Academic

I have so much to say about this fascinating book, I'm going to split my thoughts into separate posts and look forward to reading my friends' posts in between.  This post is mostly on the topic of the memoir.  In case you haven't been to a bookstore in the past two decades, you may want to know that the memoir is the genre of choice these days.  The autobiography used to be the arena of the at least once famous writer, but the memoir celebrates everyman (or everywoman) by presenting the forces that shaped that person as somehow distinctive.  These forces are usually a bad childhood marked by someone's (the writer or a family member's) mental illness, substance abuse or both.  As Tolstoy reminded us, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  I am addicted to memoirs, and I've even read an amazing memoir by another female law professor, Elyn Saks.

Amy Chua's memoir is not marked by any of the typical antagonists of the memoir -- no mental or physical illness, no substance abuse, no legal or financial problems.  Instead, the tension is between Chua's parenting style and the expectations of modern U.S. culture.  Unfortunately, we never see who wins.  My first quibble with the memoir is that it attempts to tell a story that is not finished.  If we are to truly judge her choices by their results, then the results aren't in.  Sophia and Lulu are still teenagers at home, and we get the sense that there will be other clashes between the Tiger Mom and her pride.  Chua's sister, whose cancer is chronicled somewhat, is still in treatment.  No loose ends are tied up.  This is a substantive problem and also a form problem.  The last chapter reads as a series of texts among Chua, Sophia and Lulu, sort of a "ok, 'bye/see ya later/love ya/ok, bye" ending.   Secondly, perhaps because the events in the book are still fresh, Chua studiously omits many details about her husband, which she acknowledges, and her marriage, which follows from the first omission.  Not wanting to write about one's husband and marriage seems reasonable to most people, but it makes for a strange book that one writes about one's children.  It's like viewing their family life with an obstructed view, and the family life is the main topic of the book.  I kept asking myself, "What did her husband think to himself/say to her/tell the 911 operator about that?"

No memoir is worth reading unless the writer has processed the events and has the self-awareness to write about them honestly from the viewpoint of both a participant and an observer.  Chua as writer seems very self-aware.  She is very funny and purposefully sets up dramatic irony between what she seems to be saying about a particular incident and the reaction that she knows the reader will have.  She takes a transparently tongue-in-cheek tone that lets us know that she gets it, just like we do.  Though she is rarely critical of herself in her own voice, she allows many criticisms to be thrown toward her out of the mouths of her children, whom she has already presented as extremely intelligent and wise.  Chua knows that these criticisms will resonate with us, just as they must have resonated with her.  The only moment that I thought she lacked self-honesty (and this may be simple a lapse in editing) was early on when she anticipated argument that she was pushing her prodigy children for her own selfish desires.  She counters this argument by saying that if it was all for herself, then she would spend hours and hours on Saturdays and Sundays doing yoga or other "moms day out" type of indulgences.  However, the Chua that we get to know would not accept this argument.  Chua has detailed how her life has been about learning and teaching her children the connection between short-term hardship and sacrifice and lifelong reward.  So I believe Chua's own counterargument to herself would be that she could easily be sacrificing hours and hours of yoga, book club and manicures so that she could receive praise from her friends and colleagues at the girls' recitals, Bat Mitzvah concerts, and Carnegie Hall extravaganzas.  And finally, I do wonder if more separation in time from the book's writing and the events of the book (which seem to have happened the day before the book was bound) would have given the book even more insights.