'Tiger Mom' comes to ChinaBEIJING—The school term may be
coming to a close for summer, but education remains a hot topic.
At least that’s the way the China Timessees it.
The Taiwan-based newspaper invited Amy Chua, author of the controversialBattle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, to Beijing for several public speaking engagements earlier this week.
“She uses the Chinese way to educate her kids, and it’s very successful,” said Shao Jian Biao, the deputy editor in chief atChina Times. “But parents here in China have been trying the western way, because they thought it was better. A lot of parents are confused.”
East or West?
Monday morning saw a small group of Chinese reporters—all of them female—turn up a hotel business center, eager to get Chua to expound on her views on raising children.
“I’m a mother, and I read her book very carefully,” said Shen Feng Li, Vice Director of Shanghai Morning Post. “In China, we pay a lot of attention to education.”
At a corporate gathering in another hotel, the audience was again largely female. “I have a little boy, and I read her book. I agreed with it,” said a stylishly-dressed executive who did not want to give her name.
For any parent who might have been living under a rock this year, Chua’s book was excerpted in theWall Street Journal in January with a headline that served as a wake-up call (of sorts) to Americans already anxious about a rising China: “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.”
As it turned out, her book isn’t really about how the Chinese make better parents. It’s a much more personal account of the challenges facing a mother wanting to the very best for her children.
“I actually wrote this book in a moment of crisis, when my younger daughter, Lulu, turned 13, became a teenager, and rebelled against my very strict parenting,” Chua explained.
In fact, Chua took great pains to set the record straight.
