Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

The text seeks to illuminate the differences between Western and Chinese parenting but also underscores Americans’ perception of Chinese practices. To contextualize her parenting style, Chua details the cultural system that informs her own understanding of parenthood. She cites some quantitative studies about parenting styles across different cultures, but the majority of the text’s evidence comes from personal accounts of her own upbringing, her parents’ upbringing, and her husband’s upbringing. For readers who are unfamiliar with the Chinese Zodiac, she goes to great lengths to describe its cultural impact and show how she and her daughters each embody the animal that presides over their birth year. She notes that she had once aspired to write a generations-spanning epic in the tradition of The Joy Luck Club, and through Chua’s reasoning, it is easy to see how she could present her text as the natural successor to this tradition: Rather than presenting fictionalized relationships between Chinese mothers and daughters, she offers an examination of her own generational relationships that is both entertaining and self-critical.

Chua’s intense parenting practices popularized the phrase “Tiger Mother” in the American zeitgeist. This figure is perceived as comparable to other stereotypes of controlling parents, such as helicopter parents, a