Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior bu Amy Chua?

It is true that the ways the parents raise their children will decide how well the children grow, especially the mothers who impact their children the most. There is no right or wrong in how a mother takes care of her children. All of them want the best for their children. The only difference is the level of intensity in how to raise a child. In Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School believes that the ways Chinese mothers raise their children are the most effective ways.

Her main purpose of this article is to state the differences between Western mothers and Chinese mothers which show how great Chinese mothers are.

To achieve her goal, she employs many techniques which are effective content, which includes examples and special writing style, and especially powerful tone in her piece. In Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, Amy Chua argues that the ways Chinese mothers raise their children is the best way.

There are three main differences between them just like Chua said in her piece.

The first is that Westerner parents care a lot about their children pride which influences the words they use in conversation with the children; furthermore, they expect less than Chinese parents. The second difference is the effect of long time traditional thinking about the depth of children to their parents since parents give them the forms and lives. The last is that the Chinese mothers understand the children more deeply than Western mothers.

Chua then applies her own memoir with her daughter Lulu as support for her points.

One of many techniques that Amy Chua uses throughout the article is effective content, for instance, statistics and especially examples. In paragraph 4, she provides impressive statistics which are dominant numbers about the thinking of Western and Chinese mothers. “70%” (217) in the number of Western mother who opposed the idea of pressing in academic suddenly dropped down to “roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way” (217). The gap between the numbers surprises the readers.

They might predict how different the perspectives of the mothers between two cultures are; however, they would not have thought that there would be 70% differences. Not only statistics, the number of examples Amy Chua uses in the articles were more than enough to persuade the readers. There are at least seven examples which are in paragraph 3, 6, 7, 8, 12, 16, and 20. Her examples vary from small scale stories, conversations to big arguments, and thoughts. Although her examples are a bit too much focused on her, they provided the “differences” that Amy Chua wants to show through many areas such as grades, compliment, punishment, as well as her own experiences with her daughter Lulu.

Another sub-technique that the author employs to gain effective content is writing style. Although this is an article about parenting education published on The Wall Street Journal, which is newspaper about business, Amy Chua puts into use simple words instead of fancy words in the entire article. This is a very good way to get close to the audience who I believe are parents and teenagers since they are the people who care most about the development of new generation through effective educational methods. Throughout the article, the author uses many quotes as well as conversations on the purpose of making her piece livelier.

I feel like I was actually there when the conversations were happening. This makes Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior become not only an article about some controversial issue but also a story about her life that Amy Chua wants the readers to know about as she herself is also a Chinese mother. Examples are good, but examples using conversations are even better in persuading the readers as well as transmitting the thoughts of the author.

For example is the conversations of her and Jed. She thoughtfully uses the perspectives of the father who is Westerner and the mother who is Chinese to critically point out the differences Amy Chua tries to tell the audiences. Amy Chua simply puts whoever reads this piece in her own shoes so that they can understand what Amy Chua was thinking while the conversations are taking place.

Not only examples and writing style, which are used to enrich the content of the article, but Amy Chua also transmits her idea through a unique expression, tone from the beginning until the end of the article. Amy Chua chooses many words that give strong impacts to the readers such as “garbage” (218), “Hey Fatty” (218). She expresses herself as a very serious person when it comes to parenting education. She doesn’t mind if the tone she uses will give out negative effects as she published this article in American’s newspaper where parents almost never spoke out those words to their children. Her expression, her tones in the article is also a supporting point for her argument about the differences of Western and Chinese mothers.

However, it is also a drawback when Amy Chua uses this kind of tone in her work. The readers, especially Western readers, they would feel terribly awful since they almost never in their life have called their children by those terms used by Amy Chua. In a new on television not so long after her third book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has been published, a teenager called her “the worst person ever” simply because she felt offended by the tone of Amy Chua in the book. After all, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior serves as Amy Chua’s personal achievement, memoir not as a way to pursuit all of the parents should be like her.

In the end, Amy Chua successfully applies many techniques which effective content including writing style and the usage of examples, statistic as well as expressions in Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior. Although this article was criticized by many readers about the affair of children abuse because the different perspectives about interpreting Amy Chua’s tone and examples in the article, we cannot negate that Amy Chua was a good writer who undoubtedly achieved her goal in transferring her idea using many writing skills.

Work Cited:

Chua, Amy. “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” The New World Reader. 4th. Gilbert H. Muller. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2014. 217-222. Print