Everything's Official About This

I finally read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua. I didn’t read it for the longest time because everybody was talking about it and it sounded like one of those books that is written only so everybody will talk about it. From the excerpts I read, I was convinced Amy Chua was mental and her kids must be pretty damaged. I picked up the book from the library for a quick read, just so I can also say I’ve read it.

Enough has been said about the book, so I’m not going to discuss it in great detail. What surprised me was that I actually enjoyed reading it and it brought back several fond and not-so-fond memories from my own childhood. Because my parents are also somewhat Tiger types. They were not as extreme as Chua but I’m sure if my brother or I had given them some space to be so, they would have been. Especially my dad who was appalled that I got the thirteenth rank in my LKG class. And that’s not an exaggeration. He actually held up my report card and asked me to explain why I hadn’t come first. I very glibly replied that everyone had been given the thirteenth rank, so I wouldn’t know.

Coming first was super important in our household. Whether it was an exam or an elocution competition, anything less than first place was usually received with a ‘Hmmm, who came first?’ response. My mum was not so obsessed with first place as my dad and she would try to disguise her tiger-ness by making statements like ‘Oh, if you’d worked harder, you’d have done better!’ Throughout my student years, my mum maintained that the reason I wasn’t coming first was because I was too lazy (I was always in the top five in class, but coming fifth and all was no achievement in my house).

To my dad, this first place thing was an obsession. So much so that my brother and I followed this policy when we were kids – there are two entrances to our house: one through my dad’s office room where he receives his clients and one through the drawing room of the house. If we won the first prize, we’d make a grand entry through the office room so my dad could tell all his junior lawyers, clerk, typist, sundry clients what geniuses we were. If we didn’t win, we’d quietly slip in through the other entrance. We definitely weren’t the kids who got a pat on the back for participation certificates.

Getting a ‘centum’ in mathematics was the greatest achievement possible, according to my dad. His point was that since one can’t get a centum in other subjects usually, to get the toppest score possible, you had to score a centum in math. I probably got a centum in math when I was in first standard or something, never after that. My dad was super disappointed when I got only eighty plus in math in my twelfth boards. I had a ninety plus in all other subjects and I was least bothered by my math score because I’d decided on doing English and the last time I inquired, analyzing Pride and Prejudice didn’t require a knowledge of calculus. He went on and on about how I could have been the school topper blah blah if only I’d scored a centum in math. Fat chance of that happening since the school topper was some guy who got centums in all five subjects or something.

It was my dad’s greatest dream that my brother and I would top the country, top the state. At least top Perambur. But neither of us did that. My brother didn’t top because he was a loony who’d waste time in exams deriving formulas instead of mugging them up like a decent kid. I didn’t top because I couldn’t. At least, my brother cracked the IIT but all I cracked were jokes about losers who did engineering. I made up for this somewhat by topping my class in college all three years and winning a gold medal for it. This was a bigger achievement for my dad than all the poetry and fiction I’d written in those three years. Most of which he never read. And that crazy blog I’d started which eventually led me to becoming a published writer.

All this must make it seem like I had a very pressurizing and sad childhood. Not at all. The thing is, my dad was the son of a tailor who eventually went on to become a full-timer in the Communist party. Simply put, there was no money when he was growing up. My dad went to a government-aided Tamil medium school and learnt English mostly during his college days in MCC where he made it a point to mix with the English-speaking crowd. He became a lawyer and built up his practice with no help from anybody in any position of influence. And much of how he did this was by his sheer determination to come first in everything he touched. It was a method that had worked for him and he didn’t quite understand why we couldn’t see that or why we found it funny.

One of the shocking incidents from Chua’s book that’s been the subject of much discussion is how she refused to accept a badly made birthday card from her daughter. Because she could have put in more effort and done a better job of it. When I read this, in the context in which Chua writes, I burst out laughing. Because that’s so much like my mum. In fact, I remember one Mother’s Day when I’d written a poem and made a card for her. She looked at it and said, ‘I don’t want all these meaningless gestures. Why don’t you clean your toilet?’ She also didn’t think the poem was all that great, saying I didn’t mean whatever I’d written. My mum has always been very blunt about what she thought of my writing. I remember her reading this poem I’d written on saving the environment and she said, ‘First clean your house.’ I was very fond of writing depressing poetry back then and she’d always tell me my writing was fake. I’ve taken many melodramatic oaths after listening to her scathing comments that I was never going to write a word ever again in my life.

But of course, I did write again. And every time I wrote, I’d imagine my mother reading it and I did get better. I learnt to be honest in my writing. And I think it has helped me work with editors and take their criticism professionally.

My father wanted me to write the IAS or at least become a doctor (yup, at least is what I said). But it was he who paid for my ridiculously expensive and not very employable MA degree in Gender Studies without asking me to think about what would come after. And for the record, he believes feminism is inconvenient.

Chua, in her book, says Chinese parents push their children so much because they believe their children can excel and all they are doing is to help them realize their potential. Western parents, on the other hand, are content with letting the child choose how much potential it wanted to realize. My parents are definitely Chinese. And they took great pains to be Chinese. I used to go to a convent till second standard. After that, my parents shifted me to a CBSE school. I used to speak English quite fluently when I was in the convent but in my new school, where most of the children spoke to each other in Tamil, I forgot much of the language and just wouldn’t speak it. My dad was devastated by this. In his view, speaking English was a passport to opportunities that he’d missed in his childhood. He remembered the hesitation he felt in speaking up before the English-savvy crowds and the completely different world they lived in. He didn’t want that for his children. My dad used to stalk the kids going to my school and eavesdrop their conversations to find out which language they were speaking in and how good or bad it was. His investigation report led him to the conclusion that my school had to be changed. And that’s how my brother and I landed up in PSBB, KK Nagar, a school that required us to travel 40 kms a day.

My dad hired an autorickshaw to take us that distance. It cost him 200 bucks a day. He was doing reasonably well in his practice but this was no small cost to him in those days. It was definitely a considerable sum but he did not hesitate to spend it. When the autorickshaw didn’t work out, he hired a part-time driver and we used to go to school in our embarrassingly ancient Ambassador. When the driver didn’t work out, he adjusted his office timings to suit our school schedule. Whichever classes we joined, whatever activity we took up, my dad would make sure we were able to do it by shuffling his practice around us.

Sibling rivalry is another issue Chua talks about in the book. For Western parents, comparing their children is unthinkable. But Chinese parents do it to encourage the underachiever to be more like the successful kid. Ah. Throughout my childhood, my brother was the paragon I was supposed to emulate. He was one of those annoying kids who don’t seem to study at all but are just brilliant naturally. I used to wonder if my mum ate a specially blessed mango when she was pregnant with him. I, on the other hand, was laid-back (according to my parents anyway). In our school, we had this program for ‘gifted’ children. Basically, the school gave you an aptitude test in Math, Science, and English and whoever passed could attend ‘enrichment’ classes where they’d help you hone your interests. Needless to say, my brother was in all three classes. I passed English and flunked the other two. In any other household, just passing one would have been enough to make you ‘gifted’. In mine, passing one was being ‘lazy’. I remember thinking how unfair it was and feeling like I’d never amount to much in my parents’ eyes.

In particular, I remember this one instance when we ran into a friend of my father’s on a shopping trip. My parents introduced us to him and then went on and on about how my brother had won some big prize (okay, he’d just been certified as the World’s Youngest Microsoft Certified Professional or something). They didn’t say one word about me. I felt like I didn’t exist. I remember the intense shame I felt then. But whenever I brought it up with my mum, she’d say I should be proud of my brother instead of acting jealous and try and be more like him. Obviously, this didn’t help.

It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t my brother and needn’t be him. And that I could be successful in my own way, with or without parental acknowledgment. I do wish they had been less Chinese in this respect but I also think it helped me build my character and stand up for myself. I was determined to succeed just to prove them wrong. Today, I’m fairly successful in my field, which is very different from theoretical physics (my brother’s field) and I realize that what I’ve done is to prove them right.

Despite all of this, we had quite a happy childhood. There was nothing that we were denied. If money, time, and effort could buy it, we had it. I was quite the rebel in my teenage years and there were times when I wouldn’t speak to my parents for days. Yet, when I came very close to a breakdown soon after my MA, at the age of twenty-one, I remember one night when I lay in bed between the two of them, clutching them hard and sobbing that I couldn’t imagine what life would be like five years down the line. My mum’s response was that she never thought I was so weak. It might sound harsh to anyone reading but it gave me the strength to get up and take control again. They held me together as if I were a baby and put me back on my feet. And for that boost up, I will always be grateful, despite all the scratches their tiger parenting might have left on me.

Will I be a tiger parent with my daughter? I will be a tiger in some respects. I will be honest about what I tell her because I’ve come to realize that people who tell you what they think, even if they know you won’t like it, are very rare to come by. And we all need at least one such person in our lives. I will not insist that she gets centums in math because I know there are several roads to becoming successful, having walked one myself. But yes, I will definitely hope for her to be successful – because success is important. It isn’t the only important thing but damn, it feels good. I will not indulge in comparisons because I detested it so much during my childhood that I wouldn’t be able to do it even if I somehow convinced myself that it was good for her. I will be the sort of tiger who stands in line at 6 AM for school admissions because I owe much of my life to people who did this for me. I hope my daughter and I can be friends as she grows up. But if it doesn’t happen that way, I will still be the tiger who is around if she wants me to hold her at forty.