by Amy Chua
“Congratulations, Amy. Goodness knows what I could have been if you’d been my mother,” joked our friend Caren, a former dancer. “I could have been great.”
“Oh, no, Caren, I wouldn’t wish myself on anyone,” I said, shaking my head. “There’s been a lot of yelling and screaming in this house. I didn’t even think Lulu was going to play today. To tell you the truth, it’s been traumatic.”
“But you’ve given your girls so much,” Caren persisted. “A sense of their own abilities, of the value of excellence. That’s something they’ll have all their lives.”
“Maybe,” I said dubiously. “I’m just not so sure anymore.”
It was a great party, and everyone had fun. A big highlight was that Katrin and her family attended. In the five months since her release from the hospital, Katrin had slowly regained strength, although her immune system was still weak, and I panicked every time someone coughed. Katrin looked thin but pretty and almost triumphant carrying Ella.
That night, after all the guests had gone and we’d cleaned up as much as we could, I lay in bed wondering if Lulu might come and hug me the way she did after “The Little White Donkey.” It had been a long time. But she didn’t come, and I went to her bedroom instead.
“Aren’t you glad I made you play the ‘Hebrew Melody’?” I asked her.
Lulu seemed happy, but not particularly warm toward me. “Yes, Mommy,” she said. “You can take the credit.”
“Okay, I will,” I said, trying to laugh. Then I told her that I was proud of her and that she’d been brilliant. Lulu smiled and was gracious. But she seemed distracted, almost impatient for me to leave, and something in her eyes told me that my days were numbered.
31
Red Square
Two days after Lulu’s Bat Mitzvah, we left for Russia. It was a vacation I’d dreamed of for a long time. My parents had raved about St. Petersburg when I was a girl, and Jed and I wanted to take the girls somewhere we’d never visited ourselves.
We needed a vacation. Katrin had just passed through the worst danger zone of acute graft-versus-host disease. We’d basically gone ten months without a day’s break. Our first stop was Moscow. Jed had found us a convenient hotel right in the center of the city. After a short rest, we headed out for our first taste of Russia.
I tried to be goofy and easygoing, the mood my girls most like me in, refraining as best I could from making my usual critical remarks about what they were wearing or how many times they said “like.” But there was something ill-fated about that day. It took us more than an hour standing in two different lines to change money at a place that called itself a bank, and after that the museum we wanted to visit was closed.
We decided to go to Red Square, which was within walking distance of our hotel. The sheer size of the square was overwhelming. Three football fields could have fit between the gate we entered and the onion-domed St. Basil’s Cathedral at the other end. This is not a chic or charming square like the ones in Italy, I thought to myself. It’s a square designed to intimidate, and I envisioned firing squads and battalions of Stalinist guards.
Lulu and Sophia kept sniping at each other, which irritated me. Actually, what really irritated me was that they were all grown up—teenagers my size (in Sophia’s case, three inches taller), instead of cute little girls. “It goes so fast,” older friends had always said wistfully. “Before you know it, your children will be grown and gone, and you’ll be old even though you feel just like the same person you were when you were young.” I never believed my friends when they said that, because it seemed to me they were old. By squeezing out so much from every moment of every day, perhaps I imagined that I was buying myself more time. As a purely mathematical fact, people who sleep less live more.
“That’s Lenin’s Tomb behind the long white wall,” Jed told the girls, pointing. “His body is embalmed and on display. We can go see it tomorrow.” Jed then gave the girls a short tutorial on Russian history and cold war politics.
After roaming around for a bit—we encountered surprisingly few Americans, and far more Chinese, who seemed utterly indifferent to us—we sat down at an outdoor café. It was attached to the famous GUM shopping mall, which is housed in a palatial, arcade-lined nineteenth-century building that takes up almost the entire east side of Red Square, directly across from the fortresslike Kremlin.
We decided to get blinis and caviar, a fun way to start off our first evening in Moscow, Jed and I thought. But when the caviar arrived—thirty U.S. dollars for a tiny receptacle—Lulu said, “Eww, gross,” and wouldn’t try it.
“Sophia, don’t take so much; leave some for the rest of us,” I snapped, then turned to my other daughter. “Lulu, you sound like an uncultured savage. Try the caviar. You can put a lot of sour cream on it.”
“That’s even worse,” Lulu said, and she made a shuddering gesture. “And don’t call me a savage.”
“Don’t wreck the vacation for everyone, Lulu.”
“You’re the one wrecking it.”
I pushed the caviar toward Lulu. I ordered her to try one egg—one single egg.
“Why?” Lulu asked defiantly. “Why do you care so much? You can’t force me to eat something.”
I felt my temper rising. Could I not get Lulu to do even one tiny thing? “You’re behaving like a juvenile delinquent. Try one egg now.”
“I don’t want to,” said Lulu.
“Do it now, Lulu.”
“No.”
“Amy,” Jed began diplomatically, “everyone’s tired. Why don’t we just—”
I broke in, “Do you know how sad and ashamed my parents would be if they saw this, Lulu—you publicly disobeying me? With that look on your face? You’re only hurting yourself. We’re in Russia, and you refuse to try caviar! You’re like a barbarian. And in case you think you’re a big rebel, you are completely ordinary . There is nothing more typical, more predictable, more common and low, than an American teenager who won’t try things.You’re boring, Lulu—boring.”
“Shut up,” said Lulu angrily.
“Don’t you dare say shut up to me. I’m your mother.” I hissed this, but still a few guests glanced over. “Stop trying to act tough to impress Sophia.”
“I hate you! I HATE YOU.” This, from Lulu, was not in a hiss. It was an all-out shout at the top of her lungs. Now the entire café was staring at us.
“You don’t love me,” Lulu spat out. “You think you do, but you don’t. You just make me feel bad about myself every second. You’ve wrecked my life. I can’t stand to be around you. Is that what you want?”
A lump rose in my throat. Lulu saw it, but she went on. “You’re a terrible mother. You’re selfish.You don’t care about anyone but yourself. What—you can’t believe how ungrateful I am? After all you’ve done for me? Everything you say you do for me is actually for yourself.”
She’s just like me, I thought, compulsively cruel. “You are a terrible daughter,” I said aloud.
“I know—I’m not what you want—I’m not Chinese! I don’t want to be Chinese. Why can’t you get that through your head? I hate the violin. I HATE my life. I HATE you, and I HATE this family! I’m going to take this glass and smash it!”
“Do it,” I dared.
Lulu grabbed a glass from the table and threw it on the ground. Water and shards went flying, and some guests gasped. I felt all eyes upon us, a grotesque spectacle.
I’d made a career out of spurning the kind of Western parents who can’t control their kids. Now I had the most disrespectful, rude, violent, out-of-control kid of all.
Lulu was trembling with rage, and there were tears in her eyes. “I’ll smash more if you don’t leave me alone,” she cried.
I got up and ran. I ran as fast as I could, not knowing where I was going, a crazy forty-six-year-old woman sprinting in sandals and crying. I ran past Lenin’s mausoleum and past some guards with guns who I thought might shoot me.
Then I stopped. I had come to the end of Red Square. Th
ere was nowhere to go.
32
The Symbol
Families often have symbols: a lake in the country, Grandpa’s medal, the Sabbath dinner. In our household, the violin had become a symbol.
For me, it symbolized excellence, refinement, and depth—the opposite of shopping malls, megasized Cokes, teenage clothes, and crass consumerism. Unlike listening to an iPod, playing the violin is difficult and requires concentration, precision, and interpretation. Even physically, everything about the violin—the burnished wood, the carved scroll, the horsehair, the delicate bridge, the sounding point—is subtle, exquisite, and precarious.
To me, the violin symbolized respect for hierarchy, standards, and expertise. For those who know better and can teach. For those who play better and can inspire. And for parents.
It also symbolized history. The Chinese never achieved the heights of Western classical music—there is no Chinese equivalent of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—but high traditional music is deeply entwined with Chinese civilization. The seven-stringed qin, often associated with Confucius, has been around for at least twenty-five hundred years. It was immortalized by the great Tang poets, revered as the instrument of the sages.
Most of all, the violin symbolized control. Over generational decline. Over birth order. Over one’s destiny. Over one’s children. Why should the grandchildren of immigrants only be able to play the guitar or drums? Why should second children so predictably be less rule-abiding, less successful at school, and “more social” than eldest siblings? In short, the violin symbolized the success of the Chinese parenting model.
For Lulu, it embodied oppression.
And as I walked slowly back across Red Square, I realized that the violin had begun to symbolize oppression for me too. Just picturing Lulu’s violin case sitting at home by the front door—at the last minute we’d decided to leave it behind, the first time ever—made me think of the hours and hours and years and years of labor, fighting, aggravation, and misery that we’d endured. For what? I also realized that I was dreading with all my heart what lay ahead.
It occurred to me that this must be how Western parents think and why they so often let their kids give up difficult musical instruments. Why torture yourself and your child? What’s the point? If your child doesn’t like something—hates it—what good is it forcing her to do it? I knew as a Chinese mother I could never give in to that way of thinking.
I rejoined my family at the GUM café. The waiters and other guests averted their eyes.
“Lulu,” I said. “You win. It’s over. We’re giving up the violin.”
33
Going West
My Dad, early 1970s
I wasn’t bluffing. I’d always engaged in brinkmanship with Lulu, but this time I was serious. I’m still not exactly sure why. Maybe I finally allowed myself to admire Lulu’s immovable strength for what it was, even if I bitterly disagreed with her choices. Or maybe it was Katrin. Watching her struggle and seeing what became important to her in those desperate months shook things up for all of us.
It could also have been my mother. To me, she’ll always be the quintessential Chinese mother. Growing up, nothing was ever good enough for her. (“You say you got first place, but actually you only tied for first, right?”) She used to practice piano with Cindy three hours a day until the teacher gently told her that they’d hit a limit. Even after I became a professor and invited her to some of my public lectures, she always offered painfully accurate criticisms while everyone else was telling me what a good job I’d done. (“You get too excited and talk too fast. Try to stay cool, and you’ll be better.”) Yet my own Chinese mother had been warning me for a long time that something wasn’t working with Lulu. “Every child is different,” she said. “You have to adjust, Amy. Look what happened to your father,” she added ominously.
So—about my father. I guess it’s time to come clean with something. I’d always told Jed, myself, and everyone else that the ultimate proof of the superiority of Chinese parenting is how the children end up feeling about their parents. Despite their parents’ brutal demands, verbal abuse, and disregard for their children’s desires, Chinese kids end up adoring and respecting their parents and wanting to care for them in their old age. From the beginning, Jed had always asked, “What about your dad, Amy?” I’d never had a good answer.
My father was the black sheep in his family. His mother disfavored him and treated him unfairly. In his household, comparisons among the children were common, and my father—the fourth of six—was always on the short end of the stick. He wasn’t interested in business like the rest of his family. He loved science and fast cars; at age eight, he built a radio from scratch. Compared to his siblings, my father was the family outlaw, risk-taking and rebellious. To put it mildly, his mother didn’t respect his choices, value his individualism, or worry about his self-esteem—all those Western clichés. The result was that my father hated his family—found it suffocating and undermining—and as soon as he had a chance he moved as far away as he could, never once looking back.
What my father’s story illustrates is something I suppose I never wanted to think about. When Chinese parenting succeeds, there’s nothing like it. But it doesn’t always succeed. For my own father it hadn’t. He barely spoke to his mother and never thought about her except in anger. By the end of her life, my father’s family was almost dead to him.
I couldn’t lose Lulu. Nothing was more important. So I did the most Western thing imaginable: I gave her the choice. I told her that she could quit the violin if she wanted and do what she liked instead, which at the time was to play tennis.
At first, Lulu assumed it was a trap. Over the years, the two of us had played so many games of chicken and engaged in such elaborate forms of psychological warfare that she was naturally suspicious. But when Lulu realized I was sincere, she surprised me.
“I don’t want to quit,” she said. “I love the violin. I would never give it up.”
“Oh please,” I said, shaking my head. “Let’s not go in circles again.”
“I don’t want to quit violin,” Lulu repeated. “I just don’t want to be so intense about it. It’s not the main thing I want to do with my life.You picked it, not me.”
It turns out that not being intense had some radical, and for me heartbreaking, implications. First, Lulu decided to quit orchestra, giving up her concertmaster position in order to free up Saturday mornings for tennis. Not a second goes by that this doesn’t cause me pain. When she played her last piece as concertmaster at a recital at Tanglewood and then shook the conductor’s hand, I almost wept. Second, Lulu decided that she didn’t want to go to New York every Sunday for violin lessons anymore, so we gave up our spot in Miss Tanaka’s studio—our precious spot with a famous Juilliard teacher that had been so hard to get!
Instead, I found Lulu a local teacher in New Haven. After a long talk, we also agreed that Lulu would practice by herself, without me or regular coaches, and for just thirty minutes a day—not nearly enough, I knew, to maintain her high level of playing.
For the first few weeks after Lulu’s decision, I wandered around the house like a person who’d lost their mission, their reason for living.
At a recent lunch, I met Elizabeth Alexander, the Yale professor who read her original poem at President Obama’s inauguration. I told her how much I admired her work, and we exchanged a few words.
Then she said, “Wait a minute—I think I know you. Do you have two daughters who studied at the Neighborhood Music School? Aren’t you the mother of those two incredibly talented musicians?”
It turns out that Elizabeth had two kids, younger than mine, who studied at the Neighborhood Music School also, and they’d heard Sophia and Lulu perform on several occasions. “Your daughters are amazing,” she said.
In the old days, I would have said modestly, “Oh they’re really not that good,” hoping desperately that she’d ask me more so I could tell her about Sophia’s and Lulu’s latest mu
sic accomplishments. Now I just shook my head.
“Do they still play?” Elizabeth continued. “I don’t see them at the school anymore.”
“My older daughter still plays piano,” I replied. “My younger daughter—the violinist—she doesn’t really play so much anymore.” This was like a knife to my heart. “She prefers to play tennis instead.” Even if she is ranked #10,000 in New England, I thought to myself. Out of 10,000.
“Oh no!” Elizabeth said. “That’s too bad. I remember she was so gifted. She inspired my two little ones.”
“It was her decision,” I heard myself saying. “It was too much of a time commitment. You know how thirteen-year-olds are.” What a Western parent I’ve become, I thought to myself. What a failure.
But I kept my word. I let Lulu play tennis as she pleased, at her own pace, making her own decisions. I remember the first time she signed herself up for a Novice USTA tournament. She came back in a good mood, visibly charged with adrenaline.
“How did you do?” I asked.
“Oh, I lost—but it was my first tournament, and my strategy was all wrong.”
“What was the score?”
“Love-six, love-six,” Lulu said. “But the girl I played was really good.”
If she’s so good, why is she playing in a Novice tournament? I thought darkly to myself, but aloud I said, “Bill Clinton recently told someYale students that you can only be really great at something if you love it. So it’s good that you love tennis.”
But just because you love something, I added to myself, doesn’t mean you’ll ever be great. Not if you don’t work. Most people stink at the things they love.
34
The Ending
Lulu on court
