Monthly Archives: May 2012

“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” ignited a firestorm last year, which I successfully steered clear of until my book group picked it to discuss this week. I can tell the book group moms are ready to sink their claws into this memoir and tear it apart, knowing good and well it’s about a “tiger” mother who uses harsh parenting practices to raise and gear her two daughters for success.

No TV for them, or sleepovers, or playdates, or computer games, or grades less than an A; these girls must be fluent in Chinese and practice endless hours of piano and violin after school and even on vacations. To their mom, childhood is less about having fun than being “a training period, a time to build character and invest in the future.” The Chinese parenting approach, she says, is very different from the Western way, which values independence, creativity and questioning authority. Western kids are allowed to follow their “passion,” which just turns out, she says, to be 10 hours on Facebook which is a total waste of time and eating digusting junk food.

For the Chinese, she says, authority is always to be respected and kids’ self-esteem isn’t a concern; parents regularly criticize their kids (she refers to her daughter as garbage at one point) and expect more from them (she rejects their inadequately made birthday cards). Chinese parents also decide all their activities and what’s best for their children. Kids, in turn, obey and don’t talk back. They owe their parents everything.

Author Amy Chua sets up “Tiger Mother” as a “clash of worldviews”; there’s the weak, easy Western way of child-rearing, she seems to say, and the stronger, harder to follow Chinese approach, which she does her best to adhere to with her daughters while living in Connecticut, where she’s a law professor at Yale. Her husband, a law professor there too, plays only a small peripheral role in this memoir.

In many ways her book is like stomaching the world of a type -A drill sergeant who pushes her kids as prodigies and family to the brink. It’s insufferable in parts what she believes and how she acts. And yet I was surprisingly glad to have read it (I didn’t hate the book. It’s even well told and isn’t heartless). I don’t believe the West has all the answers on child-raising, nor by this account does the East either. Her book raises valid questions about parenting. Perhaps there’s some kind of middle ground or hybrid approach worth exploring or trying, which Amy Chua herself concedes towards the end, though she doesn’t seem ready to reconcile to that way of thinking.

She says her memoir has been greatly misunderstood; that it’s really “supposed to be funny, partly self-parody” about her own transformation as a mother. Throughout the book, she seems to know she’s an overbearing, controlling fanatic to her kids, but that doesn’t seem to stop her any; only the possibility of losing her daughter seems to affect her path, which is a bit sad. You feel for the kids, no doubt. It would be comical perhaps if it weren’t all so borderline true to what she’s like. I did laugh some because she really is a piece work, this tiger lady. Continue reading →

For a visit to the San Francisco Bay Area last weekend, I got caught up in the book “The Devil’s Teeth” about the Farallon Islands and the great white sharks out there, 28 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. Published in 2005, the book had been knocking around my book shelves for years, a present from my older brother who told me I must read it. Indeed he was right, especially while in the Bay Area where I could stare out to sea, hoping to catch a glimpse of the rocky and remote Farallones on the edge of the vast Pacific.

The Farallones have long been a mysterious and dangerous island chain, where nasty storms and waves could be treacherous. Just last month tragedy struck when five crew members attempting to round the islands were killed during the annual Farallon sailboat race when waves knocked them overboard and washed their boat onto the rocks. Similarly in April 1982, six others died when a storm blasted the Farallon race.

The Farallones are not for the light of heart and only a handful of scientists are granted access to be on the southeastern island, which is a bird sanctuary. It’s a place filled with bird guano and surrounded by waters infested from September to November with great white sharks.

Such is the environment journalist Susan Casey threw herself into, joining biologists Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson on the Farallones to monitor the sharks and their attacks on seals. Her book is heady stuff, as if you can feel these 18-foot predators swimming around you under their small boat. It’s eerie and informative, giving a broad picture of the sharks, how they hunt during the day, chomp on surfboard decoys and are segregated with the larger dominant “Sisters” staying in different areas from the males. It also recounts the unlikely history of the islands where in 1942 more than 100 people from the military and government and their families once lived.

Susan Casey can write the daylights out of nature and science, but it’s her personal anecdotes and adventures of life on the island and in the shark-invested waters with the biologists and a bold sea urchin diver there that are most entertaining and gripping, especially her three-week solo stay anchored on a yacht off the island, which gets truly harrowing when a storm hits. “Even as the place was trying to kill me,” she writes early on, “I had never felt more alive.” Such sentiments capture the island’s hold on those who work and return there every year — to a place, she writes, where “only wild things came.”

In the end the price she pays to get the story amid increasing managerial restrictions on the island and others pay to continue their shark pursuits is very high. Heads roll, for sure, but luckily all get through alive. The fallout is heavy though and leaves one wanting to know more about what happened to all in the aftermath. As for the sharks, hopefully they’ll continue to come back to the Farallones and be studied for many more decades to come.

“The Devil’s Teeth” definitely made me want to read Susan Casey’s latest book “The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean” somewhere down the line — as she is a writer who combines science and adventure in a truly intriguing and informative way. Continue reading →