Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua.

Before moving back home to the Pacific Northwest, I lived in Southern California.  San Diego, specifically.  San Diego was a hideously expensive city to land in but, at the time, my husband and I were dazzled and wooed by its warm sun and sparkling beaches.  Fast forward nine years to find us cursing the sun's rays (I sunburn like nobody's business) and having not been to a beach in years.  But I digress.  The point I want to make is that spendy San Diego is home to a terribly decrepit, failing public library system.  City furloughs had cut the hours of our libraries back drastically, to the point that some were open just a few days per week and for only a few hours.  As I wandered the stacks of our neighborhood library, being careful to step around the many buckets catching roof leaks after an unexpected rain storm, I wondered again where all the money in San Diego had gone.  Surely a city with home price tags as high as it had could afford to maintain their libraries.  A look around to me that perhaps they could not - or would not.  


I now live in a small country town whose library makes it abundantly clear that this town values the public library system.  Our library is huge and beautiful, shiny and new.  For a book lover such as myself, it is heaven on earth.  My daughter and I can be found there at least weekly, reading in the cozy children's book area, wandering the back stacks looking for a book to catch my eye (yes, I do often judge a book by its cover - who doesn't?), or sitting down in front of one of the kid computers where my daughter likes to "do her business".  My favorite part of our library, however, are the shelves that greet you as you enter.  These are the "new books" and "best bets" shelves and they are where I love to hang out.  Libraries here in the PNW show like wonderful indie bookshops, with bright and shining copies of new books displayed in a come-hither kind of way.  It was here, in this promised land, that I found Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.


I added Chua's book to my stack mainly because I remember there being quite a bit of hubbub about the book when it first came out.  As I cuddled up with it later than night, I was immediately drawn in to Chua's (at times) painfully honest tales from motherhood.  The book focuses on Chua's two daughters and Chua's insistence that they take up an instrument.  Her oldest daughter opts for piano and her youngest daughter is paired with the violin.  Almost everything in the book revolves around the experiences these girls - and the entire family, as it turns out - has as life becomes (forcibly or not, depending upon your view) the intense pursuit of musical genius.  The lives of the girls and the family are consumed by Chua's determination to the point of near-destruction.  


I loved this book.  Not because I sided with Chua or approved of the manner in which she parented.  Not because I decided to become a Tiger Mother myself.  I loved it because of the ambivalence is brought out in me.  At any point in the book I was either predictably appalled or shockingly impressed.  I loved the book because it had me reflecting upon my own childhood (a resume of which would show how often I chased a new pursuit with passion, only to give up on it once it got tough or I got bored) and my adult life (a resume of which would show how often I chase a new pursuit with passion, only to give up on it once it gets tough or I get bored).  Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother had me thinking about the manner in which I am raising my own daughter and wondering about when I need to push her or when I should back off.  Chua isn't a perfect mother.  But as clear as it is that mistakes were made, so it is that Chua's heart was always full of wanting the best for her daughters.  She goes about achieving that goal in a way that appears very different from most Western families but you can't help but wonder if Chua isn't right: that maybe we do coddle our children too much, that if we don't demand high standards from them then they won't ever strive to get there on their own.