Writing teacher and mentor, Clive Matson, always said that if a writer found her or himself wanting and/or needing to explain her or his story that the reader might gain the author’s intended message, the author needed to revise their story further.
Completing a manuscript requires more than simply writing the story, editing and revising it for clarity regarding grammar and typos, or even for development of plot.
Within each story or novel lives the narrative of that story, and how it came into being.
The author’s understanding and exploration of this process informs the overall plot of the front story as much as the order of events resulting from cause-and-effect of the protagonist’s actions in the face of obstacles and conflict towards the achievement of her or his goal.
Just as the mind of a story addresses pacing, tone and tempo of plot, so to does the heart of the story speak to inspiration and what first propelled the writer to put pen to paper of fingers to keys bring that first word in to being.
No more does this stand true than with the articulation of a memoir.
All fiction is autobiographical.
It tells the author’s story through manifest content versus latent as in dreams.
No wonder Aristotle offered the first architecture of story–the structure of the three-act play upon which we still organize fiction–gained from his study of dreams.
As with dreams, stories possess a clear and definable beginning, middle and end.
Memoir offers the author’s story in latent and direct content.
Except for altering names to protect those whose privacy we seek to maintain and to also remove anything that might distract from the story, writers base memoirs on the thread of one theme flowing through their life or one aspect of their live.
In that memoirs address latent content, persons and event in our lives as their occurred while emphasizing, amplifying and often embellishing the dramatic aspect of the event, the challenge of writing about our lives becomes that of remaining present when confronting the emotional truth of our lives through the writing that appears on the page detailing these event–writing that we place their with our own hands and heart.
Amy Chua insists that her memoir, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother offers a satirical perspective on her desire and striving to raise her daughters employing the same concepts her Chinese immigrant parents utilized when rearing her and her sisters.
Her memoir focuses on the challenge Chua faces with her second daughter and youngest child, who unlike Chua’s eldest, rebels against the strict nature of Chua’s demands and rules in raising her children.
The drama of the memoir, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, centers on conflict that arises in this younger daughter and child’s resistance to comply and capitulate to Chua’s way of doing things.
With equal fierceness and tenacity Chua’s younger daughter and child stands her own ground delivering an emphatic, “No! This does not feel good. It hurts! I don’t like your style of parenting.”
As a mother of three daughters and who has faced my own trials with our second and middle, I felt and empathized with Chua. Like her, I, though African-American, had a mother who like, Chua’s parents, held values similar to what she describes as ‘immigrant work ethic‘.
If novels turn on the dime of growth and change, the success of a memoir sits squarely upon the ability of the narrative and emotional thread to lead to transformation and awareness of this evolution that the most ideal situations emerge in epiphany offering hope to both the protagonist and the reader.
That I experienced none of this when completing The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother stems from the fact that this aspect remains absent in occurrence regarding the protagonist of the memoir, Chua, herself.
Much of the difficulty with writing memoir rests not in the need for emotional truth, but the time required to arrive at one’s emotional truth.
The operative word here is emotional, not factual.
If the cornerstone of a moving memoir rested on delivering facts then everyone and their grandmother could pen memoir that would entertain.
But since that is not the case, anyone who sets about to write an engaging memoir encounters the challenge all who aspire to this task and artistry–how to identify the emotional thread of one’s life and in which lies embedded a universal theme of human struggle.
On identifying that theme, the author must then set about teasing out their story of transformation as delivered in the latent, not manifest and symbolic, content of characters that are our family and friends with whom we live, sleep, and to whom we go to sleep and wake up each night and morning.
This task is more easily stated than lived.
Which is the reason so few authors can pen a memoir that stirs the heart and moves the soul.
Much of Amy Chua’s promotion for The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has and continues to include explanations of what she intended and restating the satirical perspective of the work.
Like many who read the work, I too, find nothing funny about a mother who places her 3-or-4-year-old out on the porch covered in snow on a winter day in Connecticut as punishment and to stimulate the child to practice piano.
As a teenager I played in a piano recital with a fish bone stuck in my throat. When during the middle of dinner I felt a bone from the fish I had been eating lodged in my throat I told my mother. After trying to remove it she simply stated, “Well, you’ll simply have to play with it in your throat. We’ll go to the hospital afterwards.”
I played with the fish bone in my throat.
On returning home I felt it gone.
I never considered refusing to play. I wanted to please my mother.
To do that I needed to perform. And well.
The rebellion Amy Chua’s daughter mounts throughout the memoir demonstrates signs of life–the life of her daughter’s self and her soul.
That The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother lacks any sign of the decision making of climax that follows crisis evidences a lack of change.
Ms. Chua still does not get it.
The aha moment with its unique intensity that so defines and delineates memoirs from fiction remains absent in The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother because she has yet to experience it.
We see this in explanations she continually offers to clarify her purpose in penning the work.
In a recent parenting video, A Year of the Tiger Mother, on AOL Videos of the Day, Chua attributes much of the controversy surrounding The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother rising from the title of a Wall Street Journal article, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.
Perhaps this is true.
Then again when we allow time for our living to unfurl the full results and consequences of our actions, and an organic response of our emotions to emerge, not one that is forced for fear of what we might see or discover, we often find the stories that we write concerning these experiences take on a flavor an essence all their own.
As with crafting a novel, the process of writing a memoir possesses a second plot that runs parallel to events of the of the narrative, hidden from the reader, but no less important than the emotional thread binding order of events linking the overall arc of the narrative.
The secondary plot, the writer’s journey of crafting the narrative serves as the bridge linking the map that rolls into the terrain of the here-and-now experience of transformation that we as writers undergo as we follow the voices and actions of our characters taking dictation.
Chua concludes the video cast, A Year of the Tiger Mother, by asserting that much of the negative reactions to her memoir from American readers results from the narrative having touched on two great fears that we, Americans, hold: the fear of China and that of parenting.
Yet I wonder of the angle from which Chua views these fears.
From what soil and terrain do the roots of her perspective on this matter arise?
Michigan State University scholar, Desiree Baolin Qin, Ph.D. , also of Chinese ancestry like Chua, finds, “…high-achieving Chinese students…[experience]…greater depression and anxiety than their white [peers]….”
In the article, Tiger Moms Need to Chill, Qin urges mothers, and fathers, to find a balance “…between the parenting extremes of East and West… .”
Americans fear China, its burgeoning economy in the face of financial stagnation that hovers over the landscape of the American economy.
But is it really that we fear that Chinese parents in adhering to the values Chua outlines in her memoir, values that guided her parents and constituted Chua’s blueprint for parenting, a map of the journey on which she encountered the rebellion of her younger daughter?
Or is it that we Americans, like Amy Chua when facing the rebellion carried out by her younger daughter, see pieces of ourselves in the Chinese–aspects most particularly in parenting that time and circumstance now demonstrate serve no one well, least of all the parents who employ concepts like those utilized by Chua with her younger daughter?
I read Chua’s memoir as a coming of age story. Not of her daughters, but of Chua herself.
She says in chapter 7 that she always wanted to write a novel. She marries a novelist. But she doesn’t dare write anything but law books, which she admits are not her passion. Then, only after her daughter dares to “rebel,” Chua picks up a pen and writes BATTLE HYMN in six weeks. She’s finally able to shake the tragedy of her childhood–doing as she’s told, not as she wants–and can write her first work of non-academia.
The book itself is evidence of a change.
But like her daughter’s tame “rebellion” (she plays uber-competitive tennis instead of violin), it’s too little too late. Both are too damaged to truly change.
That Chua denies and retreats from her work, calling it satire, is further evidence of her incomplete change. The sad part of a tiger child is that she can never become an adult–she’s always under the thumb of her oppressor. This is also the sad truth of a tiger parent–they’re still that child, too.
Chua’s taken the first step in writing her (flawed) memoir. I wish her well in taking the next step–the one you describe in your post–“How to identify the emotional thread of one’s life.”
It’s not satire.
Thanks, Diana, for elucidating this essential thread of what I found missing, or more specifically, the root of the discomfort I experienced when reading Amy Chua’s memoir. Your analysis demonstrates that the wound(s) Chua suffered at the hands of her “tiger” mother/father/parents leave her unable to write her story. The best she can do is couch the narrative of her injuries in that of the story of the relationship between Chua and her younger daughter, with Chua in the role, naturally as mother. Her pain is too great to write from the place of her own inner child. The vulnerability required in doing so would shatter her illusions of control and ultimately overwhelm her.
Thanks so much for visiting and sharing this succinct insight.
I hope you are having a wonderful and relaxing weekend.
Peace and blessings.