16/11/2016 0 Comments THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER...Last weekend my friend Jishnu and his family visited us. He was reading The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, written by Amy Chua, and spoke quite animatedly about it. Jishnu is an eclectic reader and when he speaks as much about a book as he did about this one, it surely has to be a book worthy of reading. So, I downloaded an e-book version from the Internet and read it over the past two days.
This was the first time that I had read anything written by Amy Chua. I had heard of her when she shared the stage with a personal hero of mine, Richard Dawkins, at the Jaipur Literary Festival earlier this year. But, little beyond that. The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is a book that will never be discussed for its literary merit. It is a book that is entirely about the zeitgeist of an immigrant ethnic group and its mindset in terms of child rearing. It is a book in which the theme overrides all other parametric considerations of a critique. Chua’s book has the capacity to evoke fury and awe in equal measure. Besides parenting techniques, it is also about the conflict between not just individuals but between societal principles. The book is about creating successful products out of children the Chinese way. This is the most charitable I can get about Amy Chua’s parenting techniques that she writes so proudly about in her book. The book also has a cleverly veiled leitmotif – a personal glorification of herself by the authoress. She tries to deflect any overt signs of glorification that might slip through the lines by indulging in a fair amount of self-deprecation from time to time, but the glee (and often, the roar) of the tiger mom is omnipresent through the chapters. Chua’s two daughters Sophia and Louisa are both accomplished musicians, the former a pianist who has performed at The Carnegie Hall and the latter a virtuoso violinist. Amy Chua is herself an accomplished academic, as is her husband Jed Rubenfeld. He parents were successful in their respective careers too. The family is clearly one of achievers. And, Amy Chua seems to be so drunk on this obsession with achieving success that the collateral price to be paid for such success be damned. The major part of the book deals with Chua’s conflict with her younger daughter, Lulu (Louisa). Lulu is the rebel in the family, while the elder daughter Sophia is the obedient one. This emphasis is understandable because conformance of children to the dictatorial attitude of an overbearing parent does not really make for interesting reading. The contrary does. While Chua’s brutish methods pay rich dividends with Sophia, the chickens seem to come home to roost for Chuain the case of Lulu. Chua does succeed in producing a successful musician in Lulu, but loses a daughter in the process. Lulu’s rebellion and a public display of it during their family holiday in Russia, her constant declarations about hating violin (and also her mother) and eventually, her passionately taking up tennis – something that she actually loved – showcases very well the imperfectness of the Chinese parenting model. The Chinese model seems to have no provision for the alienation of children that often follows its implementation. What Lulu’s story drives home very strongly is the fact that every child is a different individual with different skills, mentality, likes, character and indeed, a different degree of obedience. It is foolhardy of any parent to try to fit every child to a predetermined parenting model, simply because this was probably the model that the grandparents deployed while raising the parent, a generation ago. Chua’s book also makes one ponder on the usefulness (or the lack of it) of imposing the parents’ ambitions on the children and the effects that this has on an individual’s childhood. While reading Chua’s book, one cannot help but amaze at the insensitivity of Chua as a mother. This comes across best when she rejects a handmade birthday greeting card that Lulu givers her simply because it does not come up to her exacting standards of quality. On other occasions, Chua undercuts the children’s happiness of vacationing as she drags them around to practice music first before partaking of the joys of the sights and sounds of the city. Clearly, Chuapaints herself as an obsessed mother without a sense of balance or proportion. The book leaves the reader in no doubt about who wears the pants in the Chua-Rubenfeld household. It is Amy Chua all the way and her husband, Jed, comes across as a wimp who seems to have very little say in the upbringing of his kids, except for an occasional whimper of protest that is instantly shot down by his wife. Well, this may not be quite the truth in reality, but the impression that the reader gets after putting down the book is precisely this. As I have mentioned earlier, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother infuriates quite a lot, but it is also a book that is surely going to make every ambitious parent think hard about the manner of raising children. As I put down the book one last time, the thought that crossed my mind was – Thank God, Amy Chua is not my mother!
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