<
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/apr/28/asian-mothers-bad-feelings-tiger-mom-stereotype>
"In January 2011, the English-speaking world was introduced to a new kind of
villain. She arrived in the form of a viral
Wall Street Journal article with
the headline “Why Chinese mothers are superior”. The author, a relatively
unknown Yale law professor named Amy Chua, outlined her strict rules for her
two daughters: no sleepovers, playdates or school plays – and no complaining
about not being in the school play, either. They were expected to be the top
students in all subjects at school (except gym and drama). When her
seven-year-old refused to play a song on the piano, Chua threatened her with no
lunch, no dinner and no birthday parties for four years until she complied.
Another time, after the same daughter misbehaved, Chua branded her “garbage”.
The backlash was swift and vicious. Chua was called an abuser, a stereotype
peddler, a shock jock. The article was an extract from her memoir,
Battle Hymn
of the Tiger Mother, and Chua did her best to explain that, in the book, she
reckons with the limits of her parenting. But it was too late: the controversy
had taken on a life of its own. Many Asian American writers responded by
sharing their ambivalence or anger about having been raised in this way. “I
grew up with a tiger parent and all I got was this lousy psychological trauma”
declared one such blog post. Suddenly a ubiquitous but private dynamic was
being held up for public debate. There were endless letters, op-eds, blogs,
tweets, Facebook posts. My grandparents in China, who are as removed from the
American commentariat as one could possibly be, asked me about the American
lady boasting about getting her kids into Harvard and giving Chinese people a
bad name.
Reading Chua’s memoir recently, I was struck by its unapologetic and breezy
tone, which feels like an artefact of its time; writers today, keenly attuned
to the risks of viral attention, are more cautious. Yet despite its singular
infamy, Chua’s book is part of a rich tradition of books and films from the
east and south-east Asian diaspora that examine complicated mother-and-daughter
relationships. Two of the seminal Chinese American novels – Maxine Hong
Kingston’s
The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan’s
The Joy Luck Club – are
structured around conversations, real and imagined, between mother-and-daughter
pairings. A seminal work of Chinese-British nonfiction, Jung Chang’s
Wild
Swans, tells the convulsive history of modern China through the lives of
Chang’s mother and grandmother – and was followed by the memoir
Fly, Wild
Swans, an intimate and pained love letter to the author’s own mother. In these
works, the mother has a way of emerging as the primordial wound: one to be
constantly picked at, never healed.
It continues in cinema: the 2018 box office hit
Crazy Rich Asians has at its
heart not a tension between the main couple, but rather that between its
Chinese American protagonist and her boyfriend’s aloof Singaporean mother,
played by Michelle Yeoh. Yeoh is once again a difficult mother in the 2022
Oscar-winning film
Everything Everywhere All at Once, this time as a frazzled
first-generation immigrant to the US who (literally) runs to the ends of the
earth to reconcile with her queer daughter. The same year Pixar released
Turning Red, which follows a Chinese Canadian teenager running away from her
overbearing mum."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
