Since I first read the excerpted piece back in January 2011 in the Wall Street Journal from the book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” by Amy Chua titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” the term “Tiger Mom” has been part of the American vernacular to symbolize ridiculous Asian & Asian American parental practices focused on raising perfect Model Minority high achieving, SAT acing and Ivy League accepted children at-any-and-all-costs.
I think the last time I had blogged about Amy Chua, it was about her daughter Sophia and her giving a high school commencement speech due to the fact that she graduated as valedictorian and had decided to attend Harvard over Yale, where her Tiger Mom is a professor. So I was kind of shocked about how time flies by when I saw a friend post this Harvard [Alumni] Magazine article about the younger daughter, Lulu finishing her freshman year and her older sister, Sophia, having just graduated – and apparently both of them are normal:
“Since the book was published in 2011, Chua’s two Jewish-Chinese-American daughters, Lulu and her elder sister, Sophia ’15, have captured the public imagination. How the two girls fare once they enter adulthood has become the final testament to whether Chua’s parenting style—which all but stirred a culture war—can really be justified. According to the book’s afterward, critics predicted that Chua’s children would grow up “friendless, robotic, mentally ill, and suicidal.”
It takes only a brief encounter with Lulu herself to realize how wrong they were. Now a rising sophomore at Harvard, she is thriving. A friend described her as a warm, witty, and popular girl who “somehow always gets away with hosting parties in her dorm.” Her boss at her summer job said she is charismatic, intuitive, and “willing to put herself out there.” Both praised her remarkable work ethic—a core value her mother sought to instill.”
I truly do hope that Chua’s daughters have not been traumatized by their mother’s tiger parenting practices. If anything, I think there was enough backlash against extreme Tiger parenting that her book did more help than harm.
Since the publishing of her infamous book, Chua and her husband had published another controversial book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, which helped reinforce the concept of “model minority.”
