Amy Chua’s Dogs

The last line of Amy Chua’s notorious Battle Cry of the Tiger Mother is “I’ve just told Jed that I want to get another dog” (229) This will be the third dog acquired in her family over the course of her children’s childhoods, as narrated in the memoir.

For anyone who was under a rock in January or has forgotten because of the revolutions in the Middle East, politics in Wisconsin, or the tsunami in Japan, Battle Hymn recounts Chua’s struggles with her younger daughter Lulu over playing the violin. Her book launch included the publication of a stomach-turning, unrepentant excerpt of the introduction to Battle Cry in The Wall Street Journal. In the excerpt, and in the book as well, Chua contrasts “Chinese parenting” and “Western parenting.” Chinese parenting—which Chua actually takes care to acknowledge is neither universally Chinese nor exclusively the province of Asians—demands from children obedience, focus on academics and the high arts, never coming in second, and the repudiation of a wide range of leisure activities. Western parenting, by contrast, fosters children’s self esteem, encourages them to find their passions, permits less than stellar achievement in school, and celebrates athletics. In Chua’s version of Chinese parenting, excellent participation is insufficient—her children must win their music competitions, earn the chance to take lessons with the most exclusive teachers, and play at Carnegie Hall (which they do).

I have to admit that from the start I have felt a certain amount of sympathy for Chua. Not because of her professed parenting style—which I do not share—but because it was clear to me that she was writing in a confessional mode. I don’t know why, but Americans seem to have a blind spot when it comes to confessional writing. I got a taste of this myself when I published an editorial on civility that kicked off with the tale of my shouting at my husband for eating my daughter’s breakfast of salami. Why on earth would any self-aware person write doing something she knows other people will criticize roundly, if not to make a point about it? But some of my readers missed this nuance and took me to task for a behavior I had already privately apologized to my husband about.

Chua’s MO is similar—she spends scores of pages building up her self-portrait as a tyrannical mother bent on making her child into a violin prodigy in order to show her moment of conversion and new outlook on parenting. The unpaginated epigraph for the book declares, “instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.” By the end of the book, Chua has lost her battle with Lulu over the violin and permitted her daughter to choose her own activities. Lulu chooses tennis. Although she does not win every match, her daughter understands that her losses are in service of her learning the game—which she is determined eventually to win. Chua reconciles herself to her daughter’s putting away of the violin in favor of a mere athletic competition by celebrating her instinct to win. If Lulu will no longer win all those violin competitions that she was pushing her into, at least she can make herself into a tennis champion.

Chua’s overt message is that she has learned that her daughter will not be a failure if she chooses her own activities. Using Chinese parenting on a Western, rebellious second child ended up driving her away; Lulu, she realized, was on the brink of replicating Chua’s immigrant father’s past, alienating himself (in every sense of the word) from his own Chinese parents. But Chua swells with pride to see that Lulu has internalized the drive to win, even if it is in tennis. This is where Chua loses me. The major shortcoming with Chua’s conversion is that she does not let go of her basic tenet that the purpose of parenting is to raise successful children. If the arena can’t be high culture, she will find a way to live with it (and even subtly try to give her daughter tips for winning). She does not question whether “Western parenting” has the same goal as Chinese parenting—to raise children to succeed.

Parenting—even in the ambitious “West”—does not have to have the children’s success as a goal. As I raise my own children, I hope I am leaving their ultimate success up to their own desires. Instead, my focus is to raise children who 1) are decent human beings and 2) use their talents to bless the world. Indeed, I feel so strongly about this second point that I had Rebecca Parker’s poem “Choose to Bless the World” read at each of their dedications. I want them to love themselves and their neighbors to make the world a better place. I think they will probably need certain tools (like a solid education) to accomplish some of their goals in this complex world of ours, but no one needs wealth, status, or a wall of trophies to do either one.

Which brings me back to Amy Chua’s dogs. Why does she include the dogs in the memoir? They are right there in that opening epigraph—“a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs”—and the introduction of each new pet into the family opens parts two and three, a counterpoint to chapter one, “The Chinese Mother.” Coco, Samoyed #1, she learns is very bright but stubborn as all get out, like Lulu refusing to cooperate in Chua’s plans for her to walk. Pushkin, also a purebred, starts out ugly, turns into a swan, but remains stupid. Chua realizes that she simply cannot make the dogs succeed the way she has pushed her daughters (why it does not occur to her to raise show dogs, I am not certain). With her husband’s help, she laughs at herself for asking in the heat of a fight about the girls, “What are your dreams for Coco?” She concludes, “My dogs can’t do anything—and what a relief. I don’t make any demands of them, and I don’t try to shape them or their future. For the most part, I trust them to make the right choices for themselves. I always look forward to seeing them, and I love just watching them sleep. What a great relationship.” (166)

Those dogs, I think, embody the third layer of Battle Hymn, the one that argues for parenting as an act of love and decency rather than success. Chua would love to parent her children the way she does Coco and Pushkin, but even after her conversion, she cannot shake the idea that the job of the parent is to make her child a success. It’s hard to tell whether Chua knows that this is what she wants to do. The dogs appear at key moments of the book, but she exhibits no other self-awareness that would suggest she knows that other reasons for parenting exist.

I can’t tell if Amy Chua has written the most brilliant self-satire I’ve ever read or if Battle Hymn is a desperate (and wildly successful) cry for help broadcast to the world at large. But I do know what those dogs are doing there.

*All page numbers refer to Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011).

Open Records, Privacy, and the Public University

Friday was a mandatory furlough day at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I am a professor, so I stayed home to work on my taxes. Between jousting with my 1040 booklet and the accumulated laundry, I had the chance to watch updates about the open records request for Madison professor William Cronon’s email spiral out in the blogosphere in real time.

What did William Cronon do to merit an open records request? On March 15, he posted a long entry on his “Scholar as Citizen” blog giving context to the budget debate in Wisconsin. Two days later, Stephan Thompson of the Republican Party of Wisconsin filed an open records request with UW-Madison, requesting any emails that might be connected to current state politics.

What does Thompson hope to accomplish by requesting Cronon’s emails? Probably his first goal is to discover whether Cronon used his @wisc.edu address for “political activities,” an abuse of state resources. “Political activities” according to guidance we at UWM have received, include advocating for the election or recall of public officials. Cronon’s blog post clearly does not cross that line.

What results fall out from this request? Cronon himself might be embarrassed, and his time diverted from scholarship to self-defense. I am not worried about Cronon, who is a sophisticated and principled scholar. He uses a personal email account for non-academic purposes. I am more concerned about the effects of this request on other UW faculty, who now operate in a climate where we might be subject to partisan investigation if we do our jobs: creating and disseminating ideas.

Academics might like to image ourselves as fearless investigators, but we too are sensitive to the political climate in which we teach and write. Remember the uproar over Marquette University’s rescinded deanship offer last year? That resulted in the cancellation of at least one research project whose lead scholar believed was not tenable in a gay-unfriendly environment. The UW editor of a listserv crucial to my research wrote yesterday that he feared his list “may be taken off the air at any time.” What if in a lecture on Wisconsin history I connect the dots between Senator Joseph McCarthy and the effort to intimidate Wisconsin’s professors through the request to Cronon? Will my email records be next? Will I be brave enough to tell the truth despite the implicit threat?

Scholars write to publish, but much of our writing is and should remain private in order to best serve purposes of the university. We answer students’ queries about their academic progress. We correspond with our professional organizations about their actions. We write reviews of scholarly manuscripts for publishers. We evaluate other scholars’ promotion and tenure portfolios. We circulate drafts of our own work to trusted colleagues, drafts where we try to work out half-formed ideas that we know are not ready for the light of day. If any of these materials can subjected to public scrutiny at will, then it follows that we might hold back from the full internal discussion needed to produce excellent scholarship and teaching.

No one is arguing that this open records request is illegal. The request, however, threatens to undermine the processes that have produced a world-class university in Wisconsin. The UW System employs scholars to generate new knowledge about how the world works, using their academic training and the full force of their intellects to that end. This open records request certainly teaches us something important about how the world works. But it may end up deterring us from achieving the public good that public universities are charged with pursuing.

[Composed Saturday March 26; UW-Madison has since released a very limited selection of Cronon's emails to the requester.]

Inside the Rotunda

You won’t see pictures of the Family Space inside the Rotunda of the Wisconsin statehouse, where signs and greeters ask photographers to respect children’s privacy.            

For much of the afternoon that my family joined the occupation of the People’s House last Saturday, my husband and I took turns taking our younger daughter to the bathroom, begging her to overcome her fear of flushing. When I had a few moments to look around, I was dazzled. Not by chaos, but by community. Away from the slogans of the marchers outside and the microphones, drums, and musicians on the ground floor, a few good folks created a space where parents can bring their children to participate in the struggle for Wisconsin’s future.

            Beyond the makeshift “Family Space” signs was an improvised children’s play area, complete with toys, paper and markers, books, snacks, drinks, and, most astonishingly, a chair for nursing mothers. We arrived in time for the 4 p.m. story hour. My older daughter threw herself into coloring, while my younger daughter sampled crackers and an apple. I was treated as though I had as much right to make decisions about the space as those already there. Should we, my fellow parents asked me, request people to take their shoes off when they arrived? When I came back, would I bring a lesson about the history of the labor movement?

While my husband took a turn with our daughter’s recalcitrant bladder, I chatted with the woman who seemed most at home. When I asked her who had donated the snacks, she said simply that she had brought them; she accepted money from me only reluctantly, though graciously. She told me, “we are teachers, librarians, professors,” as if that explained everything.

The spirit of the beloved community swept me up. I intuited that the women waiting in a never-ending line for the restroom would let the potty emergency jump the queue. When I saw a spill, I found the paper towel stash and cleaned it up. When my daughter returned, underwear and pants soaked, I found a diaper for her in the community supply. A delivery person from Ian’s now world-famous pizza sated my children’s hunger. On our way out, I was proud to tell another mother feeding her children in a dark, cold corner that she would find welcome upstairs.

            When I first reflected on my time in the Rotunda, I thought there was probably a metaphor in my daughter’s reluctance to use the bathroom, something about the mess we make when we reject public facilities. But the most important metaphor is the character of the occupation itself. Amidst the protest signs plastered on the wall were posters from the public creating community there. The “Medic Staff” reminded us to please wash our hands and watch our steps on the hard marble stairs. I learned where I could get an ID bracelet for my children, in case they got lost. A “free store” offered a host of useful supplies. A timetable listed the upcoming workshops in civil disobedience.

The people in the Family Space and in the Rotunda embodied our basic values of democracy and decency. All comers are equal participants, no matter when we arrive. We should gladly share with our neighbors. Together, we can educate, clothe, feed, and shelter our children. When we combine our money and our talents for collective enterprises, in the name of what we value, we are more than we can be alone. I do not know their names or if that space can be recreated under the new restrictions placed on those entering the capitol. But I do know that the women and men and children in the Rotunda demonstrated what the public good can be—precisely the point under debate in the “budget repair bill” and now the proposed state budget.

[note: I wrote this in February, 2011]