So there's a new book out by someone called Amy Chua, a Chinese-American Yale law professor married to a Jewish Yale law professor. They agreed that their children would be Jewish for some reason, and they also agreed that they would be raised in what they thought was a Chinese manner. Their two daughters had to be "#1" in every subject but P.E., she considered an "A-" to be a "bad grade", she didn't allow them to do anything unless they could win an award for it, and they had to spend hours a day practicing a musical instrument, which had to be either a violin or a piano. She bragged about how she constantly insulted them, denouncing them for being fat or "lazy". She called one of them "garbage" because she had trouble playing some classical piece. She gloated about the time she took her 7-year-old daughter's doll house to her car and said she would get rid of it unless the 1st grader learned to play a song perfectly on her violin in one day.
Maybe this was some expression of Chinese culture, although it doesn't explain the girls' Jewish father. No doubt a Zionist.
I looked at a message board for teachers. One teacher in Canada had a large number of Chinese-Canadian students. She said that their mothers would demand to know how their children ranked in the class. The teacher tells them they don't give out that information---they don't discuss the grades other children receive. So then they will offer to help grade papers thinking they'll get the information that way, and the teachers refuse.
There are well over a billion Chinese in the world, and that's just in China. Hard to believe they're all that way. In any case, Chua and her Jewish husband actually sat down and agreed to this. It wasn't that she couldn't help herself or that she thought this was normal. She actually sat down and decided to act this way.
The daughters should get as far away from their mother as possible. Because if anything ever happens to her---if she's ever run over by a hit-and-run driver, if her brakes ever fail, if she ever falls down the stairs and breaks her neck---the girls are going to be prime suspects.
The real problem
What bothers me is the classical music. We probably ought to explain to Chinese coming to the West that you don't make a child play the violin so that they'll become classical musicians. You make them play the violin to be sure they never become musicians at all.
I have never seen an adult play the violin unless they were getting paid for it. It's something only children do and only because they can be forced to.
You force them to play classical music because nobody likes it. The kids don't like it. Their parents don't like it. While that one girl was playing her violin in Carnegie Hall, her classmates were forming punk rock bands, playing gigs, getting paid for it and actually enjoying themselves.
It makes Joe Jackson seem like a very reasonable person. The Jackson family is rich now. Some family members have extremely serious problems, obviously, but living in poverty in Gary, Indiana, was no picnic either.
Andre Agassi revealed a while back that he hated tennis but was forced to practice for years by his father. And Agassi did pretty well for himself.
But Amy Chua?
According to Maureen Corrigan who reviewed Chua's book on NPR, both of her daughters are "gifted" musicians (some gift). As I mentioned, one of them won a competition that allowed her to perform in Carnegie Hall.
First Chua forces her daughters to play music that nobody likes, and then she makes sure that no one will ever be able to listen to them without thinking about what a bitch their mother was. When she asked her daughter for input on the book, the daughter said, "I'm sure it's all about you anyway."
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