In January 2011, the English-speaking world was introduced to a new kind of villain. She arrived in the form of a viral Wall Street Journal article with the headline "Why Chinese mothers are superior." The author, a relatively unknown Yale law professor named Amy Chua, outlined her strict rules for her two daughters: no sleepovers, playdates, or school plays—and no complaining about not being in the school play, either. They were expected to be the top students in all subjects except gym and drama. When her seven-year-old refused to play a song on the piano, Chua threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, and no birthday parties for four years until she complied. Another time, after the same daughter misbehaved, Chua branded her "garbage."
The backlash was swift and vicious. Chua was called an abuser, a stereotype peddler, a shock jock. The article was an extract from her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and Chua did her best to explain that, in the book, she reckons with the limits of her parenting. But it was too late: the controversy had taken on a life of its own. Many Asian American writers responded by sharing their ambivalence or anger about having been raised in this way. "I grew up with a tiger parent and all I got was this lousy psychological trauma" declared one such blog post. Suddenly a ubiquitous but private dynamic was being held up for public debate.
Reading Chua's memoir recently, I was struck by its unapologetic and breezy tone, which feels like an artifact of its time; writers today, keenly attuned to the risks of viral attention, are more cautious. Yet despite its singular infamy, Chua's book is part of a rich tradition of books and films from the East and Southeast Asian diaspora that examine complicated mother-and-daughter relationships. Two of the seminal Chinese American novels—Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club—are structured around conversations, real and imagined, between mother-and-daughter pairings. A seminal work of Chinese-British nonfiction, Jung Chang's Wild Swans, tells the convulsive history of modern China through the lives of Chang's mother and grandmother—and was followed by the memoir Fly, Wild Swans, an intimate and pained love letter to the author's own mother. In these works, the mother has a way of emerging as the primordial wound: one to be constantly picked at, never healed.
It continues in cinema: the 2018 box office hit Crazy Rich Asians has at its heart not a tension between the main couple, but rather that between its Chinese American protagonist and her boyfriend's aloof Singaporean mother, played by Michelle Yeoh. Yeoh is once again a difficult mother in the 2022 Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once, this time as a frazzled first-generation immigrant who runs to the ends of the earth to reconcile with her queer daughter. The same year Pixar released Turning Red, which follows a Chinese Canadian teenager running away from her overbearing mom.
These mothers do not have the vaudeville villainy of Chua's tiger mother. And yet they, too, are often strict and difficult to please; cold and prone to bouts of explosive anger; inscrutable and marked by grief. "For most of my childhood and adolescence, my mother was my antagonist," recalls the narrator in Ling Ma's widely lauded novel Severance. The British Chinese poet Sarah Howe's collection Foretokens, inspired by her mother's life in communist China, includes the very funny "A History of My Relationship With My Mother in 23 Arguments About the Laundry." Not long ago, I picked up Gish Jen's new memoir-novel Bad Bad Girl, which is inspired by her mother's childhood in war-torn Shanghai. The title takes its name from the admonishment Jen imagines her mother issuing to her from beyond the grave for writing so publicly about private grievances.
Given her ubiquity, leaving out the mother figure can be a statement in its own right. In Cathy Park Hong's book Minor Feelings, Hong recalls a fellow poet once telling her: "You have an Asian mother. She has to be interesting." Hong refuses to engage: "I must defer, at least for now. I'd rather write about my friendship with Asian women first. My mother would take over, breaching the walls of these essays, until it is only her."
Perhaps she has a point. In these stories, the mother has a way of growing impossibly large; she becomes the device through which questions of immigration, identity, and history are explored. It is in the conflict between the mother and daughter that we come to see the cultural clashes between East and West. These stories thrum with the pain of mutual unintelligibility between the first-generation immigrant who has known hunger and suffering and the second-generation child who craves love. The standoff seems intractable.
Over drinks in London one evening last summer, I mentioned to some old school friends that I was thinking of writing about the persistent trope of the Asian mother. Polite small talk was swiftly done away with, followed by two hours of impassioned discussion. Afterwards, I wanted to find a way into this subject that I was now beginning to see everywhere. Taking a highly unscientific and piecemeal approach, I asked my friends if they could speak to me at greater length about their relationship with their mothers.
It is true that no matter which continent they are from, mothers are the inexhaustible subject: the inevitable endpoint of a therapy session, the proverbial container of infinite grievances, the shortcut to understanding a person's idiosyncrasies and insecurities. But there is something about the Asian mother in popular culture that feels both overexposed and underdeveloped. What is behind this constant return to the mother figure in literature and cinema and in our own lives? When we write about her flaws and failures, and our disappointments and broken inheritances, what exactly are we looking at? And what are we hoping to find?
A necessary disclaimer: not every Asian mother fits the stereotype and not every Asian mother-daughter relationship is complicated and fraught. My friend Min claims to have identified three types of mother-child relationships. "The first, which I don't understand, is people who are friends with their mums and tell their mums everything." The second group are children "who have conflict with their parents, but they're normal conflicts." And then, she says, "there's this third group, where you have conflict, but it reaches far beyond the conflict, and it's very hard to explain to somebody who's never experienced it." Min's mother, she told me, "is able to make me feel worthless, useless, terrible, ungrateful; that she's wasted her life on you."