Have you forgotten the infamous Tiger Mother? Last year, I wrote several posts that focused on her and even did battle on this Blog and on Amazon with what I considered obsessed, anal Americans that accused Chua of child abuse and other horrible acts predicting her two daughters would need therapy in the future.
Well, Amy Chua is back, because the paperback of her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was released recently.
In addition, she has interviewed four of China’s most successful women entrepreneurs for Newsweek’s March 12, 2012 edition, and the same piece appears on The Daily Beast.
The paperback for “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” was released recently.
The four extraordinary Chinese tiger women Chua interviewed for Newsweek and The Daily Beast were Zhang Xin (a factory worker turned real estate billionaire), Zhang Lan (China’s premier celebrity restaurateur), Peggy Yu Yu (the founder of Dangdang, a leading online retailer in China) and Yang Lan (talk show host and co-owner of Sun Television Cybernetworks).
Although Amy Chua covers a number of topics in the Newsweek/Daily Beast piece, there is one theme these Chinese tiger women mention — children and education.
Amy Chua says, “Zhang Xin is a rags-to-riches tale right out of Dickens… At 14, she left for Hong Kong with her mother, and for five years she worked in a factory by day, attending school at night.”
Xin told Chua, “My mother drove me in school so hard.”
It would appear that having a real Chinese tiger mother paid off, since Forbes lists Zhang Xin as one of the 50 most powerful women in the world today.
“As a mother”, Amy Chua says, “Zhang remains more Chinese than Western. When her sons, now 11 and 13, get home from school, she makes them practice Chinese characters every day for two hours, rebuffing their pleas to go to friends’ houses or play soccer.”
Yang Lan tells Amy Chua, “The parent’s job is to help their children find their true passion … as long as they get a 90 or better (on school work), that’s all I ask.”
Yang says of the Chinese children known as little emperors, belonging to the billion spoiled brats of the one-child generation, that “These spoiled, children often study and drill from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. every day.”
In addition, Zhang Lan revealed that she was “a hard-driving mother, regularly threatening and spanking her son when he didn’t make top grades.” Today, “he has repeatedly said how grateful he is to her.”
The kicker to me was what Peggy Yu Yu said to Chua. “Working women in China have advantages over their American counterparts … at least in business, women and men in China operate largely on a level playing field.
“Sixty years of communism, ” Yu said, “did one really good thing: bring true equality between the sexes.”
To read more of Amy Chua, the infamous Tiger Mother, see In Defense of Tiger Mothers Everywhere, Amy Chua Responds to Tiger Mother Critics, Tiger Parents Saving America One Child at a Time, Amy Chua’s Suicide Critics and my Review of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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[…] post this comment was left for was Amy Chua talks to China’s Tiger Women. That comment will never be approved for that […]
Tiger parenting is great if you want your child to be as dull-witted as the 1.4 billion people in the PRC. It is also great if your desire is to rear morally void sociopaths who walk by people dying on the streets rather than helping them. Those same people traded their children and ate them during the ‘great leap forward’. Any race which can feast on the flesh of their children should not be emulated.
China has been around for 5000 years and to show for this they have ‘death by 1000 cuts’, infanticide and insolence.
If tiger parenting is so great then what are the results?
China is an innovation laggard, (sure they write patents but for the most part they are junk. See how many they write but fail to monetize those patents).
Aside from this, where is China’s Einstein, Van Gogh, Davinci, Plato , Homer, etc. Five thousand years of history, twenty percent of the world’s population and two great thinkers. What a pathetic shit-stain.
Have a great time there you sell out piece of shit.
As for your alleged pathetic “shit-stain” comment regarding China, its history and its culture, I strongly suggest you—I think this comment comes from Troy P, who is one of the most disgusting, hateful, biased, racist psychopaths I’ve personally dealt with—read Simon Winchester’s “The Man Who Loved China.”
You ASK, “where is China’s Einstein, Van Gogh, Davinci, Plato , Homer?”
My ANSWER: “In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman, brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham—the brilliant Cambridge scientist, freethinking intellectual, and practicing nudist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, once the world’s most technologically advanced country (for more than 1,500 years while the west wallowed through its dark age, the crusades against the Middle East and the Catholic Church’s inquisitions throughout Europe).”
“Gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and paper and printing, which Francis Bacon considered as the three most important inventions facilitating the West’s transformation from the Dark Ages to the modern world, were invented in China”.[13] Needham’s works attribute significant weight to the impact of Confucianism and Taoism on the pace of Chinese scientific discovery, and emphasises what it describes as the “diffusionist” approach of Chinese science as opposed to a perceived independent inventiveness in the western world. Needham held that the notion that the Chinese script had inhibited scientific thought was “grossly overrated”.
His own research revealed a steady accumulation of scientific results throughout Chinese history. In the final volume he suggests “A continuing general and scientific progress manifested itself in traditional Chinese society but this was violently overtaken by the exponential growth of modern science after the Renaissance in Europe. China was homeostatic, but never stagnant.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Needham
The reason Western history doesn’t mention the great scientists and innovators of China’s history for 1,500 years up to the 15th century when that innovation in China came to a screeching stop and even reversed course is because the West doesn’t publish much material about China’s history or culture unless it is propaganda to stir fear in the American people for political purposes during elections. Instead, it publishes its own history and culture as if it were the only one in the world worth paying attention to.
In addition, you mention infanticide that is illegal today even though some may still practice it. The U.S. also has a history of infanticide that is illegal today even though some still practice it. I suggest you educate yourself on this issue before you start pointing fingers at China as if they are inferior to the West when it comes to parents killing off their children.
For instance, “In 1966, the United States had 10,920 murders, and one out of every twenty-two was a child killed by a parent.”
http://www.infanticide.org/history.htm
Then there is your totally ignorant comment about parenting styles. After the Amy Chua debate back in 2011, some scientists did a study and determined that the ratio of parenting styles in China is about the same as it is in the United States.
There are four parenting styles
1. Authoritarian Parenting (called Tiger Parents if they are Asian)
2. Authoritative Parenting (Alleged to be the best one)
3. Permissive Parenting
4. Uninvolved Parenting
http://psychology.about.com/od/developmentalpsychology/a/parenting-style.htm
In addition, “Stanford research shows the European American style of parenting works, but so does the vastly different Asian American approach.”
When it comes to motivating a child who is struggling in school or outside of it, Fu and Markus found merit in both approaches.
“The results of these studies can calm the clash over the role of parental involvement in academic achievement. They show that Chua and her critics can both be right,” they wrote.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/may/asian-european-moms-052014.html
As for your comment malinging the Chinese for an incident in China where people walked by a child who wsa dying in the street—without mentioning other inci8dents where Chinese ahve stepped in to help when someone was injured—it’s easy to find examples of this happening in the United States too.
For instance, “New York Woman Killed While Witnesses Do Nothing”
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/march-13-1964-new-york-woman-killed-while-witnesses-do-nothing/?_r=0
Alleged victim says cries for help from Sandusky basement went unheeded
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/12/07/9279239-alleged-victim-says-cries-for-help-from-sandusky-basement-went-unheeded
You also alleged that I was a “sell out piece of shit.” It takes one to know onem and I don’t know you enough to call you a sell out piece of shit—-yet.
[…] equally eager and willing to learn what teachers teach, and every parent would have to consider Amy Chua, the author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” as a role model and not an abusive, tiger […]