Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [16]
“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.
10
Teeth Marks and Bubbles
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