Amy Chua - Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

If you think holding something in place with your collarbone and lower left jaw is uncomfortable, you are correct. Add to this a wooden chin rest and metal clamps jutting into your neck, and the result is the “violin hickey”: a rough, often irritated red blotch just under the chin, which most violinists and violists have, and even consider a badge of honor.

Then there’s “intonation”—meaning how in tune you are — another reason I think the violin is harder than the piano, at least for beginners. With piano you just push a key and you know what note you’re getting. With violin, you have to place your finger exactly on the right spot on the fingerboard — if you’re even just 1/10 of a centimeter off, you’re not perfectly in tune. Even though the violin has only four strings, it can produce 53 different notes measured by half-step increments — and infinitely more tone colors by using different strings and bowing techniques. It’s often said that the violin can capture every emotion and that it’s the instrument closest to the human voice.

One thing that the piano and violin have in common — with each other but also with many sports — is that you can’t play extraordinarily well unless you’re relaxed. Just as you can’t have a killer tennis serve or throw a baseball really far unless you keep your arm loose, you can’t produce a mellifluous tone on the violin if you squeeze the bow too tightly or mash down on the strings — mashing is what makes the horrible scratchy sound. “Imagine that you’re a rag doll,” Mr. Shugart would tell Lulu. “Floppy and relaxed, and not a care in the world. You’re so relaxed your arm feels heavy from its own weight…. Let gravity do all the work…. Good, Lulu, good.”

“RELAX!” I screamed at home. “Mr. Shugart said RAG DOLL!” I always tried my best to reinforce Mr. Shugart’s points, but things were tough with Lulu, because my very presence made her edgy and irritable.

Once, in the middle of a practice session she burst out, “ Stop it, Mommy. Just stop it. ”

“Lulu, I didn’t say anything,” I replied. “I didn’t say one word.”

“Your brain is annoying me,” Lulu said. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“I’m not thinking anything,” I said indignantly. Actually, I’d been thinking that Lulu’s right elbow was too high, that her dynamics were all wrong, and that she needed to shape her phrases better.

“Just turn off your brain!” Lulu ordered. “I’m not going to play anymore unless you turn off your brain.”

Lulu was always trying to provoke me. Getting into an argument was a way of not practicing. That time I didn’t bite. “Okay,” I said calmly. “How do you want me to do that?” Giving Lulu control over the situation sometimes defused her temper.

Lulu thought about it. “Hold your nose for five seconds.”

A lucky break. I complied, and the practicing resumed. That was one of our good days.

Lulu and I were simultaneously incompatible and inextricably bound. When the girls were little, I kept a computer file in which I recorded notable exchanges word-for-word. Here’s a conversation I had with Lulu when she was about seven:

A: Lulu, we’re good buddies in a weird way.

L: Yeah — a weird, terrible way.

A:!!

L: Just kidding (giving Mommy a hug).

A: I’m going to write down what you said.

L: No, don’t! It will sound so mean!

A: I’ll put the hug part down.

One nice by-product of my extreme parenting was that Sophia and Lulu were very close: comrades-in-arms against their overbearing, fanatic mother. “She’s insane,” I’d hear them whispering to each other, giggling. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t fragile, like some Western parents. As I often said to the girls, “My goal as a parent is to prepare you for the future — not to make you like me.”

One spring, the director of the Neighborhood Music School asked Sophia and Lulu to perform as a sister duo at a special gala event honoring the soprano opera singer Jessye Norman, who played Aida inVerdi’s spectacular opera. As it happens, my father’s favorite opera is Aida —Jed and I were actually married to the music of Aida ’s Triumphal March — and I arranged for my parents to come from California. Wearing matching dresses, the girls performed Mozart’s Sonata forViolin and Piano in E Minor. I personally think the piece was too mature for them — the exchanges back and forth between the violin and the piano didn’t quite work, didn’t sound like conversations — but no one else seemed to notice, and the girls were big hits. Afterward, Jessye Norman said to me, “Your daughters are so talented — you’re very lucky.” Fights and all, those were some of the best days of my life.

Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can’t. Once when I was young — maybe more than once — when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me “garbage” in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn’t damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn’t actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.

As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.

“Oh dear, it’s just a misunderstanding. Amy was speaking metaphorically — right, Amy? You didn’t actually call Sophia ‘garbage.’ ”

“Um, yes, I did. But it’s all in the context,” I tried to explain. “It’s a Chinese immigrant thing.”

“But you’re not a Chinese immigrant,” somebody pointed out.

“Good point,” I conceded. “No wonder it didn’t work.”

I was just trying to be conciliatory. In fact, it had worked great with Sophia.

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable — even legally actionable — to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, “Hey fatty — lose some weight.” By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of “health” and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her “beautiful and incredibly competent.” She later told me that made her feel like garbage.) Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, “You’re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you.” By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out.

I’ve thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.

First, I’ve noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children’s self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children’s psyches. Chinese parents aren’t. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.