Chua is one half of the kind of Asian-Jewish academic power couple that, as she notes, populates many university towns. Chua would not mind if her children grew up disturbed and rebellious, as long as she sold more books. Another post was titled “Parents like Amy Chua are the reason Asian-Americans like me are in therapy.” A Taiwanese video circulating on YouTube (subtitled in English) concluded that Ms. Chua a “monster” or “nuts” - and a very savvy provocateur.Ī law blog suggested a “Mommie Dearest” element to her tale (“No.

The excerpt generated more than 5,000 comments on the newspaper’s Web site, and countless blog entries referring in shorthand to “that Tiger Mother.” Some argued that the parents of all those Asians among Harvard’s chosen few must be doing something right many called Ms. Chua has received death threats, she says, and “hundreds, hundreds” of e-mails. In the week since The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of the new book by Amy Chua, a Yale law professor, under the headline “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” Ms. That you threw the homemade birthday cards they gave you as 7- and 4-year-olds back in their faces, saying you expected more effort.

Note that you once told your own hyper-successful Asian-American daughter that she was “garbage.” That you threatened to throw out your other daughter’s dollhouse and refused to let her go to the bathroom one evening until she mastered a difficult piano composition. TRY this at a dinner party in one of the hothouses of Ivy League aspiration - Cambridge, Scarsdale, Evanston, Marin County:ĭeclare that the way Asian-American parents succeed in raising such successful children is by denying them play dates and sleepovers, and demanding that they bring home straight A’s.

Battle hymn of the tiger mother