考研英语阅读篇章：中国妈妈严厉的爱
新东方在线小编为大家整理考研英语阅读系列篇章精选，考生可作为备考资料，阅读的同时将不熟的单词牢记。Tough Love, From a Chinese Mother
中国妈妈严厉的爱
January 16th 2011 | from Newsweek
Amy Chua’s email in-box has become the latest front in the mommy wars. Ever
since Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, her warts-and-all book on parenting the
Chinese way, inflamed the mommy-blogger universe with its publication last week,
Chua has been under attack. “Oh. My. Gosh,” she says, when asked how many
messages she gets each day. “I don’t know—300? 600?” Many of them are notes of
praise and thanks, she says. But many are vicious. “There are death threats. And
‘Go back to China, you abusive monster.’ It’s much more overwhelming than I
thought it would be.”
Broadly speaking, Chua’s book is about how she endeavored to raise her two
American girls, now teenagers, the way her Chinese-immigrant parents raised her.
For Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, the Chinese way includes lots of rules
and high expectations—and disciplinary techniques that can come across as cruel
and unusual. She makes one daughter stand outside in the frigid winter
weather—at age 3—for not practicing the piano as instructed, and she berates
both for the sloppiness of the handmade cards they created for her birthday. The
book has come to be seen as an indictment of the kind of permissive parenting
that permeates the country’s affluent neighborhoods, where kids get trophies
even when they lose and ice-cream sundaes just for making their beds.
Now it’s Chua who’s enduring the admonishments. On Internet discussion
boards (prompted by a piece in The Wall Street Journal with the headline WHY
CHINESE MOTHERS ARE SUPERIOR) her critics say that she has no regard for the
plight of working families, that she values achievement and status above all,
and that the parenting strategies she advocates produce weak-willed,
self-loathing robots destined for the therapist’s couch. Chua, whose daughters
enliven nearly every page of her book, tries not to take these attacks
personally, but they upset her. Her girls are confident and happy, she says, but
“I keep calling in, worried about them.” She’s glad her own mother, who advised
against publishing the book and is on vacation in England, “doesn’t use the
Internet very well.”
Chua wants to set the record straight: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is
not a how-to book. It’s a memoir about her struggles with child rearing. She
passes no judgment on anyone else. “I believe that there are many ways of being
a good parent,” she says. “My husband”—who is Jewish American—“was raised in a
very permissive, liberal family, and he came out great.” The chatterers, she
says, fail to understand that her book acknowledges the limitations of the
Chinese way. The narrative centers on Chua’s efforts to make musical prodigies
out of her daughters by forcing them to practice three hours a day, minimum,
starting in nursery school. With Sophia, the elder daughter, this authoritarian
approach works beautifully: she begins winning competitions at 10. But Lulu,
despite her musical gifts, rebels.
The climax of the book occurs in a restaurant, with 13-year-old Lulu
screaming, “I hate the violin. I hate my life. I hate you, and I hate this
family!” She throws a water glass to the floor, where it shatters. The tiger
mother relents and gives Lulu permission to quit so she can spend more time
playing tennis—a non-Chinese-mother-approved activity. “If there’s a takeaway
from the book, it’s about a search for balance,” Chua says. “And maybe the
dominant mainstream permissive Western model is not ideal, but nor is the
extremely strict ‘only violin or piano.’ ” While she’s at it, Chua would also
like people to know she’s funny and fun. “My kids actually quite like me,” she
says.(609 words)
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