现代大学英语精读6(第二版)教师用书Unit1.pdf

Unit 1 Paper Tigers Wesley Yang Additional Background Information (About Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ) What follows is a comment on Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Elizabeth Chang, an editor of th The Washington Posts Sunday Magazine, which carried the article on January 8 , 2011. The cover of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was catnip to this average parents soul. Although the memoir seems to have been written to prove that Chinese parents are better at raising children than Western ones, the cover text claims that instead it portrays a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory and how the Tiger Mother “was humbled by a 13-year-old. ”As a hopelessly Western mother married into a Chinese family living in an area that generates immigrant prodigies as reliably as clouds produce rain, I was eager to observe the comeuppance of a parent who thought she had all the answers. And, in many ways, Tiger Mother did not disappoint. At night, I would nudge my husband awake to read him some of its more revealing passages, such as when author Amy Chua threatened to burn her older daughters stuffed animals if the child didnt improve her piano playing. What Chinese parents understand, Chua writes, is that nothing is fun until youre good at it. By day, I would tell my own two daughters about how Chua threw unimpressive birthday cards back at her young girls and ordered them to make better ones. For a mother whose half-Chinese children played outside while the kids of str