Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (21 page)
Read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother Online
Authors: Amy Chua
Tags: #Asian American Studies, #Social Science, #Mothers, #Chinese American women, #General, #United States, #Mothers and daughters - China, #Personal Memoirs, #Mothers - United States, #China, #Cultural Heritage, #Biography & Autobiography, #Mothers and daughters, #Ethnic Studies, #Chua; Amy, #Mothers and daughters - United States, #Biography
Around the same time, Lulu started talking back to me and openly disobeying me in front of my parents when they visited. This might not sound like a big deal to Westerners, but in our household it was like desecrating a temple. In fact, it was so out of the realm of the acceptable that no one knew what to do. My father pulled me aside and privately urged me to let Lulu give up the violin. My mother, who was close to Lulu (they were e-mail pen pals), told me flat out, “You have to stop being so stubborn, Amy.You’re too strict with Lulu—too extreme.You’re going to regret it.”
“Why are you turning on me now?” I shot back. “This is how you raised me.”
“You can’t do what Daddy and I did,” my mother replied. “Things are different now. Lulu’s not you—and she’s not Sophia. She has a different personality, and you can’t force her.”
“I’m sticking to the Chinese way,” I said. “It works better. I don’t care if nobody supports me.You’ve been brainwashed by your Western friends.”
My mother just shook her head. “I’m telling you, I’m worried about Lulu,” she said. “There’s something wrong in her eyes.” This hurt me more than anything.
Instead of a virtuous circle, we were in a vicious spiral downward. Lulu turned thirteen and grew more alienated and resentful. She wore a constant apathetic look on her face, and every other word out of her mouth was “No” or “I don’t care.” She rejected my vision of a valuable life. “Why can’t I hang out with my friends like everyone else does?” she’d demand. “Why are you so against shopping malls? Why can’t I have sleepovers? Why does every second of my day have to be filled up with work?”
“You’re concertmaster, Lulu,” I’d reply. “It’s a great honor they’ve given you, and you have a huge responsibility. The entire orchestra is counting on you.”
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, and I had no answer. So I did the only thing I knew: I fought fire with fire. I gave not one inch. I called her a disgrace as a daughter, to which Lulu replied, “I know, I know. You’ve told me.” I told her she ate too much. (“Stop it. You’re diseased.”) I compared her to Amy Jiang, Amy Wang, Amy Liu, and Harvard Wong—all first-generation Asian kids—none of whom ever talked back to their parents. I asked her what I had done wrong. Had I not been strict enough? Given her too much? Allowed her to mix with bad-influence kids? (“Don’t you dare insult my friends.”) I told her I was thinking of adopting a third child from China, one who would practice when I told her to, and maybe even play the cello in addition to the violin and piano.
“When you’re eighteen,” I would shout as she stalked away from me up the stairs, “I’ll let you make all the mistakes you want. But until then, I will not give up on you.”
“I
want
you to give up on me!” Lulu yelled back more than once.
want
you to give up on me!” Lulu yelled back more than once.
When it came to stamina, Lulu and I were evenly matched. But I had an advantage. I was the parent. I had the car keys, the bank account, the right not to sign permission slips. And that was all under U.S. law.
“I need a haircut,” Lulu said one day.
I replied, “After you spoke to me so rudely and refused to play the Mendelssohn musically, you expect me to get in the car now and drive you where you want?”
“Why do I have to bargain for everything?” Lulu asked bitterly.
That night, we had another big argument, and Lulu locked herself in her room. She refused to come out and wouldn’t answer when I tried to talk to her through the door. Much later, from my study, I heard the click of her door unlocking. I went to see her and found her sitting calmly on her bed.
“I think I’m going to go to sleep now,” she said in a normal voice. “I’ve finished all my homework.”
But I wasn’t listening. I was staring at her.
Lulu had taken a pair of scissors and cut her own hair. On one side, it hung unevenly to about her chin. On the other, it was chopped off above the ear in an ugly, jagged line.
My heart skipped a beat. I almost exploded at her, but something—I think it was fear—made me hold my tongue.
A moment passed.
“Lulu—” I began.
“I like short hair,” she interrupted.
I glanced away. I couldn’t stand to look at her. Lulu had always had hair that everyone envied: wavy, brown-black—a Chinese-Jewish special. Part of me wanted to scream hysterically at Lulu and throw something at her. Another part of me wanted to wrap my arms around her and cry uncontrollably.
Instead, I said calmly, “I’ll make an appointment with a hair salon first thing in the morning. We’ll find someone to fix it.”
“Okay.” Lulu shrugged.
Later, Jed said to me, “Something has to change, Amy. We have a serious problem.”
For the second time that night, I felt like crying uncontrollably. But instead, I rolled my eyes. “It’s not a big deal, Jed,” I said. “Don’t create a problem where there isn’t one. I can handle this.”
25
Darkness
My little sister Katrin and me in the early eighties
When I was growing up, one of my favorite things was to play with my third sister, Katrin. Maybe because she was seven years younger than me, there was no rivalry or conflict. She was also preposterously cute. With her shiny black eyes, her shiny bowl haircut, and her rosebud lips, she was constantly attracting the attention of strangers, and once won a JCPenney photo contest that she hadn’t even entered. Because my mother was often busy with my youngest sister, Cindy, my second sister, Michelle, and I took turns taking care of Katrin.
I have great memories from those days. I was bossy and confident, and Katrin idolized her big sister, so it was a perfect fit. I made up games and stories, and taught her how to play jacks and Chinese hopscotch and how to jump rope double Dutch. We played restaurant; I was the chef and the waiter, and she was the customer. We played school; I was the teacher, and she, along with five stuffed animals, was my student (Katrin excelled at my courses). I held McDonald’s carnivals to raise money for muscular dystrophy; she manned the booths and collected money.
Thirty-five years later, Katrin and I were still close. The two of us were the most alike of the four sisters, at least on the surface. She and I both had two Harvard degrees (actually, she had three, because of her M.D./Ph.D.), we both married Jewish men, we both went into academics like our father, and we both had two children.
A few months before Lulu chopped off her hair, I got a call from Katrin, who taught and ran a lab out at Stanford. It was the worst call I have ever received in my life.
She was sobbing. She told me that she had been diagnosed with a rare, almost certainly fatal leukemia.
Impossible, I thought confusedly. Leukemia striking my family—my lucky family—for a second time?
But it was true. Katrin had been feeling exhausted, nauseated, and short of breath for several months. When she finally saw a doctor, the results of the blood tests were unmistakable. In a cruel coincidence, the leukemia she had was caused by the very kind of cell mutation she was studying in her lab.
“I’m probably not going to live very long,” she said, crying. “What’s going to happen to Jake? And Ella won’t even know me.” Katrin’s son was ten, her daughter barely one. “You have to make sure she knows who I was.You have to promise me, Amy. I better get some pictures—” And she broke off.
I was in shock. I just couldn’t believe it. An image of Katrin at ten flashed into my head, and it was impossible to put that together with the word
leukemia
. How could this be happening to Katrin—
Katrin
? And my parents! How could they take this—it would kill them.
leukemia
. How could this be happening to Katrin—
Katrin
? And my parents! How could they take this—it would kill them.
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