I was raised by Tiger Mom — and it worked

By Doree Lewak March 28, 2018

Some second-semester college seniors are content to phone it in. Lulu Chua-Rubenfeld,
on the other hand, just completed a 90-page thesis on Jewish-American identity in early 20th
century New York and a 10-page paper on the Shah of Iran. “If I could be the kind of person
who could let loose, I would. But I can’t just blow off a paper,” says the bubbly 22-year-old
Harvard senior. “I don’t slack — and that’s part of Tiger Mom.”

Seven years ago, Lulu was a 14-year-old high school freshman at the Hopkins School in
New Haven, Conn., when her mom, Amy Chua, published her incendiary, best-selling 2011
memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” Chua detailed her strict “tiger mom” parenting
tactics with her two daughters, Lulu, a rebellious violin prodigy, and Lulu’s older sister,
overachiever Sophia, who was a Harvard-bound high school senior when the book came out. The
girls’ childhoods included a total ban on TV-watching, play dates and sleepovers. Chua wrote of
how when Lulu was 4, she rejected her daughter’s homemade birthday card for looking sloppy.
Lulu was ordered to practice the violin six hours a day, and both girls were required to
play the piano flawlessly — or Chua would threaten to burn their stuffed animals. The merest
hint of failure was met with name-calling: Sophia was “garbage,” Lulu a “disgrace as a
daughter.” Imperfection was not an option. Now, Lulu is 22 years old, about to graduate from
Harvard and feeling ready to take on the world — thanks to Tiger Mom.
“It was just as intense as the book makes it out to be, practicing violin six hours a day for
years. It was absolutely grueling,” says Lulu, speaking from her Harvard dorm. “She was an
intense mom. Had I had the option of hours of violin every day or watching TV with my friends,
of course I wouldn’t have chosen [the former].”

In the book, she famously erupted during a family trip to Russia. Smashing a glass at a
cafe, she bellowed: “I’m not what you want — I’m not Chinese! I don’t want to be Chinese.
Why can’t you get that through your head? I hate the violin. I hate my life. I hate you, and I hate
this family!” Lulu recalls the fallout. “I think she was more in shock, because for her it felt like
the culmination of a lot of stress and fighting. She started writing her book right after, I think
literally in Moscow, as her outlet.”
‘[My mom] gave me the tools to drive my own confidence … I will definitely be a tiger
mom.’ Shockingly, once she arrived at the Cambridge campus, her parents were completely
hands-off. “OK, we’re going to get out of your hair now,” Lulu recalls them saying shortly after
they dropped her off with her suitcases. “She’s super uninvolved now. I don’t think she even
knows what classes I’m taking. She thinks her job is done and hopefully I’ve absorbed some of
her lessons. Now I have to sink or swim.” While she found independence “exhilarating,” it
wasn’t without its hiccups.

During her first semester, Lulu panicked over an ethics paper on Kant’s concept of the
categorical imperative and found herself slumped on her dorm’s bathroom floor in tears. She
called Tiger Mom. “She was very stern with me,” recalls Lulu. “She said, ‘Pull yourself together
because you know you can do this. Get off the bathroom floor and start writing.’” Lulu wound
up getting an A on the paper and in the class. Later in her freshman year, she discovered her life
had become source material for a child-psychology class.
 To illustrate the fixed nature of temperament, a professor had highlighted an incident in
her mother’s memoir in which a 3-year-old Lulu stood outside her house, refusing to come in
from the cold, after a clash over playing the piano. “She would sooner freeze to death than give
in,” her mother wrote. Lulu was outraged. She confronted the professor, demanding to know why
she was made an example of. “I was like, ‘You don’t know me — you don’t know if I’ve
changed.’ So I called my mom and she was like, ‘Lulu, you haven’t changed.’ I’m still a rebel,
right? I have to live up to my reputation,” she says with a laugh.
And while students were curious about her upbringing, she doesn’t feel she’s been
overshadowed by her overbearing mother. “I feel mostly totally normal,” she says. “I don’t think
I’m important enough for people to care.” “I really was a great violinist,” she adds. “At Harvard,
I’m not the best of anything — everybody’s a genius here — but I never have impostor
syndrome. I always feel like I deserve it, because I did work really hard.”

She says all that heavy lifting in high school prepared her well for Harvard, where she
can sleep all she wants and socialize with friends. “I feel much more relaxed now than I did in
high school,” says Lulu, who is single. “I go out, I have lots of friends. It’s definitely a work-
hard, play-hard mentality.”
As she looks back on her college experience, Lulu has a newfound appreciation for her
mother’s brutal parenting style. “People assume that tiger parenting would beget low self-esteem
because there isn’t that constant praise, but I think I’m exiting with a lot more confidence than
some others, because my confidence is earned,” she says. “[My mom] gave me the tools to drive
my own confidence.”
While she’s still figuring out what she will do after graduation — she’s considering law
school and a move to New York City — she says she does know one thing. “I will definitely be a
tiger mom,” she says. “It’s not a blanketly bad thing to push. Sometimes it just means you really
believe in your child.”