Following up on my previous post: Vanity Fair: What JD And Usha Vance Learned From Their ‘Tiger Mom’ At Yale Law School: Peter Savodnik (The Free Press), The Tiger Mother Roars Back:
In January 2011, Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua was in the middle of her book tour, in her hotel room in Seattle, when an email came in from the future vice president of the United States.
Her book—Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—had just come out, and she was getting pummeled in the media for demanding that her daughters get straight A’s and play the piano or violin. She was called the “worst mother ever.” There were death threats.
“I’m not a crier, but I was so depressed,” Chua told me. “I was there by myself—I had bodyguards—and I get an email from J.D. Vance.”
The first-year law student had a question about his upcoming exam in Chua’s Contracts class. She had been mentoring Vance and quickly replied.
“Three hours later, probably after a beer, he writes me another email, and he’s like, ‘You know what? I should be studying, but I’m so curious about all this furor, so I went to Barnes & Noble, and I read it,’ ” she said, referring to her book. “He’s like, ‘I do not know why this is controversial.’ ”
Then, he told her, “You remind me of Mamaw”—Vance’s grandmother, who raised him with the same tough love that courses through Tiger Mother.
Vance added that he “felt a little bit bad” for giving her the impression that he came from an intact family, saying things were “more complicated” back home. He attached a document to the email, “and it’s the opening of Hillbilly Elegy,” Chua said, “and even though I was in trauma about my own situation, I read this thing, and I said, ‘J.D., you have to write your own book.’ ”
Which, of course, he did.
Chua connected Vance with her agent, and in June 2016—just over four months before Donald Trump was elected to the White House for the first time—the book was published. Progressive America loved it. They thought of Vance as their in-house anthropologist, the man who could explain these sad, strange people who had just voted for The Great Satan.
“She helped create the origin story for the person who’s the future vice president of the United States,” a former student, who is now an attorney in New York, told me. “That’s classic Amy Chua.”
Tiger Mother made Chua a celebrity—transforming her into the greatest super-connector in the Ivy League. She symbolized everything that Americans once associated with our elite institutions: initiative, excellence, discipline, perseverance—meritocracy.
Which, in retrospect, made her an obvious target.
While Chua didn’t set out to attack the emerging, more mediocre, more illiberal campus—with its emphasis on safe spaces and trigger warnings and microaggressions and all the other inanities we now associate with so-called elite universities—her book undoubtedly alarmed those who had helped bring this campus into being. Those who subscribed to the new ethos, those who enforced its values. To the enforcers, Chua was not just wrong but offensive, even “dangerous.”
Over the next decade, Chua was accused of all species of impropriety: racism, misogyny, grooming. Her critics eventually trained their sights on her husband, fellow Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld. That prompted a two-year investigation into Rubenfeld, who was ultimately suspended for two years for allegations of verbal harassment, unwanted touching, and attempted kissing—all of which, he said, he “absolutely, unequivocally, 100 percent” denies.
Many professors—many human beings—would have been undone. But Chua has somehow emerged from her inquisitions stronger, more famous, more infamous.
She has been vindicated.
On Inauguration Day, she’ll be in Washington with her husband—as special guests of the vice president-elect.
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