Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua Read Free Book Online

produce 53 different notes measured by half-step increments—and infinitely more tone colors by using different strings and bowing techniques. It’s often said that the violin can capture every emotion and that it’s the instrument closest to the human voice.
    One thing that the piano and violin have in common—with each other but also with many sports—is that you can’t play extraordinarily well unless you’re relaxed. Just as you can’t have a killer tennis serve or throw a baseball really far unless you keep your arm loose, you can’t produce a mellifluous tone on the violin if you squeeze the bow too tightly or mash down on the strings—mashing is what makes the horrible scratchy sound. “Imagine that you’re a rag doll,” Mr. Shugart would tell Lulu. “Floppy and relaxed, and not a care in the world. You’re so relaxed your arm feels heavy from its own weight.... Let gravity do all the work.... Good, Lulu, good.”
    “RELAX!” I screamed at home. “Mr. Shugart said RAG DOLL!” I always tried my best to reinforce Mr. Shugart’s points, but things were tough with Lulu, because my very presence made her edgy and irritable.
    Once, in the middle of a practice session she burst out, “ Stop it, Mommy. Just stop it. ”
    “Lulu, I didn’t say anything,” I replied. “I didn’t say one word.”
    “Your brain is annoying me,” Lulu said. “I know what you’re thinking.”
    “I’m not thinking anything,” I said indignantly. Actually, I’d been thinking that Lulu’s right elbow was too high, that her dynamics were all wrong, and that she needed to shape her phrases better.
    “Just turn off your brain!” Lulu ordered. “I’m not going to play anymore unless you turn off your brain.”
    Lulu was always trying to provoke me. Getting into an argument was a way of not practicing. That time I didn’t bite. “Okay,” I said calmly. “How do you want me to do that?” Giving Lulu control over the situation sometimes defused her temper.
    Lulu thought about it. “Hold your nose for five seconds.”
    A lucky break. I complied, and the practicing resumed. That was one of our good days.
    Lulu and I were simultaneously incompatible and inextricably bound. When the girls were little, I kept a computer file in which I recorded notable exchanges word-for-word. Here’s a conversation I had with Lulu when she was about seven:
    A: Lulu, we’re good buddies in a weird way.
    L: Yeah—a weird, terrible way.
    A: !!
    L: Just kidding (giving Mommy a hug).
    A: I’m going to write down what you said.
    L: No, don’t! It will sound so mean!
    A: I’ll put the hug part down.
     
    One nice by-product of my extreme parenting was that Sophia and Lulu were very close: comrades-in-arms against their overbearing, fanatic mother. “She’s insane,” I’d hear them whispering to each other, giggling. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t fragile, like some Western parents. As I often said to the girls, “My goal as a parent is to prepare you for the future—not to make you like me.”
    One spring, the director of the Neighborhood Music School asked Sophia and Lulu to perform as a sister duo at a special gala event honoring the soprano opera singer Jessye Norman, who played Aida inVerdi’s spectacular opera. As it happens, my father’s favorite opera is Aida —Jed and I were actually married to the music of Aida ’s Triumphal March—and I arranged for my parents to come from California. Wearing matching dresses, the girls performed Mozart’s Sonata forViolin and Piano in E Minor. I personally think the piece was too mature for them—the exchanges back and forth between the violin and the piano didn’t quite work, didn’t sound like conversations—but no one else seemed to notice, and the girls were big hits. Afterward, Jessye Norman said to me, “Your daughters are so talented—you’re very lucky.” Fights and all, those were some of the best days of my life.

10
     

     
    Teeth Marks and