I was standing at a bookstore in Brisbane reading the book 'Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother ' to kill time today.
Read about it yourself here.
Disregarding all the controversies surrounding the book and the author(how she was criticized, scoffed at, and even received death threats). I have only 2 words to describe her book. UTTER BULLSHIT.
Admittedly, it was rather interesting reading about immigrant mentality and how the Chinese culture shaped the parenting methods of the Chinese. However, besides that, the book is fundamentally a description of the supposed genealogical and genetic superiority of her family and her devotion to the stereotypical elitist, high society posturing.
Throughout the parts that I managed to read through, Amy Chua goes on and on and on about the educational background of her family, emphasizing on her connections with Yale University, Harvard University, NYU and the like.More than half a dozen times she repeated wrote that her daughters were 'highly gifted', 'prodigious' at music while she shows off her knowledge of classical music(throwing around professional classical music lingo) and her believe that only classical music is suited for educated people of her like. She makes some broad-brush statements like how 'playing the drums lead to drugs', 'white parents are too soft', '' and some other exhausted stereotypes of.
Fuck this. This is exactly the elitist, condescending bullshit that infuriates me to no ends.
In all honesty, I managed to read through only a quarter of the book(only took me 20+ minutes though, its not exactly rocket science). However, I can sense a deep, inherent, subconscious inferiority complex in her which is rooted in her immigrant family background, of which she tries desperately to cover by publishing her 'resume' in a form of a book. She desperately wants readers to think her family is of noble lineage(going as far as to write that her great great great great grandfather was an aristocrat during Imperial China) and to be perceived as to having, for the lack of a better word, 'class'.
The concept of having class is one that is hopelessly elusive and ambiguous. In my perspective, class doesn't come with money, or education, or connections. Class is something you are born with, an aura or quality your family exudes. It is the same idea that owning a MacBook Pro will not make you cool and good in computers if you are a douche and an IT illiterate in the first place; or how having a rich grand patriarch does not mean you are of noble lineage.
Amy Chua wants Class. She is keen to a point of desperation to have 'class', and it is the same desperation that betrays her utter lack of it.
With her personality, she will forever be this daughter of a poor immigrant family with an inferiority complex and issues fitting into the American society and her pursuit of the american dream. Class, in my humble opinion, is beyond her.
