Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [9]
2. I’m going to count to three, then I want musicality!
3. If the next time’s not PERFECT, I’m going to TAKE ALL YOUR STUFFED ANIMALS AND BURN THEM!
In retrospect, these coaching suggestions seem a bit extreme. On the other hand, they were highly effective. Sophia and I were a great mother-daughter fit. I had the conviction and the tunnel-vision drive. Sophia had the maturity, patience, and empathy I should have had, but didn’t. She accepted my premise that I knew and wanted what was best for her—and she cut me a break when I was bad-tempered or said hurtful things.
When Sophia was nine, she won a local piano award, performing a piece called Butterfly by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. Butterfly is one of Grieg’s sixty-six Lyric Pieces, which are miniature compositions, each meant to evoke a particular mood or image. Butterfly is supposed to be light and carefree—and it takes hours and hours of grueling drudge-drilling to get it to sound that way.
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it’s math, piano, pitching, or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration, and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.
At the Winners Concert where Sophia performed, as I watched her deft fingers fluttering and tumbling up and down the piano like real butterfly wings, I was overcome with pride, exhilaration, and hope. I couldn’t wait for the next day, to work more with Sophia, and to learn more music together.
7
Tiger Luck
Jed and me on our wedding day
Like every Asian American woman in her late twenties, I had the idea of writing an epic novel about mother-daughter relationships spanning several generations, based loosely on my own family’s story. This was before Sophia was born, when I was living in New York, trying to figure out what I was doing working at a Wall Street law firm.
Thank goodness I’m a lucky person, because all my life I’ve made important decisions for the wrong reasons. I started off as an applied mathematics major at Harvard because I thought it would please my parents; I dropped it after my father, watching me struggling with a problem set over winter break, told me I was in over my head, saving me. But then I mechanically switched to economics because it seemed vaguely sciencelike. I wrote my senior thesis on commuting patterns of two-earner families, a subject I found so boring I could never remember what my conclusion was.
I went to law school, mainly because I didn’t want to go to medical school. I did well at law school, by working psychotically hard. I even made it onto the highly competitive Harvard Law Review, where I met Jed and became an executive editor. But I always worried that law really wasn’t my calling. I didn’t care about the rights of criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me. I also wasn’t naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.
After graduating I went to a Wall Street law firm because it was the path of least resistance. I chose corporate practice because I didn’t like litigation. I was actually decent at the job; long hours