Amy Chua is best known as the Tiger Mom, leader of the pushy parent tribe. She gained the moniker after writing her best-selling memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which detailed her strict Chinese-American child-rearing approach.
She is less well known for being a Yale professor. Yet when she wasn’t browbeating her daughters into hours of violin practice or homework, Chua was teaching students and writing critically acclaimed books on international politics and ethno-nationalism.
Now she has just published Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, which explores the destructive force of political tribalism and how this has affected the US at home and abroad.
She decided to write the book after appearing on Real Time with Bill Maher three years ago to talk about Ukrainian nationalism.
Speaking from her home in New Haven, Connecticut, Chua says: “There were all these nasty tweets afterwards, saying: ‘What does the Tiger Mother think she’s doing talking about nationalism?’ I remember thinking these people don’t even know I’m a professor and not just a parent.
“I told my publisher and editor [about Political Tribes] and they weren’t so happy because they wanted a more lucrative follow-up to the memoir. I might do that down the line, but I just felt that for myself, I needed to go back and write a more serious book.”
Her broad thesis in Political Tribes is that Americans are almost uniquely blind to the importance of group identities. The US has historically been a “super-group”, made up of a diverse population bound by a strong national identity of Americanness.
Chua argues that US foreign policymakers have looked at other countries in the same way. She gives the examples of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq where the tribal motives of the people whose lives were being thrown into chaos were ignored.
Now the US itself is being pulled apart by tribal divisions and the “super-group” is breaking down. Race has split the poor and class has split white Americans.
She writes: “Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. The left believes that rightwing tribalism — bigotry, racism — is tearing the country apart. The right believes that leftwing tribalism — identity politics, political correctness — is tearing the country apart. They are both right.”
Identity has fascinated Chua for as long as she can remember.
“I’ve always been very conscious of my identity because for most of my life I really stuck out,” she says.
Chua, whose ethnic Chinese parents emigrated from the Philippines, spent the first eight years of her life in Indiana where she was bullied for being different. “We were the only Asian family for blocks and blocks. I had a funny accent to start with. I brought a Thermos with Chinese food to school.
“When I went to Harvard, I stuck out again because I was this public school kid who had no idea about these private fancy schools.”
Chua — who is a stimulating conversationalist: chatty, clever, enthusiastic and funny — says her true tribe is her family.
“I’m very aware of tribalism, when you’re an outsider you stick with your own, your family. I view my whole life as slowly turning being an outsider into a source of strength instead of weakness, shame and insecurity — even with the Tiger Mom thing.”
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother provoked outrage when it was published in 2011. Rather than being a how-to manual, the book is an account of the rewards and costs — her daughter Lulu had rebelled — of her extreme parenting style. Details of her draconian rules, which included no sleepovers, no playdates and no grade less than an A, prompted a barrage of abusive emails and even death threats.
The experience toughened her, she says, adding: “At first, I thought why did I do this? I didn’t know people were going to be so mad. But I look back and I’m proud I contributed to a big conversation that had to be had.
“It wasn’t all negative. When my kids complained it was stressful I would say: ‘Oh come on, you just got to meet Mark Wahlberg.’ They’ll admit there was a fair share of fun things.”
In terms of academic success, Chua’s methods appear to have paid off. Sophia, 25, is at Yale Law School and Lulu, 22, is majoring in history at Harvard.
“I’m just relieved,” says Chua. “It could have gone either way. With Lulu especially, we had just come out of this very difficult stage, which is why I wrote the book. She had rebelled completely. I don’t want to sugarcoat it. Parenting is never easy. This is not a humble brag.”
Now she’s an empty nester, she says, and has more time to write. She also enlists the help of her “brilliant” students as research assistants — she chooses “half conservative and half liberal, of all stripes and every religion”.
She is evidently inspired by her pupils and enjoys mentoring. She is particularly interested in the “relatively few students from poor lower-class white backgrounds”. One of her former pupils is JD Vance who credits Chua for encouraging him to write Hillbilly Elegy.
Her discussions with students, among other factors, helped her call Trump’s election victory.
Chua, who says she is a socially liberal independent, says: “I talked to so many people who said, I couldn’t say this but my parents are voting for him. Even immigrants.”
Trump’s rise caused her to rework Political Tribes. “I’d long been saying developing country political dynamics are so different from the US and that’s why we always get our foreign policy wrong because we don’t have these populist movements and demagogues and ethno-nationalists. Then I stopped, and I actually reworked the book. An early theme of the book is that the political dynamics in America are starting to resemble those in developing countries much more than ever before.”
Chua tries to reach an optimistic conclusion in the book — described as a “little kumbaya” in the London Evening Standard — with the hope that in time Americans can overcome their divisions.
She cites individual acts she’s seen among her students: a third-generation Holocaust survivor agreeing to disagree with an anti-Israel activist; the daughter of an undocumented worker from Mexico finding love with the son of a police officer from New Hampshire.
These might seem like a “Band-Aid for bullet wounds”, she writes, but there is evidence that when individuals from different groups get to know one another, huge progress can be made.
Chua admits: “If we’re going to get past this polarisation, there will have to be a collective will not just at the individual level. We need courageous political leaders — it’s so much easier to appeal to the tribe, get emotions riled up.”
Political Tribes is the second book Chua, 55, has written post-Tiger Mom. In 2014, she and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, 59, also a Yale law professor, published The Triple Package, which argued that specific cultural traits made for group success.
Clearly, Chua thrives on being busy.
She is up at 6am. “I take care of the dog. I love that first cup of coffee. My brain slowly deteriorates from the moment I wake up so I try to do all my important writing and hard stuff until about 10am. I gradually shift to easier and easier things. On days I teach I focus on teaching.”
And with her Tiger Mom television-free days behind her, she and her husband have also found another way to unwind: binge-watching TV.
“We’re huge TV addicts now. I don’t think I watched a single show when the children were young.”
Then we’re back to tribes. Peaky Blinders — the drama about gang warfare set in 1920s Birmingham, England — is her current favourite. “I watched an entire series in one night,” she says with a huge laugh.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
