Amy Chua

Happiness is not always through success. Equally, the constant pursuit of success is sure unhappiness. But we have to find the balance. My own thoughts are that parenting is very personal. And we all feel enormous insecurity about parenting. What are they going to think of us 20 years down the line?

You know, parenting is so personal. And we're all afraid that we didn't quite get it right. And it feels like the stakes are so high. By we - what if we made a mistake?

Parenting is the hardest thing I have ever done. I tried to find the balance between the strict, traditional Chinese way I was raised, which I think can be too harsh, and what I see as a tendency in the West to be too permissive and indulgent. If I could do it all again, I would, with some adjustments.

There are many things the Chinese do differently from Westerners. There__ the question of extra credit, for example. One time, Lulu came home and told me about a math test she__ just taken. She said she thought it had gone extremely well, which is why she didn__ feel the need to do the extra-credit problems.I was speechless for a second, uncomprehending. __hy not?_ I asked. __hy didn__ you do them?___ didn__ want to miss recess.__ fundamental tenet of being Chinese is that you always do all of the extra credit all of the time.__hy?_ asked Lulu, when I explained this to her.For me this was like asking why I should breathe.__one of my friends do it,_ Lulu added.__hat__ not true,_ I said. ____ 100% sure that Amy and Junno did the extra credit._ Amy and Junno were the Asian kids in Lulu__ class. And I was right about them; Lulu admitted it.__ut Rashad and Ian did the extra credit too, and they__e not Asian,_ she added.__ha! So many of your friends did do the extra credit! And I didn__ say only Asians do extra credit. Anyone with good parents knows you have to do the extra credit. I__ in shock, Lulu. What will the teacher think of you? You went to recess instead of doing extra credit?_ I was almost in tears. __xtra credit is not extra. It__ just credit. It__ what separates the good students from the bad students.""Aww - recess is so fun," Lulu offered as her final sally. But after that, Lulu, like Sophia. always did the extra credit. Sometimes the girls got more points on extra credit than on the test itself - an absurdity that would never happen in China. Extra credit is one reason that Asian kids get such notoriously good grades in the United States.Rote drilling is another. Once Sophia came in second on a multiplication speed test, which her fifth grade teacher administered every Friday. She lost to a Korean boy named Yoon-seok. Over the next week, I made Sophia do twenty practice tests (of 100 problems each) every night, with me clocking her with a stopwatch. After that, she came in first every time. Poor Yoon-seok. He went back to Korea with his family, but probably not because of the speed test.

Once when I was young-maybe more than once-when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage. As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophie, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectful toward me. When I mentioned I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests. "Oh dear, it's just a misunderstanding. Amy was speaking metaphorically-right, Amy? you didn't actually call Sophie 'garbage.'""Um, yes I did. But it's all in the context," I tried to explain. "It's a Chinese immigrant thing.