chinese mother essay

‘Tiger Mother’: Are Chinese Moms Really So Different?

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 (piano, violin) and practiced for hours under close watch. If they resisted, she pounced: at one moment she called her daughter “garbage,” in another “pathetic.”

(Read TIME’s Q&A with Amy Chua.)

The piece, adapted from Chua’s just-released memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , is now at the center of a raucous global debate about parenting, identity and family. More than a million people have read the story online, more than 5,000 have commented on it, and countless others have passed it along to friends and family members. It’s doing the rounds on Facebook and has been animated , to hilarious effect, by the folks at Taiwan’s Next Media (of Tiger Woods drama re-enactment fame). Reactions range from (to paraphrase) “You’re on to something” to “You’re a bigot and a bad mother” to “You’re just like my mom” — often in the same breath.

For better or for worse, many people saw themselves or their parents — or both — in Chua’s portrait. In accounts that are by turns intimate, hilarious and angry, hundreds of people of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds have shared their own childhood stories online, articulating, perhaps for the first time, the pressure they felt as children and how it shaped their lives. Gene Law, a Chinese-Canadian journalist and son of a Taiwanese immigrant mother and a Chinese-Canadian father, could relate to Chua’s tale. “As the article said, I’m indebted to my parents until they die,” he wrote in an e-mail. “This is my mom’s school of thought. I dare not disagree.” But Law questioned the long-term efficacy of the “Tiger Mother” approach: the harder his mother pushed him, the more he rebelled. Now, he wrote, “my relationship with my mother is more tense than the Korean DMZ.”

(Read “Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from China.”)

But do such clashes have anything to do with Chinese culture, or with culture at all? “Hiding behind culture to justify cruelty is offensive,” wrote one commenter, “IansMom,” on Quora.com, a social-media message board. “Chua is a bully, and she’s teaching her kids to be the same.” Whether they admire Chua or not, few readers accept the precept that calling a child “garbage” is a cultural practice rather than an ill-tempered expression of exasperation. Chua, to be fair, anticipates this objection in her essay. “I’m using the term ‘Chinese mother’ loosely,” she writes. “I know Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too.” Yet the piece, as many critics point out, seems to turn on clichés about what Chineseness entails (good grades, music, no sports), echoing the stifling model-minority tropes that have trailed Asian immigrants for decades.

Indeed, in my conversations with friends, sources and colleagues in Hong Kong and China, the word that came up most frequently in relation to Chua — after wrong and stereotype — was old-fashioned . Here, as elsewhere, parenting practices are always changing — the Tiger Mother, if she ever existed, is not as fierce as she once was. Jiang Xueqin, deputy principal at Beijing’s Peking University High School, says he was “shocked” by the “crass generalizations” in Chua’s piece. “It goes without saying that there is no one type of Chinese parent,” he says. “Some are disengaged, some are deeply involved — it’s the same as anywhere.” Describing her hopes for her 8-year-old son, a 34-year old Beijing resident named Xiang Yuqiong says, “I want my son’s life to be like mine, but better.” Each parent is different, but that sentiment, we can all agree, is universal.

— With reporting by Chengcheng Jiang / Beijing

Correction: The original version of this story included an excerpt from a Quora.com post that had been designated for restricted circulation. It has been excised.

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Tiger Mothers: Raising Children The Chinese Way

Maureen Corrigan

Amy Chua may well be nuts. What kind of a mother hauls her then-7-year-old daughter's dollhouse out to the car and tells the kid that the dollhouse is going to be donated to the Salvation Army piece by piece if the daughter doesn't master a difficult piano composition by the next day? What kind of a mother informs her daughter that she's "garbage"? And what kind of mother believes, as Chua tells readers she does, that: "an A- is a bad grade; ... the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal; and ... that medal must be gold"?

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother By Amy Chua Hardcover, 256 pages The Penguin Press List price: $25.95

Read An excerpt

What kind of a mother? Why, a mother who's raising her kids the Chinese, rather than the Western, way. In her new memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , Chua recounts her adventures in Chinese parenting, and -- nuts though she may be -- she's also mesmerizing. Chua's voice is that of a jovial, erudite serial killer -- think Hannibal Lecter -- who's explaining how he's going to fillet his next victim, as though it's the most self-evidently normal behavior. That's the other gripping aspect of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother : There's method to Chua's madness -- enough method to stir up self-doubt in readers who subscribe to more nurturing parenting styles. Trust me, Battle Hymn is going to be a book club and parenting blog phenomenon; there will be fevered debate over Chua's tough love strategies, which include ironclad bans on such Western indulgences as sleepovers, play dates, and any extracurricular activities except practicing musical instruments ... which must be the violin or piano.

Hear An Interview With Amy Chua On 'Tell Me More'

Arts & life, battle hymn of the tiger mother.

The back story to Chua's memoir is this: She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and is now a professor at Yale Law School and the author of two best-selling "big-think" books on free-market democracy and the fall of empires. When Chua married her husband, fellow Yale law professor and novelist Jed Rubenfeld, they agreed that their children would be raised Jewish and reared "the Chinese way," in which punishingly hard work -- enforced by parents -- yields excellence; excellence, in turn, yields satisfaction in what Chua calls a "virtuous circle." The success of this strategy is hard to dispute. Older daughter Sophia is a piano prodigy who played Carnegie Hall when she was 14 or so. The second, more rebellious daughter, Lulu, is a gifted violinist. Chua rode the girls hard, making sure they practiced at least three hours a day even on vacations, when she would call ahead to arrange access to pianos for Sophia in hotel lobby bars and basement storage rooms. Chua also rarely refrained from criticizing her daughters, and in one of the many provocative passages that fill her book, she explains:

Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable -- even legally actionable -- to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty -- lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. ... Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

Amy Chua is the author of two books on globalization and democracy and is a professor at Yale Law School. Courtesy Penguin Press hide caption

As Chua admits, though, the Chinese model doesn't dwell on happiness, nor does it deal well with failure. (Some of the most hilarious parts of her memoir deal with her attempts to apply Chinese parenting methods to the family's two dopey Samoyed puppies.)

I was on my living room couch, reading the end of Chua's memoir, when my 12-year-old daughter came downstairs and announced that she had "done enough reading" for one day and that since she had also practiced flute (for 15 minutes) she was going to kick back and watch TV -- in this case, a made-for-TV Disney movie. Chua tartly sums up the stereotypically "Western" Disney plot this way:

"In Disney movies," she says, the [studious kid] always has to have a breakdown and realize that life is not all about following rules and winning prizes, and then take off her clothes and run into the ocean or something like that. But that's just Disney's way of appealing to all the people who never win any prizes. Winning prizes gives you opportunities, and that's freedom -- not running into the ocean."

I looked over at my daughter and had mixed feelings about her just chillin' in front of the TV, rather than plugging away in that virtuous circle of enforced practice. I guess we won't be sending out the invitations for Carnegie Hall anytime soon.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

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Excerpt: 'Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother'

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Motherlode | on chinese mothers and american kids, on chinese mothers and american kids.

Perhaps the most talked-about story in parenting circles this week is Amy Chua’s essay in The Wall Street Journal titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.”

Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and the author of the new book (released today) “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which, like her essay, is a how-to guide for Western parents who want to learn the methods Chinese parents use to raise, as Chua puts it, “so many math whizzes and music prodigies.”

To hear Chua tell it, the secret lies in being downright mean. Her daughters, Lulu and Sophia, she writes, have never been allowed to “attend a sleepover, have a play date, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama, play any instrument other than the piano or violin, not play the piano or violin.”

In one memorable example of how this works (or doesn’t depending on your point of view), Chua describes a tussle with her younger daughter, Lulu, who was seven years old and practicing a difficult piano piece. Chua worked “nonstop” with Lulu “drilling each of her hands separately,” then trying to put the two parts of the piece together. After a week of this, Lulu had had enough. The little girl “announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.”

What would you have done?

Here is what Chua did:

“Get back to the piano now,” I ordered. “You can’t make me.” “Oh yes, I can.” Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have “The Little White Donkey” perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, “I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?” I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn’t do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

At this point Chua’s (Western) husband stepped in.

He told me to stop insulting Lulu — which I wasn’t even doing, I was just motivating her — and that he didn’t think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn’t do the technique — perhaps she didn’t have the coordination yet — had I considered that possibility? “You just don’t believe in her,” I accused. “That’s ridiculous,” Jed said scornfully. “Of course I do.” “Sophia could play the piece when she was this age.” “But Lulu and Sophia are different people,” Jed pointed out. “Oh no, not this,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Everyone is special in their special own way,” I mimicked sarcastically. “Even losers are special in their own special way.”

Eventually — after so much yelling that Chua lost her voice — Lulu learned the piece, and even felt triumphant about it, her mother writes. “Western parents worry a lot about their children’s self-esteem,” she concludes. “But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child’s self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there’s nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn’t.”

And that is Chua’s basic philosophy, the thing that separates Chinese mothers from weak-willed, indulgent Westerners. “What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it,” she writes. “To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences.”

In an essay in The New York Times Magazine this coming weekend, Judith Warner places Chua’s preachings into a larger context — just another in the decades-long parade of ways that parents have tried to do their job “right.”

Looked at through that lens, Warner argues, Chua’s model is being marketed as a timely antidote to “the whole mishmash of modern, attuned, connected, concerned, self-esteem-building parenting,” which, in turn, was a response to the laissez faire, be-your-child’s-friend, kind of parenting that came before that.

“Despite the obvious limits of Chua’s appeal,” Warner writes, “her publisher is clearly banking on her message finding wide resonance among American moms worn out from trying to do everything right for kids who mimic Disney Channel-style disrespect for parents, spend hours a day on Facebook, pick at their lovingly prepared food and generally won’t get with the program.”

In other words, we parents are always looking for a new way because the (most recent) “old way” didn’t work. And we originally fixated on that “old way” because the way before wasn’t perfect either. And perfect, after all, is the goal — the one thing that all these recalibrations of parenting wisdom have in common.

As Warner writes:

Through all the iterations of Mommy madness, ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad,’’ this article of faith always remains intact: that parents can have control. Developmental neuroscientists may talk of genes and as-yet-undiscovered-and-hence-uncontrollable environmental factors that affect the developing fetus, social scientists may talk of socioeconomic background and the predictive power of parents’ level of education — the rest of us keep hope alive that parental actions, each and every moment of each and every better-lived day, have the ultimate ability to shape a child’s life outcome. The notion that parental choices — for early-onset Suzuki or otherwise — have this uniquely determinative effect is, in light of current research, almost adorably quaint, akin to beliefs that cats must be kept out of a baby’s bedroom at night lest they climb into the crib and suck away the child’s breath. But it remains part and parcel of modern mother love.

Powerful evidence that what Chua advocates is not ancient universal truth, but rather just the latest trend, can be found one click away from her essay in the Journal — in an article by the reporter Victoria Ruan. Titled “In China, Not All Practice Tough Love,” it describes how mothers there are turning from parenting that stresses “discipline and authority” and making best sellers of books like “A Good Mom Is Better Than a Good Teacher” and “Catching Children’s Sensitive Periods” and “My Kid Is a Medium-Ranking Student.” They are also importing titles from the West, including John Gray’s “Children Are From Heaven: Positive Parenting Skills for Raising Cooperative, Confident and Compassionate Children,” (yes, the same John Gray who wrote the “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” books) and “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk,” by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.

All of which leaves us with the following conclusions:

1. The latest parenting trend in the United States is potentially Chinese in origin while the latest parenting trend in China is potentially Western.

2. The reason parents on both sides of the globe are searching for new ways is because there really is no one ideal way.

3. If neither path is foolproof, then we should feel free to choose what feels best for us, rather than what is “best.”

Given such a choice, I choose to be the parent who does not lose her voice screaming over a piano exercise (even if it means the child drops piano lessons) and who does allow her child to go on sleepovers and perform in the school play (even if it means a little less time drilling math equations).

How about you?

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‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’

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By Amy Chua

Jan. 19, 2011

This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. It’s also about Mozart and Mendelssohn, the piano and the violin, and how we made it to Carnegie Hall.

This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones.

But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.

Part One The Tiger, the living symbol of strength and power, generally inspires fear and respect.

The Chinese Mother

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover • have a playdate • be in a school play • complain about not being in a school play • watch TV or play computer games • choose their own extracurricular activities • get any grade less than an A • not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama • play any instrument other than the piano or violin • not play the piano or violin.

I’m using the term “Chinese mother” loosely. I recently met a supersuccessful white guy from South Dakota (you’ve seen him on television), and after comparing notes we decided that his working-class father had definitely been a Chinese mother. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish, and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise.

I’m also using the term “Western parents” loosely. Western parents come in all varieties. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Westerners are far more diverse in their parenting styles than the Chinese. Some Western parents are strict; others are lax. There are same-sex parents, Orthodox Jewish parents, single parents, ex-hippie parents, investment banker parents, and military parents. None of these “Western” parents necessarily see eye to eye, so when I use the term “Western parents,” of course I’m not referring to all Western parents - just as “Chinese mother” doesn’t refer to all Chinese mothers.

All the same, even when Western parents think they’re being strict, they usually don’t come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments thirty minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough.

Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that “stressing academic success is not good for children” or that “parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.” By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be “the best” students, that “academic achievement reflects successful parenting,” and that if children did not excel at school then there was “a problem” and parents “were not doing their job.” Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

This brings me to my final point. Some might think that the American sports parent is an analog to the Chinese mother. This is so wrong. Unlike your typical Western overscheduling soccer mom, the Chinese mother believes that (1) schoolwork always comes first; (2) an A-minus is a bad grade; (3) your children must be two years ahead of their classmates in math; (4) you must never compliment your children in public; (5) if your child ever disagrees with a teacher or coach, you must always take the side of the teacher or coach; (6) the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal; and (7) that medal must be gold.

Excerpted from BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER by Amy Chua. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Amy Chua, 2010.

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Are 'Chinese Mothers' Best? How Different Parenting Styles Stack Up

Over the weekend, we read this fascinating Wall Street Journal essay about whether the tough-love Chinese parenting style is superior to the touchy-feely Western approach to raising kids.

According to the writer, a Chinese mom who raised her children in America, the Chinese assume their kids are strong enough to handle practicing piano for hours on end, even when they are having a hard time with a complicated piece. The writer says that according to the Chinese mentality, it's OK to tell your kids they are "pathetic" or "garbage" when they aren't trying hard enough, or if they disrespect a parent. It's also OK to punish your children for getting an A-minus on a test.

We aren't ones to cast judgment on people's parenting prerogatives. However, the essay did make us curious about how different parenting styles stack up with experts, and what we can learn from each.

"Parenting is extremely cultural," says social psychologist Susan Newman , Ph.D., author of several books including The Case For The Only Child (available in June). "The Chinese style dates back 30 years to China's one-child policy. From their perspective, they had this one shot to create a child who was very successful. So I think part of this is that parents sacrificed all for their children, and they continue to have these extremely high expectations for their children."

In the U.S., there are three general categories of parenting: Permissive, authoritative and demanding.

The good: It's great to nurture a child's self-esteem to give them the confidence to try new things and think for themselves. " Parents often intervene in disputes when children are having an argument instead of letting children figure it out themselves," says Newman. "A little less coddling in the Western culture is positive."

The bad: "Generally speaking, we are a culture of parents who can't say 'No.' It all boils down to 'No' -- we let our children off the hook a lot and make excuses for them. This is not all parents, but it's a good majority. We're very big on the blame game. We're very happy to say it was a bad teacher or the test wasn't fair when a child brings home a bad grade. Parents come up with all kinds of defensive ways to protect their children. Kids need to fail in order to learn how to succeed."

The takeaway: It's fine to be permissive in some situations, but if it's your across-the-board policy, you're probably being taken advantage of by your kids. Supplement your laid-back attitude by setting a motivational example. "What is your work ethic? What is your drive?" says Newman. "Kids pick up on these things. If you try to make a souffle and it collapses so you stop trying, that's teaching them that it's OK to give up when something is difficult."

Authoritative

The good: Parents' wishes and parental respect come first. Teaching your children that you are in charge by saying "No" and demanding respect. **

**The bad: " The issue with across-the-board toughness is that children have different innate abilities and strengths," says Newman. "A Chinese mother would think I'm crazy for saying this, but you can only push a child so far before you have a backlash and they no longer want to please you, and there's unrepairable damage to the relationship with your child."

The takeaway: Get to know your child. This sounds simple, but a lot of parents don't do it. Look at aptitude tests and their performance in sports and the arts to determine when they are being lazy and when they simply don't have they natural ability. Come down hard when you know they're not giving something their all, and be encouraging if it's an activity or subject that doesn't come easily.

Highly Demanding

The good: Being unrelenting in your expectations for a child may produce results from time to time, if and only if your child is responsive to that style of parenting. But, generally, says Newman, this style backfires.

The bad: At the extreme end of demanding, some of the harsher punishments -- yelling, name-calling and physical expressions of anger such as spanking -- can be seen as abusive. "I think you'd have a lot of trouble finding Western parents who are going to call their kids 'garbage' as the mother in the essay did," says Newman. "By our standards, it is abusive."

The takeaway: Double-check your mindset. "Parenting has become so competitive -- it's really like a competitive sport in this country," says Newman. "Again, this harsher approach can jeopardize your relationship with your child. But this is not letting the majority of parents, the softies, off the hook. They still need to learn to say 'no.'"

Where do you fall on the parenting spectrum? Not a mom yet? Which style do you think you'll choose?

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Excerpt)

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Amy Chua , the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School, published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in 2011. The book became an immediate and controversial bestseller.

It is “a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.”

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Thoughts From the Daughter of a Chinese Mother

A new book about parenting rings true for immigrant children—but also perpetuates some troubling stereotypes

by Julianne Hing

My Asian-American friends and I shared the Wall Street Journal 's weekend excerpt from Amy Chua's from her parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , with a mixture of incredulity and survivor's pride. One friend jokingly said the article had triggered flashbacks of traumatic, long-blocked memories.

The piece has an unfortunate headline: "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." In it, Chua recounts her decision to raise her two daughters Sophia and Louisa the "Chinese way," and not give in to the inevitable "family decline" that befalls immigrant families. Here's how it usually goes: immigrant parents arrive in America and work tireless lives of sacrifice to open up every educational opportunity to their children, who repay their debt to their parents by becoming high-achieving attorneys and physicians and engineers. But the next generation of kids grow up spoiled by Western notions of self-actualization, and throw away generations of hard work to become idealistic artists, and organizers, and reporters. It's a familiar storyline for those acquainted with tired model minority stereotypes.

Chua's method included strict rules--no sleepovers, no television, only straight As, mandatory musical instruments--and a sick mixture of threats and taunts. Chua wrote :

Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young--maybe more than once--when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage. As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.

Extreme to say the least. Chua's tone is arrogant but filled just the same with bullseye observations, and I spent a long time trying to untangle the sincere from the deadpan. So much of the piece is an accurate reflection of a specific brand of hard-ass Asian parenting. But would other people be able to sense the gleeful embellishments in her piece, the way she seems to relish insulting and threatening her kids to get them to perform? And then I doubled back: was I being too charitable to read it as exaggeration?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Internet, one of my aunties sent the piece around to other women in my family last night. "Thought you might enjoy this," my auntie wrote to other mothers. "Were you raised by a Chinese mother ... or are you perhaps one yourself?"

My mother was horrified at the piece, called it embarrassing and terrible and outrageous, said that she resented the fact that Chua used the term "Chinese mother," even with the disclaimers at the opening that not all Chinese mothers deserve the title, and some non-Chinese mothers could be admitted to the club of harsh, ultra-strict parenting.

Like Chua, my parents sacrificed a great deal to raise me and my siblings--they make for great stories now that we're all adults. My mom would hand us math workbooks to occupy us during car rides the way other parents hand their kids Pop Tarts or carrot sticks. She, like Chua, packed our violins in the trunk of the minivan so we could practice even while we were on vacation and forbade sleepovers and weeknight television well into my high school years. I struggled mightily with math and science and my mother would wake me up at 6 am on weekends so we could go over math drills together for hours. Letting me fail was not an option to her, though I occasionally wished she would have. Thanks to her, I didn't.

All of this I recognize as love.

When I told my mom I might write about the piece here she started choosing her words very carefully, like an elected official issuing a public statement after having a mic thrust in their face. She was not just responding to Chua, she was speaking in defense of all sensible, rational, compassionate Chinese mothers.

She called Chua's description of filial devotion "twisted," but didn't totally disagree with her either. My mom and I agreed that Chua's plainly abusive treatment of her daughters was nothing to be proud of, but my mother in particular didn't want people thinking that such behavior came with the Chinese parenting package.

I don't know anyone who doesn't carry around one scar or another from childhood, who wasn't wounded in some way in the course of their upbringing. But I grew up around lot of other Chinese-American kids who were pushed to succeed and had parents that were various shades of Chua. Not every kid holds up to that kind of parental pressure. Asian-American females in particular are especially prone to depression and suicide; scientists have linked that in part to cultural pressures to succeed. And herein lies one of the most salient perils of buying into the model minority myth, a theory that posits that Asian-Americans owe their relative economic successes to cultural values prioritizing academic rigor, hard work, individual responsibility, and family cohesion. The stereotype has been foisted upon Asian-Americans and used to divide communities of color while obscuring the realities of the Asian-American experience . Some, like Chua, seem to have internalized it.

Chua might scoff at my wonderful parents' crumbling resolve. I was allowed to stop playing the violin and piano before high school, I had far from a 4.0 GPA and was still allowed to celebrate birthdays and Christmas. I was allowed to play in my middle school's jazz band and run on its track and field team, I've been allowed to pursue the career of my own choosing. My parents never had a problem praising us or offering encouragement when we failed. Chua might see these mercies as indulgences, I'm thankful my parents saw them as a matter of course.

You can be a Chinese mother without being Chua's brand of Chinese mother, my mother wanted me to know. Read it as one extreme woman's memoir, she seemed to say, not as a parenting manual. Except for the parts where Chua talks about how important it is for children to respect and honor their parents and take care of them. And the sections where she points out that rote repetition and dogged perseverance are your only sure ticket to success.

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Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

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What is a Chinese mother?

By Celeste Headlee John Hockenberry Mark Effron

Author, mother, and law professor Amy Chua is creating a firestorm with an essay published in this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal titled, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.? The essay, which was given its title by the Journal, included excerpts from her new book ?Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.? Both showcases Chua’s strict parenting style ? from forcing her daughters to practice the piano well into the night without bathroom breaks, to forbidding them to attend sleepovers.

We’ve invited Amy on the show today ? not to discuss whether her parenting methods are good or bad or right or wrong – but to talk about whether or not her methods are really Chinese. And if they’re not Chinese, what they are instead.

Amy Chua: Life of a Tiger Mother

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ABOUT THE BOOK Amy Chua was a wellrespected and highprofile Yale Law Professor who published two bestsellers yet, no one seemed to have taken much notice of her. Then everything changed. In January, 2011 Chua published her explosive memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which propelled her into the spotlight. Within weeks, Amy Chua was on Time.com 's top ten list of the most thoughtprovoking, angerinducing, and viral viewpoints of the year. Before 2011 ended, she was nominated one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. In Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua details her own unique take on parenting and uses her own family model as proof that Chinese mothers raise successful children. Chua argues that although people hesitate to accept the notion of cultural stereotypes in parenting, the truth is that many studies support significant measurable differences in parenting between Chinese and Westerners. The book created a firestorm of controversy and sparked a robust and active dialogue about how cultural styles impact upbringing. Although Chua offered the disclaimer that being a "Chinese mother" does not mean you must be Chinese in ethnicity, but simply a parent who ignores the style of parenting that has become common in Western societies, a Wall Street Journal excerpt that appeared the day prior to the book's release fanned the flames of controversy and linked the topic firmly with Chinese culture. Entitled Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, the essay elicited an astounding 8,800 comments in response from readers, some offering praise, but most vilifying Amy Chua as a parent. MEET THE AUTHOR Debbie J. is an experienced writer and a member of the Hyperink Team, which works hard to bring you high-quality, engaging, fun content. Happy reading! EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Amy L. Chua was born October 26, 1962, in Champaign, Illinois. Her Chinese immigrant parents came to the United States from the Philippines in 1961, eloping together to pursue advanced degrees at MIT. They were extremely strict, but loving. Amy Chua was the eldest of four girls. Amy and her sisters Michelle, Katrin, and Cynthia (Cindy) were raised in the Roman Catholic faith, and lived in West Lafayette, Indiana. Chua recalls that her father worked until three in the morning to make a good life for his family, and that he took great pleasure in introducing his family to American pastimes and activities such as tacos, Sloppy Joes, Dairy Queen, sledding, skiing, camping. The day her parents became naturalized citizens is a moment Amy Chua recalls with great pride. Her parents both grew up in the Philippines under Japanese occupation, and came to the States after celebrating liberation under General Douglas MacArthur. Although her father's family was very wealthy, her mother came from a poor but intellectual family. The Chua family's reenactment of the American dream is a theme woven through Chua's second book. Her father, Leon Ong Chua, was born June 28, 1936. After earning his first degree in the Philippines in 1959, he came to the United States on a scholarship, eventually completing his PhD at the University of Illinois in 1964. While the family lived in Indiana, he was an academic at Purdue University. When Amy was eight years old, the family moved to Berkeley, California, where Leon Chua became Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences professor at the University of California in Berkeley. He is known for formulating the Memristor theory in 1971, a method of memory resistance through use of a passive twoterminal electrical component. He is also considered the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks, and invented Chua's circuit. He has since been awarded eight honorary doctorates, and remains active in research and writing. CHAPTER OUTLINE ...and much more

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Why chinese mothers are superior summary (english/nepali) and question answers | mero solution.

Amy Chua

The kids will touch the enjoyment only when they good at it and that must come with hard training. Such a tough training many people were not agree with the way she did. She said Western parent tend to give up early about training their kids. She mention the differences between Chinese and Western parenting such as, Chinese parents can say things that western parent can't say like call their kid "Fatty" as refer to health. Western parents are too worry about hurting their child's feeling so they will not say anything that might damage kid's self-esteem. Chinese parents can demand and order straight As from their kids because Chinese parent believe that their child can get them. Western parents tend to persuade kids to try to do their best. Chinese parents are pushing their kids to overcome their own desire. Western parents are too worry about how their children's will feel.

In the last part, she conclude that Chinese way of loving their children is to prepare them for the future. Western parents are loving their kids by provide them positive support. Two different mid-set that separate these two type of parenting. *********************************************************************** Summary of Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior in Nepali

Summary of Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior in Nepali

A. Comprehensive :

Q.1. What does Chua mean when she says, "What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it?" Do you agree with her?

ANSWER : According to Chua, many Chinese parents push their children to work hard to get good at things because they believe that, despite the resistance the child may have at first, the praise and satisfaction that comes from this hard work will make it worth it, thus giving them motivation to work at the skill even harder.

Q.2. Does Chua's husband agree or disagree with her child-rearing methods? Why does he react the way he does?

ANSWER : While Chua believes that children owe something to their parents, her husband believes the opposite. He believes that since parents are the ones that choose to give life to their children that they should be prepared to provide for them as a result.

Q.3. According to Chua, why are Chinese parents able to do things that Western parents cannot?

ANSWER : Because western patents are always worried about their child's self esteem and self-image, resulting in sugar coating

Q.4. How does Chua respond to the charge that Chinese parents don't care about their children?

ANSWER : She says "they would give up any thing for their children its just a different parenting model".

Q.5. According to Chua, how do Chinese child-rearing practices prepare children for life?

ANSWER : Chua says that Chinese child-rearing practices give children strong work habits, skills, and confidence.

B. Purpose and Audience :

Q.1. What preconceptions about Chinese mothers does Chua think Westerners have? Do you think she is right about this?

ANSWER : Chua believes that many westerners believe that Chinese mothers are overbearing and indifferent to their children's needs. While I do not believe that the perception itself is correct, I think she is correct in stating that many believe this to be true.

Q.2. Does Chua seem to expect her readers to be receptive, hostile, or neutral to her ideas? What evidence can you find to support your impression? How do you know?

ANSWER : She seems to anticipate her readers to react negatively to her ideas. When she talks about the time she called her daughter "garbage", she mentions that she was ostracized by a social circle when mentioning this incident. She also mentions the rise of books that portray Asian mothers as heartless; she seems aware that this parenting style is not well received among most Westerners.

Q.3. What is Chua's thesis? Where does she state it?

ANSWER : Chua's thesis, which she states in paragraph 11, is that there are three main differences between Westem parenting and Chinese parenting.

Q.4. In an interview, Chua said that the editors of the Wall Street Journal, not she, chose the title of her essay. Why do you think the editors chose the title they did? What title do you think Chua would have chosen? What title would you give the essay?

ANSWER : The editors likely chose this title because it is a controversial statement that would draw in readers. Chua's point doesn't seem to be to claim superiority, her goal seems more oriented toward explaining the nuances of these parenting techniques to dispel the criticism they receive and to talk about how these techniques differ from Western techniques. Her title may have been something along the lines of "How Chinese and Western Mothers Differ." I would have chosen a similar title as well; I believe that the author's goals should be recognized in the title.

Q.5. Why does Chua begin her essay with a list of things her two daughters were not allowed to do as they were growing up? How do you think she expects readers to react to this list? How do you react?

ANSWER : Chua expected readers to be shocked, possibly angered by this list; she included it with the intent of eliciting this kind of response in the reader. She intends to persuade the reader to read more by appealing to their emotion.

Q.6. Is this essay a point-by-point comparison, a subject-by-subject comparison, or a combination of the two organizational strategies? Why does Chua arrange her comparison the way she does?

ANSWER : This essay is organized using a point-by-point structure. This organizational style works well because it allows Chua to touch on many individual points and write about how each parenting style differs regarding that point in a way that is not confusing for the reader.

Q.7. What evidence does Chua present to support her view that there are marked differences between the parenting styles of Chinese and Western parents?

ANSWER : Most of the evidence that Chua provides is based upon her own opinions and observations. Her comparisons between how Chinese and Western parents deal with learning instruments and how to speak to one's child are based purely on her own experiences. In paragraph 5, Chua cites a study to compare Chinese immigrant mothers and Western mothers' opinions on topics like academic expectations.

Q.8. Chua was born in the United States. Does this fact undercut her conclusions about the differences between Western and Chinese child-rearing? Explain.

ANSWER : The fact that Chua was born in the US does not undercut her arguments; if anything, this helps her case. Being born in the US has given her an opportunity to see both parenting styles she discusses firsthand. Her conclusions are more severely undercut by the lack of nuance she provides; there is little evidence that the techniques she discusses are effective. ***********************************************************************

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An Examination of Chinese vs. Western Parenting Through Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

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"I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. . . . I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent, and pathetic,” writes Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor, describing the tactics she used to force her daughter Lulu to play “The Little White Donkey” on the piano (61). This is one example Chua chronicles of parenting her two daughters, Sophia and Lulu, in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother . In her book, Chua uses the term “tiger mother” to describe a style of parenting most commonly exercised by Chinese parents (4). Chua addresses the differences between Chinese and Western parenting in the introduction, writing, “Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting” (5). From this statement, Chua goes on to briefly illuminate these differences, such as Chinese parents spending “approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children” in comparison to Western parents (5).

The book unleashed a heated response, with some readers even sending death threats against Chua (Dolak). Why did Chua’s book elicit such backlash? On the one hand, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’s reliance on Chinese and Western stereotypes and Chua’s writing style may well invite controversy of this magnitude, but so do the responses of her critics. Through an examination of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and the discourse that the book spurred, we can see how representations of both Chinese and Western mothers have been distorted and, in turn, how these misrepresentations sidetracked what could have been an important discussion about Chinese versus Western parenting.

The controversy first erupted in January 2011 when the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , titled “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.” Chua, who has stated numerous times that her book is not a parenting manual, claimed that “the Wall Street Journal’s article strung together the most controversial sections of her book and failed to highlight that the book is a memoir about a personal journey of motherhood” (Dolak). Ironically, Chua’s criticism of the Wall Street Journal excerpt can be applied to her own book. Just as the Wall Street Journal article “strung together the most controversial sections of her book,” Chua has strung together her most controversial parenting anecdotes in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother .

We can better understand this parallel between the excerpt and the book by inspecting the letter in response that Chua’s daughter Sophia wrote, which reads in part, “No outsider can know what our family is really like. . . . They don’t see us eating our hamburgers with fried rice. They don’t know how much fun we have when the six of us—dogs included—squeeze into one bed and argue about what movies to download from Netflix” (Chua-Rubenfeld). Perhaps the reason why no outsider can get a glimpse into this charming vision of Chua’s family is because Chua decides not to portray this vision in the book, even though one would expect moments of familial intimacy to be included in a “memoir about a personal journey of motherhood” (Dolak). To a certain extent, Chua’s decision to include anecdotes like “The Birthday Card” (in which Chua rejects the birthday cards Sophia and Lulu made for her because they were made carelessly and tells her daughters “I deserve better than this. So I reject this.”) over stories about family bonding almost makes sense (Chua 103). After all, Chua seems eager to point out how strict and demanding she is compared to her Western counterparts and these anecdotes arguably do the job. With her one-dimensional portrayal of Chinese parenting, Chua perpetuates “the media stereotypes of Asian-Americans that are already so prevalent in our society—quiet, obedient, good-at-math nerds that through their rigid discipline end up having deficient social skills” (Chi).

Not only does Chua describe her daughters and herself as walking Chinese stereotypes, she typecasts the Western mothers she discusses in her book. The author suggests that Chinese parents raise more successful kids because of their Chinese heritage while Western parents raise less successful kids because of their Western heritage. This idea is primarily illustrated through comparisons she draws between her family and their Western counterparts throughout the book, such as the juxtaposition of Sophia and her Western peers at the Neighborhood Music School. While Chua enforced a rigorous practice schedule of ninety minutes a day, seven days a week for Sophia, “Most of the other students at the school had liberal Western parents, who were weak-willed and indulgent when it came to practicing” and mentions a student named Aubrey, “who was required to practice one minute per day for every year of her age” (Chua 27–28). Eventually, and of course partly because of this intense practice schedule, Sophia ended up playing at Carnegie Hall as an eighth-grade student (140). Chua explicitly calls herself (and her ability to execute such a rigid practice schedule for her daughter) a “big cultural advantage” for Sophia (27). This quotation is crucial to our understanding of Chua’s use of stereotypes, demonstrating that she is able to drive her daughters to success because she is Chinese and that following these “Chinese values” is more favorable to raising successful kids than being a Western mother following “Western values.”

What is the difference between a “Chinese mother” and a “Western mother”? Chua addresses this question in an interview with Time magazine, saying,

I think the biggest difference is that I’ve noticed Western parents seem much more concerned about their children’s psyches, their self-esteem, whereas tough immigrant parents assume strength rather than fragility in their children and therefore behave completely differently. (Luscombe)

To further examine the ethnic distinctions that Chua makes, we must also consider her disclaimer regarding her usage of the terms “Chinese mother” versus “Western parents” in her book. Chua writes, “When I use the term ‘Western parents,’ of course I’m not referring to all Western parents—just as ‘Chinese mother’ doesn’t refer to all Chinese mothers,” adding that some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish, and Ghanaian parents qualify as “Chinese mothers,” as well (Chua 4). However, Chua’s disclaimer is ineffective, because she does not readdress this clarification in the rest of her book, and instead, perpetuates stereotyped images of Chinese mothers and children versus Western parents and children. The effect of Chua’s book is an oversimplification of “Chinese students” and “American students” (not to mention, of course, that students can be both): the former is obedient and good at rote tasks while the latter is lazy and undisciplined.

Unfortunately, the critics responding to Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother rely on the same stereotypes that Chua employs. We see this quite visibly in writer Ayelet Waldman’s response to Chua’s book in the Wall Street Journal , “In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom.” In her article, Waldman employs the very stereotypes Chua uses in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , beginning with a list, as Chua does, that detail the activities Waldman’s children are allowed to do: quit studying the piano and the violin, sleep over at their friends’ house, surf the Internet, etc. ( Wall Street Journal ). Waldman makes it quite obvious that she has taken Chua’s list of forbidden activities for her children and has reversed it to make it a list of permitted activities. That is, Waldman seems to exaggerate the lax attitudes of certain Western parents just as Chua played up the harsh practices of the Chinese tiger mother. For instance, she writes that she always permits her children to “sleep over at their friends’ houses, especially on New Year’s Eve or our anniversary, thus saving us the cost of a babysitter” and to “participate in any extracurricular activity they wanted, so long as I was never required to drive farther than 10 minutes to get them there, or to sit on a field in a folding chair in anything but the balmiest weather for any longer than 60 minutes” ( Wall Street Journal ). It is clear from her essay that Waldman is a devoted and attentive parent, but she still resorts to such statements that reaffirms the idea of a lenient Western mother. Both Waldman and Chua perpetuate Chinese and Western stereotypes with a complacence that is hard to understand at times. Why are these mothers so willing to caricature their culture and parenting?

Waldman’s essay demonstrates the divisive effect of both Chua’s use of stereotypes and Chua’s simplification of Chinese and Western parenting. For instance, Waldman recounts how her daughter Rosie overcame mild dyslexia “not because we forced her to drill and practice and repeat, not because we dragged her kicking and screaming, or denied her food, or kept her from the using the bathroom, but because she forced herself.” She is pointedly contrasting her daughter to Chua’s daughters, who were forced to “drill and practice and repeat” and more specifically, Lulu, who was not allowed to use the bathroom until she mastered a piano piece (Waldman). “[Rosie] climbed the mountain alone, motivated not by fear or shame of dishonoring her parents but by her passionate desire to read,” states Waldman. It seems that according to Waldman, to be self-motivated and to be motivated by fear or shame of disappointing one’s parents are mutually exclusive and that the former is more respectable than the latter. However, such a categorization seems unfair to the children who are pushed by their parents, such as Chua’s daughter Sophia.

Sophia disproves Waldman’s argument through an essay that she wrote for school prior to Chua penning her book. In this essay, Sophia writes that just before her performance at Carnegie Hall, “I realized how much I loved this music” (Chua 140). That is, while Sophia may have followed her mother’s rigidly enforced ninety minutes a day, seven days a week practice schedule because she was motivated by “fear or shame of dishonoring her parents,” as Waldman would say, Sophia evidently grew a passion and a love for the piano that no one, not even Chua, could command her to develop. “Oftentimes training children fairly early to work very hard and be disciplined would be one way to foster their self-motivation,” writes Professor Ruth K. Chao in her study “Beyond Parental Control and Authoritarian Parenting Style: Understanding Chinese Parenting Through the Cultural Notion of Training” (1117). That is, working hard from a young age may allow a child to see the benefits of doing so and thus, he may be inclined to set his own goals.

In contrast to Chua’s simplified and stereotyped work, Chao delves into the cultural factors that have led these two cultures to develop distinct parenting styles. In her study, fifty immigrant Chinese mothers and fifty European-American mothers answered scales, or questionnaires, derived from “Block’s 1981 Child Rearing Practices Report” (Chao 1114). After conducting the research, Chao concludes “that the concepts often used to describe Chinese parenting (i.e., ‘authoritarian,’ ‘controlling,’ or ‘restrictive’) have been rather ethnocentric and misleading” (1111). Chao dismantles these concepts by examining two Chinese terms: chiao shun , which “contains the idea of training (i.e., teaching or educating) children in the appropriate or expected behaviors” and guan , which Tobin et al. explain “literally means ‘to govern’” but also can mean “‘to care for’ or even ‘to love’” (qtd. in Chao 1112). She states that “the sociocultural traditions and values that have shaped [these] child-rearing concepts” do not exist in the West (1117). Furthermore, Chao found that even the word “training” itself triggered “very positive” associations for the Chinese mothers participating in her study, while the European American mothers associated “training” with words like “militaristic” or “regimented” (1117). These findings suggest the difficulties in classifying Chinese parenting in strictly American terms. Even the very same word, “training,” evokes two very different responses in Chinese culture versus European-American culture. As Chao states, “These highly charged negative ‘derivations’ of authoritarian [ sic ] have been applied to describe the parenting styles of individuals who in no way share this same historical and sociocultural context” (1117). Thus, Chao’s analysis calls into question the disapproval expressed by critics of Chua who may not understand the cultural context of Chinese parenting. Chua’s decision not to examine the cultural context in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , but merely present its striking features, is what lends the book to such controversy. Had Chua given her largely American readership a better idea of the cultural concepts that fashioned Chinese parenting, Chua and her critics would have been able to engage in a more informed discussion of the merits and drawbacks of Chinese and Western parenting.

Discussions of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother will have implications that far exceed the scope of the book. The book comes at a time of heightened American anxiety about China becoming a formidable economic challenger to the United States. More significantly, Chua’s book comes at a time when students from Shanghai came in first in every subject tested by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) while children from the United States placed 17 th in reading, 23 rd in science and 31 st in math ( The Telegraph ). U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s statement in response to the PISA test results almost seems to be taken directly off a page of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother . He says that U.S. students “express more self-confidence in their academic skills” than students in any other nation that participated in the PISA and that “this stunning finding may be explained because students here are being commended for work that would not be acceptable in high-performing education systems” (Ed.gov). While Secretary Duncan’s comments deal with the 2009 test results, his speech is still relevant today because American students maintained this high self-regard in the most recent 2011 test results ( The Telegraph ). How we interpret these results is crucial: we cannot take a Chua-Waldman reading of these scores by assuming that all American students are thus lazier but have a higher sense of self-esteem than all Chinese students. Rather, by keeping Chao’s study in mind, we can recognize the impact of culture on the parenting and education of both China and the United States.

No one culture holds the secret to successful parenting and even Chua herself recognizes this by the end of her book. After recounting an incident of dramatic rebellion from her daughter (involving chopping off her hair to just below her ear and smashing a glass in a restaurant), the author considers the possibility that there are merits in both Chinese parenting and Western parenting (Chua 174, 205–206). Indeed, Chua now allows Lulu to participate in improv, a very “American” pursuit, admitting, “I’m still in the fight, albeit with some significant modifications to my strategy” (221).

In his essay, “The Case for Contamination,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor at Princeton University, discusses how society accepts contentious concepts, such as women entering “learned professions” like law or medicine and poses the question, “Isn’t a significant part of it just the consequence of our getting used to new ways of doing things?” (52). Indeed, society began to accept the idea of women entering learned professions mostly because more and more women entered learned professions. Yet if we are to get used to “new ways of doing things,” such as adopting Chinese parenting concepts, we must remove the stigma, get past the stereotypes, and promote a freer exchange of ideas through “conversations that occur across cultural boundaries” (Appiah 23). Chua and her book spurred “conversations,” but not the kind that brings about change. Rather, these conversations reinforced the boundaries between Chinese and Western cultures. Perhaps, if we can get past the hyperbole and Chua’s dramatics in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , we will discover ideas that transcend the boundaries of culture: hard work and parents wanting the best for their children. What we must do, then, is to move away from a discourse of stereotypes and generalizations and toward an informed conversation that recognizes the specific cultural traditions and values that have shaped the parenting style of each culture. Through such a conversation, we will be able to better recognize the merits of both parenting styles.

WORKS CITED

Appiah, Kwame A. “The Case For Contamination.” New York Times Magazine 1 Jan. 2006: 30–52. ProQuest National Newspapers Premier. Web.

Chao, Ruth K. “Beyond Parental Control and Authoritarian Parenting Style: Understanding Chinese Parenting Through the Cultural Notion of Training.” Child Development 65.4 (1994): 1111–1119. Print.

Chi, Frank. “Amy Chua: Manipulating Childhood Trauma and Asian-American Stereotypes to Sell a Book.” Boston.com . The New York Times Company, 16 Jan. 2011. Web. 16 Apr. 2012.

Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother . New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.

Chua-Rubenfeld, Sophia. “Why I Love My Strict Chinese Mom.” New York Post . News Corp, 17 Jan. 2011. Web. 14 Apr. 2012.

Dolak, Kevin. “Strict, Controversial Parenting Style Leads to Death Threats for ‘Tiger Mother’ Amy Chua.” ABC News . ABC News Network, 17 Jan. 2011. Web. 14 Apr. 2012.

Duncan, Arne. “Remarks at OECD’s Release of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 Results.” ED.gov . U.S. Department of Education, 7 Dec. 2010. Web. 21 Apr. 2012.

Luscombe, Belinda. “Chinese vs Western Mothers: Q&A with Amy Chua” Time . Time, 11 Jan. 2011. Web. 09 Apr. 2012.

Pearson, Allison. “The Discipline of a Chinese Mother.” Telegraph.co.uk . Telegraph Media Group, 27 Jan. 2012. Web. 14 Apr. 2012.

Waldman, Ayelet. “In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom.” Wall Street Journal . News Corp, 16 Jan. 2011. Web. 14 Apr. 2012.

YERIN PAK '16CC is a sophomore History major at Columbia College and is originally from Seoul, Korea. In her free time, Yerin enjoys writing, reading and traveling.

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Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior By Amy Chua Summary

It is no secret that the traditional Chinese family places a great deal of emphasis on academic achievement. In her essay “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” Amy Chua describes the tough love parenting style she used to raise her children. According to Chua, the key to successful parenting is to instill a strong work ethic in your children from an early age.

Chua argues that Western parents are too permissive and that this leads to spoiled, entitled kids who are not willing to put in the hard work required to succeed. She believes that Chinese mothers produce more successful children because they are more demanding and have higher expectations.

While it is true that many Western families could learn a thing or two from the Chinese parenting style, Chua’s essay is ultimately flawed due to its one-sidedness and lack of understanding of the Western mindset.

Superior Chinese Mothers It’s true that the techniques used by parents to raise their children will have a significant influence on how well they grow, especially the moms who have the most impact. There is no right or wrong when it comes to parenting. They all desire the greatest possible for their kids. The only distinction is in terms of intensity of effort involved in raising a child.

The article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” is written by Amy Chua. In her article, she mentioned that the way she raised her children is the best way and other mothers should do the same. According to her, Chinese mothers are better than Western mothers because they expect more from their children and have higher standards. They are also more likely to spend more time with their children and be more involved in their lives.

While it is true that some of the things she said may be true, there are also some drawbacks to the way she raise her children. For one, she is very strict with them and does not allow them to have any fun. She also does not let them make any mistakes and expects them to be perfect. This can lead to the children feeling pressure and not being able to enjoy their childhood.

Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor who has written the book Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, believes that the methods used by Chinese mothers to raise their children are the most beneficial. Her main goal in this essay is to illustrate how great Chinese moms are through highlighting the differences between Western parents and Chinese parents. To reach her aim, she employs several strategies including example-based content, specific writing style, and strong tone in her work.

Chua’s choice of words such as “Western parents are concerned about their children’s psyches. Chinese parents aren’t. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.” (2) is one example that employs ethos to her article.

She also uses pathos when she writes “It sounds more like a nightmare than a dream…And yet these are things my friends who grew up with Western parents revere: sleeping later, not having to do homework, being able to play the violin or piano for fun instead of for achievement. To Chinese parents, the difference between Western and Chinese parenting styles can be summed up this way: Western parents try to respect their children’s individuality while Chinese parents try to build it ”.

In Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, Amy Chua claims that the methods Chinese moms raise their children are the finest. There are several distinctions between them, as Chua points out in her essay. The first is that Westerner parents care a great deal about their children’s pride, which has an impact on what they say to the kids. Furthermore, they expect less than Chinese parents.

Meanwhile, Chinese parents always try to be their children’s best friend and do not hesitate to use harsh words in order to motivate them.

The second difference is that Westerner parents are more concerned about their child’s present happiness while Chinese parents focus on the future. They believe that making their children study hard now will pay off when they grow up and have a successful career.

The last difference is that Westerner parents are afraid of having high expectations for their children because they do not want them to feel like they cannot reach the expectations; as a result, they often praise their children for small accomplishments. On the other hand, Chinese parents expect nothing but the best from their children and are not afraid of pushing them to their limits.

The influence of long-held traditional beliefs about the depth of children to their parents, given that parents provide them the forms and lives. The third is that Chinese mothers are more deeply aware of their children than Western moms. Chua then uses her own autobiography as proof for her assertions. One of Amy Chua’s many tactics throughout the essay is useful content, such as statistics and, notably, examples.

She speaks about the academic achievements of her daughters to illustrate how Chinese mothers are more successful in raising their children. Furthermore, Chua’s choice of words is also significant. She uses phrases such as “refuse to accept mediocrity” which creates a tone that is both intense and assertive, perfectly representing the image of a Tiger Mother.

The purpose of Amy Chua’s article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” is to provide a detailed explanation as to why she believes that Chinese mothers produce more successful children than Western mothers. She begins by discussing the different parenting styles of Eastern and Western cultures. She argues that the main reason why Chinese mothers are more successful is because they have higher expectations for their children and they are not afraid to push them to their limits.

Chua provides several examples of how her own daughters have benefited from her strict parenting style. She describes how her older daughter, Lulu, was able to get into an Ivy League school by working extremely hard and never giving up. Chua also talks about how her younger daughter, Sophia, was able to learn three languages by the time she was five years old because her parents pushed her to learn as much as she could.

In conclusion, Amy Chua’s article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” is a convincing and well-written argument that demonstrates why she believes that Chinese mothers are more successful in raising their children. She uses effective content, such as statistics and personal examples, to support her claims.

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How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda

The author and her mother captured in three family photographs arranged as a triptych.

The messages wishing me a gruesome death arrive slowly at first and then all at once. I am condemned to be burned, raped, tortured. Some include a video of joyful dancing at a funeral, with fists pounding on a wooden casket. The hardest ones to read take aim at my mother, who has been immobilized by the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis since 2014. Most of the messages originate in China, but my mother and I live in New York. As the COVID lockdown has swept the city, I find out that the health aides she depends on are to be banned from her facility and take to Twitter to publicize my despair. But this personal plight as a daughter unexpectedly attracts the attention of Chinese nationalists who have long been displeased with my work as a writer reporting on China. In short order, my predicament is politicized and packaged into a viral sensation. “Has your mom died yet?” China15z0dj wants to know. “Your mom will be dead Haha. 1.4 billion people wish for you to join her in Hell. Haha!”

At some point, I stop scrolling. The messages I dread the most come not from Internet strangers but from people who know me—my aunt, my uncle, my mother’s childhood best friend. On WeChat, they link to various Chinese-language articles about me and ask, “Have you read this?” The next question would be almost funny if it weren’t so painfully earnest: “Do you know this Jiayang Fan?”

I do not presume to know this character, but countless social-media posts, video blogs, and comments describe her as a creature driven by self-loathing. I find a story about my mother and me in the Global Times , a state-controlled Chinese newspaper with twenty-eight million followers on Weibo. It has been picked up by the country’s most popular news aggregator and then energetically disseminated on various platforms. The more I read, the more fascinated I become by the creation of this alter ego. I am watching a portrait of myself being painted, minute by minute, anonymous hands contributing daubs and strokes, the more lurid the better. “Jiayang Fan, of Chongqing, China, followed her parents to the U.S. at the age of eight,” one article begins. “Even though her body flows with Chinese blood—the blood of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor—she has decided to metamorphose into an American citizen and denigrate her Chinese face as an indisputable burden!” Creatively, the same words are used as a voice-over accompanying a video post in which images of my mother’s face and mine, culled from social media, are rendered in traditional Chinese brush-painting style. A computerized female voice describes Jiayang Fan as a columnist at the New York Times —evidently, this piece of fact checking fell by the wayside—one who makes a living by smearing her homeland. Not only have I falsely accused China of being the geographic origin of the coronavirus pandemic; I also had the nerve to support the pro-democracy terrorists in Hong Kong .

Deliciously, once the U.S. finds itself in the grip of the pandemic, Jiayang Fan gets her comeuppance. It turns out that her mother is on a ventilator, and, when medical equipment runs short, it seems that she is to be summarily unplugged from the machine, as a result of American racism. “She might believe herself to be American,” the article notes. “But she never expected Americans would treat her like this.” Many articles and posts are illustrated with grainy cell-phone screenshots of a woman in her sixties in a hospital bed. Her face is bloated and shiny with tears; a thick suction tube protrudes from her throat. In the upper right corner of each image, in a smaller box, is a younger woman whose twisted, wailing face matches that of the older woman. We quickly understand that this is Jiayang Fan in a video chat with her mother. The articles invite us to behold the humiliation that befits a villain. There is some confusion about whether Fan’s mother has died—she has not—but the moral of the story is clear enough: despite Fan’s sycophantic “worship” of America, her adopted country does not reward the depraved traitor.

“Jiayang Fan” is reminiscent of the heroes and villains of the revolution that I used to write about as a first grader. My home town, Chongqing, was briefly a Nationalist capital at the end of the Civil War, in 1949; my first school outing, at the age of six, was to Zhazidong and Baigongguan, concentration camps where the Nationalists incarcerated, tortured, and executed hundreds of Communists. One prisoner in particular captured my imagination: Song Zhenzhong, a boy my own age known as Little Turnip Head, because his bony skull appeared outlandishly large atop his malnourished body. The son of high-ranking Communists, Little Turnip Head was less than a year old when he was captured with his parents, and grew up in prison, passing messages to his parents’ comrades in neighboring cells. On the eve of the Communist victory, as Nationalists prepared to flee, he was shot, and became sanctified as the revolution’s youngest martyr.

By second grade, I’d written several “reflections on the heroism of Little Turnip Head.” Imitating what I read in my school primers, I mastered the formula: in my essays, people were forever sacrificing themselves, rescuing injured classmates at great personal cost. All this moral valor was pretty much the opposite of what I observed in the Army compound where my mother and I lived, where daily life abounded in pedestrian deceptions. Didn’t my mother, whom I idolized, sell her egg coupons on the black market? And hadn’t she, as an Army doctor, given my teachers medications for minor ailments, in order to exempt me from corporal punishment? Still, the hagiographies and demonologies of official Party history formed the basis of my education.

“Jiayang Fan,” in her small way, bears all the hallmarks of a new villain. Her crime, turning her back on her motherland, is one I have been taught to revile since I was two, when my father left for America. It was 1986, and he had been selected to study biology at Harvard, as one in the first wave of visiting scholars in the U.S. In my mind, my father resembled America itself, an abstraction that gestured toward a gauzy ideal. That he was chosen to go there rendered him special, the way that America, the richest country on earth, was special. At the same time, America’s ruthless capitalism and unapologetic dominance also made the country sinister and soulless. And so, although our government had sent my father to the U.S., his presence there now made him suspect.

If I had some intimation that my mother was working to secure our passage to the West, it was hard to reconcile with her public protestations to the contrary. Although she griped about the red tape hampering our departure, she remained unflinchingly devoted to the Communist Party, whose patriotic hymns she hummed daily while she rinsed the dishes. In 1992, as we prepared to leave, adults sometimes asked me if we were going to America. Were they truly curious, or did they already know the answer? Innocent questions were just as likely to be perilous trip wires. Before answering, I watched my mother’s eyes for instruction and waited for her gaze to guide me. When I solemnly shook my head, I felt myself not to be lying, exactly, but deflecting bodily harm.

Maybe such reflexive doublethink shows me to be as devious as my online persecutors alleged. But their fixation on my disloyalty to China does not encompass the existential complexity of my betrayal. For what is an immigrant but a mind mired in contradictions and doublings, stranded in unresolved splits of the self? Sometimes I have wondered if these people knew something about Jiayang Fan that had always eluded me. For them, there is not an ounce of doubt, whereas uncertainty is the country where I most belong.

On July 4th—a date that had no meaning to me except that it was exactly a month short of my eighth birthday—my mother and I landed at J.F.K. Airport, our six suitcases bulging with rolls of hand-sewn bedding, bags of Sichuanese chili peppers, a cast-iron wok, and her stethoscope. My mother now found herself, at the age of forty, living in a tiny studio apartment in New Haven, Connecticut—my father was at Yale by then—with a husband who, she soon discovered, was carrying on an affair. Within a year and a half, he had left us, and she was faced with eviction; she had less than two hundred dollars to her name, and spoke little English.

Now the two of us became the embodiment of the Chinese phrase xiang yi wei ming —mutual reliance for life. My mother knew that in a vastly unequal and under-resourced world she would have to secure whatever small advantages she could. Born to Party cadres who, as soldiers, had been wounded on the battlefield in the quest to realize Mao’s vision of Communist China, my mother had been spared the worst of the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution. A brutal, unsentimental pragmatism shaped her deepest instincts. Her decision to become a physician sprang not from a passion for medicine but from the realization that this was her only path to a college education. My parents met in graduate school and, after I was born, a product of China’s one-child policy, entrenched sexism dictated that she should shift her focus from her career to fending for me, her only child.

Shortly before we were to be evicted, a man with a handlebar mustache came to disconnect our phone. A kindly socialist in his fifties named Jim, he took pity on us and invited us to stay with his family, in West Haven. Desperation burnished in my mother a raw, enterprising grit. In broken English, she told Jim that her one wish was to give her daughter a good education. He revealed what seemed to my mother like a valuable piece of insider info: the best public schools were in the wealthiest Zip Codes. After months of trudging to the local library, where Jim told her that newspapers could be read for free, she answered an ad to be a live-in housekeeper in a Connecticut town that she pronounced “Green Witch.” My mother did not believe herself to be doing something bold or daring. She had simply devised a Chinese work-around to a quintessentially American problem.

In the mid-nineties, Greenwich was one of the wealthiest places in the country, and as blindingly white as the blizzards I was encountering for the first time in New England. A good education had previously been a nebulous concept in my mother’s mind, but, with the help of the local library and her employers, it now acquired the concreteness of a blueprint. Public school in a fancy neighborhood could pave the way for a scholarship at a private school, then boarding school, and a prestigious liberal-arts college—a conveyor belt of opportunities carrying me toward the East Coast élite and away from her.

During my first year at Greenwich Academy, I was the only Asian student in my grade. Early on, a classmate whose mother was friends with my mother’s employer plopped down next to me on the school bus and asked a question whose answer she already knew perfectly well: “So your mother is a maid?” Not long afterward, another classmate, an elfin-faced blonde, asked me how I had escaped being killed in China. “You know,” she said, “because they murder all girl babies over there.” In a current-events class, I was struck by the teacher’s deployment of pronouns: us and them, the Americans and the Chinese. When I tried to answer a question about China, I was flummoxed by the grammar required; as the only Chinese-born person in the room, was I meant to say “they” or “we”?

In the first house where my mother worked, we lived in a maid’s room and shared the bed. Everything resembled brightly wrapped gifts for children: sea-blue toile and salmon seersucker, gingham checks and cabana stripes. Nothing matched, and everything was monogrammed. I had no friends, so I watched a lot of TV. One Saturday night, I was astonished to discover a half hour of news from CCTV, the state channel of the People’s Republic of China. Those thirty minutes, every week, bookended by soaring Party tunes and montages of the Chinese flag unfurling against hammer and sickle, took on an inexpressible sanctity. For a year, my mother and I spent our Saturday nights sitting on our bed under our chintz coverlet, watching the Party broadcast. The day it mysteriously vanished from the air, replaced by programming in English, I wept as if some part of me had been scraped out.

A little girl asks her parents if quarantine is over yet.

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The needs of Greenwich households were mercurial, and every few years my mother would have to scan the want ads again. The stress of not being able to find another position close to my school suspended her in a state of near-permanent anxiety. In the mid-nineties, she developed facial rashes, which mapped their way across the planes of her cheeks and blistered on her upper lip. The briskness with which they ravaged her face tormented my mother. It was as if her body were rebelling against the downward trajectory of her life—from a respected physician bestowing small favors on her daughter’s teachers to a housekeeper who dressed her daughter in hand-me-downs from her employers’ children. Soon she was plagued by pains that migrated through her body. When, after working all day, she collapsed on the sofa in our room, she would probe her abdomen—kidneys, liver, bowel—trying to find a cancer that she’d become convinced was there. “The lump is inoperable, an immediate death sentence,” she would say.

My mother’s worries scared me, but she could share them with no one else. Years of having only a useless child for company hardened her despair and loneliness into a rage that could gust into violent, seething storms. Once, out of sheer horror that I might lose my mother, I suggested that she see a doctor. I knew our situation well enough by then—we didn’t have health insurance—to be apprehensive about my boldness. She’d likely berate me for not understanding that a visit to an Official American Institution was too expensive, too complicated, too intimidating. My mother had been sewing a button that had fallen off a tartan skirt, part of my school uniform, and my question caused her eyes to flit up and settle accusingly on me. “Do you think a doctor would get her own body wrong?” she challenged. That it was an illness erupting from the crushing weight of powerlessness and shame was not a diagnosis she could afford to obtain or bear to imagine.

My mother never did develop the cancer she dreaded would kill her, but, in the fall of 2011, at the age of fifty-nine, she received a far harsher sentence: she would be buried alive by a disease she had never heard of. As A.L.S. gradually paralyzed her, while leaving her intellect intact, our years were filled with I.C.U. visits, emergency surgeries, stays in nursing homes, and wrenching conversations with strangers about the logistics of death. Then, in 2014, after my mother could no longer breathe without a ventilator, she was moved to the Henry J. Carter Specialty Hospital, in Harlem, which, I was told, was the only long-term acute-care facility in Manhattan that could take her.

Early on, it was clear that my mother needed more help than Carter could provide. To avoid bedsores, she had to be turned every two hours. The mucus that gathered in her airway had to be suctioned every half hour. Because she was on a ventilator and had had a tracheotomy, she could no longer produce sound, and we had to devise a new way of “speaking.” I would hold up an alphabet chart and trail through the letters with my finger until a blink from my mother told me to stop, and letter by letter a message would emerge. My mother’s English remains rudimentary. Even when she could speak, she often resorted to placeholders like “this,” “thing,” “here,” and “stuff.” Now her sentences wove heedlessly between Chinese and Chinglish, urgent with demands I could neither decode nor meet. I lived on a La-Z-Boy next to her hospital bed, which I positioned so that our faces were visible to each other if either of us happened to open our eyes in the middle of the night. Not that my mother could sleep much. Her body resisted the rhythm of the ventilator, and, several times a day, a rapid-response team had to manually pump air into her choked lungs. Every second that she couldn’t see me left her petrified. I stopped showering.

After a few months, it became apparent to both of us that I needed to go back to work—but how could I abandon her to strangers? I looked for an apartment near the hospital and trained a shifting roster of heath-care aides, Fujianese immigrants and the hardiest, most unself-pitying women I know. Like my mother, they had survived in America by working lowly jobs to support their families, and went about their chores with the quiet stamina of those who never take a penny for granted. Alternating their duties week by week, they tended to her twenty-four hours a day, never even missing Chinese New Year.

A former athlete, my mother had loved physical activities; not long before her diagnosis, she developed a fondness for paddleboarding. Could there have been a worse devastation for her than progressive imprisonment in her body? As she lost the ability to move even a finger, her temper occasionally slashed those around her as would a sharp object in the hands of an unruly child. I was not immune to its cuts in my daily visits, but it was often the aides who bore the brunt.

My mother currently has two aides, Zhou and Ying, and needs them to survive in the way that she needs the ventilator for her next breath. But she agonizes about the exorbitant cost of full-time help, which Medicare and Medicaid do not cover. You should be investing in an apartment, in Queens, she insists. I tell her to quit fretting and do not say anything to her whenever the numbers fail to add up. The process of making it all work financially is trying and mortifying. When discussing the details with anyone––a friend, a stranger, an insurance rep––I’m afraid of “losing face.” The phrase comes from Chinese, but the English inadequately conveys the importance of mianzi —self-respect, social standing—which Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, described as the “guiding principle of the Chinese mind.”

My mother has always knelt at the altar of mianzi , an aspiration of which A.L.S. makes a spectacular mockery. You may think it’s embarrassing to slur your speech and limp, but wait until you are being spoon-fed and pushed around in a wheelchair—all of which will seem trivial once you can no longer wash or wipe yourself. The progress of the disease is a forced march toward the vanishing point of mianzi . When my mother was first given her diagnosis, she became obsessed with the idea of why—why her, why now, and, above all, why an illness that would subject her to the kind of public humiliation she feared more than death itself. When she could still operate her first-generation iPad, my mother gave me a contact list of everyone she was still in touch with in China, and told me that, except for her siblings, no one must know of her affliction. Such self-imposed isolation seemed like madness to me, but she preferred to cut friends out of her life rather than admit to the indignity of her compromised state. Her body’s insurrection, my mother believes, is her punishment for her prideful strivings in America.

There’s a Chinese saying that my mother liked to use about ruined reputations: “You could never regain your purity even if you jumped into the Yellow River.” Not long ago, I found a journal she kept soon after we arrived in America, just when her life was beginning to unravel. Her words make clear that going back to China would mean intolerable disgrace, in a society that, in instances of domestic collapse, invariably faulted the woman; yet to stay in this alien country, subsisting on menial work, was to peer over a cliff into the unknown. In excruciating indecision, my mother wondered “if it would not be easier to die.” Letting go would be a release, “but what will happen to Yang Yang?” she asked, using her pet name for me. “There might not be a way out for me, but there are still opportunities yet for Yang Yang.”

My mother first learned about COVID -19 from watching Chinese TV news. In her pressure-regulated bed, she spends twenty hours a day toggling between CCTV broadcasts and mawkish drama series. When I told her about how the early spread of the virus had been covered up in China, she was skeptical. News from me is suspect because I am a member of the Western media. (To her, my job has value only because a few people have told her that they’ve heard of the magazine I write for and because some important people, people much more important than she, have deemed my writing fit for publication.) Whenever I inform her that I am travelling to report on China, as I did last year when I went to cover the Hong Kong protests, she laboriously blinks out the message “donot gainst china.” This is what my mother has been urging since I became a writer. This is what my mother has blinked out with growing intensity since Donald Trump started talking about “the Chinese virus.”

One night in early March, when the pandemic still felt like a distant tragedy happening to others, I read that thirteen residents at a nursing home in Washington State had been killed by the virus, and that seventy of its hundred and eighty employees had developed symptoms. I lay in bed waiting for morning, and at seven o’clock called the nurses’ station on my mother’s floor. My tone was solicitous, as I explained that I was Yali Cong’s daughter and asked if the nurses could make sure to wear masks and wash their hands before tending to her. The woman on the line replied that she couldn’t tell the other nurses what to do—“and neither can you.” As she replaced the receiver, she made a remark to someone nearby that thudded in my ear: “She’s telling us what to do but she’s the one who’s Chinese.”

Throwing my coat on over my pajamas, I rushed to the hospital, which is a five-and-a-half-minute walk from my apartment. At the entrance, there were uniformed guards and a notice that said “Effective immediately, all visitation for patients and residents is temporarily suspended.” Something about my face caused one security guard to apologize. “It’s state policy,” he said. “It can’t be helped.”

I called Ying and Zhou. It was a Friday, the day they were supposed to rotate their shifts. It takes Zhou two hours to get to Carter from her home, in Queens, which she shares with her son’s family and in-laws. I wanted to make sure she hadn’t already left. Knowing that losing a week’s income would worry her, I feebly muttered something about how the pandemic had caught us all off guard. Then I called Ying and begged her to stay with my mother in the hospital for another week. After I assured her, groundlessly, that the facility would likely reopen in a week, she agreed to stay.

With the hospital closed to visitors, the only way I could communicate with my mother was through FaceTime. She is often in severe pain, and, without me there to badger the hospital staff about minute changes in her insulin dosage or the timing of her pain medication, she cried more and slept less. This meant less sleep for Ying, too. For years, I have had to mediate between my mother and the aides, between the aides and the hospital nurses, between my mother and the nurses. But a phone screen could not possibly accommodate all the subtleties needed to allay my mother’s fears.

I was useful, really, for only one thing: calling the nurses’ desk to explain conflicts as they arose among multiple aggrieved parties. But I didn’t actually know any of the names of the relevant parties. Although my mom always remembers which nurse has how many children or who works deftly enough to press air bubbles out of her gastric tube, neither she nor Ying, who speaks no English, can remember anyone’s name. Instead, they use nicknames, usually based on the nurses’ appearance. But, at the height of the pandemic, new nurses arrived on the ward, none of whom I’d ever seen. Once, in the middle of the night, I received a call from Ying debriefing me on the misconduct of an “old doughnut.”

“An old doughnut?” I asked, my voice still enveloped in sleep.

“Yes, she gave your mom the wrong medication.”

“An old doughnut gave my mom the wrong medication?” I sat up.

“It’s definitely Old Doughnut, not Mo’ Money,” she said. I rubbed my eyes. “They are the only two on duty. Your mother thinks one of them gave her the wrong medication in her sleep.”

I called the nurses’ desk. No one answered. I called Ying back, got the name of the medication in question, and assured my mother that a stool softener was not likely to cause lasting damage. By then, my mother had spelled out a string of nicknames including Meng Lu (the Chinese shorthand for Marilyn Monroe) and Princles (my mother’s attempt at “freckles”), and regaled me with their every misdeed and blunder. It was after 5 A . M . when I hung up.

Pre-pandemic, my visits could relieve tensions between Ying and my mother. Now they were locked in a room together, armed with nothing but glares. On video chat, I emphasized our enormous gratitude to Ying for staying, and admonished my mother to be mindful of her exhaustion. Privately, I pleaded with Ying for forbearance. But, not long afterward, Ying sent me a note, in her tenuous, slanted hand, relaying a message blinked out by my mother, which included the line “she like three-year-old.” Because Ying doesn’t speak English, she had no idea that she had painstakingly transcribed a list of her own flaws.

This was a step too far. On video chat that evening, I warned my mother that, for her own sake, she had to behave. And then, in English, I said, “Remember what it was like when you were working?” I made sure I didn’t say the word “housekeeper.” “Remember how it came down to respect?” Alluding to our past in front of a family “outsider” made me go rigid, but it had to be said. In our Connecticut days, “respect” was a word my mother fastened on, as if uttering this piece of English vocabulary in private could solve our public predicament. After a day of scrubbing, cleaning, washing, and folding, she was full of recrimination toward everyone who had demeaned her. At first, it was the adults of a household she served, then the children, who she insisted had copied their parents’ haughty expressions of contempt. Then, one day, my mother rebuked me for being “just like them.” “You think you are like them because of your English and your fancy school,” she said. “But you are nothing—nothing but a housekeeper’s daughter.”

In the months after my mother received her A.L.S. diagnosis, I would sometimes conduct an experiment. In bed, after a deep breath, I would will my body to be completely still. The sensation was like pausing in the middle of a dark forest and hearing the ambient noise of birds and leaves for the first time. This is what it feels like to be my mother, I would think, to be imprisoned in your body. When the lockdown was announced in New York, I thought about this experiment occurring on the scale of an entire city, as all infrastructure and commerce ground to a halt. My mother was now incarcerated in a body that was confined in a sealed facility, which was trapped inside a locked-down city.

As the world outside her hospital grew more cataclysmically unbearable, it became very important to me to curate her perception of it. On the day that a hospital where she’d once been treated lost thirteen patients to COVID -19, I jabbered on about the new zucchini recipes I’d discovered online. What good would it do to tell her that if she were to be infected she would almost certainly die and that I would not be allowed at her bedside? Most days, my mother said only two things. One: “donot gainst china.” And two: “u still have job?” The pandemic did nothing to lessen her reverence for hierarchy. For her, deference was a precondition of living, and never more so than when precarity loomed.

One evening, reading on my phone that more stringent lockdown orders could soon be in place, I realized that I was out of rice and late in mailing my rent check. I grabbed the trash and headed out to the street. Then my phone rang. It was Ying, telling me that she was no longer permitted to cross the hall to the kitchen. As I stood on the sidewalk, I heard a man say, “Fucking Chinese.” Only after he’d gone did I realize I was holding the garbage-can lid like a shield. That night, I tweeted about the incident. It was an act of exposure that my mother would have frowned upon. “Where’s your bruise?” she would say, if I complained about being mocked at school: if an incident does not physically harm you, it shouldn’t register. But why had I felt pinned to that tableau in which the man’s words seemed more real than my body? To assert that it had happened was the only way I could wrest the moment away from the stranger.

A few days after family members were shut out of Carter, I called the Patient Relations Department to ask if the virus had entered the facility and what measures could be taken to protect patients. When no one answered, I contacted the C.E.O. at the time, David Weinstein. There wasn’t much he could tell me, but he gave me his cell number, and, a couple of days later, we took a walk in a park next to the hospital. Weinstein, who is in his sixties, said that he had been in the nursing-home business for three decades and that his mother lived in one. Terrible timing, he told me from behind two layers of masks. The health-care system was broken, and both our mothers were caught up in it.

When I tweeted about my mother’s predicament, various friends in the health-care industry weighed in. Some said that I should consider removing her from the facility. Part of being a regular at hospitals is always to have a Plan B, so I started to think about what this would involve. I got the numbers of respiratory specialists, respiratory-equipment companies, hospital-equipment companies. The dearth of ventilators alarmed me. Even if I managed to procure one, I would need to be trained to use it. I would have to find health aides and respiratory aides, who would be almost impossible to recruit at a time like this. And, on the off chance that I did accomplish all this, where would I put her? My apartment barely accommodated my meagre furnishings.

Plan A, meanwhile, was to make sure that Carter would do its absolute best for my mother. I’d offered to arrange a food delivery for the staff, around four hundred people, in order to save them trips to the market. Now I called Weinstein, who listed some food staples that would be useful. I contacted grocery stores, but most had set quotas on items like milk and bread. Others wouldn’t deliver. I finally found a wholesaler who could provide what we needed, and launched a bare-bones online funding drive to support the hospital. When the shipment arrived—a hundred and fifty-six loaves of bread, twelve hundred eggs, fifty quarts of milk, a hundred pounds of peanut butter, six hundred and twenty-five apples, a hundred and sixty pounds of bananas—Weinstein sent me pictures, and some of the nurses thanked me.

A queen tries to rationalize with a king who would rather behead people than write them thankyou notes.

It felt good to help, and it was sanity-preserving for me to have a task to focus on, but I was aware of what I was doing: ingratiating myself with the institution, in the hope that my mother, if it came to it, might receive some sort of preferential treatment. I thought of my mother’s gifts of medicine to my teachers in Chongqing, and the embarrassing results when she tried to wheedle my American teachers into giving me more homework. (I was sent home with an admonishing letter.) America was an entirely different system, with its own levers and gears, and I was better placed to operate them than she had been.

I was about thirteen when I hatched a plan to save us. I would divide myself into a Chinese self and an American one: at home, I was the dutiful, Confucian daughter; at school, a dedicated student of clenched politesse and Wasp pieties. I sincerely thought that I could slip in and out of these different versions of myself; they were like costumes, and, if sewn and crafted with sufficient skill, they would help us keep going, my mother and me. There was only one problem: I didn’t know that a person capable of engineering multiple identities was not necessarily a person who could control the borders between them. In my diary from that time, a present from my mother’s employer, which had a Degas ballerina on the cover, I gave voice to emotions powered by all the impostors who took up residence inside me. My deepest emotions—a crush on a boy I met at the library, the hatred for the spoiled children my mother served, my irritation with my mother, my secret ambition one day to write the great American novel centered on the itinerant lives of a Chinese mother and daughter—were buried in fictional characters that grew out of an inability to reconcile myself to myself.

In early April, David Weinstein and I were planning a second round of groceries when I saw a missed call from Carter. When I managed to reach Patient Relations, the next morning, a woman cordially informed me that some Carter patients had contracted COVID .

“How many?” I asked.

“Do we know how it was contracted?”

“Are the patients on my mother’s floor?”

I was told that I could not be privy to this information, but that, in the event that my mother tested positive, I would be informed.

“Well, has she been tested?”

“Will she be?”

Rather than answer my question, the woman said that all companions of patients would have to leave by 4 P . M . that day. I explained my mother’s condition and her dependence on her aides; I asked if an exception could be made. No, not possible. “Even if she is not safe without a companion?” I asked. That would be for the doctor to decide. I tried one more tack: could I withdraw her from the hospital? She hesitated. Technically, yes, she said, but, given how much equipment my mother needed, it was unlikely that I’d be able to get her out of Carter in less than two weeks.

So much for Plan B. And I had another realization: losing the aide might be no less disastrous for my mother than contracting the virus. She has survived nearly a decade since her diagnosis—the average is three to five years—and the care that the aides provide, turning and suctioning her, is almost certainly integral to this longevity.

The next hours were spent on the phone, calling everyone I could think of. It was going on 4 P . M . when I found myself talking with a nurse who had occasionally been the object of my mother’s stern, blinked-out criticism.

“Jiayang, listen to me,” she said. I expected her to chastise me for my incessant pestering. Instead, the line went quiet for a second. “I’ve got you,” she said. “I know better than anyone how much your mother needs her aide.” The nurses were already overwhelmed on the floor, and tougher weeks were anticipated. “We want her to stay, too.”

For what seemed like the first time that day, I drew a breath. I called a concerned friend to tell him that things would be O.K., but another call beeped in. It was the nurse again and there was hesitation in her voice. The medical director had overridden her. “I’m sorry,” she said.

I tried phoning Weinstein, without success, but even as I did so I felt that there was something calculating in the attempt to reach him, as if I were calling in the debt of bread, milk, and peanut butter. What was I hoping for but some last-minute stay of execution?

Five minutes before Ying was due to be kicked out, I was on FaceTime with her, desperately trying to reassure my mother, whose face was creased and gray. It was then that I took the screenshots that later spread across Chinese social media. The shame of this moment, I felt, needed to be remembered.

In the far corner of the frame, Ying was wiping her eyes. Then I heard the security guards.

“There’s a translator here,” Ying said, in Chinese. “She’s saying I have to go.”

“This isn’t humane!” I shouted, in English. I threatened legal action, bartered, begged, but the people who could hear were beyond the reach of persuasion. I heard Ying cry out to my mother, “ Ayi! ”—Auntie!—and stayed on the line with her as she was escorted out. By the time she emerged at the front door, crying helplessly, I was there to meet her. She was still wearing her slippers.

I don’t remember how many times that night I called the nurses’ station on my mother’s corridor. At one point, a kind nursing aide, unable to bear the sight of my mother crying for an eighth straight hour, used her cell phone to facilitate a brief FaceTime conversation between us. I also got some advice from the head nurse: try to get in touch with Mitchell Katz, the president of New York City Health and Hospitals. Seeing that he had an active Twitter account, I tweeted at him, appending one of the screenshots that I had taken of my mother’s distress. I knew that I was exploiting our private trauma and making a performance out of the kind of emotion that my mother and I have spent our lives hiding. But saving face would not rescue my mother.

That night, I received a text from an unknown number. It was not Mitchell Katz but Yuh-Line Niou, a New York state assemblywoman whose district includes Manhattan’s Chinatown. She had seen the photos on Twitter and wanted to know what she could do to help. Then I heard from Brian Benjamin, a state senator whose district includes Harlem, and from a prominent Twitter personality who knew Mitchell Katz and offered to text him for me. Early the next morning, I got a call from Patient Relations. The woman’s voice was newly tentative, and she asked if I would be available for a Zoom conference. Weinstein, the medical director, and the head of P.R. informed me that my mother’s aide would be allowed back after all. There was no real explanation, but my impromptu Twitter campaign had borne fruit. And, I had to admit, so did my association with this magazine. Was this how power worked?

Once Ying called me from the hospital, confirming that she was there with my mother, I fell into a stonelike sleep. When I finally woke, I could not tell if it was night or day and was seized by an anxiety so tight that I felt as if I were being held underwater. I began frantically groping around my bed, and, as fragments of a dream returned, I realized that I was looking for my mother. In the dream, she is on a stretcher, being loaded into an ambulance—a scene I’ve witnessed many times—but the bed they put her on is too narrow and she tumbles off. As she falls, her body, so frail that it requires multiple tubes to supply its vital organs, becomes more fragile still, until it turns to porcelain. She shatters into a thousand shards on the ground. It’s fine, it’s fine, I assure myself: I can still pick her up. As long as I gather all the pieces, I can puzzle her back together. I do not anticipate that the pieces will grow smaller and lighter until they float aloft in the wind, until I am chasing a sheet of sand. I am running now and, inexplicably, carrying my diary. In the end, I am able to catch only a single grain of the sand on the tip of my finger. Mom! I keep shouting at my finger, terror-stricken that I will lose this last speck of her. The only place I can think of storing it is between the pages of my diary.

The day after Ying returned to the hospital, I got a message on Twitter from someone I didn’t know: “Dear Jiayang, I believe you have been targeted on Chinese social media (see pictures). Please take those threats seriously. Keep safe and take care!!!” I’d been on Twitter long enough to be familiar with the platform’s tendency to magnify opposition and heighten vitriol. It wasn’t uncommon for attacks to be personal and vicious, but I usually paid them little attention.

This was on a different scale. Replies were arriving faster, devoid of context: “I never know what happiness is until I see your sobbing bitch face”; “Authoritarianism rescues the injured and saves life: democracy takes the life of your bitch mother.” “Brownnosers will brownnose until they have nothing,” an attractive young woman whose bio read “Born in China” wrote. Many people used the abbreviation “NMSL,” which perplexed me until I Googled it. It stands for ni ma si le , a common insult in Chinese and one with particular relevance to me: “Your mother is dead.” A startling number of people wished that I had a fatal case of the coronavirus.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I had read that a virus is neither dead nor alive, and replicates only in the shelter of a host organism. I began to think of “Jiayang Fan” as viral not in a social-media sense but in a biological one; the calamitous state of the world and certain random mutations in the story had made it unexpectedly contagious. My original posts had served their purpose; now they were serving the purposes of others. I had unwittingly bred a potent piece of propaganda.

Corners of the Chinese Internet buzzed with theories about my motivation. I was slandering China in exchange for American citizenship. No, I was after fame and fortune. When a nationalist publication wrote a public letter offering to donate a brand-new ventilator to save my mother’s life—“to combat evil with kindness”—it was presumed that an ingrate like me would try to find fault with the machine. I was besieged on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Many people on Twitter seemed to have come from Chinese platforms; sometimes, when a new crop of assailants descended, they would be hailed as “soldiers” come to do battle with the enemy, Jiayang Fan.

None of this felt quite real. I received notifications of attempts, originating in China, to hack my Apple password, but I did not fear for my personal safety. My mother’s voice echoed in me: “Where’s your bruise?” But, soon, seemingly everyone I’d ever encountered in China messaged me articles with a screenshot of my mother. My aunt forwarded me a message that a friend had shown her. “What Jiayang Fan has inflicted upon her mother is worse than any disease,” the author lamented. “How could a daughter so wretchedly trample her mom’s good reputation?” My aunt said that many acquaintances had written her notes like this and that they made “her heart hurt.” My actions, even if they took place on the other side of the world, had ramifications, she wanted me to know: “They affect my daughter and your uncle, too.” The family name was at stake.

In a chat thread she sent me, someone with the screen name Bering Strait, who had known my maternal grandfather, recalled that he had been a loyal follower of Mao in the Red Army. “It is a good thing he is dead not to be party to this humiliation,” Bering Strait observed. Gradually, an intimate history of my mother’s life came into view; reading through such discussions was like wandering into rooms of a past that my mother had locked away long ago. Someone else knew that my mother, as a child, had been informally promised to a neighbor’s son, as was sometimes the custom. Her enthusiasm for learning English in college, to the point of “forgetting to eat and sleep,” was recounted, and cast in a newly suspect light: had she been plotting her escape to America all those years ago? For all her diligence and beauty—she “was known as the goddess among the male comrades”—she was evidently an incompetent mother. “A child’s wrongdoing is a parent’s failing”—a deeply Confucian adage—was a sentiment evoked time and again to explain my mother’s fate. Many were worried that this airing of our “family ugliness” might taint their own reputations. Anyone who had even a passing affiliation with the institutions of my mother’s youth—her Army battalion, college class, hospital ward—bemoaned the possibility that their mianzi could be compromised.

For all my aunt’s frustration with me, she was insistent that my mother should never know the way that she was being discussed. “It would eviscerate her,” she told me. That I knew was true. My mother had lost touch with many people who knew her in China, precisely because she hadn’t wanted to mar this last preserve of dignity. This wellspring of nostalgic pride, which had privately nourished her in the years of deprivation in the U.S., was something I had desecrated, an even more unpardonable offense than my political betrayal. As a former classmate wrote, “No matter her inadequacies as a parent, it must be said that Jiayang Fan is the far greater criminal for killing her own mother.”

What my persecutors do not know is that my mother once accused me of killing her. I was fifteen, and home from boarding school. Her outburst was, of all things, in response to my request to see a dermatologist. The area around my belly button had been itching uncontrollably—I later found out that an allergy was to blame—and my only relief was to scratch until the small weeping blisters turned my flesh into a wet raw mess. My mother told me that it was a matter of hygiene, but the more I soaped and scrubbed the worse it got. The idea of a doctor was out of the question, because, according to my mother, it was not a life-or-death matter. But I was less afraid of death than of the mockery of my classmates, some of whom had found the blood seeping through my shirt grotesque, and, for once, I refused to be talked down. My mother stopped in the middle of folding laundry and appraised me with an icy calm.

“I just want to see a doctor,” I said, my eyes becoming wet.

“Stop the act. Dirty—this is what people call you, a dirty Chinese pig.”

Confusion momentarily superseded indignation: no one had ever called me that. It would be years before I wondered if someone—an employer? the children of an employer?—had called her that. I looked at her face, so warped with rage that I could not see my mother in it.

“Stop looking at me like that, traitor,” she said.

“Traitor.” The word pierced me. “Yes, a traitor,” she repeated, her voice swelling with conviction. She told me that my betrayal had long been evident and that I should stop feigning innocence. It was then that she brandished my diary, which she believed contained the evidence of my crime. My mother told me that I was a “sick person,” the kind who makes up lies to humiliate those who had given her everything. She had killed herself for me, she said, and I was plotting to betray and abandon her.

It’s reductive to compare a mother with a motherland, but I have since wondered if the intensity of her rage resembled the emotions of my anonymous online detractors. The fact that many couched their accusations in the language of familial estrangement—“your American daddy doesn’t want to rescue garbage like you”—lent an unmistakable intimacy to my ostensibly political betrayal. The anger seemed to arise from an aggrieved awareness of its futility: a primal wound in search of a mother’s touch. The flip side of surging triumphalism and expansive aspiration is the enduring, ineluctable ache of loss. This much my mother and I knew better than anyone else.

I do not believe that the corrosive toll of these emotions was ever evident to my mother as she rode through them, dogged and alone. Survival had forced her to conceal more and more of herself, so that eventually the most important truths were the ones she kept from herself. The hours of stunned silence, just after she received her final diagnosis in a hospital in New York, felt not dissimilar to our arrival in the city two decades earlier, when all we could do was grope in astonishment around our new reality. As her doctor, an impassive man with an Irish accent, gave her the news, my mother fixed her attention firmly on her toes. It wasn’t until we were on the 6 train, heading downtown, that she spoke. The plan had been to have dinner in Chinatown, but now she asked, Could we go see the World Trade Center? It was the first time either of us had ever alluded to 9/11. We were U.S. citizens now, but, when the towers fell, we’d been resident aliens. “Are the broken buildings still there?” my mother now asked. I said that I thought not, though I didn’t know for sure. It was somewhere on that subway ride, among a tangle of strangers, that my mother instructed me not to share the news of her illness. I have always remembered the request as explicit, but it now occurs to me that she didn’t need to ask. I could always read her thoughts as they passed between us in furtive glances.

When the image of my mother’s face whizzed around Chinese social media, the reactions it aroused bore out her cynicism: the world was every bit as cruel and indifferent as she had always suspected. But I hung on to the irrational notion that, unless my mother’s eyes encountered the abuse, it could not be real—that at least in the hospital room where she would likely live out the rest of her life there existed a world in which she had a measure of control.

But late one morning in April Ying sent me a link to a story on WeChat with a short audio message: “Your mother wants to know, is this you? I’m reading your mother the article right now.”

I felt that familiar prickling in my nerve endings, the constant urge to manage the situation. But I didn’t call Ying back, and beg her not to read the article. Instead, after a day of doing nothing, I went for a walk. Outside, there was a wan, speckled moon and a cool clarity in the night air. I stood in a playground near abandoned swings and gazed up to the fourth floor of my mother’s hospital, and the darkened box of her window. I don’t like to imagine the emotions that coursed through my mother as she lay there defenseless, listening to what had been written about us. I don’t like to think about her reappraising the daughter whom she both knew and did not know. When Ying texted again, I knew it would be a message from my mother. I feared being misunderstood by someone whose life was so kneaded into my own, whose choices had both bound and liberated me, and whose words, even when blinked with the last functioning muscles of her body, could utterly undo me.

My mother’s message was brief and pointed. It contained a Chinese idiom, “A clean body needs no washing”—that is, if you are not guilty of anything, you have nothing to atone for. In English, she then added, “I am survive.” ♦

How stigma affects Asian Americans living with hepatitis B

by Marilyn Perkins, Thomas Jefferson University

Asian Americans comprise just 6% of the U.S. population, but they represent over 60% of Americans with hepatitis B. Hepatitis B (HBV) is a virus that infects the liver, and while some people may recover from the infection, others can go on to develop liver failure or cancer. HBV is transmitted through blood, semen or other bodily fluids, but it can also be passed from mother to child during birth, which is how the majority of Asian Americans acquire the disease.

Up until 2010, laws in China allowed for discrimination against people with HBV, barring adults from employment and keeping children out of school. Though these policies are now outlawed, there remains a stigma against the disease in both China and the U.S.

Researcher Hee-Soon Juon, MSN, Ph.D., at Thomas Jefferson University has been working with Asian-American communities to investigate and raise awareness of HBV since the early 2000s. In a new study published in The Journal of Viral Hepatitis , she and her research team explore how stigma against HBV affects those with the condition.

The study surveyed 365 Korean-Americans with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) to see how stigma against HBV affected them. Participants responded to questions about their physical health , mental health and if they believed they had experienced racial discrimination.

Dr. Juon found that people who felt more stigmatized were more likely to report worse depression and physical health, and that greater knowledge of the disease didn't necessarily translate to feeling less judged for their condition. Perceived racial discrimination was also tied to feelings of stigma and depression.

"We confirmed that stigma is very impactful for a CHB patient," says Dr. Juon. "This can have consequences on their treatment journey."

In fact, past research has shown that stigma against a disease may dissuade individuals from seeking care, cause mental distress or lead to explicit discrimination. Dr. Juon says the next steps in this research will be developing interventions that can help combat stigma for those with HBV.

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Hunter Biden expected to plead guilty to tax-related misdemeanor crimes as part of a plea agreement

The Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Delaware has reached a plea agreement with Hunter Biden , in which he is expected to plead guilty to two federal misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes. Biden also faces a separate felony gun possession charge that will likely be dismissed if he meets certain conditions, according to court documents filed on Tuesday.

Two sources familiar with the agreement told NBC News that it includes a provision in which the U.S. attorney has agreed to recommend probation for Biden for his tax violations. Legal experts also said that the tax and gun charges will most likely not result in any jail time for President Joe Biden’s son.

It’s the first time the Justice Department — part of the executive branch, headed by the president — has brought charges against a child of a sitting president.

The decision by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who was nominated by President Donald Trump in 2018, indicates an end to the sweeping, five-year investigation by federal prosecutors, FBI agents and IRS officials into Hunter Biden’s conduct. The Biden administration has kept Weiss in place in order to avoid having a U.S. attorney appointed by the president oversee his son’s criminal case.

Weiss’s office said in a statement, “Hunter Biden received taxable income in excess of $1,500,000 annually in calendar years 2017 and 2018. Despite owing in excess of $100,000 in federal income taxes each year, he did not pay the income tax due for either year.” Regarding the gun charge, the statement said, “from on or about October 12, 2018 through October 23, 2018, Hunter Biden possessed a firearm despite knowing he was an unlawful user of and addicted to a controlled substance.” Weiss’s office also said that its investigation of Biden is ongoing.

Chris Clark, attorney for Hunter Biden, told NBC News in a statement: “With the announcement of two agreements between my client, Hunter Biden, and the Unites States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, it is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.”

“Hunter will take responsibility for two instances of misdemeanor failure to file tax payments when due pursuant to a plea agreement. A firearm charge, which will be subject to a pretrial diversion agreement and will not be the subject of the plea agreement, will also be filed by the Government. I know Hunter believes it is important to take responsibility for these mistakes he made during a period of turmoil and addiction in his life. He looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward.”

A White House spokesperson said, “The President and First Lady love their son and support him as he continues to rebuild his life. We will have no further comment.”

Former President Donald Trump, who faces criminal charges for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, criticized the agreement in a post on his website Truth Social.

“The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket.’ Our system is BROKEN,” Trump wrote.

The resolution suggests that prosecutors did not find cause to file charges related to Hunter Biden’s dealings with foreign entities or other wrongdoing. Trump and several Republican-led congressional inquiries have long alleged that Biden engaged in years of criminal conduct with individuals tied to the Chinese government and with companies in Ukraine and elsewhere.

In 2021, Biden paid all of the outstanding taxes that he owed for 2017 and 2018, the years named in the charges. Biden was not charged with failure to file returns for those years. He filed returns but agreed to plead guilty to not paying enough in both years, which was over $100,000.

The felony gun possession charge will be resolved in what is known as pre-trial diversion agreement, where charges are dropped if certain conditions are met by the defendant, such as not committing a crime in a given time period. The specific conditions in Biden’s gun case were not disclosed in the court documents.

In a statement, the Justice Department said Biden “faces a maximum penalty of 12 months in prison on each of the tax charges and a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison on the firearm charge,” but noted that “sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after taking into account the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.”

In cases where there’s an agreement with prosecutors like this one, judges typically abide by the terms of the deal, which in this case would be a sentence of probation, but not always.

A judge will schedule a date for an arraignment within the next several weeks. Hunter Biden is expected to surrender to Delaware authorities and will be processed by U.S. Marshals there.

In April, NBC reported that federal prosecutors were considering four charges against Biden. The charges filed Tuesday do not include a previously discussed felony count of tax evasion related to a business expense for one year of taxes in 2018.

The criminal probe was overseen by Weiss, whose lengthy deliberations, which have dragged on for months, provoked frustration and bewilderment from other law enforcement officials including inside the FBI and IRS, as both agencies finished their respective investigations in 2022, according to three senior law enforcement officials. One additional senior US official said that the bulk of the IRS investigation was complete in 2020.

Biden’s drug purchasing initially came to the attention of local police in Delaware in 2018, and the FBI was brought in to assist shortly afterward, according to a senior law enforcement official.

The federal investigation of Hunter Biden began in 2018 under the Trump administration as a broad inquiry of his international business relationships with an emphasis on potential national security implications. Over time, it narrowed into an examination of his personal taxes and purchase of a pistol. A grand jury was convened in Delaware and continued to hear testimony from witnesses throughout 2022, according to two sources familiar.

Biden has acknowledged that business partners sought him out because of his last name, and that he made millions from deals related to foreign countries but has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. In his memoir, Biden said that he used the money for his drug addiction and to maintain his lifestyle. Biden has previously acknowledged his extensive use of cocaine during this period.

At times, tensions among investigating U.S. attorney’s offices and agencies ran high and there were disagreements about potential courses of action, two former senior law enforcement officials told NBC News.

In early 2020, the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh joined the investigation at the request of then-Attorney General Bill Barr, who was tasked with assessing information provided by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani about alleged corruption in Ukraine that included allegations about Hunter Biden, according to three senior law enforcement officials.

Investigators looked into whether Biden acted as an agent or lobbyist for a foreign government— a potential violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Investigators ultimately determined there was no basis for charges beyond Biden’s gun application and his failure to pay his estimated taxes on time.

In April, an IRS special agent involved in the Hunter Biden probe wrote to members of Congress claiming he could provide information that would reveal failures to handle “clear conflicts of interest” in the case and detail instances of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols.” The IRS has declined to comment on the allegations.

But law enforcement officials familiar with the matter described it as a thorough investigation involving criminal investigators, FBI agents and counterintelligence agents in Baltimore and Wilmington, white-collar crime and financial analysts from FBI Headquarters in Washington, as well as multiple prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware.

House Republicans have been investigating Hunter Biden’s finances and have alleged that he was involved in a bribery scheme .

House Oversight Committee chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said his committee would continue investigating Biden.

“These charges against Hunter Biden and sweetheart plea deal have no impact on the Oversight Committee’s investigation. We will not rest until the full extent of President Biden’s involvement in the family’s schemes are revealed,” Comer said.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com.

Sarah Fitzpatrick is an investigative producer for NBC News.

Tom Winter is a New York-based correspondent covering crime, courts, terrorism and financial fraud on the East Coast for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

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COMMENTS

PDF Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior Wall Street Journal, 2011
between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or t. at "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By con.
'Tiger Mother': Are Chinese Moms Really So Different?
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 ...
PDF Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing aca-demic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way.
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior: a Critical Examination
Amy Chua's essay "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" presents thought-provoking arguments about the benefits of the Chinese parenting approach. However, her claims should be critically examined in the context of cultural diversity, individual variations in parenting practices, and the potential drawbacks of strict parenting styles.Rather than promoting a dichotomous view of "superior" versus ...
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior for Literature
January 10, 2011. In her essay " Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," an excerpt from her new book, " Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," Amy Chua makes a case for parenting with the kind of ...
Tiger Mothers: Raising Children The Chinese Way : NPR
Why, a mother who's raising her kids the Chinese, rather than the Western, way. In her new memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , Chua recounts her adventures in Chinese parenting, and -- nuts ...
The Tiger Mother, America's Top Parent
America's Top Parent. By Elizabeth Kolbert. January 23, 2011. As a "Chinese mother," Amy Chua set rules for her girls: no sleepovers, no playdates, no grade lower than an A on a report card ...
On Chinese Mothers and American Kids
Perhaps the most talked-about story in parenting circles this week is Amy Chua's essay in The Wall Street Journal titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.". Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and the author of the new book (released today) "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," which, like her essay, is a how-to guide for Western parents who want to learn the methods Chinese parents ...
'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother'
Unlike your typical Western overscheduling soccer mom, the Chinese mother believes that (1) schoolwork always comes first; (2) an A-minus is a bad grade; (3) your children must be two years ahead ...
Are 'Chinese Mothers' Best? How Different Parenting Styles Stack Up
January 10, 2011. Over the weekend, we read this fascinating Wall Street Journal essay about whether the tough-love Chinese parenting style is superior to the touchy-feely Western approach to ...
Amy Chua
Amy Chua, the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School, published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in 2011. The book became an immediate and controversial bestseller. It is "a story about ...
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
WSJ's Christina Tsuei speaks to two moms raised by Chinese immigrants who share what it was like growing up and how they hope to raise their children. Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and ...
Thoughts From the Daughter of a Chinese Mother
January 11, 2011. by Julianne Hing. My Asian-American friends and I shared the Wall Street Journal 's weekend excerpt from Amy Chua's from her parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ...
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior: [Essay Example], 585 words
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior. In "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," Chua compares the stereotypical Chinese parents to the Western parents which is an issue raised since many people question how Chinese kids are brought up to be very influential who add a great impact in their community. Chua starts by visiting the idea of the superior ...
What is a Chinese mother?
Author, mother, and law professor Amy Chua is creating a firestorm with an essay published in this past weekend's Wall Street Journal titled, "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.? The essay, which was given its title by the Journal, included excerpts from her new book ?Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.? Both showcases Chua's strict parenting […]
Amy Chua: Life of a Tiger Mother
Entitled Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, the essay elicited an astounding 8,800 comments in response from readers, some offering praise, but most vilifying Amy Chua as a parent. MEET THE AUTHOR Debbie J. is an experienced writer and a member of the Hyperink Team, which works hard to bring you high-quality, engaging, fun content. Happy reading!
PDF Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way.
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior (An Essay by Amy Chua)
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior (An Essay by Amy Chua) || BBS 1st Year English|| Patterns for College Writingcomprehensible discussion, explanation, and sum...
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior Summary (English/Nepali) And Question
Amy Chua, mother of two successful daughters, wrote an essay "Why Chinese Mother Are Superior" to share her story about raising her kids in a Chinese way. She compares the way she trains her kids is different than Western parents and Chinese parents. She gives many examples of Chinese parenting such as, her kids were trained music instrument ...
An Examination of Chinese vs. Western Parenting Through Battle Hymn of
In her study, fifty immigrant Chinese mothers and fifty European-American mothers answered scales, or questionnaires, derived from "Block's 1981 Child Rearing Practices Report" (Chao 1114). ... albeit with some significant modifications to my strategy" (221). In his essay, "The Case for Contamination," Kwame Anthony Appiah, a ...
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior By Amy Chua Summary Essay
In her essay "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," Amy Chua describes the tough love parenting style she used to raise her children. According to Chua, the key to successful parenting is to instill a strong work ethic in your children from an early age. Chua argues that Western parents are too permissive and that this leads to spoiled ...
How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda
Immigrant struggles in America forged a bond that became even tighter after my mother's A.L.S. diagnosis. Then, as COVID-19 threatened, Chinese nationalists began calling us traitors to our country.
How stigma affects Asian Americans living with hepatitis B
Asian Americans comprise just 6% of the U.S. population, but they represent over 60% of Americans with hepatitis B. Hepatitis B (HBV) is a virus that infects the liver, and while some people may ...
How One Couple's Dog Proposal Went Viral on TikTok
When Rachel Richter's fiancé proposed, he made sure to include their dog, Daisy, in the special moment by surprising her with a dog engagement of her own.
Responses to Amy Chua's Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
Our Readers Roar: What Makes a Good Parent. Updated Jan. 15, 2011 12:01 am ET. Share. Resize. Review's essay by Amy Chua has generated more than 5,700 comments on the Journal's website, more than ...
Hunter Biden expected to plead guilty to tax-related ...
The Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Delaware has reached a plea agreement with Hunter Biden, in which he is expected to plead guilty to two federal misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes ...