Correction appended: Jan. 20, 2011
An editorial cartoon in the Jan. 13 edition of Hong Kong’s English daily the South China Morning Post shows a family — a father, mother and frowning boy — together in the kitchen. On the table sits an untouched breakfast — the sodden castoffs, we infer, of the insolent child. “If you don’t eat it,” the father threatens, “we’re going to have you adopted by Amy Chua.” The child looks horrified.
Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School, an author and, as of last week, one of the most talked-about mothers in the world. On Jan. 8, the Wall Street Journal published an essay she wrote headlined “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” in which she discusses her approach to child rearing. Her kids, Louisa and Sophia, were never allowed to have playdates, watch TV or get anything less than A’s in school. They played instruments of her choosing and practiced for hours under close watch. If they resisted, she pounced: at one moment she called her daughter “garbage,” in another “pathetic.”
