Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [63]
I was in Boston a lot during the fall and winter of 2008. Every weekend, our whole family would go up—sometimes we’d make the two-hour drive to Boston immediately after Lulu and I got back from our four-hour trip to Miss Tanaka. Katrin didn’t care at all about having visitors herself—and after the chemo killed off her immune system, visitors were discouraged—but she was worried about Jake and Ella, and it made her happy when we spent time with them. Sophia adored her baby cousin Ella, and Lulu and Jake were best friends. They had similar personalities and looked so much alike, people often thought they were siblings.
Of course, we were all holding our breath for one thing: to see whether Katrin made it into remission. On Day 20, they took the critical biopsy. Another week passed before we got the results. They weren’t good—not at all. Katrin had lost her hair, her skin was peeling, and she had every conceivable gastroenterological complication, but she was not in remission. Her doctor told her she’d need another round of chemo. “It’s not the end of the world,” he said, trying to sound upbeat. But we’d done our research, and we all knew that if the next round didn’t work, the odds of Katrin having a successful transplant were effectively zero. It was her last chance.
28
The Sack of Rice
Sophia, age sixteen
I came home from work one evening to find a carpet of raw rice on the kitchen floor. I was tired and tense. I’d just taught, then met with students for four hours, and I was thinking about driving to Boston after dinner. A big burlap sack lay in shreds, there were rags and plastic bags all over, and Coco and Pushkin were barking up a storm outside. I knew exactly what had happened.
At that moment Sophia came into the kitchen with a broom, a distraught look on her face.
I exploded at her. “Sophia, you did it again! You left the pantry door open, didn’t you? How many times have I told you the dogs would get into the rice? The entire fifty-pound bag is gone—the dogs are probably going to die now.You never listen. You always say, ‘Oh I’m so sorry, I’ll never do that again—I’m so terrible—kill me now,’ but you never change. The only thing you care about is staying out of trouble. You have no concern for anyone else. I’m sick of you not listening—sick of it!”
Jed has always accused me of a tendency to use disproportionate force, attaching huge moral opprobrium to the smallest of oversights. But Sophia’s strategy was usually just to take it and wait for the tempest to pass.
This time, however, Sophia exploded back. “Mommy! I’ll clean it up, okay? You’re acting like I just robbed a bank. Do you know what a good daughter I am? Everyone else I know parties all the time, and they drink and do drugs. And do you know what I do? Every day I run straight home from school. I run. Do you know how weird that is? I suddenly thought the other day, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I running home?’ To practice more piano! You’re always talking about gratitude, but you should be grateful to me. Don’t take out your frustrations on me just because you can’t control Lulu.”
Sophia was completely right. She’d made me proud and my life so easy for sixteen years. But sometimes when I know I’m wrong and dislike myself, something inside me hardens and pushes me to go even further. So I said, “I never asked you to run home—that’s stupid. You must look ridiculous. And if you want to do drugs, go ahead. Maybe you can meet a nice guy in Rehab.”
“The dynamic in this household is ridiculous,”