crazy chinese mother

Slate article about her book: http://www.slate.com/id/2280712/

for being a professor she's also a really really graceless writer

I found its repetitive rhythm quite effective. Maybe not for a whole book.

it's not like she has a phd in English (or anything)

this chinese success meme hasn't really caught on in england, parental pressure & intense work ethic is seen as a generic 'middle class immigrant' virtue, mainly south asian by virtue of numbers. nigerians also ime, and nigerian kids themselves are often 'omg nigerian parents damn'.

http://highexpectationsasianfather.tumblr.com/

Yeah, it seems to be more of an FOB thing. Most of the immigrant kids at my school were from eastern Europe and they dominated the soccer teams. xpost

This woman's CV indicates that she got both her degrees at Harvard; she must be heartbroken that she only managed to find employment at Yale.

i heard somewhere tracy jordan's kids are mechanical engineering majors at MIT.

In spite of her charming glibness, her self-effacing confessions, her guffaw-inducing rants, Chua’s jaw-dropping methods…are often of the “don’t try this at home” variety: rejecting hurriedly handmade birthday cards, insisting she deserves better; “bloodbath practice sessions”; arranging piano access for multihour practices wherever the family vacationed (which was often and far); even humiliating her daughters to force them to present pitch-perfect tributes at their beloved grandmother’s funeral.

lololololol

tracy morgan i meant. whoever is real.

They really should turn her life into an HBO sitcom.

whoaa cool cover bro http://files0.cityweekend.com.cn/files/images/image-20110105-reld0x5ahi9k53makbjg_t_w300_h300.jpg

interesting exchange here

http://www.quora.com/Parenting/Is-Amy-Chua-right-when-she-explains-Why-Chinese-Mothers-Are-Superior-in-an-op-ed-in-the-Wall-Street-Journal

what a spectacle - this exorbitantly cruel woman not only refusing to apologize for herself but telling you that you're getting parenting wrong

i feel silly for even posting about it b/c the whole thing seems so obviously trolly, on the part of her and her agent and PR people and her publisher and the WSJ, who must be feeling pretty pleased with themselves

chinese mother superiors
http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/071R8zu4ozfi3/610x.jpg

sorry.

wait, so she was playing a role or something...??

xpost

well, her reply to the quora poster basically says she didn't write the headline, the book is more nuanced, and "much of it is about my decision to retreat from the "strict Chinese immigrant" model."
xpost

She got straight As. Skipped 5th grade. Perfect SAT score. Varsity swim team. Student council. Advanced level piano. Harvard early admission. An international post with the Boston Consulting Group in Hong Kong before returning to the U.S. for her Harvard MBA. Six figure salary. Oracle. Peoplesoft. Got engaged to a PhD. Bought a home. Got married.

Her life summed up in one paragraph above.

Her death summed up in one paragraph below.

Committed suicide a month after her wedding at the age of 30 after hiding her depression for 2 years.

Holy ouch.

(Though I winced in expectation of that "punchline" in all honesty)

Guys I don't think that Mudede article was serious

It wasn't, but what connects it to Chua and Bronson is the trope going back to John Locke that parents spoil their children.

I'm open to Bronson, I just wish he wouldn't use "overpraise," where he really means "stupid praise" or "insincere praise." I don't remember ever getting praise for something I did well and saying, "All right, enough of this crap."

The thing about ageism, which inheres in all this, is that it's so impervious: You don't even have to say "some of my best friends are," you can say "I was you once" and "now I know better."

all this self conscious parenting whether controlling/hectoring or praising/nurturing or w/e takes its inspiration from the desire to trivialize the humanity of children, because you know parents are threatened by these all too real little people theyre responsable for

This woman can keep her parenting methods.

I can tell you that, as the middle of three, the most academically successful was also the one with which the least amount of hectoring by my folks.

she's doing a reading in haight/ashbury soon... i kinda want to go, just to see if she gets ambushed by a bunch of hippies. it could be a bloodbath.

I think in SF, chinese mothers and children of chinese mothers outnumber hippies about 30,000:1.

Now if you replaced hippies with crusts you may be on to something.

turns out crazy chinese mom ain't that crazy, just a victim of WSJ's editorial department:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/13/apop011311.DTL&type=printable

"Amy Chua thinks she's raising her kids the Chinese way, but she is really raising them to be what the WSJ considers China to be: a pool of highly skilled labor that someone else will profit from."

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/why_chinese_mothers_are_not_su.html#more

ie this article is not about Chua or her kids but about the WSJ tellings its readers what they want to hear

in chinese, the symbol for "child abuse" is also the symbol for "opportunity."

I dunno, I think I'm relatively cynical about the press but it seems kind of incredible that the WSJ could have totally just picked these misleading excerpts without input from Chua or even allowing her to publish a rebuttal if it is in fact so misleading.

she seems only to have made a token protest - am guessing that she and the book are as described in that interview, but she (and the WSJ) knew exactly how much publicity it'd get if presented as they did. presumably she's relying on all those people who've sent it rocketing up the amazon list to read it (or interviews like this) so she's not demonised forever.

pretty sure amy chua walked into this w/ both eyes open by letting the WSJ edit her piece - after all, she knows better than anyone else what's in the book!

if she is the victim of the WSJ editing department, well who better to screw over than a law professor huh? no possible fallout could come from that

i've been trying to think of the right way to say this but i think something else the WSJ readership probably "wants to hear" in a masochistic kind of way is that today's children are overcosseted and that we'd all better man up if we want to be tough and strong and, well, beat the chinese. as a new parent you hear a lot of this kind of overcompensatory talk from other new bourgie parents (maybe minus the part about the chinese) - a kind of reaction against the dr spock school of listening and encouraging which might be best summed up by the classic, contentious, gina ford books, which promote the idea of rigid iron laws that your newborn must follow. these books are VERY popular (and also VERY disparaged). i still don't know if i've put this the right way. perhaps i can sum it up with a jpg.

http://www.onelargeprawn.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2010/Harden_the_fuck_up.jpg

lol

like seriously, check out the comments on any gina ford "contented little baby" books some time - half of them are like "if you follow these instructions you are committing child abuse" and the other half are like "lol worked for me i guess"

that's an interesting thought

i'd guess it's a rather limited understanding of 'toughness' tho, no muscular xtianity or bloodied knuckles...

but it will help to ironplate their progenies' fragile self confidence when they end up in the bottom quartile at goldman and need to asset-strip a few more surinamese coffee plantations to keep their own kids at philips academy for another year

There are people who read the WSJ (namely me and other people in my family) who don't earn piles of money. Moreover, some wealthy people are first- or second-generation wealth who don't identify with this "we" stuff or this either / or business. If you have to fret too much about how to treat your children, maybe you need some time off.

Honestly, I am sick and tired of these articles where what is probably a small percentage of America's affluent calls attention to its psychological handicaps. Don't know how to raise children? Don't have them!

holy shit, this book is like pageview christmas for everyone.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/01/13/is-extreme-parenting-effective/balancing-freedom-with-discipline

to sum it up, this lady is a see you next tuesday.

Ms. Chua is one half of the kind of Asian-Jewish academic power couple that, as she notes, populates many university towns. Her husband is Jed Rubenfeld, also a Yale law professor, and the author of two successful mystery novels. Ms. Chua, herself the author of two previous books, was reported to have received an advance in the high six figures for “Tiger Mother.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/fashion/16Cultural.html?_r=1&hp

never saw that coming

piano lessons must be expensive

I am gonna force my kids to play an instrument btw

high six figures uhm srlsy?

rip publishing industry

Cheng 10 months ago
Jewish men and asian girls are the new power couple. They make beautiful couples and its a great . I love my Jewish husband and don't regret it ever

http://www.filination.com/blog/2009/03/30/cross-cultural-interracial-relationships-jewish-boys-and-asian-girls/

Ms. Chua’s husband appears only peripherally in “Tiger Mother” — though there is one battle in which she lashes out at him after he worries that she is pushing their daughters to the point that there is “no breathing room” in their home.

this guys such a whipped faygelah, has no say in how his household is run - smh

why hasn't there been an azn version of portnoys complaint written yet

reading the NYT interview, gotta say the PR campaign for this has been magnificent

hubby's better looking than i imagined

http://tlcbooktours.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/JedRubenfeld.jpg

wannabe actor!

When describing his Juilliard years, one can hear a smile in his voice. They were such great years, and it was such fun to be at Juilliard and studying drama, he said, adding that he also made wonderful friends, some of whom—like Marcia Cross and Eriq La Salle—have gone on to successful acting careers.

After his two years at Juilliard, Rubenfeld switched gears yet again, and entered Harvard Law School.