vivian shaw

Perilous family: Amy Chua, Sino-anxiety, and U.S. politics

With great fervor, news and social media, bloggers, and readers have flocked upon Amy Chua’s controversial article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” which appeared in The Wall Street Journal last week. The article, advertised as an “excerpt” from Chua’s new book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” generated over 7,000 comments, countless blog posts, rebuttals from both Chua and her eighteen-year old daughter, and even death threats.

Chua’s claims that Asian—or in her terming, Chinese—parents manufacture brilliantly successful offspring through years of brutal discipline did not surprise me. Asian Americans are quite familiar with this greatly mythologized parenting tactic. Personally, I’ve heard about it my entire life—from my own parents, immigrant Taiwanese parents whose comparatively relaxed expectations spared me such an experience, peers within the Asian-American community (some whose families matched Chua), and through that fuzzy, osmotic knowledge of cultural belonging—an education that is at once fundamental and vague. By contrast, many critics of the article were shocked (and appalled) by Chua’s bragging, arguing that parenting styles like hers have contributed to alarmingly high rates of suicide and depression among Asian American youth, young women in particular, some even speculating the long-term emotional damage sustained by Chua’s own daughters.

But more impressive than Chua’s stereotypes was the media phenomenon surrounding the article, its widespread infamy among readers normally unconcerned with Asian American culture, and the very fact that an article about Chinese American families, a group that’s relatively marginal both within American media and scholarship, would elicit such an outpouring of intrigue and emotion. We can consider some context for this marginalization: according to the 2000 U.S. Census, 3.6% of Americans identify as Asian American. Asian Americans are often excluded from research, with studies focusing on racial divisions according to three categories—“White,” “Black,” and “Hispanic/Latino.” Importantly, this neglect reflects many scholars’ difficulty in placing Asian Americans within racial analysis—an inclusion that would disrupt notions of a black-white binary and that is further exacerbated by the paradox of the model minority myth  (or status, with terminology depending on one’s politics). According to this myth, Asian Americans’ seeming statistical educational and financial success conflicts with a core definition of “minority” and thus, segregates them from other racial and ethnic minority groups living in the U.S. To imagine this visually, Asian Americans are both to be unseen and seen in American culture. Invisible: to blend seamlessly into mainstream white culture and democratic values of prosperity. Visible: to perform as a foil to other minorities who, by comparison, have not “advanced” to such high levels of income and education.

Scholars have widely criticized the model minority myth, and Chua deserves no passes here. Probably one of the most important and frequently leveraged criticisms derives from the reality that Asian Americans do not constitute a monolithic group, ethnically or socio-economically. But rather than spend too much time unpacking the internal fallacies of “MMM,” I want to examine what agenda is set with The Wall Street Journal pursuing this dialogue in the first place, particularly in the haughty voice of Chua. Notice that Chua’s article falls under the “Life & Culture” category. At the height of the Great Recession and news media’s publishing crisis, it seems no coincidence that major newspapers like The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have ramped up their storytelling of middle class lifestyles, bridging an apparent gap between entertainment and news. Social media plays an influential role in the changing publishing landscape—we could argue that an article’s value might best be measured by its volume of sharing on Facebook. But lifestyle news isn’t simply a space wherein readers can escape from the depressing and laborious facts of hard journalism. It’s a soft arm of a more overt U.S. geopolitics set forth by hard news, guiding readers toward a cultural view supportive of these politics. From this angle, we see Chua’s article playing to Sino-anxiety and tensions around the family as a unit of politics.

China’s economic ascension is an obsession of Western news media—read Paul Krugman’s column in The New York Times any given week and he might likely be talking about China’s undervalued currency. So is the family (perhaps, even more so). What some might regard as the most sacred interpersonal grounds has lent itself to the mainstream media as a proxy by which broad political issues can be framed. Consider, how often issues buttressing the conservative and liberal divide contend with tensions around defining and/or maintaining the family—abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, the military, and income. It’s no wonder that readers were riled up. Chua’s claim that Chinese parenting is “superior” to American families provokes both conflicts, hedging forth the fear that America’s apparent economic decline is also cultural, and accelerated by Chinese families “abroad” and within U.S. borders. Reports on bourgeois trends might feel tacky for American readers struggling with their wallets; unacceptable are insinuations that “foreign parenting” would overpower the Western family. The point of Chua’s article, and the crux of its anxiety, is not simply that Chinese Americans can navigate successfully in an American economy, but that Chinese culture is poised to dominate Western culture—the renaissance of one necessitating the fall of the other.

Chua embodies “yellow peril,” a classic xenophobia characterizing East Asians as willfully destructive toward Western culture and the Western family. (Interestingly, Chua has written on violence toward Chinese and other “market-dominant minorities” in the Global South.) But is this peril not contradictory, when it’s brought to the verge through affluence and dominance—values of a distinctly U.S., neo-liberal lifestyle? These tensions are indeed messy, but as they’re framed, not coincidental.

[An edited version of this essay appears on RacismReview.com.]