Mother, superior?

Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom" has set off a fiery debate over the merits of Western versus Asian parenting styles. Jeff Yang jumps into the flames -- and talks to the author who ignited them

If you're Asian American -- or if you have close Asian friends -- you know that a staple of Asian American humor is stories about over-the-top maternal expectations and demands. Black folks tell "yo momma" jokes; Asian folks tell "my momma" jokes.

That's because for many Asian Americans, the path to adulthood is a sustained, multi-decade-long three-legged race, in which mom drags offspring through a furious gauntlet of piano lessons and college prep, violin lessons and more college prep, disappointment and anger and blowups and reconciliation and then more college prep.

We survivors commonly call this the "Crazy Asian Mom" phenomenon.

Always lovingly, of course. And never to her face.

I was reminded of my own archive of Crazy Asian Mom stories last Saturday, when the Wall Street Journal published a purported excerpt from the book, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," by Yale law professor Amy Chua. (I'll explain the "purported" part later.)

The resulting essay, provocatively titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," reads like a strident assertion of the benefits of Crazy Asian Mom parenting -- and a blunt indictment of Western childrearing ideals. In it, Chua suggests that Chinese parents are able to raise "stereotypically successful" kids -- math whizzes and music prodigies -- by following a regimen that includes banning social interaction (playdates, sleepovers) and nonessential activities (TV, videogames, sports, arts other than music, music other than piano or violin). She asserts the value of rote repetition and strict discipline; dismisses concepts like fun, self-actualization and self-esteem as fraudulent distractions; and advocates absolute and unilateral parental control, without concern over whether kids are happy in the here and now (because true happiness only comes when one has accomplished long-term goals and achieved lasting success).

As you might imagine, the essay has become the Andromeda Strain of viral memes, proliferating wildly across the blogosphere, Twitscape and Facespace. It has blazed a particularly fiery path across the extended network of digital Asian America, where it's been forwarded and reforwarded again and again, consuming all other conversation in its wake.

And the reaction from Asian Americans who've read it has been surprisingly uniform: Disbelief and rage, punctuated by blinding flashbacks to their own repressed, oppressive youth.

"A+" is for Asian

"I received a thousand e-mails about the article, and when I finally read it, I went through a brief episode of PTSD," says Lac Su, whose memoir of his own tormented Asian American childhood, "I Love Yous Are for White People," was published to broad acclaim in 2009. In his case, PTSD, which stands for post-traumatic stress disorder, could easily mean "parental trauma stress disorder." His parents, thinking he was "slow," subjected him to hours of supplemental tutoring -- and when he still failed to meet their standards, tried a different kind of intellectual supplement, making him eat an entire cow brain every Saturday until he was eight years old.

Su compares the passing down of Crazy Asian Mom -- er, Tiger Mother -- techniques to the cycle of child violence. "When kids are abused by their parents, they pass that abusive behavior down to their own kids without knowing," he says -- adding that he has vowed never to spank or even to get angry at his own two kids as a result (and also noting that he showers them with "I love yous," belying the title of his book).

Su isn't alone in accusing Chua of "child abuse." The charge has been made both by those who experienced similar parenting firsthand and those who didn't but find the notion of requiring perfection from children and forcing them to drill for hours at a time to be barbaric -- even sadistic.