Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior By Amy Chua

Are stereotypes deemed true because society says that they are or do people truly believe stereotypes exist? Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor and author of "Day of Empire" and "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability", writes an article titled, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior”, detailing her beliefs in racial stereotypes and how Chinese parenting is better than Western parenting in many aspects. Chua is a Chinese mother, and she raises her two daughters like how her Chinese mother raised her. Chua believes being Chinese attributed to raising successful children, however, race has little to do with success and any parent from any background is capable of raising successful children.

Chua credits being Chinese as a means of producing successful children and because of this accreditation, her article highlights one of the “8 conversations about race and ethnicity”. The conversation is titled, “It’s an Asian thing – you wouldn’t understand”. The conversation is “proclaiming a certain pride in their racial or ethnic identity while also claiming an exclusive relationship to a wide range of experiences and cultural products typically associated with their racial group” (Moya 13). The whole idea of this conversation is about telling how one’s life, because of racial stereotypes, is unique to themselves and their culture, and people not in a certain ethnic group wouldn’t understand their struggle. For Chua, being a Chinese mother is something only other Chinese and Asian people would understand because they were raised in the same environment more or less. She makes her experiences and examples exclusive for Chinese people and she takes pride in being Chinese so she is able to own up to her stereotypes for raising successful children. Chua supports her exclusiveness by saying, “The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners.” Chua also includes, “Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can 't” as more support for this conversation. Its hard to argue against Chua in this case of her conversation because Chua is indeed a Chinese mother and she has her tangible achievements in her living daughters to prove her success. However, “It’s an Asian thing” is interchangeable so that even if a Western parent wanted to claim that their parenting method was superior, people would have to agree with their examples because their method of raising children is unique to that culture. And not everything being mentioned as a “Asian thing” is