Illustration: Liu Rui

By James Palmer

There's been a great deal of talk about Amy Chua's new book on raising her kids, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and claims that the style she triumphs is typical of tough-minded immigrant mothers. But the truth of Chua's case, and of the realities of education, kids, and success in the modern world, has been obscured by the author's own talent for publicity.

Chua ran a classic marketing strategy, writing an article for the Wall Street Journal emphasizing the most controversial aspects of her book, as well as hyping her kids' own success. Sure, they went to Ivy League schools. But a few minutes digging online quickly reveals the truth: Chua's kids attended an extremely expensive and elite private school, the kind from which a kid feels ashamed if he or she doesn't get into Harvard or Yale.

 Comments by their classmates online reveal that Chua's kids did well, but were hardly standouts among their contemporaries - and that a great deal of Chua's claims about her own style are nothing but hype, since her kids' friends remember playing video games and doing sleepovers with them.

Sure, you might say, but isn't Chua an example of tough-love immigrant success  herself, which is why she was able to send her kids to that school?

Not so much.

Chua's dad was a top-flying ethnic Chinese from the Philippines, educated in the US. By the time she was two, he was already on staff at Perdue University, and was a famous Berkeley professor by her teens. Her story would be better paraphrased as "rich family has successful kids."

The truth is that the majority of educational and career success in the modern US, as in many other countries and regions, is about the money and access the kids grew up with, not about how they're raised.

The modern US has the lowest class mobility of any developed country. Going to an expensive private school, rather than being thrown into the maelstrom of the public school system, makes a gigantic difference in where you go to university. So does your parents' willingness to fight for you.

Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, discusses one of the essential qualities of what he calls "middle class" parenting - the ability to turn up to parents' evenings, push for your kid to get special attention, secure tutors, as well as a thousand of other tiny privileges for them.

This is partially about attitudes, but more about time and energy. Apart from a few amazing exceptions, working-class parents don't have the same resources available as the middle class; try working 12 hours at manual labor, commuting on the bus two hours each way, and going to argue with your kids' teacher.

Consider the difference between the Hispanic-American and Asian-American communities when it comes to educational success, one slightly below average and the other considerably above. Nobody could call Hispanic-American mothers soft!

Many put this down to Confucian values, and perhaps they play a role. But it's also about the conditions under which they came into the US.

Asian-Americans have been part of the middle class in the US for two, perhaps three, generations already. Their great-great-grandparents, in some cases, might have come across as poor railway workers in California, but far more came as part of the exodus of the elite from South Korea and some Southeast Asian countries in the 1950s and 1960s. These were people who were used to being at the top of their society. Getting into the US from so far away generally meant you were, at least by local standards, already rich and connected.

In contrast, those who came from Central and South Americas were normally the poor and desperate, risking their lives in hazardous but relatively cheap border crossings for the chance of low-level jobs.

The Asian-Americans came in at the middle; the Hispanics at the bottom. Groups like the Hmong, ethnic villagers brought into the US en masse in the late 1970s by the government, are far less successful than other Asian-Americans.

So let's not pretend there's some magic secret of parenting that ensures success. As Chua's own story shows, once you dig past the hype, money, class, and power make far more difference than maternal virtue.

The author is an editor with the Global Times. jamespalmer@globaltimes.com.cn

No soft landings for American kids in today's new world order