Kids Raised by Perfectionists: Sandra Tsing Loh versus Amy Chua
In the last post, we saw the experience of Tiger Mother Amy Chua and her intense approach to raising her multi-talented girls. As a study in contrasts, I wanted to compare Amy Chua’s experience with that of author Sandra Tsing Loh. Both women have similar backgrounds but have ultimately pursued dramatically different careers and have taken different parenting approaches.
My husband and I adore Sandra Tsing Loh’s writing. When The Atlantic Monthly arrives, my husband always alerts me when one of her columns is inside. It is always honest and entertaining reading. In addition to insight on issues like race, class and feminism, Ms. Tsing Loh has written about her divorce and, recently, her thoughts on parenting and Amy Chua.
Ms. Tsing Loh’s most recent book is Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! The book is a memoir of Ms. Tsing Loh’s experience trying to find an appropriate kindergarten program for her eldest child in the Los Angeles area. Scared off from the Los Angeles public school system by numerous friends and a raft of poor school performance statistics, she begins a journey to locate an appropriate private school. What follows is a fascinating journey into how education is conducted today and how one mother finds balance between the competing pressures of providing excellent educational opportunities for one’s children and confronting economic reality.
Similarities Between Ms. Chua and Ms. Tsing Loh
Both Ms. Chua and Ms. Tsing Loh were raised by fairly strict Chinese parents. Both had a father in the sciences who pushed academic excellence and was very frugal about spending money. Both were forced to study the piano. Both went on to prestigious universities: Ms. Chua to Harvard and Ms. Tsing Loh to Cal-Tech. Both realized in college that they were perhaps on the wrong path.
“Understand that my father is not the sort of Chinese immigrant who has ever suffered low expectations for his children. Ever since I was little, it was clear that if we girls could not actually bring home the Nobel Prize in physics, then becoming head of NASA or president of Harvard College would do. Or if we had to feed a wild, artsy, creative urge . . . conductor of the London Philharmonic. . . .
My dad was obsessed with the great waste of time that was the liberal arts. Every bad thing in life was attributed to it. . . . I started as an overachiever. Pushed by my parents, I earned an 800 Math SAT in high school and a perfect score on AP calculus . . . And so of course I went off to college to major in physics. . . . [A]t [Cal-Tech] the great science school, [I] wrote comedic articles. That was my Caltech career—bombing my tests and writing funny pieces about it for our unread student paper! To wit:
‘. . . I believe I’m on the short list of candidates for patron saint of those lost at Caltech. Junior year, I have been assigned as physics lab partner classmate Sekhar Chivukula, widely renowned as a genius. Of our pairing it is said: ‘Sekhar will do the calculations. Sandra will handle the radioactive samples. . . . ’”
–Sandra Tsing Loh, Mother on Fire
“[A]ll my life I’ve made important decisions for the wrong reasons. I started off as an applied mathematics major at Harvard because I thought it would please my parents; I dropped it after my father, watching me struggling with a problem set over winter break, told me I was in over my head, saving me. But then I mechanically switched to economics because it seemed vaguely sciencelike. . . I went to law school, mainly because I didn’t want to go to medical school. . . . But I always worried that law really wasn’t my calling. . . . After graduating I went to a Wall Street law firm because it was the path of least resistance.”
–Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Interestingly, today, both Ms. Chua and Ms. Tsing Loh admire most the careers of authors like Amy Tan and would gladly trade places with Ms. Tan as the premiere voice of Chinese-inspired literature in America.
“I decided to write an epic novel. Unfortunately, I had no talent for novel writing, as [my husband’s] polite coughs and forced laughter while he read my manuscript should have told me. What’s more Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and Jung Chang all beat me to it . . . . At first, I was bitter and resentful, but then I got over it and came up with a new idea. Combining my law degree with my own family’s background, I would write about law and ethnicity in the developing world.”
–Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
“My goal was to achieve early success as a writer, preferably by the age of twenty-five. . . . Then would come the six-figure advance for a novel. Then would come . . . what? I guess more novels. . . . Looking ahead, I saw that my forties promised to be less a maturing than a kind of extraordinary goldening. I envisioned these as my Yo Yo Ma/Amy Tan years. This would be a seasoned, a leavened time of life when the artist travels around the country accepting lifetime awards and honorary medals from the President, the Queen, Bill Moyers. These would be the PBS years, the Lincoln Center years . . . One would be inducted into the Smithsonian as a National Treasure . . . .”
–Sandra Tsing Loh, Mother on Fire
Both women also went on marry non-Chinese men. Ms. Chua married a Jewish man named Jed she met on the Harvard Law Review and Ms. Tsing Loh, a musician named Mike. Their marriages caused them to confront questions about their own racial identity and their familial obligations to perpetuate Chinese culture in America.
“When I was four, my father said to me, ‘You will marry a non-Chinese over my dead body.’ But I ended up marrying Jed, and today my husband and my father are the best of friends. . . . A tiny part of me regrets that I didn’t marry another Chinese person and worries that I am letting down four thousand years of civilization.”
–Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Ms. Tsing Loh and I share the interesting fact that our children generally look nothing like us. Genetics are truly surprising and variable. In Ms. Tsing Loh’s case, her mother was German and her dad Chinese. Ms. Tsing Loh would be generally recognized by most people as Asian. She married a fair-skinned, fair-haired man and had two blonde daughters!
“Of Chinese-German extraction, I could be said to look Hispanic. And with my two blonde daughters . . . ? . . . From a racial point of view, it looks like either I’m their Third World nanny or I stole my white babies.”
–Sandra Tsing Loh, Mother on Fire
Likewise, I am a brown-haired, brown eyed, Mediterranean-influenced mom with a blonde and a strawberry blonde daughter. I cannot tell you how many people have asked me recently when I am out and about in my pregnant state with my two daughters in tow whether this will be my first child! I must look like the nanny too!
Differences Between Ms. Tsing Loh and Ms. Chua
As you can tell from many of the excerpts above, the biggest difference between Ms. Tsing Loh and Ms. Chua is that Ms. Tsing Loh has made strides toward not living her life to please her parents while Ms. Chua still seems to still struggle with the issue.
Ms. Tsing Loh uses humor to make peace with the upbringing she received from her her well-intentioned but overbearing parents. She is self-deprecating and has no pretensions about herself or her children . . . or anyone else’s for that matter.
“I remember when Jonathan and Aimee’s son Ben first developed his extraordinary childhood gift for the violin. Jonathan was especially thrilled at how much Ben clearly loved playing, how passionate Ben was about music, ‘I never had that,’ Jonathan said, ‘that love of music. For me growing up, practicing was always a chore.’ ‘That’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘Perhaps Ben can grow up to become a musician, a real working musician like Mike, and move out to where we live in Van Nuys.’ Jonathan visibly started, checked himself. Then added: ‘Well, there are plenty of surgeons who enjoy playing the violin!’
–Sandra Tsing Loh, Mother on Fire
Ms. Chua is still trying to please her parents, even though it appears her parents have grown and moved on and no longer have the same stringent set of expectations they did when raising Ms. Chua and her sisters. For example, when Ms. Chua is struggling to get second daughter Lulu to do as she wishes, her parents intervene:
“My mother, who was close to Lulu (they were e-mail pen pals), told me flat out, ‘You have to stop being so stubborn, Amy. You’re too strict with Lulu—to extreme. You’re going to regret it.
‘Why are you turning on me now?’ I shot back. ‘This is how you raised me.’
“You can’t do what Daddy and I did,’ my mother replied. ‘Things are different now.’
–Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Yet even Ms. Tsing Loh can’t escape her desire for parental approval altogether, nor the guilt of wondering whether she is doing enough for her children. Her personal journey and the resulting educational choice she made for her children forces us to examine our own insecurities and dreams, and confront the pain of rejection and the limitations, small and large, imposed by one’s place in the American economic pecking order.
Through Ms. Tsing Loh’s and Ms. Chua’s experiences, we see that the desire for parental love and approval continues far beyond childhood and never truly ends. We also see that once an expectation is set in the minds of children, it is very hard to erase, even when the parent has a change of heart years later.
Do you sympathize more with Ms. Tsing Loh or Ms. Chua? As a parent, Is it worse to push too hard or push too little? Please share in the comments.