Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

by Amy Chua

  Florence made it into remission by March, after six weeks of chemotherapy. By then, she was a frail shadow of herself—I remember how small she looked against the white hospital pillows, like a 75% photocopy reduction of herself—but she still had all her hair, a decent appetite, and the same buoyant personality. She was ecstatic about being discharged.

  Jed and I knew the remission was only temporary. The doctors had repeatedly warned us that Florence’s prognosis was poor. Her leukemia was aggressive and would almost certainly relapse within six months to a year. Because of her age, there was no possibility of a bone marrow transplant—in short, no possibility of a cure. But Florence didn’t understand her disease and had no idea how hopeless things were. Jed tried a few times to explain the situation, but Florence was always stubbornly obtuse and upbeat, and nothing seemed to sink in. “Oh, dear—I’m going to have to spend a lot of time at the gym when this is all over,” she’d say surreally. “My muscle tone’s all gone.”

  In the immediate term, we had to decide what to do with Florence. Living on her own was out of the question: She was too weak to walk and needed frequent blood transfusions. And she really didn’t have much family she could turn to. By her choice she had almost no contact with her ex-husband, Sy, and her daughter lived much farther away.

  I proposed what seemed the obvious solution: Florence would come live with us in New Haven. My mother’s elderly parents lived with us in Indiana when I was little. My father’s mother lived with my uncle in Chicago until she died at the age of eighty-seven. I’ve always assumed that I would take in my parents if the need arose. This is the Chinese way.

  To my astonishment, Jed was reluctant. There was no question of his devotion to Florence. But he reminded me that I had often had trouble with Florence and gotten angry at her; that she and I had wildly different views about child-rearing; that we both had strong personalities; and that, even ill, Florence was unlikely to keep her views to herself. He asked me to imagine what it would be like if Lulu and I got into one of our raging, thrashing fights and Florence felt the need to intervene on behalf of her granddaughter.

  Jed was right of course. Florence and I got along great for years—she introduced me to the world of modern art, and I used to love accompanying her to museum and gallery events—but we started having conflicts after Sophia was born. In fact, it was through butting heads with Florence that I first became aware of some of the deep differences between Chinese and (at least one variant of) Western parenting. Above all, Florence had taste. She was a connoisseur of art, food, and wine. She liked luxurious fabrics and dark chocolate. Whenever we returned from travels, she always asked the girls about the colors and smells they’d encountered. Another thing Florence had definite taste about was childhood. She believed that childhood should be full of spontaneity, freedom, discovery, and experience.

  At Crystal Lake, Florence felt that her granddaughters should be able to swim, walk, and explore wherever they pleased. By contrast, I told them that if they stepped off our front porch, kidnappers would get them. I also told them that the deep parts of the lake had ferocious biting fish. I may have gone overboard, but sometimes being carefree means being careless. Once when Florence was babysitting for us at the lake, I came home to find two-year-old Sophia running around outside by herself with a pair of garden shears as large was she was. I snatched them furiously away. “She was going to cut some wildflowers,” Florence said wistfully.

  The truth is I’m not good at enjoying life. It’s not one of my strengths. I keep a lot of to-do lists and hate massages and Caribbean vacations. Florence saw childhood as something fleeting to be enjoyed. I saw childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest for the future. Florence always wanted just one full day to spend with each girl—she begged me for that. But I never had a full day for them to spare. The girls barely had time as it was to do their homework, speak Chinese with their tutor, and practice their instruments.

  Florence liked rebelliousness and moral dilemmas. She also liked psychological complexity. I did too, but not when it was applied to my kids. “Sophia is so envious of her new sister,” Florence once giggled, shortly after Lulu was born. “She just wants to ship Lulu back where she came from.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” I snapped. “Sophia loves her new sister.” I felt that Florence was generating sibling rivalry by looking for it. There are all kinds of psychological disorders in the West that don’t exist in Asia.

  Being Chinese, I almost never had any open confrontations with Florence. When I said “butting heads with Florence” earlier, what I meant was criticizing and railing against her to Jed behind her back. With Florence I was always accommodating and hypocritically good-natured about her many suggestions. So Jed had a point, especially since he’d borne the brunt of the conflict.

  But none of that mattered one bit, because Florence was Jed’s mother. For Chinese people, when it comes to parents, nothing is negotiable.Your parents are your parents, you owe everything to them (even if you don’t), and you have to do everything for them (even if it destroys your life).

  In early April, Jed checked Florence out of the hospital and brought her to New Haven, where he carried her up to our second floor. Florence was incredibly excited and happy, as if we were all at a resort together. She stayed in our guest room, next to the girls’ bedroom and just down the hall from our master bedroom. We hired a nurse to cook and care for her, and physical therapists were always coming and going. Almost every night, Jed, the girls, and I had dinner with Florence; for the first couple of weeks, it was always in her room because she couldn’t come downstairs. Once, I invited a few of her friends and threw a wine and cheese party in her room. When Florence saw the cheeses I’d picked, she was aghast and sent me out for different ones. Instead of being mad, I was glad that she was still Florence and that good taste ran in my daughters’ genes. I also made a note of which cheeses never to buy again.

  Although there were constant scares—Jed had to race Florence to the New Haven hospital at least twice a week—Florence seemed to recover miraculously in our house. She had an enormous appetite and gained weight rapidly. On her birthday, May 3, we were able to all go out to a nice restaurant. Our friends Henry and Marina came with us and couldn’t believe this was the same Florence they’d seen in the hospital six weeks earlier. In a high-necked asymmetrical Issey Miyake jacket, she was glamorous again and didn’t even look sick.

  Just a few days later, on May 7, Sophia had her Bat Mitzvah at our house. Earlier that same morning we’d had another crisis, with Jed rushing Florence to the hospital for an emergency blood transfusion. But they made it back on time, and Florence looked fabulous when the eighty guests arrived. After the ceremony, under a perfect blue sky, on tables with white tulips, we served French toast, strawberries, and dim sum—Sophia and Popo had planned the menu—and Jed and I marveled at how much you have to spend to keep things simple and unpretentious.

  A week later, Florence decided that she was well enough to go back to her own New York apartment, as long as the nurse went with her. She died in her apartment on May 21, apparently from a stroke that killed her instantly. She had plans to go out for drinks that evening and never knew that her time was limited.

  At the funeral, both Sophia and Lulu read short speeches they’d written themselves. Here’s part of what Lulu said: When Popo was living at my family’s house over the last month, I spent a lot of time with her, whether it was eating lunch together, playing cards with her, or just talking. On two nights, we were left alone together—“babysitting” each other. Even though she was sick and couldn’t walk well, she made me feel not scared at all. She was a very strong person. When I think of Popo, I think of her happy and laughing. She loved to be happy and that made me feel happy too. I’m really going to miss Popo a lot.

  And here’s part of what Sophia said: Popo always wanted intellectual stimulation, full happiness—to get the utmost vitality and thought out of every minute. And I think s
he got it, right up to the end. I hope someday I can learn to do the same.

  When I heard Sophia and Lulu say these words, several things came to mind. I was proud and glad that Jed and I had taken Florence in, the Chinese way, and that the girls had witnessed us doing it. I was also proud and glad that Sophia and Lulu had helped take care of Florence. But with the words “loved to be happy” and “full happiness” ringing in my head, I also wondered whether down the road if I were sick, the girls would take me into their homes and do the same for me—or whether they would opt for happiness and freedom.

  Happiness is not a concept I tend to dwell on. Chinese parenting does not address happiness. This has always worried me. When I see the piano- and violin-induced calluses on my daughters’ fingertips, or the teeth marks on the piano, I’m sometimes seized with doubt.

  But here’s the thing. When I look around at all the Western families that fall apart—all the grown sons and daughters who can’t stand to be around their parents or don’t even talk to them—I have a hard time believing that Western parenting does a better job with happiness. It’s amazing how many older Western parents I’ve met who’ve said, shaking their heads sadly, “As a parent you just can’t win. No matter what you do, your kids will grow up resenting you.”

  By contrast, I can’t tell you how many Asian kids I’ve met who, while acknowledging how oppressively strict and brutally demanding their parents were, happily describe themselves as devoted to their parents and unbelievably grateful to them, seemingly without a trace of bitterness or resentment.

  I’m really not sure why this is. Maybe it’s brainwashing. Or maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome. But here’s one thing I’m sure of: Western children are definitely no happier than Chinese ones.

  16

  The Birthday Card

  Everyone was moved by what Sophia and Lulu said at Florence’s funeral. “If only Florence could have heard them,” Florence’s best friend Sylvia said sadly afterward. “Nothing would have made her happier.” How, other friends asked, could a thirteen-and ten-year-old capture Florence so perfectly?

  But there’s a backstory.

  It actually starts years earlier, when the girls were quite young, maybe seven and four. It was my birthday, and we were celebrating at a mediocre Italian restaurant, because Jed had forgotten to make reservations at a better place.

  Obviously feeling guilty, Jed was trying to act jaunty. “O-k-a-y! This is going to be a g-r-e-a-t birthday dinner for Mommy! Right, girls? And you each have a little surprise for Mommy—right, girls?”

  I was soaking some stale focaccia in the small dish of olive oil the server had given us. At Jed’s urging, Lulu handed me her “surprise,” which turned out to be a card. More accurately, it was a piece of paper folded crookedly in half, with a big happy face on the front. Inside, “Happy Birthday, Mommy! Love, Lulu” was scrawled in crayon above another happy face. The card couldn’t have taken Lulu more than twenty seconds to make.

  I know just what Jed would have done. He would have said, “Oh, how nice—thank you, honey,” and planted a stiff kiss on Lulu’s forehead. Then he probably would have said that he wasn’t very hungry, and was only going to have a bowl of soup, or on second thought just bread and water, but the rest of us could order as much as we goddamn liked.

  I gave the card back to Lulu. “I don’t want this,” I said. “I want a better one—one that you’ve put some thought and effort into. I have a special box, where I keep all my cards from you and Sophia, and this one can’t go in there.”

  “What?” said Lulu in disbelief. I saw beads of sweat start to form on Jed’s forehead.

  I grabbed the card again and flipped it over. I pulled out a pen from my purse and scrawled “Happy Birthday Lulu Whoopee!” I added a big sour face. “What if I gave you this for your birthday, Lulu—would you like that? But I would never do that, Lulu. No—I get you magicians and giant slides that cost me hundreds of dollars. I get you huge ice cream cakes shaped like penguins, and I spend half my salary on stupid sticker and eraser party favors that everyone just throws away. I work so hard to give you good birthdays! I deserve better than this. So I reject this.” I threw the card back.

  “May I please be excused for a second?” Sophia asked in a small voice. “I need to do something.”

  “Let me see it, Sophia. Hand it over.”

  Eyes wide with terror, Sophia slowly pulled out her own card. It was bigger than Lulu’s, made of red construction paper, but while more effusive, equally empty. She had drawn a few flowers and written “I love you! Happy Birthday to the Best Mommy in the World! #1 Mommy!”

  “That’s nice, Sophia,” I said coldly, “but not good enough either. When I was your age, I wrote poems for my mother on her birthday. I got up early and cleaned the house and made her breakfast. I tried to think of creative ideas and made her coupons that said things like ‘One Free Car Wash.’”

  “I wanted to make something better, but you said I had to play piano,” Sophia protested indignantly.

  “You should have gotten up earlier,” I responded.

  Later that night, I received two much better birthday cards, which I loved and still have.

  I recounted this story to Florence shortly afterward. She laughed in astonishment, but to my surprise, she was not disapproving. “Maybe I should have tried something similar with my kids,” she said thoughtfully. “It just always seemed that if you had to ask for something, it wouldn’t be worth anything.”

  “I think it’s too idealistic to expect children to do the right things on their own,” I said. “Also, if you force them to do what you want, you don’t have to be mad at them.”

  “But they’ll be mad at you,” Florence pointed out.

  I thought of this exchange many years later, the day of the funeral. According to Jewish law, burials must take place as soon as possible after death, ideally within twenty-four hours. The suddenness of Florence’s death was unexpected, and in one day Jed had to arrange for a plot, a rabbi, a funeral home, and the service. As always, Jed handled everything quickly and efficiently, keeping his emotions to himself, but I could tell that his whole body was shaking, his grief too much to bear.

  I found the girls in their bedroom that morning, huddled together. They both looked stunned and frightened. No one so close to them had ever died before. They had never attended a funeral. And Popo had just been laughing in the next room a week earlier.

  I told the girls that they each had to write a short speech about Popo, which they would read at the service that afternoon.

  “No, please, Mommy, don’t make me,” Sophia said tearfully. “I really don’t feel like it.”

  “I can’t,” Lulu sobbed. “Go away.”

  “You have to,” I ordered. “Both of you. Popo would have wanted it.”

  Sophia’s first draft was terrible, rambling and superficial. Lulu’s wasn’t so great either, but I held my elder daughter to a higher standard. Perhaps because I was so upset myself, I lashed out at her. “How could you, Sophia?” I said viciously. “This is awful. It has no insight. It has no depth. It’s like a Hallmark card—which Popo hated.You are so selfish. Popo loved you so much—and you—produce—this!”

  Crying uncontrollably, Sophia shouted back at me, which startled me because like Jed—unlike Lulu and me—Sophia’s anger usually simmers, rarely boiling over. “You have no right to say what Popo would have wanted! You didn’t even like Popo—you have this fixation with Chinese values and respect for elders, but all you did was mock her. Every little thing she did—even making couscous—reflected some terrible moral deficiency for you. Why are you so—Manichaean? Why does everything have to be black or white?”

  I didn’t mock her, I thought to myself indignantly. I was just protecting my daughters from a romanticized model of child-rearing doomed to failure. Besides, I was the one who invited Florence to everything, who made sure she saw her granddaughters all the time. I gave Florence her greatest source of happiness—beautiful, respe
ctful, accomplished grandchildren she could be proud of. How could Sophia, who was so smart and even knew the word Manichaean, not see that and attack me instead?

  Externally, I ignored Sophia’s outburst. Instead, I offered some editorial suggestions—things about her grandmother that she might mention. I asked her to talk about Crystal Lake and going to museums with Florence.

  Sophia took none of my suggestions. Slamming the door after I left, she locked herself in her bedroom and rewrote the speech herself. She refused to show it to me, wouldn’t look at me, even after she had cooled down and changed into a black dress and black tights. And later, at the service when Sophia was at the podium speaking, looking dignified and calm, I didn’t miss the pointed lines: Popo never settled for anything—a dishonest conversation, a film not quite true to the book, a slightly false display of emotion. Popo wouldn’t allow people to put words in my mouth.

  It was a wonderful speech. Lulu’s was too; she had spoken with great perceptiveness and poise for a ten-year-old. I could just imagine a beaming Florence saying, “I’m bursting.”

  On the other hand, Florence was right. The kids were definitely mad at me. But as a Chinese mother, I put that out of my head.

  17

  Caravan to Chautauqua

  The summer after Florence’s passing was a difficult one.To begin with, I ran over Sophia’s foot. She jumped out of my car to grab a tennis racket while I was still backing up, and her left ankle got caught in the front wheel. Sophia and I both fainted. She ended up having surgery under full anesthesia and two big screws put in. Then she had to wear a huge boot and use crutches for the rest of the summer, which put her in a bad mood but at least gave her a lot of time to practice the piano.

  One good thing in our lives, though, was Coco, who got cuter by the day. She had the same strange effect on all four of us: Just looking at her lifted our spirits. This was true even though all my ambitions for her had been replaced by a single dynamic: She would look at me with her pleading chocolate almond eyes—and I would do whatever she wanted, which was usually to go running for four miles, rain, sleet, or shine. In return, Coco was compassionate. I knew she hated it when I yelled at the girls, but she never judged me and knew that I was trying to be a good mother.