often, Lulu and I got into tedious, escalating arguments, wasting so much time we’d miss a museum’s opening hours or have to cancel a dinner reservation.

  It was worth it. Whenever we got back to New Haven, Sophia and Lulu always stunned their music teachers with the progress they’d made away from home. Shortly after a trip to Xi’an, China—where I made Sophia practice at the crack of dawn for two hours before I would allow us to go see the 8000 life-sized Terracotta Warriors commissioned by China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, to serve him in the afterlife—Sophia won her second concerto competition, this time playing Mozart’s Concerto no. 15 in B-flat Major. Meanwhile, Lulu was invited to play as the first violinist in all kinds of trios and quartets, and we suddenly found ourselves being wooed by other violin teachers, who were always on the lookout for young talent.

  But even I have to admit that it sometimes got hard. I remember once we took a vacation to Greece with my parents. After seeing Athens (where we managed to slip in a little practicing between the Acropolis and the Temple of Poseidon), we took a small plane to the island of Crete. We arrived at our bed-and-breakfast around three in the afternoon, and my father wanted to head out immediately. He couldn’t wait to show the girls the Palace of Knossos, where according to legend the Minoan King Minos kept the Minotaur, a monster with a man’s body and bull’s head, imprisoned in an underground labyrinth.

  “Okay, Dad,” I said. “But Lulu and I just have ten minutes of violin to do first.”

  Everyone exchanged alarmed glances. “How about practicing after dinner?” my mother suggested.

  “No, Mom,” I said firmly. “Lulu promised she’d do this, because she wanted to stop early yesterday. But if she cooperates, it really should just take ten minutes. We’ll go easy today.”

  I wouldn’t wish the misery that followed on anyone: Jed, Sophia, Lulu, and I cooped up in one claustrophobic room, with Jed lying on top of the bedspread, grimly trying to focus on an old issue of the International Herald Tribune; Sophia hiding in the bathroom reading; my parents waiting in the lobby, afraid to interfere and afraid other guests would overhear Lulu and me bickering, yelling, and provoking each other. (“That note was flat again, Lulu.” “Actually, it was sharp, Mommy, you don’t know anything.”) Obviously, I couldn’t stop after ten minutes when Lulu had refused to play even a single scale properly. When it was all over, Lulu was furious and tear-stained, Jed was tight-lipped, my parents were sleepy—and the Palace of Knossos was closed for the day.

  I don’t know how my daughters will look back on all this twenty years from now. Will they tell their own children, “My mother was a controlling fanatic who even in India made us practice before we could see Bombay and New Delhi”? Or will they have softer memories? Perhaps Lulu will recall playing the first movement of the Bruch Violin Concerto beautifully in Agra, in front of an arched hotel window that looked straight out to the Taj Mahal; we didn’t fight that day for some reason—probably jet lag. Will Sophia recall with bitterness the time I laid into her at a piano in Barcelona because her fingers were not kicking high enough? If so, I hope she also remembers Rocquebrune, a village perched on a cliff in France, where the manager of our hotel heard Sophia practicing and invited her to perform for the entire restaurant that evening. In a glass-windowed room overlooking the Mediterranean, Sophia played Mendelssohn’s Rondo Capriccioso, and got bravos and hugs from all the guests.

  15

  Popo

  Florence

  In January 2006, my mother-in-law, Florence, called from her apartment in Manhattan. “I just got a call from the doctor’s office,” she said in an odd, slightly exasperated voice, “and now they’re telling me that I have acute leukemia.” Just two months earlier, Florence had been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer, but true to her indomitable personality, she’d gone through surgery and radiation without a complaint. The last I’d heard, everything was fine, and she was back on the NewYork art scene, thinking about writing a second book.

  My stomach tightened. Florence looked sixty but was about to turn seventy-five. “That can’t be right, Florence, it must be a mistake,” I said aloud, stupidly. “Let me get Jed on the phone, and he’ll figure out what’s going on. Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”

  Everything wasn’t all right. A week after our conversation, Florence had checked into New York Presbyterian Hospital and was starting chemotherapy. After hours of agonizing research and third and fourth opinions, Jed had helped Florence choose a less harsh arsenic-based treatment plan that wouldn’t make her as sick. Florence always listened to Jed. As she liked to tell Sophia and Lulu, she had adored him from the
moment he was born, one month premature. “He was jaundiced and all yellow and looked like a wrinkled old man,” she used to laugh. “But I thought he was perfect.” Jed and Florence had a lot in common. He shared his mother’s aesthetic sensibilities and eye for good proportions. Everyone said he was her spitting image, and that was always meant as a compliment.

  My mother-in-law was gorgeous when she was young. In her college yearbook, she looks like Rita Hayworth. Even at fifty, which is how old she was when I first met her, she turned heads at parties. She was also witty and charming, but definitely judgmental. You could always tell which outfits she found tacky, which dishes too rich, which people too eager. Once I came downstairs in a new suit, and Florence’s face brightened. “You look terrific, Amy,” she said warmly. “You’re putting yourself together so much better these days.”

  Florence was an unusual combination. She was fascinated by grotesque objects and always said that “pretty” things bored her. She had an amazing eye, and had made some money in the 1970s by investing in works by relatively unknown modern artists. These artists—among them Robert Arneson and Sam Gilliam—all eventually got discovered, and Florence’s purchases skyrocketed in value. Florence never envied anyone, and could be strangely insensitive to people who envied her. She didn’t mind being alone; she prized her independence and had turned down offers of second marriage from many rich and successful men. Although she liked stylish clothes and art gallery openings, her favorite things in the world were swimming in Crystal Lake (where she had spent every summer as a child), making dinner for old friends, and most of all, being with her granddaughters Sophia and Lulu, who, at Florence’s request, had always called her “Popo.”