Some second-semester academy seniors are agreeable to buzz it in. Lulu Chua-Rubenfeld, on the added hand, aloof completed a 90-page apriorism on Jewish-American character in aboriginal 20th aeon New York and a 10-page cardboard on the Shah of Iran.
Chua abundant her austere “tiger mom” parenting approach with her two daughters, Lulu, a alienated violin prodigy, and Lulu’s earlier sister, overachiever Sophia, who was a Harvard-bound aerial academy chief aback the book came out. The girls’ childhoods included a absolute ban on TV-watching, comedy dates and sleepovers. Chua wrote of how aback Lulu was 4, she alone her daughter’s bootleg altogether agenda for attractive sloppy.
Imperfection was not an option.
Now, Lulu is 22 years old, about to alum from Harvard (where she currently maintains a 3.9 GPA) and activity accessible to booty on the apple — acknowledgment to Tiger Mom.
And yet Lulu backward the course, continuing to convenance violin, earning beeline A’s and alike accepting aboriginal admission into Yale, admitting she ultimately absitively on Harvard (“There’s no adventitious of active into my parents at a bar in Boston,” she says).
Shockingly, already she accustomed at the Cambridge campus, her parents were absolutely hands-off.
“OK, we’re activity to get out of your beard now,” Lulu recalls them adage anon afterwards they alone her off with her suitcases.
While she begin ability “exhilarating,” it wasn’t afterwards its hiccups.
During her aboriginal semester, Lulu afraid over an belief cardboard on Kant’s abstraction of the absolute acute and begin herself angled on her dorm’s bath attic in tears. She alleged Tiger Mom.
Lulu anguish up accepting an A on the cardboard and in the class.
Later in her apprentice year, she apparent her activity had become antecedent actual for a child-psychology class.
To allegorize the anchored attributes of temperament, a assistant had accent an adventure in her mother’s account in which a 3-year-old Lulu stood alfresco her house, abnegation to appear in from the cold, afterwards a affray over arena the piano.“She would eventually benumb to afterlife than accord in,” her mother wrote.
Lulu was outraged. She confronted the professor, ambitious to apperceive why she was fabricated an archetype of. “I was like, ‘You don’t apperceive me — you don’t apperceive if I’ve changed.’ So I alleged my mom and she was like, ‘Lulu, you haven’t changed.’ I’m still a rebel, right? I accept to alive up to my reputation,” she says with a laugh.
And while acceptance were analytical about her upbringing, she doesn’t feel she’s been overshadowed by her ascendant mother.
She says all that abundant appropriation in aerial academy able her able-bodied for Harvard, area she can beddy-bye all she wants and associate with friends. Last year, she was admiral of the Sab Club, aforetime accepted as Sablière Society, a longtime women-only club that went babe beneath her leadership.
As she looks aback on her academy experience, Lulu has a newfound acknowledgment for her mother’s barbarous parenting style.
While she’s still addition out what she will do afterwards graduation — she’s because law academy and a move to New York City — she says she does apperceive one thing.