Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [57]
Lulu would respond, “Why am I in this family?”
The odd thing was that Lulu actually loved orchestra. She had lots of friends, she liked being a leader, and she had great chemistry with the conductor, Mr. Brooks. I’d see her joking around and laughing spiritedly at rehearsals—maybe because rehearsal was time away from me.
Meanwhile, the disagreements between Jed and me were growing. Privately, he’d tell me furiously to show more restraint or to stop making crazy overgeneralizations about “Westerners” and “Chinese people.” “I know you think you do people a huge favor by criticizing them, so that they can improve themselves,” he’d say, “but have you ever considered that you just make people feel bad?” His biggest criticism was “Why do you insist on saying such glowing things about Sophia in front of Lulu all the time? How do you think that makes Lulu feel? Can’t you see what’s happening?”
“I refuse to cheat Sophia out of praise she deserves, just to ‘protect Lulu’s feelings,’” I’d say, infusing the last three words with as much sarcasm as I could muster. “This way, Lulu knows I think she’s every bit as good as Sophia. She doesn’t need affirmative action.”
But apart from intervening occasionally to defuse blowups, Jed always took my side in front of the girls. From the beginning, we’d had a united-front strategy, and despite his misgivings, Jed didn’t go back on it. Instead, he tried his best to bring balance to the family, making us go on family biking trips, teaching the girls how to play poker and pool, reading them science fiction, Shakespeare, and Dickens.
Then Lulu did something else unimaginable: She went public with her insurgency. As Lulu well knew, Chinese parenting in the West is an inherently closet practice. If it comes out that you push your kids against their will, or want them to do better than other kids, or god forbid ban sleepovers, other parents will heap opprobrium on you, and your children will pay the price. As a result, immigrant parents learn to conceal things. They learn to look jovial in public and pat their kids on the back and say things like, “Good try, buddy!” and “Go team spirit!” No one wants to be a pariah.
That’s why Lulu’s maneuver was so smart. She’d argue loudly with me on the street, at a restaurant, or in stores, and strangers would turn their heads to stare when they heard her say things like, “Leave me alone! I don’t like you. Go away.” When friends were over for dinner and asked her how her violin playing was going, she’d say, “Oh, I have to practice all the time. My mom makes me. I don’t have a choice.” Once she screamed so loudly in a parking lot—she was enraged at something I’d said and refused to get out of the car—that she attracted the attention of a policeman, who came over to see “what the problem was.”
Oddly enough, school remained an inviolable bastion—Lulu left me that much. When Western kids rebel, their grades typically suffer, and occasionally they even flunk out. By contrast, as a half-Chinese rebel, Lulu continued to be a straight-A student, liked by all her teachers and repeatedly described in report cards as generous, kind, and helpful to other students. “Lulu is a joy,” one of her teachers wrote. “She is perceptive and compassionate, a favorite among her classmates.”
But Lulu saw it differently. “I have no friends. No one likes me,” she announced one day.
“Lulu, why do you say that?” I asked anxiously. “Everyone likes you.You’re so funny and pretty.”
“I’m ugly,” Lulu retorted. “And you don’t know anything. How can I have any friends? You won’t let me do anything. I can’t go anywhere. It’s all your fault.You’re a freak.”
Lulu refused to help run the dogs. She refused to take out the garbage. It was glaringly unfair for Sophia to do chores and not Lulu. But how do you physically make someone five feet tall do something they don’t want to do? This problem is not supposed to come up in Chinese households,