Thursday, Jan. 20, 2011
t是什么意思
Tiger Moms: Is Tough Parenting Really the Answer?
By Annie Murphy Paul
六级词汇表
It was the "Little White Donkey" incident that pushed many readers over the edge. That's the name of the piano tune that Amy Chua, Yale law professor and lf-described "tiger mother," forced her 7-year-old daughter Lulu to practice for hours on end — "right through dinner into the night," with no breaks for water or even the bathroom, until at last Lulu learned to play the piece.
For other readers, it was Chua calling her older daughter Sophia "garbage" after the girl behaved disrespectfully — the same thing Chua had been called as a child by her strict Chine father. (See a TIME Q&A with Amy Chua.)
And, oh, yes, for some readers it was the card that young Lulu made for her mother's birthday. "I don't want this," Chua announced, adding that she expected to receive a drawing that Lulu had "put some thought and effort into." Throwing the card back at her daughter, she told her, "I derve better than this. So I reject this."
chownEven before Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chua's proudly politically incorrect account of raising her children "the Chine way," arrived in bookstores Jan. 11, her parenting methods were the incredulous, indignant talk of every playground, supermarket and coffee shop. A prepublication excerpt in the Wall Street Journal (titled "Why Chine Mothers Are Superior") started the ferocious buzz; the online version has been read more than 1 million times and attracted more than 7,000 comments so far. When Chua appeared Jan. 11 on the 现在进行时Today show, the usually sunny host Meredith Vieira could hardly
contain her contempt as she read aloud a sample of viewer comments: "She's a monster"; "The way she raid her kids is outrageous"; "Where is the love, the acceptance?"
Chua, a petite 48-year-old who carries off a short-skirted wardrobe that could easily be worn by her daughters (now 15 and 18), gave as good as she got. "To be perfectly honest, I know that a lot of Asian parents are cretly shocked and horrified by many aspects of Western parenting," including "how much time Westerners allow their kids to waste — hours on Facebook and computer games — and in some ways, how poorly they prepare them for the future," she told Vieira with a toss of her long hair. "It's a tough world out there." (See Nancy Gibbs' take on the challenges of parenting.)
Chua's reports from the trenches of authoritarian parenthood are indeed disconcerting, even shocking, in their candid admission of maternal ruthlessness. Her book is a Mommie Dearest囧记单词 for the age of the memoir, when we tell tales on ourlves instead of our relatives. But there's something el behind the inten reaction to Tiger Mother, whic
h has shot to the top of best-ller lists even as it's been denounced on the airwaves and the Internet. Though Chua was born and raid in the U.S., her invocation of what she describes as traditional "Chine parenting" has hit hard at a national sore spot: our fears about losing ground to China and other rising powers and about adequately preparing our children to survive in the global economy. Her stories of never accepting a grade lower than an A, of insisting on hours of math and spelling drills and piano and violin practice each day (weekends and vacations included), of not allowing playdates or sleepovers or television or computer games or even school plays, for goodness' sake, have left many readers outraged but also defensive. The tiger mother's cubs are being raid to rule the world, the book clearly implies, while the offspring of "weak-willed," "indulgent" Westerners are growing up ill equipped to compete in a fierce global marketplace.
不要说爱我One of tho permissive American parents is Chua's husband, Jed Rubenfeld (also a professor at Yale Law School). He makes the occasional cameo appearance in Tiger Mother, cast as the tenderhearted foil to Chua's merciless taskmaster. When Rubenfeld protested Chua's harangues over "The Little White Donkey," for instance, Chua informed
him that his older daughter Sophia could play the piece when she was Lulu's age. Sophia and Lulu are different people, Rubenfeld remonstrated reasonably. "Oh, no, not this," Chua shot back, adopting a mocking tone: "Everyone is special in their special own way. Even lors are special in their own special way."
With a stroke of her razor-sharp pen, Chua has t a whole nation of parents to wondering: Are we the lors she's talking about?
Photo illustration by Jim Naughten for
cs之歌TIME Magazine
Thursday, Jan. 20, 2011
Tiger Daughter
quit的用法By Bill Powell
汉英转换器>英语小诗歌First-grader and math whiz in training Abby Cui-Powell David Hogsholt / Reportage by Getty Images for TIME
I sat in our suburban home in Shanghai and read online the excerpt from Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. My reaction to it was straightforward: Maybe a little over the top, but, yeah, that's about right. My wife's reaction: "I guess I'm not the toughest Chine mother after all."
Our daughter, age 6, is in first grade. She's bilingual (Mandarin and English). She takes violin and ballet lessons. And she does two to three hours of homework a night, ven days a week. She is not Superkid. The fluency in English excepted ("An accident of birth," I remind her every time she comes home boasting about acing her latest English quiz), she's a normal kid. Pretty much every other child in her class at her Chine school does the same stuff.
