The Battle Hymn of the Whack Mom

A couple of months ago I was having coffee with an old acquaintance, a woman of Chinese descent and mother to two daughters. She asked if I had read the recent op-ed in the WSJ about Asian methods of mothering. She blushed as she asked me. I said I hadn't. She said that if I did, please understand that it had nothing to do with how Chinese women behave toward their children. She was very embarrassed about the stereotype conveyed in that op-ed.

The op-ed piece was written by Amy Chua to promote her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom. It worked like a charm. As a result of the outrageous 1000 or so words in the Wall Street Journal, the book took off and became an instant bestseller.

Now I've read the book. It was entertaining, but I have no idea what the fuss is about. The Battle Hymn is maybe a 60,000 word thing, not a book really, about a very whack woman who has decided to write a long essay rationalizing her crazy behavior with her children (and her dog). It's inadvertently funny as hell and some of it is undoubtedly exaggerated; maybe more than a bit is just plain made up. There is no doubt about one thing: Ms. Chua is nuts. She's a functioning lunatic sure, but she's still a lunatic. She tries in paragraph after paragraph to put a smiley face on her behavior, but this book is sociopathy dressed up as a parenting guide.

The main conceit of this book is that Amy Chua's behavior with her children, her pet and her husband are normal for her culture. That's just not right. As my friend warned me, Ms. Chua has taken the cultural stereotypes of Asian upbringing and upped them to the 18th power. Along the way, she seems proud to display her bigotry and her consistent pathologic efforts to stereotype the behavior of others. There really is not a lot of difference between Mommy Dearest and this book except that here Ms. Chua tries to couch her dreadful behavior as being something necessary for the advancement of one's children.

There is a big fallacy in this book: children can be molded like pieces of clay into whatever form a parent wants. Ms. Chua believes in this fallacy fervently. She also believes she is behind every success that her children experience. The woman is more than a bit delusional.

It's ironic that Ms. Chua's father is one of the leaders in the science of chaos theory, a field that examines order in nature and physical systems that is essentially unpredictable. That's how children are. You can influence children certainly. But your actions as a parent have an inherently unpredictable component that grows as the child gets older.

The Battle Hymn is a fun read for the inadvertent one liners sprinkled throughout. I laughed out loud at the rationalizations Ms. Chua makes time and time again. It's quick to get through, not particularly well written, and is funny for all the wrong reasons.

The degree to which Ms. Chua pushes her children seems to be what has made this book a lightning rod. How much pushing is too much? I certainly have no idea. Early on in my efforts at parenting, I met someone like Ms. Chua. He wasn't Chinese. He was a European math professor. We had him over for dinner. He kept looking at our daughter the whole time. Afterwards, he talked to me in our living room.

"Your daughter has great math aptitude. She could be a prodigy," he said with all seriousness. How did he determine this by just watching her at dinner? I didn't ask.

"Well she is very bright," I said. I note my daughter was all of three at the time.

"Are you teaching her math?"

"Like what? Counting, yes."

"No, no, not that. A girl like that. She could know calculus by six."

"No, I haven't gone beyond counting."

"You have to! You owe it to your child. You owe it to the world!"

Mr. Math Professor was nuts. I was not going to teach my daughter algebra when she was five and calculus when she was six. Could she have handled it? Who knows? Maybe. But why would I want to do that? I guess I could have done it. Then I could have written a book about it, The Battle Hymn of the Jewish Father. And I would be just as crazy as that math professor and...Amy Chua.

Instead, that one event eventually made me start to write what I'm working on right now, a novel about a math prodigy and her family. Sure there is some mental torture that takes place in the novel. If there wasn't there wouldn't be much of a story, would there? But it's all made up. Made up torture is fun. Really torturing your child with calculus at six is, on the other hand, a very bad idea.