Humor of the Tiger Mother

My initial reaction to Amy Chua’s essay, an excerpt from her infamous book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was the same as many other readers—that is, disgust, anger, and a little embarrassment of sharing the same ethnicity as her.  Throughout the essay, Ms. Chua paints her self-portrait in a way that reminds me more of a controlling bully than a coach or a mother.  Her over-generalizations of “western mothers” versus “Chinese mothers” speak volumes of her self-righteous ideals of a so-called superior culture.  However, after reading Amy Chua’s daughter’s response to the critics of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, my disgust faded to intrigue.  Were Ms. Chua’s extreme-sounding methods of parenting really mostly exaggeration and tongue-in-cheek humor, or was Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld’s response (which was rather sympathetic to her mother) a form of Stockholm syndrome?  A closer look at the elder Chua’s essay shows evidence that misplaced humor—as opposed to extremely bad parenting—was the real issue in the essay.  While I don’t doubt that Ms. Chua is a very strict mother, I believe that the stories she gleefully recounts are meant to create a sort of shock and awe sort of humor.  It seems that the basic structure from which she derives her humor is having some extreme statement or action, then justifying it with some understated response.  For example, when she tells about her experience at a party where she tells an acquaintance that she called her daughter a piece of garbage, she casually writes that she ended up causing one guest to leave early, and needing to be “rehabilitated” with the other guests.  Chua’s casual use of universally negative words such as “coerce” (“coercion Chinese-style” when she forces her daughter Lulu to play a piece perfectly) works especially well to highlight her shock-and-awe humor.  But no evidence is stronger than Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld’s word: “One problem”, she writes of her mother’s fallout with the public, “is that some people don’t get your humor”.  While I do not find the humor that Ms. Chua uses particularly entertaining, I feel that her viewpoints on parenting is hardly as extreme as she makes it out to be in her book.

Melody Yee

Section 2

ASA 2