Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [13]
Interestingly, the French composer Claude Debussy had the same reaction to the gamelan orchestra as my mother-in-law. For Debussy, as for Florence, the gamelan was a revelation. He wrote to a friend in 1895 that Javanese music was “able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable shades.” He later published an article describing the Javanese as “wonderful peoples who learn music as easily as one learns to breathe. Their school consists of the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, and a thousand other tiny noises, which they listen to with great care, without ever having consulted any of those dubious treatises.”
Personally, I think Debussy was just going through a phase, fetishizing the exotic. The same thing happened to Debussy’s fellow Frenchmen Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin, who started painting Polynesian natives all the time. A particularly disgusting variation of this phenomenon can be found in modern-day California: men with Yellow Fever, who date only Asian women—sometimes dozens in a row—no matter how ugly or which kind of Asian. For the record, Jed did not date any Asian women before me.
Maybe the reason I can’t appreciate gamelan music, which I heard when we visited Indonesia in 1992, is that I fetishize difficulty and accomplishment. I don’t know how many hundreds of times I’ve yelled at Lulu, “Everything valuable and worthwhile is difficult! Do you know what I went through to get this job at Yale?” Gamelan music is mesmerizing because it is so simple, unstructured, and repetitious. By contrast, Debussy’s brilliant compositions reflect complexity, ambition, ingenuity, design, conscious harmonic exploration—and yes, gamelan influences, at least in some of his works. It’s like the difference between a bamboo hut, which has its charm, and the Palace of Versailles.
In any case, I rejected the gong for Lulu, as I did the recorder. My instinct was just the opposite of my in-laws’ . I believed that the only way for Lulu to get out from under the shadow of her high-performing sister was to play an even more difficult, more virtuosic instrument. That’s why I chose the violin. The day I made that decision—without consulting Lulu, ignoring the advice of everyone around me—was the day I sealed my fate.
9
The Violin
One jarring thing that many Chinese people do is openly compare their children. I never thought this was so bad when I was growing up, because I always came off well in the comparison. My Dragon Lady grandmother—the rich one, on my father’s side—egregiously favored me over all my sisters. “Look how flat that one’s nose is,” she would cackle at family gatherings, pointing at one of my siblings. “Not like Amy, who has a fine, high-bridged nose. Amy looks like a Chua. That one takes after her mother’s side of the family and looks like a monkey.”
Admittedly, my grandmother was an extreme case. But Chinese people do similar things all the time. I was recently at a Chinese medicine store, and the owner told me that he had a six-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. “My daughter,” he said, “she smart. Only one problem: not focused. My son—he not smart. My daughter smart.” Another time, my friend Kathleen was at a tennis tournament and fell into conversation with a Chinese mother who was watching her daughter play a match. The mother told Kathleen that her daughter, who was a student at Brown, was probably going to lose. “This daughter so weak,” she said, shaking her head. “Her older sister—much better. She go to Harvard.”
I know now that parental favoritism is bad and poisonous. But in defense of the Chinese, I have two points. First, parental favoritism can be found in all cultures. In Genesis, Isaac favors Esau, whereas Rebekah loves Jacob better. In the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, there are always three siblings—and they are never treated