2nd Place at Wulong Adventure Race!
Racing at the Wulong Mountain Quest concluded on September 6th, and results should be online soon. In the meantime, check out the info below!
www.followtravismacy.blogspot.com
www.wulongquest.com.
LITERARY CONNECTION
Title: Tiger, tiger, all too bright
Author(s): Christine Rosen
Source: Commentary. 131.4 (Apr. 2011): p53. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Book review
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
Full Text:
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
BY AMY CHUA
Penguin, 256 pages
American parents have an inexhaustible appetite for being bossed around. Every year publishers let loose an avalanche of books intended to remind the country's mothers and fathers about the need to perfect everything about their children, from diet to fine motor skills.
These books usually adopt a kindly tone; remonstrances, when offered, are done with the parent's fragile ego in mind, and an overall spirit of hopefulness pervades each page. Even the covers are strenuously reassuring, decorated with images of smiling children chasing balloons and rainbows or the author's benevolently smiling face. This is a departure from the old days, when authors like behavioral psychologist James B. Watson issued stern warnings to parents about the dangers of excessive hugging.
A retro moment in parenting advice is upon us, however. In the publishing sensation of the year, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , Amy Chua has taken it upon herself to set straight the weak Western parents of those rainbow-chasing children. She argues that strict Chinese methods of childrearing produce the best children and attempts to prove it by describing in detail the regimen she imposed on her two daughters during the past 17 years. The book is well timed, given current cultural anxieties about the decline of American power and the rise of China. Thirty years ago, we feared the Japanese auto industry; if Chua is to be believed, American parents should start looking at our kids like we used to look at our Oldsmobiles. Like the Olds, little Owen and Olivia will be left in the dust of the competitive global economy if we don't change the way we are raising them.
Chua writes that, from the moment her first child was born, she was determined "not to raise a soft, entitled child--not to let my family fall." She and her husband, both tenured faculty members at Yale Law School, had high expectations for their daughters and expected the gifts to meet them. Indeed, anyone who has cringed while watching a child receive yet another trophy for nothing more than "participation" will cheer Chua's efforts to challenge the empire of American self-esteembuilding. Chinese parents "assume strength, not fragility" in their children, she says, and as a result these parents expect more--in her case, straight A's in school, fluency in Chinese, and extreme discipline in the pursuit of their music lessons.
"What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it" Chua writes. "To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences." A typical Saturday in the Chua household includes hours of music rehearsals, individual practicing, and homework, with only a brief, oxymoronic "fun family activity" to alleviate the hard work. Sundays are the same, absent the scheduled family fun. By the time I finished the book, I had the makings for a new extreme-parenting reality competition--"Survivor: New Haven."
If this were the extent of her advice to parents, she would be a typical, albeit slightly more strident, member of the parenting-advice subculture. Chua herself is a hybrid of several types of mothering styles. She has the immigrant mother's drive to see her children at the top of the class academically, for example, and the stage mom's bizarre need to control every aspect of her daughters' social interactions and public performances.
But what she is above all is very, very anxious about her own status. The book is less a parenting manual or memoir than it is a map of the psyche of an obviously intelligent yet deeply narcissistic upper-middleclass meritocrat. Chua has found a perfectly marketable angle in which to swaddle her anxiety: I'm a Tiger Mom! she tells us again and again. I'm doing things the Chinese way! Look how successful my children will be (and I already am)! In fact, the only oracle Chua regularly consults is herself. And herein lies the trouble.
Self-doubt is not in her nature, though she buries the fact in complex layers of seeming irony. When she overhears her daughters calling her "insane" she claims not to care, and probably doesn't. "I wasn't fragile, like some Western parents," she writes. After transcribing for the reader a stern lecture she gave her daughter, she remarks, "I was deeply moved by my oration." What she is not moved by are any expressions of unhappiness by her daughters; when she sees such expressions, she simply ignores them. "Sophia was up to any challenge," Chua writes, describing her older daughter's pianoplaying. "Best of all, she listened to everything I said." And yet, this is the same daughter who, at the age of six, was discovered to have been gnawing the piano with the same beaver-like industriousness with which she practiced it. Later, Chua is shocked when the girl tells her she was miserable the entire time she was 13.
Nor do the well-meaning efforts of her husband or children to please her meet with success. When they take her out for a birthday dinner, she can't resist sniping that it was "a mediocre Italian restaurant, because Jed had forgotten to make reservations at a better place." In addition to the "stale focaccia," she had--in what has already become a famous anecdote--to endure the indignity of being given poorly rendered handmade birthday cards. Her chilling rejection of her four-year-old's efforts becomes a tirade about both daughters' lack of appreciation for her: "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."
The girls eventually redid the birthday cards, and, as a self-satisfied Chua recounted to her astonished mother-in-law, "If you force them to do what you want, you don't have to be mad at them."
Readers, too, are constantly reminded of the extraordinary amount of time Chua has invested in her children. Chinese parenting is a "never-ending uphill battle requiring a 24-7 time commitment, resilience, and guile," she writes. And yet how did Chua reconcile this commitment with the equally time-consuming challenge of becoming a tenured law professor with a productive publication record at an Ivy League university? Here there is a curious and telling elision. Only once does Chua mention a "Chinese nanny," one who evidently "prepared a silken tofu braised in a light abalone and shitake sauce with a cilantro garnish" for her younger daughter, Lulu. This is all well and good for Lulu, but it is disingenuous of Chua to fail to account for the domestic help she must have had over the years. Today, all too often among the anxious elite, mother's little helper isn't a nip of gin; it's a nanny whose own hours make indentured servitude look appealing.
Similarly, while congratulating herself for knocking the provincialism out of her children, Chua unwittingly betrays unappealing but all-too-common class snobbery. "I was thrown into nursery school not speaking a word of English" Chua told her daughters. "Even in third grade, classmates made fun of me. Do you know where those people are now? They're janitors, that's where" After reading this, I longed for the janitorial staff of Yale University to mount a months-long strike so that Chua might have the opportunity to reconsider the worth of those who clean her office for a living.
Although Tiger Mother is not given to epiphanies, she constructs one that unwittingly reveals the weakness rather than the strength of her philosophy. The book ends with Chua's younger daughter balking at the Stakhanovite schedule she is forced to keep. Eventually she simply refuses to abide by Chua's rules any longer, ditching the violin and taking up tennis instead. Chua claims this taught her to back off a bit from her parenting and respect her daughter's wishes.
But it is revealing that Chua's supposed epiphany came not after the many, many times her daughter told her she wanted to stop playing the violin. It came only after the daughter threw a tantrum in public , smashing a glass and screaming that she hated her life and hated Chua. "I felt all eyes upon us, a grotesque spectacle" she writes. That is: she was horribly embarrassed. Chua might not care if her daughters hate her (she says so several times, in fact), but she cares a great deal about what other people think of her.
That anxiety is the leitmotif of the book. It might also explain the timing of the book's release; it was published while her daughters are still on the cusp of adulthood, having not had to face the challenges of getting into and succeeding in college and finding work afterward. Leaving home turns out to be a crucial moment for kids raised by demanding Chinese parents. A recent study of Asian-American students at the University of California, Irvine, conducted by University of Denver psychologist Julia Dmitrieva found that their freshman grades and performance dropped far more than those of their white peers. Dmitrieva speculates that these children, used to having their parents controlling every aspect of their lives, arrive at college lacking the skills they need to manage their own time. Asian-American girls age 15-24, moreover, have the highest rate of suicide among women in that age group, which may not offer the greatest endorsement for the pressure-cooker parenting Chua describes here.
Such facts are unlikely to sway Chua. She claims to have written a "battle hymn," one that ends with her wiser and properly humbled. But a real humbling can only come to a person who has an ounce of self-awareness. Chua has many things: an impressive resume, a best-selling polemic, oodles of self-confidence, and two obviously appealing children. But in the end, her meritocratic anxiety masquerading as her culture's ancient methods for raising children falls short, for she fails to teach her daughters the most important lesson of all: how to become a good person.
She says nothing to her children about good morals or good judgment, and nowhere in the book is there a brief for teaching children ethical behavior for its own sake. Incessant practicing might win you a concerto competition, but good character and a true moral compass last a lifetime.
CHRISTINE ROSEN is senior editor of the New Atlantis.
Rosen, Christine
Source Citation
Rosen, Christine. "Tiger, tiger, all too bright." Commentary 131.4 (2011): 53+. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 23 Aug. 2011.
Document URL
http://0-go.galegroup.com.sable.jefferson.lib.co.us/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CA252724766&v=2.1&u=lsc&it=r&p=LitRG&sw=w
www.followtravismacy.blogspot.com
www.wulongquest.com.
LITERARY CONNECTION
Title: Tiger, tiger, all too bright
Author(s): Christine Rosen
Source: Commentary. 131.4 (Apr. 2011): p53. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Book review
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
Full Text:
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
BY AMY CHUA
Penguin, 256 pages
American parents have an inexhaustible appetite for being bossed around. Every year publishers let loose an avalanche of books intended to remind the country's mothers and fathers about the need to perfect everything about their children, from diet to fine motor skills.
These books usually adopt a kindly tone; remonstrances, when offered, are done with the parent's fragile ego in mind, and an overall spirit of hopefulness pervades each page. Even the covers are strenuously reassuring, decorated with images of smiling children chasing balloons and rainbows or the author's benevolently smiling face. This is a departure from the old days, when authors like behavioral psychologist James B. Watson issued stern warnings to parents about the dangers of excessive hugging.
A retro moment in parenting advice is upon us, however. In the publishing sensation of the year, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , Amy Chua has taken it upon herself to set straight the weak Western parents of those rainbow-chasing children. She argues that strict Chinese methods of childrearing produce the best children and attempts to prove it by describing in detail the regimen she imposed on her two daughters during the past 17 years. The book is well timed, given current cultural anxieties about the decline of American power and the rise of China. Thirty years ago, we feared the Japanese auto industry; if Chua is to be believed, American parents should start looking at our kids like we used to look at our Oldsmobiles. Like the Olds, little Owen and Olivia will be left in the dust of the competitive global economy if we don't change the way we are raising them.
Chua writes that, from the moment her first child was born, she was determined "not to raise a soft, entitled child--not to let my family fall." She and her husband, both tenured faculty members at Yale Law School, had high expectations for their daughters and expected the gifts to meet them. Indeed, anyone who has cringed while watching a child receive yet another trophy for nothing more than "participation" will cheer Chua's efforts to challenge the empire of American self-esteembuilding. Chinese parents "assume strength, not fragility" in their children, she says, and as a result these parents expect more--in her case, straight A's in school, fluency in Chinese, and extreme discipline in the pursuit of their music lessons.
"What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it" Chua writes. "To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences." A typical Saturday in the Chua household includes hours of music rehearsals, individual practicing, and homework, with only a brief, oxymoronic "fun family activity" to alleviate the hard work. Sundays are the same, absent the scheduled family fun. By the time I finished the book, I had the makings for a new extreme-parenting reality competition--"Survivor: New Haven."
If this were the extent of her advice to parents, she would be a typical, albeit slightly more strident, member of the parenting-advice subculture. Chua herself is a hybrid of several types of mothering styles. She has the immigrant mother's drive to see her children at the top of the class academically, for example, and the stage mom's bizarre need to control every aspect of her daughters' social interactions and public performances.
But what she is above all is very, very anxious about her own status. The book is less a parenting manual or memoir than it is a map of the psyche of an obviously intelligent yet deeply narcissistic upper-middleclass meritocrat. Chua has found a perfectly marketable angle in which to swaddle her anxiety: I'm a Tiger Mom! she tells us again and again. I'm doing things the Chinese way! Look how successful my children will be (and I already am)! In fact, the only oracle Chua regularly consults is herself. And herein lies the trouble.
Self-doubt is not in her nature, though she buries the fact in complex layers of seeming irony. When she overhears her daughters calling her "insane" she claims not to care, and probably doesn't. "I wasn't fragile, like some Western parents," she writes. After transcribing for the reader a stern lecture she gave her daughter, she remarks, "I was deeply moved by my oration." What she is not moved by are any expressions of unhappiness by her daughters; when she sees such expressions, she simply ignores them. "Sophia was up to any challenge," Chua writes, describing her older daughter's pianoplaying. "Best of all, she listened to everything I said." And yet, this is the same daughter who, at the age of six, was discovered to have been gnawing the piano with the same beaver-like industriousness with which she practiced it. Later, Chua is shocked when the girl tells her she was miserable the entire time she was 13.
Nor do the well-meaning efforts of her husband or children to please her meet with success. When they take her out for a birthday dinner, she can't resist sniping that it was "a mediocre Italian restaurant, because Jed had forgotten to make reservations at a better place." In addition to the "stale focaccia," she had--in what has already become a famous anecdote--to endure the indignity of being given poorly rendered handmade birthday cards. Her chilling rejection of her four-year-old's efforts becomes a tirade about both daughters' lack of appreciation for her: "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."
The girls eventually redid the birthday cards, and, as a self-satisfied Chua recounted to her astonished mother-in-law, "If you force them to do what you want, you don't have to be mad at them."
Readers, too, are constantly reminded of the extraordinary amount of time Chua has invested in her children. Chinese parenting is a "never-ending uphill battle requiring a 24-7 time commitment, resilience, and guile," she writes. And yet how did Chua reconcile this commitment with the equally time-consuming challenge of becoming a tenured law professor with a productive publication record at an Ivy League university? Here there is a curious and telling elision. Only once does Chua mention a "Chinese nanny," one who evidently "prepared a silken tofu braised in a light abalone and shitake sauce with a cilantro garnish" for her younger daughter, Lulu. This is all well and good for Lulu, but it is disingenuous of Chua to fail to account for the domestic help she must have had over the years. Today, all too often among the anxious elite, mother's little helper isn't a nip of gin; it's a nanny whose own hours make indentured servitude look appealing.
Similarly, while congratulating herself for knocking the provincialism out of her children, Chua unwittingly betrays unappealing but all-too-common class snobbery. "I was thrown into nursery school not speaking a word of English" Chua told her daughters. "Even in third grade, classmates made fun of me. Do you know where those people are now? They're janitors, that's where" After reading this, I longed for the janitorial staff of Yale University to mount a months-long strike so that Chua might have the opportunity to reconsider the worth of those who clean her office for a living.
Although Tiger Mother is not given to epiphanies, she constructs one that unwittingly reveals the weakness rather than the strength of her philosophy. The book ends with Chua's younger daughter balking at the Stakhanovite schedule she is forced to keep. Eventually she simply refuses to abide by Chua's rules any longer, ditching the violin and taking up tennis instead. Chua claims this taught her to back off a bit from her parenting and respect her daughter's wishes.
But it is revealing that Chua's supposed epiphany came not after the many, many times her daughter told her she wanted to stop playing the violin. It came only after the daughter threw a tantrum in public , smashing a glass and screaming that she hated her life and hated Chua. "I felt all eyes upon us, a grotesque spectacle" she writes. That is: she was horribly embarrassed. Chua might not care if her daughters hate her (she says so several times, in fact), but she cares a great deal about what other people think of her.
That anxiety is the leitmotif of the book. It might also explain the timing of the book's release; it was published while her daughters are still on the cusp of adulthood, having not had to face the challenges of getting into and succeeding in college and finding work afterward. Leaving home turns out to be a crucial moment for kids raised by demanding Chinese parents. A recent study of Asian-American students at the University of California, Irvine, conducted by University of Denver psychologist Julia Dmitrieva found that their freshman grades and performance dropped far more than those of their white peers. Dmitrieva speculates that these children, used to having their parents controlling every aspect of their lives, arrive at college lacking the skills they need to manage their own time. Asian-American girls age 15-24, moreover, have the highest rate of suicide among women in that age group, which may not offer the greatest endorsement for the pressure-cooker parenting Chua describes here.
Such facts are unlikely to sway Chua. She claims to have written a "battle hymn," one that ends with her wiser and properly humbled. But a real humbling can only come to a person who has an ounce of self-awareness. Chua has many things: an impressive resume, a best-selling polemic, oodles of self-confidence, and two obviously appealing children. But in the end, her meritocratic anxiety masquerading as her culture's ancient methods for raising children falls short, for she fails to teach her daughters the most important lesson of all: how to become a good person.
She says nothing to her children about good morals or good judgment, and nowhere in the book is there a brief for teaching children ethical behavior for its own sake. Incessant practicing might win you a concerto competition, but good character and a true moral compass last a lifetime.
CHRISTINE ROSEN is senior editor of the New Atlantis.
Rosen, Christine
Source Citation
Rosen, Christine. "Tiger, tiger, all too bright." Commentary 131.4 (2011): 53+. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 23 Aug. 2011.
Document URL
http://0-go.galegroup.com.sable.jefferson.lib.co.us/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CA252724766&v=2.1&u=lsc&it=r&p=LitRG&sw=w
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