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).