s*****r
发帖数: 1032 | 1 This is from a (western?) mom on an email list. I post it here assuming it
is in public domain. A reply from a Chinese mom is also attached below.
"
First I'm going to say that this is an excellent read, a very engrossing and
extremely well-written book that pulls you in. In that way, the book is
great.
But...
all the backpedaling Amy Chua has been doing publicly since the WSJ piece
ran ---- all her public and private statements about how the WSJ
misrepresented her and her book and how the book is about how she had to re-
evaluate being a Tiger Mother and form a compromise --- that's pretty much
just a bunch of crap.
At the end, Chua has absolutely nothing good to say about Western parenting
whatsoever, and she's pretty smug about how fabulous the results of "tiger
mothering" are. She gets her victims/daughters to say for the book how they
are glad she was so fucking horrible to them because now they are fluent in
Mandarin, academic superstars, and musical virtuosos. And of course
absolutely no one who is raised by a regular Western parent achieves a thing
is the not-very-unspoken, smug conclusion (Chua ignores the fact that her
husband, an American raised by regular Americans, is an extreme high
achiever, a Yale law professor who wrote a bestselling novel in his spare
time). Chua also says Western parenting results in horrible favoritism and
"tiger mothering" does not, but there was plenty of favoritism in her mother
and father's family, which she seems to gloss over and never reconciles
with her feeling that bad, Western parenting does that and not wonderful,
Chinese parenting.
All the big re-evaluation and re-adjustment she does is to back off on one
child somewhat and let her start playing tennis, at the age of 13, and that'
s because her own parents keep telling her that she has to. Chua admits
then that a small minority of children react poorly to endless amounts of
verbal abuse and pressure and will become estranged from their parents, and
that she has to ease up on this one child.
And as for "a small minority" of children reacting poorly to this, Chua
doesn't do any studies. Her sample size of herself, her few siblings, her
parents and her two children contains two people who did not turn out as
expected, so you would think she'd realize that it's much more likely that
it's a sizable amount of those raised this way who don't thrive. (Her own
father moved across the world to escape his own "tiger mother" and is
estranged from his family).
And the amount of verbal abuse Chua pours onto her children their entire
childhoods.... just freaking frightening. Here I have some expertise, being
from a background where I was severely verbally abused as a child (among
other things, my father told me upon multiple occasions that he wanted to
kill me, wanted me to die, hoped I would die in an accident, was a parasite,
etc...), and I can say that it's pretty hard for me to contemplate that she
didn't harm her children severely with that abuse. Maybe it's mitigated by
the fact that, as she points out, her verbal abuse got them to achieve
great things, and so the self-worth from huge achievements balances out the
harm from the verbal abuse, but meh, I doubt it. The harm done to me by
extreme parental verbal abuse is huge. I was a National Merit Scholar and
went to Stanford law school, but it wasn't because I was verbally abused.
My particular flavor of emotional fuckeduppedness comes in large part from
that verbal abuse.
The xxxx list earlier had an excellent email written by a woman raised in
this style whose high-achieving, Harvard graduate sister killed herself,
which the surviving sister thinks was due to this kind of upbringing. As
that survivor discovered, there is an extremely high suicide rate among
Asian American girls, probably linked to extreme parental pressure. You'll
see absolutely nothing like that in Chua's book. She just comes to the
conclusion--- after years of pressure from her parents and her husband --
that she needs to back off a bit on one child but not the other because a
tiny number of Asian children become estranged from their parents. She
doesn't seem to think that there is anything more dire at stake than that
her kid might cut her off after leaving home.
The one thing I do agree with is that children can achieve a lot if a lot is
expected of them. Over and over it's shown that the typical child can be
very advanced at math if given an outstanding math teacher and curriculum (e
.g., that movie about the math teacher with inner city kids, "based on a
true story"). Down at 826 Valencia St. I see all the time how if you treat
every single kid who walks in as a great writer and work with that child
diligently, they will all write great things. But it must be, in my opinion
, done without extreme verbal abuse.
" | M********8
发帖数: 3837 | 2 其实要是虎妈就以一个耶鲁教授、或者菲律宾人的名义写这本代表中国人妈的书，我毫
无所谓她写啥，管我屁事，有用的就听没用的就不听。但是中国妈本来已经有了这样的
形象，加上了她这样“正统”的人的endorsement, 以后我们的孩子无论怎么做，人家
都会说是非常功利性推出来的（虽然是事实，但是大家美国生活，懂得什么是该做，什
么是该说，什么是政治正确！）。我们自己关起门来推推交流一下不要紧，跑出去面对
其他种族这样宣传，给自己孩子日后的整体机会添堵，所以你从来不会看到任何一个犹
太人介绍他们种族的成功秘诀，不给自己树靶子。
我们这个种族真正需要的，是一种多元化的形象，宁愿有个成功孩子的妈妈跑出来介绍
举重若轻的经验，不需要这种举轻若重的经验。 | s*****r
发帖数: 1032 | 3 我也是觉得这个“代表”让人不舒服。我孩子再过两天要去学校talent show弹钢琴，
也不知道那些老外家长们会怎么联想。 | M********8
发帖数: 3837 | 4 问题是美国是个主流价值追求多元化的社会，所以她这种代表给中国人孩子套个框框，
就是说把所有的中国孩子全放这个箩筐里，无论这些中国孩子怎么出色，最终都是自相
厮杀，只不过是把本来的竞争条件提高了，本来SAT满分就够了，现在SAT满分以外还要
钢琴演奏级，但是给中国孩子的软名额还是那么多，倒霉的还是我们自己，其他种族的
孩子就被以不同的标准来衡量。
所以那些吹捧虎妈的，真是给人卖了还帮着数钱。虎妈的孩子是犹太人与中国人，搞不
好她还能打张菲律宾牌（菲律宾作为美国前殖民地是单独罗列出来的），她的孩子不怕
stereotype，还是几代移民，我们没有那么多张不同背景牌能打的，最怕单一化的形象。 | y****i
发帖数: 12114 | 5 看看chua女士的表演，不得不说犹太人的确恶心。
这个女的算什么中国人？ |
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