Exhaustive “Tiger Mother” Coverage

Amy Chua’s WSJ article made everyone hate her. The topic has exploded all over my Facebook and elsewhere, since I am also an ABC. Here is a list of retorts and comments from all over Teh Intarwebz.

• Original WSJ article
• lore.interi.org discussion by us
• quora.com comments, including one by Christine Lu about her sister who committed suicide, AND Amy Chua’s response (thanks to Court)
• A blogger’s response: “Parents like Amy Chua are the reason Asian-Americans like me are in therapy“. This blog post is especially relevant to me because of this quote: “Screwing up academically was the only power I had over my dad, a tyrant who wouldn’t let me take art or English courses.” (thanks to Dylan)
• A Tony Hsieh interview on BusinessWeek. People laud him for being “different”, taking risks, and rebelling against his stereotypical asian parents.
• And Tony Hsieh’s 2010 book, Delivering Happiness
• Yet another blog response
• WSJ published a response by Amy Chua after everybody exploded on her with banelings
• This SFGate article is actually positive about the book, and says that the initial WSJ article was trolling for publicity. Apparently the book’s message is NOT “tiger moms are awesome” — the message is “I tried this, it didn’t work, I changed and now I have a great relationship with my daughters.” (thanks to Maria)
• How to raise an unhappy child from some Berkeley-related research thing or something
• Funny animation (thanks to Tomasso)
• Battle-hymn of the sexually-sane mother (thanks to maiki)
• Why Chinese Mothers are Average (thanks to Shirley)
• HuffPost: Why Amy Chua is Wrong about Parenting (Christine Carter) (irayo ma Lawren)
• Slate Blog by Nina Rastolgi, fellow Lynbrook alumna (thanks Kristin)
• Quick write-up of an interview Amy Chua gave at Berkeley (thanks to Gautham)
• Ayelet Waldman’s comments
• Cartoon by Gene Yang, who went to my church
• Blog post on intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation

Other relevant links:

• This is a really good talk about education by Sir Ken Robinson (thanks to maiki)
• A book for kids & their parents about why not to lie: How To Behave And Why (thanks to Maria)
• High Expectations Asian Father is always good for lols
• So is My Mom Is A Fob
• maiki says Outliers will make me cry
• Stupid WSJ article on “white flight” that trolled my high school in 2005

On suicide:

• China Daily, 2009, “Suicide rates high among Asian-Americans”, which actually opens with remarks about Christine Lu‘s sister
• Yahoo news or something, 2008, “The High Suicide Rate of Asian Americans”
• imdiversity, 2003, “Hiding the Pain: Suicides High Among Asian Immigrant Women”
• Pacific Citizen, 2010, “The Growing Rate of Depression, Suicide Among Asian American Students” (from the Christine Lu Quora post)

I get insane and upset thinking about this whole thing, so I’ll leave it at this list for now.

Thank you everyone for discussing it with me. It’s good to get it out of my system. Even though I’m torturing myself, please, please talk to me about it more. It’ll only help.