The Free Press
Honestly with Bari Weiss
Tiger Mom Amy Chua Takes Washington
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Tiger Mom Amy Chua Takes Washington
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Fourteen years ago, Amy Chua published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It was received less like a book and more like a nuclear bomb. Here are some headlines from the time: “Why I Will Never Be a Tiger Mom.” “Why Amy Chua Is Wrong About Parenting.” “Amy Chua Is a Circus Trainer, Not a Tiger Mother.” “The Human Race Needs Elephant Mothers, Not Tiger Mothers.” “Amy Chua's Recipe for Disaster and the Externalized Cost of Book Sales.”

Then, just as the publicity around Tiger Mother died down, Amy came out with The Triple Package, about why some ethnic groups succeed. People called her racist. Then she came out in support of Brett Kavanaugh's court nomination in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (before he was accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford). Afterward, people accused her of misogyny and grooming. And she was almost forced out of Yale for it. 

Then, in 2021, she was accused of hosting boozy dinner parties during COVID lockdowns and “dinner party-gate” was born. Yale punished her by barring her from teaching her “small group” first-year student contingency. 

Fast-forward to 2025. And the tables have turned.

Being a strict “tiger mom”? In. Free speech? In. Wokeness and hypersensitivity? Out.

Covid lockdowns? Definitely out. Vicious character assassinations at Senate confirmations? Out. As Free Press reporter Peter Savodnik just wrote: “The ideas that Chua was pilloried for are suddenly back in fashion.” 

Just a few weeks ago, she attended the inauguration of the incoming president and vice president—one of whom happens to be her former student and mentee. 

It’s easy to be a weather vane—to go where the wind blows. It's hard to be Amy Chua—to stand up for your beliefs even when they are not popular, even when it means personal consequences. On today’s episode, live in D.C. during inauguration weekend, Chua explains how and why she won—and what it feels like to be vindicated. 

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I love Amy Chua. Thank you for this conversation

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Great interview. Amy shed more lights on our cultural moment than most voices from both the left and the right. Perhaps the greatest insight came towards the end. Bari framed it as a tragic view of human nature: most people are not willing to fight for what's true or good but rather keep their heads down in order to survive and get ahead. Amy shared an example of that. After the George Floyd incident, the radicals at Yale called for defunding the police. Amy received lots of emails from her students complaining about the stupidity of defunding police but none was willing to call their bluff. The reason was that the costs of going against social tide was too high. There were more important things such as getting dates. That serves as a vivd illustration that life is a struggle between shepherds and wolves for the will of sheeps. Psychologically, most people behave like sheeps. It's not tragic or comic but just a simple fact of human nature. Throughout history, prosperous societies must be able to raise enough shepherds to offset the tyranny of wolves. There have only been a few societies that have managed to accomplish and sustain that for a significant period of time. I was born and grew up in China between 1960-1980s and lived in the West since then. For thousands of years, wolves ruled China by systematically killing off shepherds. For a 30 year window between 1980s and 2010s, it managed to leave some room for free thinkers and entreprenuers (shepherds). Ironically, during roughly the same period, the West was going in the other direction: political correctness gradually gained the upper hands and began to feed shepherds to the wolves in sheep's clothes. We are now at a point where the cultural fortunes of two countries are about to reverse themselves once again. Authoritarianism has regained the upper hand in China; the good old USA is waking up from a long slumber of Wokeness. It's interesting that Amy stated that Yale is not her community. But she also did not want to leave and give up the opportunity to make an impact on her students. Who knows. There might just be another JD Vance around the corner. She also said that she always feels that there is a target on her back. That is only natural. There are always more wolves than sheperds in any society given the human condition. And the sheeps couldn't tell who is whom. What are you going to do? That's the key question of leadership, perhaps the only one that matters in the end.

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