Tiger Mother as Ethnopreneur: Amy Chua and the Cultural Politics of Chineseness

Amy Chua catapulted to fame in the United States with the publication of her bestselling World on Fire: How Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2002) and a much-discussed Wall Street Journal excerpt from her next book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). A wry account of a ‘Chinese’ mother's efforts, not all successful, to raise her two daughters to be high-achievers, Tiger Mother created some controversy owing to its critique of ‘Western’-style parenting and its perceived advocacy of a ‘Tiger Mother’ brand of parenting that drew on the author's own experience of being raised by Chinese-Filipino immigrant parents in America. Not only did Battle Hymn generate heated discussion in America about the stereotyping of Asian-Americans as ‘model minority’; it also tapped into American anxieties about the waning of U.S. power in the wake of a rising China, while provoking spirited responses from mainland Chinese women looking to raise their children in ‘enlightened’ ways. This article follows Amy Chua's career as an ‘ethnopreneur’ who capitalises on her claims of ‘Chineseness’ and access to ‘Chinese culture.’ Drawing on localised/provincialised, regional, and family-mediated notions of Chineseness, Chua exemplifies the ‘Anglo-Chinese’ who exploits – and profits from – national and cultural differences within nations as well as among Southeast Asia, the U.S., and China in order to promote particular forms of hybridised (trans)national identities while eschewing the idea of mainland China as the ultimate cultural arbiter of Chineseness.