Amy Chua's 'Tiger Mother' at S.F. book signing

The woman called "America's most controversial mom" by the Daily Beast drew a mixed but mostly Asian crowd of 200 when she showed up Wednesday night at the Booksmith on Haight Street in San Francisco to talk about her incendiary memoir, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother."

Published on Jan. 11, Amy Chua's book reveals that her two daughters were never allowed to attend a sleepover, watch TV, get any grade less than an A or play any instrument other than the piano or violin, and that she called her daughter "garbage" when the daughter was disrespectful of her.

"I didn't know anything about her two weeks ago, and now she's infamous, a very polarizing figure," said Michael Tom, who came to the reading from Milpitas. He said he mostly disagrees with her, but can relate to what she writes about.

"I was raised by a Tiger Dad," he says.

Chua, a 48-year-old Yale Law School professor, clearly struck a nerve with her candid account of her strict parenting approach, excerpted in the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 8 under the headline "Why Chinese Parents Are Superior," and forwarded around the Internet faster than a celebrity sex video. It has been viewed by 1 million people, and readers are flocking to buy the book. As of Thursday, it had climbed to No. 5 in Amazon.com's sales ranking, and 149 customer reviews were posted on the site.

Chua has received hundreds of e-mails, including death threats, daily since the excerpt was published, and her mothering methods have been debated in the blogosphere and the media. She wrote a follow-up in the Journal stressing that her book is a memoir, not a how-to guide, and that was the first thing she said at Booksmith on Wednesday night, too. Columnist David Brooks wrote a negative Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, and Chua's elder teenage daughter, Sophia, defended Chua's parenting in an open letter to her mother in the New York Post.

This week Time magazine's cover story is on Chua's book, and Ayelet Waldman, the Berkeley author of "Bad Mother," wrote a critical commentary on Chua's parenting style for the Journal. Waldman knows how a writer's words can become a cultural flash point and follow her around forever, after writing in the New York Times that she loves her husband more than her children.

Susan Koo of San Francisco, mother of a 9-month old girl, said she came to see Chua because of the Journal excerpt.

"I and every Asian friend of mine had received it in our e-mail."

The youngest of three children, she, like Chua's daughters, played the piano as a child. But her mother never stood over her and made her practice. "She was more of a Tiger Mom with my brother, who came first. I got away with a lot."

Julie Wang, who drove up from San Jose for the reading, said she agrees with Chua's message and that "what's been missing from the discussion of her book is the economic climate. Chinese parents stress education because they know their children will have to compete for very few jobs. There are not that many slots in the state colleges and UC. So the people who will get those slots are the ones with good grades."

"When you're first generation, you don't question it when your parents push education," said Vietnamese American Lien Dinh of San Francisco. "I agree with that. That's why people immigrate here, for opportunity. I feel like if I don't live up to their standards, then what did they come here for?"

The petite, slim Chua, raised in Berkeley from age 8, breathed a sigh of relief when she took the microphone, and said, "It's nice to see some friendly faces in the audience." Among them was her sister, Katrin, a physician and a professor at Stanford's School of Medicine. Their father, an electrical engineering and computer sciences professor at UC Berkeley, is on sabbatical in London with her mother.

When asked about her mom's reaction to the book, Chua said, "They're a little mad, very upset for me, because they feel I'm so deeply misunderstood."

She got a big laugh when she said her mom told her, "No Chinese person would publish a book like this."

"If I had it to do over again, I would do the same thing, with some adjustments," she said of her child rearing. But she volunteered that she does have some regrets: "I wish I had not used such harsh words and blown up so much. And I wish I had paid more attention to the differences between my children. And I do wish I'd given my children more choices."

Emily and Chauncey DiLaura, a Caucasian couple from San Francisco whose children are 25 and 27, came to see Chua because Chauncey was a fan of her two previous books on international affairs.

Emily thinks the book is such a lightning rod because "parenting is so fraught with guilt and second-guessing, when anyone comes out with a strong viewpoint it creates a dialogue about the choices we make and how to strive for balance. Being out of the war, it's interesting to see the battle is still raging."

Asian Pop columnist Jeff Yang talks to Amy Chua and other Asian Americans about "Tiger Mother." Page F2

Go to www.sfgate.com to read Terry Hong's review of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother."

Regan McMahon is an Oakland writer. E-mail her at datebookletters@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page F - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle