I didn't have room for this in the initial review of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but there's also an interesting side story about parenting in isolation. Chua knew she was choosing a parenting style that was well outside the mainstream. Having done the cost/benefit analysis and come to such a different conclusion, parenting advice and criticism from her friends, and even her husband, was useless. Of course they thought she was too strict. They always thought she was too strict. They have thought many things that clearly paid off were too strict. So she got used to tuning them out. But you can't do that without really entrenching. So faced with a situation where she knew the music teacher was both wrong and a bitch, and in the presence of her parents telling her the music teacher was wrong and a bitch and shouldn't be inflicted on the children, she still wouldn't stand up for her children. She'd gotten so used to pushing ahead against public opinion that she had no mechanism at all for evaluating when it was time to stop Chinese parenting. This may be part of the whole "no internal motivation thing": she's doing Chinese Parenting because she wants to be a Chinese Parent, not because she's doing the right cost/benefit analysis on a per-action basis, and thus doesn't know when it becomes counter-productive even by her own standards.
It's also worth noting that Chua is a really fantastic writer. Had she grown up in an environment where that was nurtured, or even allowed, she really could have been something. As is, she's technically marvelous but missing the larger point.
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