When J.D. Vance was announced as the GOP candidate for vice-president, I, like many people, was reminded of his mystifying memoir of 2016. Who writes a memoir at age 30? What “Hillbilly Elegy” lacked in restraint and reserve it made up for…well, actually, it also lacked in perspective and insight.
Press coverage mentioned that Vance became friends with law professor and author, Amy Chua, while studying at Yale Law School. Chua is perhaps best known for her memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” published in 2011. Surrounded as we are by soft parenting and confusion about what the goal of motherhood and fatherhood is, I was intrigued and tracked down a copy.
The subtitle of Chua’s book reads: “This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western one. But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.” What? It’s an apt subtitle, because the book, just like this string of gibberish, does not make a lot of sense. The fact that a tenured law professor at an elite institution managed to publish a book without a clear thesis is strange. Then again, maybe a memoir is like free verse poetry; no rhyme or reason required.
In the genre of revelatory personal essay, Chua begins with a straightforward explanation of how and why she pushed her daughters into classical music—piano for one, violin for the other—and how her parenting style is informed by what she calls “Chinese parenting.” This she contrasts loosely and liberally with “Western parenting.”
In sweeping generalizations, which are not entirely unwarranted, Chua defines “Chinese parenting” by the experience of many immigrant families from China and surrounding countries with similar cultural values. Again, these are broad and sweeping generalizations, but they seem to have some merit. This Chinese/Eastern parenting philosophy emphasizes practice, drills, disciplined commitment, and achievement. Chua seems to be trying to identify why it is that Indian students so frequently win the spelling bee, Chinese students make up such a large percentage of Ivy League classes, and the Japanese have given the world both the Suzuki Method and Kumon, two philosophies based on relentless repetition.
Part of the lack of specificity may have to do with the fact that Chua was not raised in China. In an awkward moment included in the memoir, Chua tells a room full of dinner guests that she called her daughter “garbage.” When an aghast Western mother responds that, surely, she didn’t call her daughter garbage, Chua insists she really did, rationalizing it as a display of Chinese parenting. To her credit, the interlocutor has the chutzpah to point out that Chua is not a Chinese immigrant; she was raised in the United States of America! You don’t have to be some kind of gentle parenting softie to see the obvious disadvantage of name-calling and screeching to immediate family harmony and long-term child success.
Perhaps in an effort at self-deprecating humor, Chua reveals how much she is herself a “Western parent,” pampering her daughters with expensive private lessons, expensive private school, birthday party clowns, and trained architects to complete school projects at the aforementioned ritzy school. She also frequently capitulates, allowing sleepovers after saying she wouldn’t and other shows of weakness that are decidedly un-Chinese.
It’s unclear how Ms. Chua has aged (I suppose that is none of our business). But she certainly seems like a prime candidate for “Rushing Woman Syndrome.” All that tense sitting, yelling, travel, speaking, not to mention casual little day job as a law professor in the Ivy League, most mere mortal mothers would start to feel some strain.
This lifestyle of intense ambition raises another point: Could Chua have imparted transferrable work ethic without the misery of elite classical music enforced through constant coercion and frequent yelling? While Chua wants to believe that she propelled her daughters to success by micromanaging them and demanding evermore improvement.
How much of their abilities, however, arose from the fact that their parents were highly successful. Children learn by imitation, and in sometimes subtle ways we communicate what we value through our everyday actions. If she cared so much about music and attended every lesson, Chua may as well have learned to play an instrument and enjoyed it herself instead of just sitting tensely on the sidelines and gripping the arms of the chair at every public performance. Brenda Ueland would have some advice for Chua.
I suppose it is Chua who gets the last laugh, all the way to the bank. Having dashed off a troubling, enigmatic memoir that rose to bestseller status by kicking the hornet’s nest of parenting philosophy, bravely telling us how mean she is and precisely how much she screamed at her spirited daughter, she gets royalties until the cows come home and has ingratiated herself with the up-and-coming political elites entering the halls of power. Good for her!
What I cannot forgive her for is how she ended her “Coda” chapter in which we learn this was, in fact, dashed off in media res, with no long-term perspective or meaningful insights. After so proudly telling everyone that she refused to accept her daughter’s first attempts at birthday cards and required them to rewrite their grandmother’s eulogy to display of an acceptable degree of sophistication, Chua closes her book with saccharine, sentimental, poorly written nonsense. After relating her sister’s near-death experience with a rare disease, she writes this chipper conclusion:
“My sister Katrin is doing better now. Life is definitely tough for her, and she’s not out of the woods yet, but she’s a hero and bears everything with grace, doing research around the clock, writing paper after paper, and spending as much time as she can with her kids.”
After this string of platitudes and generalizations, Chua muses about “the lesson” of her sister’s illness, going so far as asking, “But what does it mean to live life to its fullest?” Well, probably not wasting countless hours of our precious time screaming and yelling and fuming at those we love. Now, I have been guilty of poorly written material, hackneyed expressions, and cutting verbal corners. I’ve also been guilty of raising my voice, however much I may wish to report otherwise. But I am glad that these crimes were at least not preceded by haranguing my grieving children into rewriting their grandmother’s eulogy.
Ok, now I’m just being petty. However, I will say that while reading about a mother yelling frequently, I was much less inclined to curb my own tendencies to lack of decorum. How much better it would be to put our focus on people who succeed where we fail instead of consoling ourselves that at least we’re not that bad.
J.D. Vance’s memoir, like this, its predecessor, needed another 30 years in development. We do, as Chua reminds us, “all have to die.” Let us hope by the hour of our death we have some explanation for the life we lived, the words we wrote, and the ideas we adopted. Chua’s narrow version of “Chinese parenting” creates superficial success, but I see little evidence of depth, one of the most important features of a life worth living.
