Tuesday, January 11, 2011

You Suck, Part 2: Amy Chua in the Wall Street Journal

It is hard, given the space here, to do justice to the awfulness of Amy Chua's article "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior," so I'll try to distill it down to the essential issues:

It is racist.  Very, very racist.  And yes, Ms. Chua, you can be racist and a "minority."  (By the way, being Chinese, makes you a worldwide "majority," so stop milking the term and grow the fuck up.)

It encourages abusive child-rearing.  No, this is not a cultural difference of opinion.  Being a nasty bitch to your children and talking smack about other people's kids isn't proper parenting, in word or in deed, no matter where you live in the world.

It ignores the high rates of suicide and self-abuse that occur in cultures that encourage this kind of nastiness.  Yeah, your kid is a great piano player, but you beat the shit out of her self esteem to get her there.  You also denied her anything like a decent social experience, and you've made sure that she will grow up to be a career-driven, frigid bitch like you.  I hope you like the sound of Beethoven and resentment.

It is more about how Amy Chua thinks she is a perfect mother, against all evidence, than about her failed efforts at lauding the cultural superiority of a society that believes shame can fix anything.  Western society is slowly learning that guilt isn't the answer to all ills, and China is lagging behind.  Catch up, Ms. Chua, and join the modern world.

Ms. Chua confuses abuses brainwashing with filial gratitude.  Yeah, you berated, threatened, abused, ground-down and emotionally bludgeoned your kid into playing "The Little White Donkey."  You made her miserable, treated her like trash, made her feel stupid and worthless and alone, threw out her things, screamed at your husband, and acted like the most self-entitled, egotistical, living-vicariously-through-my-children's-successes sociopath I have ever encountered in the educated world.  And when your daughter finally gets it, when she finally succeeds, you think she is happy out of pride?  She's happy because you might leave her alone for a few minutes, you psychotic, self-righteous, nasty bitch!  I can beat a donkey until it climbs a hill, but just because it is a steep hill and the donkey couldn't climb it the day before, I'm still a lousy person for having done it.

Amy Chua represents the worst of academia; she is a cold, narrow-minded cultural imperialist that shouldn't be allowed near children, either hers or anyone else's.  She is arrogance personified, a holdover from the days when China thought itself the master of the world.  And like China, she will learn too late that the world has moved past her, and she will struggle to catch up.

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