tiger cubs v precious lambs（参考译文）.doc

Tiger cubs v precious lambs 虎崽与羊羔的较量 The contest with China moves into the classroom and nursery 与中国的较量进入了教室和育儿室 SOME 2,400 years ago Mencius, a Confucian sage, endured a peripatetic Chinese childhood. His tigerish mother moved house three times before settling on one good enough for the infant genius—close to a good school. Many modern parents, anxious to give their child a winning start in the postcode lottery of life, would sympathise. They agonise about how to raise their children. Chinese mothers, however, still know what’s best. 大约2400年前，儒家圣人孟子经历了一个四处搬迁的童年时期。他的虎妈搬了三次家，最后定居在一个适合培养她那神童儿子的地方——紧挨一所好学校。很多现代父母对此作法会产生共鸣，他们面对因为住处不同而带来的种种生活变数，却又迫切地想让孩子赢在起跑线上。他们对如何培养孩子感到十分苦恼。而中国母亲却一直清楚什么是培养孩子的最好方法。 So contends Amy Chua, a Chinese-American law lecturer, who has whipped up a storm with her book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, and, in particular, a provocative extract published in the Wall Street Journal. The article’s starting-point is that “Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids”, because “Chinese mothers are superior”. Chinese matriarchs are better because they are tougher, stricter and readier to be loathed for banning children from almost any form of fun, from play dates to—horrors!—computer games. Indulgent Western parents, cosseting their baa-lambs’ self-esteem and releasing them to play in the mud when they could be doing extra arithmetic or practising scales, are condemning them to a life of underachievement. 华裔美国法学讲师蔡美儿就持这种观点。她的《虎妈战歌》一书曾引发了一场轩然大波，特别是该书颇具煽动性的摘要被刊登在华尔街日报上。文章的起始点是“华人家长总是培养出优秀的孩子”，因为“华人妈妈很厉害”。华人妈妈更为优秀，是因为她们更坚韧、更严厉，而且不在乎得罪自己的孩子，禁止他们参加各种形式的娱乐，包括同学聚会和令家长们痛恶的电脑游戏。过于放纵孩子的西方父母对孩子小羊羔般呵护有加，在本应做课外算术题或者练习音阶的时候任凭他们玩泥巴Criticising someone’s fitness as a mother is worse than calling her a bad driver. Doing it on a continental scale is bound to upset—especially, during a vogue for scare stories about China’s rise, when the critic is Chinese (or in this case, an American, who was born in America to immigrants from the Philippines, yet conside