Amy Chua - Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

“You shouldn’t have said six hours, Lulu — she’s going to get the wrong idea. It’s only six hours when you waste five of them.”

Lulu ignored this. “Daniela felt so sorry for me. She asked when I had time to do anything else. I told her that I don’t really have time for anything fun, because I’m Chinese.”

I bit my tongue and said nothing. Lulu was always collecting allies, marshaling her troops. But I didn’t care. In America, everyone was always going to take her side. I wasn’t going to let peer pressure get to me. The few times I did, I regretted it.

Once, for example, I allowed Sophia to attend a sleepover party. This was an exception. When I was little, my mother used to say, “Why do you need to sleep at someone else’s house? What’s wrong with your own family?” As a parent, I took the same position, but on this occasion Sophia begged and begged me, and in a moment of uncharacteristic weakness, I finally gave in. The next morning, she came back not only exhausted (and unable to practice piano well) but crabby and miserable. It turns out that sleepovers aren’t fun at all for many kids — they can be a kind of punishment parents unknowingly inflict on their children through permissiveness. After pumping Sophia for information, I learned that A, B, and C had excluded D; B had gossiped viciously about E when she was in the other room; and F at age twelve had talked all night about her sexual exploits. Sophia didn’t need to be exposed to the worst of Western society, and I wasn’t going to let platitudes like “Children need to explore” or “They need to make their own mistakes” lead me astray.

There are many things the Chinese do differently from Westerners. There’s the question of extra credit, for example. One time, Lulu came home and told me about a math test she’d just taken. She said she thought it had gone extremely well, which is why she didn’t feel the need to do the extra-credit problems.

I was speechless for a second, uncomprehending. “Why not?” I asked. “Why didn’t you do them?”

“I didn’t want to miss recess.”

A fundamental tenet of being Chinese is that you always do all of the extra credit all of the time.

“Why?” asked Lulu, when I explained this to her.

For me this was like asking why I should breathe.

“None of my friends do it,” Lulu added.

“That’s not true,” I said. “I’m 100 % sure that Amy and Junno did the extra credit.” Amy and Junno were the Asian kids in Lulu’s class. And I was right about them; Lulu admitted it.

“But Rashad and Ian did the extra credit too, and they’re not Asian,” she added.

“Aha! So many of your friends did do the extra credit! And I didn’t say only Asians do extra credit. Anyone with good parents knows you have to do the extra credit. I’m in shock, Lulu. What will the teacher think of you?You went to recess instead of doing extra credit ?” I was almost in tears. “Extra credit is not extra. It’s just credit . It’s what separates the good students from the bad students.”

“Aww — recess is so fun,” Lulu offered as her final sally. But after that Lulu, like Sophia, always did the extra credit. Sometimes the girls got more points on extra credit than on the test itself — an absurdity that would never happen in China. Extra credit is one reason that Asian kids get such notoriously good grades in the United States.

Rote drilling is another. Once, Sophia came in second on a multiplication speed test, which her fifth-grade teacher administered every Friday. She lost to a Korean boy named Yoon-seok. Over the next week, I made Sophia do twenty practice tests (of 100 problems each) every night, with me clocking her with a stopwatch. After that, she came in first every time. Poor Yoon-seok. He went back to Korea with his family, but probably not because of the speed test.

Practicing more than everyone else is also why Asian kids dominate the top music conservatories. That’s how Lulu kept impressing Mr. Shugart every Saturday with how fast she improved. “You catch on so quickly,” he’d frequently say. “You’re going to be a great violinist.”

In the fall of 2005, when Lulu was nine, Mr. Shugart said, “Lulu, I think you’re ready to play a concerto. What do you say we take a break from the Suzuki books?” He wanted her to learn Viotti’s Concerto no. 23 in G Major. “If you work really hard, Lulu, I bet you can have the first movement ready for the winter recital. The only thing is,” he added thoughtfully, “there’s a tough cadenza in the piece.” Mr. Shugart was wily, and he understood Lulu. A cadenza is a special section, usually near the end of a concerto movement, where the soloist plays unaccompanied. “It’s kind of a chance to show off,” said Mr. Shugart, “but it’s really long and difficult. Most kids your age wouldn’t be able to play it.”

Lulu looked interested. “How long is it?”

“The cadenza?” said Mr. Shugart. “Oh, very long. About a page.”

“I think I can do it,” Lulu said. She had a lot of confidence, and, as long as it wasn’t me forcing it on her, she loved a challenge.

We plunged into the Viotti, and the battles escalated. “Calm down, Mommy,” Lulu would say maddeningly. “You’re starting to get hysterical and breathe all funny again. We still have a month to practice.” All I could think of was the work ahead of us. Although relatively simple, the Viotti concerto was a big step up from what Lulu was used to. The cadenza was filled with rapid string crossings as well as “double stops” and “triple stops”—notes played simultaneously on two or three different strings, the equivalent of chords on the piano — which were difficult to play in tune.

I wanted the cadenza to be good. It became a kind of obsession for me. The rest of the Viotti was okay — parts of it were a bit pedantic — but Mr. Shugart was right: The cadenza made the whole piece worthwhile. And about a week before the recital, I realized that Lulu’s cadenza had the potential to be spectacular. She made its melodic parts sing out exquisitely; somehow that was intuitive for her. But not nearly so good were the sections that required technical precision — in particular, a series of double-stop-string-crossing zingers near the end. During practice, it was always hit or miss with those passages. If Lulu was in a good mood and concentrating, she could nail them. If she was in a bad or distracted mood, the cadenza fell flat. The worst thing was that I had no control over which mood it would be.

Then I had an epiphany. “Lulu,” I said, “I have a deal to propose.”

“Oh no, not again,” Lulu groaned.

“This is a good one, Lulu.You’ll like it.”

“What — practice two hours, and I won’t have to set the table? No thanks, Mommy.”

“Lulu, just listen for a second. If you play the cadenza really well next Saturday — better than you’ve ever played it — I’ll give you something you won’t believe, something that I know you will love .”

Lulu looked scornful. “You mean like a cookie? Or five minutes on a computer game?”

I shook my head. “Something so amazing even you won’t be able to resist.”

“A playdate?”

I shook my head.

“Chocolate?”

I shook my head again, and it was my turn to be scornful. “You think that I think you can’t resist chocolate ? I know you a little better than that, Lulu. I have in mind something you’ll never EVER guess.”

And I was right. She never guessed, perhaps because it was so wildly out of the realm of possibility given the available facts.

In the end, I told her. “It’s a pet. A dog. If you give me a great cadenza next Saturday, I’ll get us a dog.”