Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [19]
But probably most important, we stuck with the Chinese model because the early results were hard to quarrel with. Other parents were constantly asking us what our secret was. Sophia and Lulu were model children. In public, they were polite, interesting, helpful, and well spoken. They were A students, and Sophia was two years ahead of her classmates in math.They were fluent in Mandarin. And everyone marveled at their classical music playing. In short, they were just like Chinese kids.
Except not quite. We took our first trip to China with the girls in 1999. Sophia and Lulu both have brown hair, brown eyes, and Asianesque features; they both speak Chinese. Sophia eats all kinds of organs and organisms—duck webs, pig ears, sea slugs—another critical aspect of Chinese identity. Yet everywhere we went in China, including cosmopolitan Shanghai, my daughters drew curious local crowds, who stared, giggled, and pointed at the “two little foreigners who speak Chinese.” At the Chengdu Panda Breeding Center in Sichuan, while we were taking pictures of newborn giant pandas—pink, squirming, larvalike creatures that rarely survive—the Chinese tourists were taking pictures of Sophia and Lulu.
Back in New Haven a few months later, when I referred in passing to Sophia as being Chinese, she interrupted me: “Mommy—I’m not Chinese.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, Mommy—you’re the only one who thinks so. No one in China thinks I’m Chinese. No one in America thinks I’m Chinese.”
This bothered me intensely, but all I said was, “Well, they’re all wrong. You are Chinese.”
Sophia had her first big music moment in 2003 when she won the Greater New Haven Concerto Competition at the age of ten, earning the right to perform as a piano soloist with a New Haven youth orchestra at Yale University’s Battell Chapel. I went wild. I blew up the article about Sophia in the local newspaper and framed it. I invited more than a hundred people to the concert and planned a huge after-party. I bought Sophia her first full-length gown and new shoes. All four grandparents came; the day before the performance, my mother was in our kitchen making hundreds of Chinese pearl balls (pork meatballs covered with sticky white rice), while Florence made ten pounds of gravlax (salmon cured with sea salt under a brick).
Meanwhile, on the practice front, we kicked into overdrive. Sophia was going to perform Mozart’s Rondo for Piano and Orchestra in D Major, one of the composer’s most uplifting pieces. Mozart is notoriously difficult. His music is famously sparkling, brilliant, effervescent, and effortless—adjectives that strike terror in the hearts of most musicians. There’s a saying that only the young and old can play Mozart well: the young because they are oblivious and the old because they are no longer trying to impress anyone. Sophia’s Rondo was classic Mozart. Her teacher Michelle told her, “When you’re playing your runs and trills, think of champagne or an Italian soda, and all those bubbles rising to the top.”
Sophia was up to any challenge. She was an unbelievably quick study, with lightning-quick fingers. Best of all, she listened to everything I said.
By then, I had become a drill sergeant. I broke the Rondo down, sometimes by section, sometimes by goal. We’d spend one hour focusing just on articulation (clarity of notes), then another on tempo (with the metronome), followed by another on dynamics (loud, soft, crescendo, decrescendo), then another on phrasing (shaping musical lines), and so on. We worked late into the night every day for weeks. I spared no harsh words, and got even tougher when Sophia’s eyes filled with tears.
When the big day finally arrived, I was suddenly paralyzed; I could never be a performer myself. But Sophia just seemed excited. At Battell Chapel, when she walked out onto the stage to take her soloist’s bow, she had a big smile