Opinion

Why we lap up cultural stereotypes like ‘Tiger Mother’

One virtue of the “Tiger Mother” controversy is that, after half a century, the Jewish mother may at last be supplanted in the national consciousness as the key ethnic neurosis-generation machine.

Amy Chua, author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” (Penguin Press), is married to a Jewish man, and the only defense I can come up with for her utterly mystifying book is that it was written to give her husband’s mother and grandmother and all other women of his ancient tribe the break they so dearly deserve.

Forget all the talk about Chua’s ideas on education and excellence and the like. “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” isn’t really about all that. It’s a book intended to immortalize a new cultural stereotype at a time when we’re supposed to be disgusted by them and look beyond them.

Chua’s commercial genius is that she understands just how much people — especially nice polite liberal elite Americans — yearn for the politically incorrect permission to believe in such stereotypes.

But the only way they can be granted such permission is if the stereotyper has unimpeachable credentials. Thus, “Glee” can traffic in gay stereotypes because its creator is gay — and Chua can create a caricature of the hard-driving Chinese mother because she is one herself.

The same was true half a century ago when the Jewish mother emerged as a dominant cultural stereotype — first in Bruce Jay Friedman’s brilliant 1964 comic novel “A Mother’s Kisses” and then immortalized by the smothering maternal tyrant Sophie Portnoy in Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

What’s weird about “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is that it’s as if “Portnoy’s Complaint” had been written by Sophie Portnoy. The “Tiger Mother” makes Sophie and all other Jewish mothers glitter and gleam by comparison. It’s like this: The Tiger Mother rejects her 3-year-old’s hand-made birthday card because it’s not good enough; the Jewish mother saves every scrap of that child’s scribblings until her home is ready to be featured on “Hoarders.”

At the beginning of the book, Chua describes how she punishes her 3-year-old’s act of defiance by dragging the girl outside on a bitterly cold day and telling her she’s going to leave her on the porch. (This is a child she likens, tellingly, to a “feral horse.”) Only the fear of a report to the Administration for Children’s Services compels her to coax the toddler back inside.

And the Jewish mother? She screams at her children for refusing to wear mittens when it’s 42 degrees outside. Ba-dum.

And so on.

If Amy Chua didn’t intend to relieve her mother-in-law of what we might (post-Palin) call the Jewish “love libel,” then it’s hard to conceive of an explanation for her breezy, 250-page account of emotional abuse other than that it might help pay for extensive psychiatric bills.

As far as IQ goes, this tenured Yale Law School professor is clearly off the charts. But her level of emotional intelligence is indicated by the fact that she rejects the eulogy she demanded her 10-year-old daughter write for her mother-in-law’s funeral by saying “How could you, Sophia? This is awful. It has no insight.”

That Chua acknowledges she said this “viciously” is supposed to demonstrate that she is willing to be honest about herself. How nice. How familiar. Chua constantly suggests she is un-Western, but the solipsistic self-regard on display on every page marks her as just another one of those glib Park Slopey blatherers who contribute to supposedly fearless self-exposure essay collections as “The Bitch in the House” and “The Bastard on the Couch.”

She repeatedly informs us that “raising kids the Chinese way is much harder than raising them the Western way.” Oh? Harder on whom, exactly? A woman who tells her small children she doesn’t like the birthday cards they’ve made for her isn’t doing something hard; it strikes me she is surrendering to what her husband’s people, on Yom Kippur, repeatedly call “an evil inclination.”

She describes her husband’s tradition as being “probing, questioning,” and it is that — but Jews are supposed to ask questions for a reason. The reason is that it’s the way we learn how to be good people.

Chua is consumed with drawing out superlative performance from her children — on instruments, in eulogies, on birthday cards, in school. But she appears to have no interest in providing them with moral guidance. And how could she — a mother who, by her own admission, uses affection the way an audience uses applause?

So Amy Chua is blech. Fine. What’s not fine is that she defends her own indefensible conduct by informing us that she is the present-day embodiment of the age-old “Chinese mother.”

My guess is that this book gives us a portrait of Chinese tradition that is ultimately about as deep as the “ancient Chinese secret” that was revealed, in that classic 1970s commercial, to be Calgon detergent.