Why I Love Tiger Mom

"Your parents will be proud of your grades," a law professor told a group of anxious 1Ls yesterday, "unless they want to be the next Tiger Mother." Indeed, the Tiger Mother as portrayed in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua has come to symbolize extreme parenting that makes everyone uncomfortable. Her oft-cited Wall Street Journal list of things Chinese mothers never let their children do includes going to sleepovers or getting a grade lower than an A. Americans have generally responded with skepticism and scorn, pointing out that this strict form of parenting doesn't foster the creativity that makes America great. Chinese-Americans have responded by trying to distinguish themselves from Chua. "My parents let me go to sleepovers and I turned out ok," my Asian friends wrote on Facebook.

In the few weeks following the initial backlash, people have pointed out that our response might reflect our insecurities about America's decline. Or that Chua is merely pushing our buttons, and that we should just ignore it. Indeed, Tiger Mother, is intentionally polemical, easily leading commentators to read what they want into the book. After listening to Slate Audio Book Club's "definitive" discussion of Tiger Mother, I was left with the impression that Chua is not introspective, fails to admit weakness, and seeks validation from her daughters' musical accomplishments.

Nonetheless, after going ahead and reading the book anyway, I am convinced that all the pundits have got it wrong. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is not a how-to book; it's not a foreign policy book disguised as a parenting book; it's not even a straightforward memoir. What it is is a hilarious jab at the yuppie holy grail--and those who can't take the joke should keep their mouths shut. The holy grail, of course, is the yuppie offspring. Having gone to a respectable private college, gotten high paying jobs in liberal cities, yuppies' next--and most satisfying--accomplishment is raising little Lelands and Morgans who will be just as successful as they are, except more artistic. This is why--as my boyfriend always points out--any article in the Times or The New Yorker about Ivy League admissions immediate gains most-emailed status. This is why we have dozens of parenting books, classes, and Baby Bjorn stores to promote creativity and child self-actualization. So when someone comes along and pokes holes in our theory of parenting, backlash ensues.

And really "poking fun" of western parenting is what Chua does best. Chua on creative school projects: "there's nothing I hate more than all these festivals and projects that private schools specialize in. Instead of making kids study from books, private schools are constantly trying to make learning fun by having parents do all the work." Chua on Chinese parents' tendencies to compare their children: "The mother told Kathleen [a friend] that her daughter, who was a student at Brown, was probably going to lose [a tennis match]. 'This daughter so weak,' she said...'Her older sister--much better. She go to Harvard." Chua takes shots at herself too. Describing her daughter, Lulu's decision to take up tennis instead of the violin, Chua says, "Had I perhaps chosen the wrong activity for Lulu? Tennis was very respectable--it wasn't like bowling. Michael Chang had played tennis." This last sentence isn't a serious justification for why tennis is respectable, but a facetious characterization of Chua's reasoning. Maybe you have to come from an Asian-American/immigrant background to appreciate it, but I found Chua's descriptions of herself to show an ultimate awareness of her blind areas.

Chua admits that Chinese parenting is very lonely, especially in the US; you have to make up excuses why you're daughters can't go on playdates. So her very act of describing her extreme moments is an invitation for criticism. In one section, Chua displays some unedited "notes" that she left for her daughters to guide their music practices each day. One has the title "Chow Chow LeBoeuf," then goes on to say "HELLO LULU!!! You are doing great. Light!! Light!!!! LIGHT!!!...10 minutes: Kreutzer #32. Work it through YOURSELF, with a metronome. SLOW. Light bows. If you can do this, you rock." These notes embody so much of Chua's personality. Some craziness, some humor, and a lot of dedication. We see her daughters rolling their eyes as they read this, but smiling enough to follow the instructions.

One Day: Best Beach Read of 2010

It's not often that a cover of a nearly-kissing-couple reveals a profound novel underneath. David Nicholls bucks the trend by combining breezy language and fast-paced storytelling with epic themes and deep character portrayals in his new novel One Day.

One Day is quite gimmicky on the surface. It's about a boy (Dexter Mayhew) and a girl (Emma Morley) who have a one night stand the evening of university (they're British) graduation on July 15, 1988. The book then checks in with the two of them on July 15 of every year for the next twenty years. But the way Nicholls does this sets it apart from typical chick-lit fare. Instead of contriving a meeting every year, say at a wedding or randomly bumping into each other at a restaurant, Nicholls deliberately checks in with them each July 15, using the opportunity to fill us in on their lives the other 364 days of the year. Nicholls makes clear that Dex and Em are part of each others' lives year round. Instead of filling us in on their lives through removed third-person omniscient, he spends equal amounts of time communicating in Dex and Em's respective voices.

Through this method, we get two fully realized characters. One chapter set in the early Nineties begins with Dexter's voice: "These days the nights and mornings have a tendency to bleed into one another. Old fashioned notions of a.m. and p.m. have become obsolete and Dexter is seeing a lot more dawns that he once used to." A couple pages later, Nicholls switches to Em: "Emma Morley east well and drinks in moderation. These days she gets eight good hours sleep then wakes promptly of her accord just before six-thirty and drinks a large glass of water." These sentences don't simply fill us in on the characters' lives, but do it in such a way that shows what the characters think of themselves. These are thoughts that they would have believably used to describe themselves.

Sure, the characters each do a few things that make you want to roll your eyes, but their big decisions are recognizable to all. Immediately after the one night stand, for example, Dexter does a stint of world traveling, going from country to country "teaching English," but also bedding various women. He is then saved from the nomadic lifestyle by a television gig, becoming rich and more dependent on drugs in the process. Though this screams cliched rich-kid story, Nicholls excellent portrayal renders Dexter as a real person who needs to reconcile luck with success. In one passage, Dexter muses on how to "dump" his friends for more successful, attractive friends. Even if you haven't faced this specific problem, everyone can relate to the idea of outgrowing acquaintances. Meanwhile, Em must ask how to find the courage to do what she really wants as she endures a thankless job while yearning to be a writer.

Though Dex and Em eventually grow out of their twenties, the early twenties is a great time to read this book. From my perspective as a recent college grad, One Day provides perspective on how one's priorities change through the ages. Obsessed with success and being other people when their young, the characters learn to appreciate family and themselves over time. In this sense, it reminds me of a much more serious book, The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, that follows two sisters from the 1950's through the 1980's. The difference is that One Day is written in a way that's conducive to the beach.

Nicholls provides some acute social commentary throughout. From the beginning, he makes fun of Emma's type even as he creates her. Looking around Emma's progressive, hipster-ish room during the one-night stand, Dex notes that "the problem with interesting girls is that they were all the same." Later, Nicholls jabs at overblown weddings:
"They have started to arrive. An endless cascade of luxuriously quilted envelopes, thumping onto the doormat. The wedding invitations."

Current events from 1988 to 2007 take a backseat in this book. (There's no mention of 9/11, but some discussion of the subsequent war). While the cultural references--"I have tickets to the London premier of Jurassic Park"--might attract audiences of a certain age, they are entirely gratuitous. Though the situations could have only occurred in the late 20th century and first decade of the twenty-first, the story of two young people figuring out their lives is timeless.

The Imperfect Imperfectionists

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman has gotten a lot of press coverage since its debut. A "novel" about journalists working a struggling English-language paper based in Rome, it has attracted the attention of many journalists who might feel a connection. The Washington Post lauds The Imperfectionists as a novel "about what happens when professionals realize that their craft no longer has meaning in the world's eyes." This is a great idea, and could have led to profound character studies. Unfortunately, Rachman's execution of The Imperfectionists has resulted in several shallow portrayals of many instead of a more coherent examination of a few.

As many have pointed out, The Imperfectionists is more of a series of linked stories than a bona fide novel. Each chapter focuses on one employee of an unnamed international newspaper. (Rachman himself used to work at the International Herald Tribune). Each chapter explores how that employee undergoes an ironic twist as the newspaper marches towards its demise. So we've got the obituary writer who faces death in his personal life, a business writer who gets scammed, a devoted reader who doesn't know anything about current events, and so forth. Perhaps one ironic twist would be believable, but a dozen are not. As a whole, the stories make for a heavy handed way of saying "look how these characters have to confront their true selves just like how the newspaper needs to confront its true importance." Clever, perhaps, but not thought provoking.

This 280 page book consists of about a dozen 25 page stories. Rachman demonstrates that there's just not enough space in 25 pages to paint believable characters. He relies on types for most of them. There's the bitter, single middle aged woman who loves to complain about her proofreading job, but can't live without it (Ruby Zaga). There's the type-A Editor-in-Chief who must have control over her professional life, but lacks control over her personal life (Kathleen Solson). There's also the poor little soft rich kid publisher who went to Yale and inherited responsibility for the paper (Oliver Ott).

However, some segments are more original than others. The stories that do work successfully convey a person's entire life in a few short pages. The opening story is about Lloyd Burko, an aging foreign correspondent who is now short on cash, having been demoted to a freelancer. He roams the streets of Paris as he tries to rekindle with a daughter and then a son from two of four different marriages. We get the sense that he used to be a ladies man and is now reduced to watching his current, much younger wife, have affairs with the next door neighbor. Though Burko could have easily been a cliche of a washed-out asshole who everyone now loves to hate, Rachman puts us on his side immediately. We root for him as he attempts to seek redemption through his son.

Despite my criticisms, it's not like Rachman set out to write a profound, earth-shattering novel of ideas. The Imperfectionists succeeds as a light-hearted series of escapades. Funny lines are scattered about. Here is Arthur Gopal, the obit writer, trying to avoid work:

"No one had died. Or rather 107 people have in the previous minute, 154,000 in the past day, and 1,078,000 in the past week. But no one who matters. That's good — it has been nine days since his last obit and he hopes to extend his streak."

The Imperfectionists is a great beach read that will keep one's attention without creasing one's brow.

David Mitchells Shows Off Storytelling Chops in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Reading Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel, several years ago, I was impressed by how he wove together post-modern elements to form a thoroughly believable story arc spanning thousands of years. Cloud Atlas is technically a series of six linked stories that begins in the eighteenth century and ends at some unknown future civilization. The main character of each story finds the memoirs by the main character of a previous story, so that each story is revealed to be hidden in another story. Together, these tales form a sweeping meditation on humanity's failings and hopes.

Since Cloud Atlas, Mitchell has reverted to more traditional story-telling. His Black Swan Green is a semi-autobiographical novel of a boy growing up in England in the 1970's. Though not a thrilling story, Mitchell captures the tweenage boy's voice perfectly.

Mitchell's latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, reprises the straightforward approach to tell the story of a Dutch clerk falling in love with a Japanese mid-wife while uncovering corruption in 1799 Dejima, Japan. Jacob de Zoet is trying to make his fortune in a five year stint before returning to Holland to marry his sweetheart, Anna. Of course, the moment we read of Jacob's plans, we know things are probably not going to turn out quite the way he hopes. A fish out of water, his first mistake is to announce to some of his colleagues that he's there to help the chief root out corruption. His second mistake is to be too trusting of his superiors. His third is to fall in love with Orito, a disfigured Japanese mid-wife. Meanwhile, the war back in Europe between Holland and England brews, stirring up consequences for the small army of traders on Dejima.

All of these story lines are evoked with remarkable detail. Like in Black Swan Green, Mitchell is able to get into the minds of his characters and describe what they see convincingly. When first arriving in Japan, Jacob notices the “gnarled old women, pocked monks, unmarried girls with blackened teeth." These details are something that a Dutchman could believably pick up without having any insight into Japanese culture.

At the same time, this historical novel can not escape typical historical flourishes. The accents are awkward at times. The Dutch speak like Eighteenth Century Englishmen. When the Japanese speak Dutch, their sentences come out in stereotypically incorrect English. But when the Japanese speak to each other, presumably in Japanese, the sentences come out in stereotypically formal and stiff.

Though following a traditional approach, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is also a meditation on the art of storytelling itself. The plot of the novel is nearly entirely driven by minor characters' revelations through orally communicated stories. When most authors do this, the revelation comes as a convenient plot device, explaining away mysteries neatly with a bow on top. Most of the time, it's pretty fake though sometimes entertaining. Mitchell's stories feel real because he has explained the motivations behind why characters would keep their stories, and only reveal them at necessary moments. For example, an ex-convict doesn't reveal his secret past until he might get killed for not revealing it. In addition, Mitchell doesn't rely on story-as-revelation as his only method of revelation. An important revelation about paternity is discovered through the father's own eyes as he sets sights on his son.

Moreover, there are so many of these discrete anecdotes that they become a fact of life. It's as if everyone on Dejima sits around telling stories, so the reader never knows when one story in particular will be important. Early on, some of the traders sit around drinking. One tells the story of how another one pretended to be wealthy to get a wealthy wife, only to find that he had been tricked in the same way:

“On Mr Grote’s last trip home,” obliges Ouwehand, “he wooed a promising young heiress at her town house in Roomolenstraat who told him how her heirless, ailing papa yearned to see his dairy farm in the hands of a gentleman son-in-law, yet everywhere, she lamented, were thieving rascals posing as eligible bachelors. Mr Grote agreed that the Sea of Courtship seethes with sharks and spoke of the prejudice endured by the young colonial parvenu, as if the annual fortunes yielded by his plantations in Sumatra were less worthy than old monies. The turtledoves were wedded within a week. The day after their nuptials, the taverner presented the bill and each says to the other, ‘Settle the account, my heart’s music.’ But to their genuine horror, neither could, for bride and groom alike had spent their last beans on wooing the other! Mr Grote’s Sumatran plantations evaporated; the Roomolenstraat house reverted to a co-conspirator’s stage prop; the ailing father-in-law turned out to be a beer porter in rude health, not heirless but hairless.”

This anecdote isn't particularly useful except to say what types of desperate situations drive people to come to Dejima. But it is a funny story with lots of attention to detail. Such details make Thousand Autumns a vivid, satisfying read.

How Lydia Davis is Redefining the Short Story

Lydia Davis is a perfect companion for a long flight. Writing stories that are often less than a page, her Collected Stories is conducive to putting down for nap time. At the same time, Davis' stories are compulsively readable. Many stories are revelatory, with the main insight wrapped in one or two particularly well-placed sentences. The reader keeps reading in anticipation of what surprise the next sentence might bring. Here's a story, "Disagreement," in its entirety:

"He said she was disagreeing with him. She said no, that was not true, he was disagreeing with her. This was about the screen door. That is should not be left open was her idea, because of the flies; his was that it could be left open first thing in the morning, when there were no flies on the deck. Anyway, he said, most of the flies came from other parts of the building: in fact, he was probably letting more of them out than in."

In this story, Davis employs her signature matter of fact tone to convey a series of events without judgment. She brings to light the ridiculousness of the disagreement by not providing any of the motivation behind it. In the telling of events, she also mirrors the typical pattern of an argument. Isn't it just like a couple to argue over something insignificant?

Davis' longer pieces often consist of shorter pieces stitched together under the umbrella of one title. For example, the memorable "We Miss You," is a series of individually titled sections about an elementary school classroom that writes letters to one of its hospital-ridden members over a holiday season in the 1940's. It's a mock analysis of the children's writing to their classmate. One section analyzes references to classmates - "only two children make references to their classmates"-- while other sections analyze spelling, references to Christmas presents, and references to classroom activities. Though each individual section is blandly told, narrowly focused on a somewhat boring topic, the entire exercise is a fascinating study of a way of looking at children's letters.

Indeed, Davis' main talent is revealing the thought and the meaning behind mundane actions. The New Yorker's James Wood points out that Davis' stories are self-aware in a non traditional way. Instead of allowing readers to eavesdrop on characters' thoughts, as in the standard short story, Davis allows readers to eavesdrop on the narrator's thoughts. So we are exposed to the agony behind small decisions. Here is a character waiting for someone to call, "When he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort, as I found with my husband."Davis simultaneously gives us much insight into the narrator—it’s probably a she; she is kind of neurotic—while holding back vital details. Why is this woman waiting for someone to call? Why is she waiting for someone who is not her husband to call? The story succeeds in making it possible for the woman to be anyone, yourself included. As she starts to analyze her impatience and anger, you do too.

Most of my friends have not heard of Lydia Davis, and I like to describe her as someone who’s pushing the edge of what the short story does—whatever that means. Though hard to describe, this kind of boundary bending style is something you know when you see it. Here’s a final example called “Head, Heart:”

“Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love.
I want them back, says heart . . .
Help, head. Help heart.”