Battle Hymn, Shmattle Hymn

For this to make sense, you need to read this first if you haven't already because your head was up your arse.

I have a confession to make - I'm kinda obsessed with Amy Chua right now. It's not because she's kind of nuts, which she is. It's because she's 48 years old and has two (presumably very traumatized) children - but still looks pretty friggin hot.

Y'all will have to look up a picture of her yourselves, because putting up photographs of other chicks on my blog isn't how I roll (also, she's a Law professor at Yale and might momentarily forget I'm not her kid and beat my ass for violating copyright), but take my word for it when I say she's got pretty great skin going.

If I ever meet her, I won't ask her if she shackles her kids to the bed or strip-searches them every time they come home from school - I'll ask what brand of moisturiser she uses. Also, toner - essential or marketing gimmick?

On a serious note, I do think she's nuts. I myself have no truck with Western parents who raise their kids to be lazy, burger-eating, soda-guzzling, The Kardashian-watching little shits. Nothing makes me more mad than hearing some parent simpering on about their kid's "deferred success" when their kid flunks a test.

So I say this not as some bleeding-heart liberal or even someone who's a parent (God forbid). I say this as a Chinese person who got a damn-good hiding herself when she scored 95% on a test as a child: Lady, you're more ga-ga than the Lady herself.

First, her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is a little pre-mature. One of her kids is 14 or 15 - which is a little early for self-congratulation of any sort. From a Singaporean perspective, 15's nothing - there's still the 'O' Levels and 'A' Levels to fuck up. So this crowing about the superiority of the Chinese child-rearing technique is, well, a little un-Chinese.

Most truly Chinese parents hold their breath when a kid is born and do not exhale until the kid is 40 and has a solid pension plan. Even if you're unmarried, 30 and run your own business, a good Chinese mother will still deem you incapable of buying your own underwear. So why the noisy exhaling now, Ms Chua? Neither of your kids has won a Nobel Prize, saved a small country, gone to war against one or found herself a good Chinese lawyer/doctor/engineer to marry. Seems like a great deal of underachieving to me.

And then there's the very un-Chinese demonstration of a lack of understanding of statistical odds. In the Wall Street Journal, among the many things she said both her daughters were never allowed to do was to not be number 1 in every subject except gym and drama. Surely, in a class of 30 or 40, that's a little unreasonable, odds-wise?

If there's at least one other Chinese kid in that class with a mother who harbours similarly optimistic objectives and equally tyrannical ideas on child-rearing, it would be a zero-sum game that your child cannot win every time. It's like two Christians praying to the same God that they'll beat the other in a race - that's why I like my rivals to be atheists. (Anyway, if the other kid is fresh off the boat from Shanghai, your kid doesn't stand a chance.)

To put things firmly in focus, imagine if both her daughters weren't fortuitously spaced apart by several years - what if they were twins in the same class? Short of them tying for every single test score, one of them is destined to be a failure (i.e. second in class). Does this make her in equal parts a failure and success as a mother?

I was raised in a similar pressure-cooker type environment, in a suburb where bored housewives were defined by the grades their kids got because they weren't smart enough to get them themselves. I've had classmates who were too scared to go home when the bell rang because they got a 'B' for Malay Language - a subject that has done sweet fuck-all for everyone in the working world till this day.

All that hadn't bred in me a love for the stricture of being Chinese and its dictates of what constitutes value in this world - it'd only made me hate Chinese New Year very, very much.

In any case, the litmus test for whether Ms Chua's brand of parenting works is whether her kids will come home for Chinese New Year two decades from now when they've gained autonomy and purged from their minds the many hateful hours of piano lessons.

I can tell her very authoritatively that there are children who do not.