by Ann Hulbert
Chloe, with Marc chiming in, also proudly contrasted fervent dedication like theirs to the serial dabbling encouraged by American parents. But their more hardscrabble and harmonious story served to affirm a faith in child-driven—not parent-dictated—excellence and enlightened pedagogy. Given a tepid welcome by her in-laws in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park after her divorce, Chloe and Marc were hardly low-impact additions to the household. Their piano went in the garage, as did they, for hours. So they became regulars at a nearby park, lugging along his cello for plein air practicing—and Marc squeezed in some outdoor fun as well. There on the hillside with Chloe, playing Handel on his cello when he was five, Marc also got a lucky break. He was spotted by the sales associate of the Pasadena Symphony, who gave the two of them comp seats when he discovered they were far too strapped to be subscribers.
Marc eagerly joined the audience—and found an audience. The symphony’s staff, including the assistant conductor, was captivated by a child who was so rapt (he pored over scores), so fervent (Marc was obsessed with Handel’s Messiah), so talented (by ear, he could name all the notes of any chord he heard, in order). Marc played with remarkable feeling as well as facility, and all his practicing didn’t dampen his friendly ebullience in the slightest. Adulation, however, wasn’t what such a prodigy-parent pair, subsisting on child support from Marc’s father, needed. His new fans knew enough to at least try to resist fawning over a precocious star. What Marc did need was an intensive, and very expensive, education. At six, he landed a generous scholarship at L.A.’s Colburn School of Music. There both his piano and cello teachers had the added job of keeping him humble when a front-page Los Angeles Times story about him, followed by his Davidson Institute fellowship, suddenly brought lots of media inquiries and performance opportunities.
In America Marc faced nothing like the “unambiguous” path to virtuoso success that had structured Lang Lang’s early years in China. In any case, Chloe had ruled out competitions because Marc disliked them. Nor did she have the perks of privilege that Amy Chua took for granted as she juggled her daughters’ private school demands and music schedules, and secured special teachers: ample income, an academic’s flexibility, Ivy League clout and connections. And even Chua, a dynamo, was swamped. Marc proudly said, “My mom is my manager.” Chloe (who had decided to homeschool him, which ruled out her returning to work) quietly said she felt like an overwhelmed improviser. “First, and foremost,” she added later, she was “his protector,” yet their mostly ad hoc approach also meant they were constantly on edge. An old-fashioned patron would have been welcome. Instead, Marc got caught up in a swirl of celebrityhood, which Chloe eyed eagerly—but also warily—as a route to sponsorship of a sort.
Marc, unlike Jay Greenberg, loved his talk show and performing experiences—and he was thrilled when Lang Lang, having heard from Jay Leno that he had a devoted acolyte in Marc, met him on a trip to L.A. in 2006 and they bonded. But Chloe, familiar with traditional Chinese disapproval of overpraising, also knew the risks of the prodigy circuit. The pitfalls of identifying genius early didn’t go unnoticed by the Davidson Institute’s founders either. In the wake of Lewis Terman and Julian Stanley, Bob and Jan Davidson saw to it that their carefully chosen fellows didn’t use the spotlight to parade God-given specialness or downplay the grit essential for success. Instead, the fellowship application as well as the award festivities were occasions to discuss passion and persistence, obstacles and failures, and the importance of supportive allies. Without explicitly saying so, Chloe followed suit, anticipating Lang Lang’s “play it forward” theme. Marc didn’t merely stir awe with his facility and real feeling at the piano. (He had by now dropped the cello.) He was a small spokesman for a pedagogically, and cross-culturally, correct mission.
Prodigies before Marc had been held up as examples, displaying their mastery, but children themselves had rarely been the exhorters—which in Marc’s case meant spreading the latest tenets of metacognitive wisdom that he had been reared on. In theory, at least, the exercise was helpful to him, too. He conveyed what the psychologist Carol Dweck in 2006 called a “growth mindset,” rather than a “fixed” one. He didn’t boast about his brilliant way with Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 15, but instead begged for harder pieces. He gave priority to process over prizes, skirting competitions—though he was zealously competitive with himself: early on he refused to play anything that seemed remotely childish (even as he doted on his stuffed pig collection).
Marc emphasized the pull of constant work and learning. “I want to achieve incredible things. That’s why I practice a lot,” he explained, which didn’t mean he simply surged forward. He hit snags, but you “can’t give up too easily,” he said. Diligence, Chloe added, demanded stubbornness. Effortlessness—Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow”—didn’t really come up, though Chloe spoke of the joy that music brought Marc. Duckworth later described puzzling over the relation between flow and the “not-so-fun-in-the-moment exertion” of deliberate practice. She even staged a debate between Csikszentmihalyi and Anders Ericsson that she hoped would settle the matter. It didn’t. Duckworth called for more research and in the meantime floated a hypothesis. Deliberate practice—using constant feedback to master a skill just out of reach—was an action, she proposed; flow was an experience. Gritty people didn’t just do more of the former. They also enjoyed more of the latter—when they were performing, not trying to improve.
Marc certainly gave the impression that performance—which wise teachers warn can stunt progress if begun too early and done too often—was a source of real pleasure, not of perfectionist pressure. Playing Schubert with Lang Lang in My Brilliant Brain was a dream come true (and the two continued to meet up whenever Lang Lang’s schedule permitted). Chloe, who was intent on finding teachable moments in travel abroad, chose performances that were occasions for Marc to give back, not just to showcase his gift—hoping that he in turn might be the beneficiary of others’ largesse. His participation in a benefit concert for victims of Hurricane Katrina joined the list of other doings on a website Chloe now maintained. Marc played to raise money for poor children, and he made appearances at schools and on radio broadcasts (both American and Chinese) to spread music appreciation to youth. He played at a world summit on innovation, at a benefit for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake, at a U.S.-China strategic economic dialogue, at a celebration of young Chinese-American leaders. They were on the road, Chloe said, more than they were at home.
All this virtuous persistence, so far, gave no sign of eclipsing passion. “The thing is,” Marc said, you “have to love music.” He couldn’t have sounded more grateful to his mother and his mentor for opening doors. “I think with an ordinary mom,” he said, “I never would have played with an orchestra.” And thanks to his idol, he had an exciting new goal as of 2007: that year, Lang Lang invited Marc to join him in 2009 for their Carnegie Hall duet. Lang Lang also recommended a new teacher, an eminence at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, as an alternative to Juilliard, which Chloe had looked into for Marc. Starting the summer of 2007, she wedged the literally outlandish bimonthly commute into their already crazy travel schedule. The time had come for the arduous technical work that Marc, now eight and a half, hadn’t tackled with his American teachers at Colburn, who had encouraged his musicality.
Ahead of schedule, Marc’s midlife crisis as a musical prodigy was beginning. Neither he nor Chloe needed Lang Lang’s life story (not yet published) in order to recognize the escalating tensions. By the following year (when the memoir appeared), the similarities were striking—and so was a big difference. Marc faced his own Professor Angry, but he and his mother talked back to him, and they talked to each other. Marc, the superdiligent student who had worked through a dozen pages of a piece when his Colburn teacher assigned him one page, now confronted demands that were formidable even for him. “It was so much abuse, verbally and emotionally,” Chloe said, remembering the lesson when the teacher had thrown a CD, impatient that Marc
hadn’t yet signed with a record label. (He had gotten an offer, Chloe said, after the lovely 2008 performance of Schubert’s Fantasia in F Minor with Lang Lang at the Royal Albert Hall, but she had felt it was premature.) “If I’ve been teaching fifty years and nobody has gone mad,” she recalled the professor taunting, “you should be okay. How come an American boy can’t take training like that? How come my Chinese students can do it?”
Chloe figured that Marc, and she, could take it, given the stamina both of them had mustered so far. “In the future,” she had boldly predicted to Andrew Solomon, “Marc will be telling people, ‘I’m American-born, but trained in China.’ China will love him for that.” But their China-bound quest for East-West synergy went against the grain in a way Lang Lang’s America-bound journey hadn’t. Chloe and Marc both felt drained, not newly anchored, and he got to decide his course. What Marc didn’t say as he sat down with the CBS interviewer in the fall of 2009 at Carnegie Hall, because he wasn’t yet completely sure, was that he and his mother had recently walked to his Shanghai professor’s studio for the last time, both of them in tears.
Their old synchrony was no more. Marc had always been spiritedly stubborn. Nearing eleven, and feeling embattled (and jet-lagged), he had begun to balk under rising pressure. Chloe was deeply conflicted. “I don’t want to hear the word pushy used about me,” she had told Solomon in 2008. In retrospect, though, she acknowledged that Marc hadn’t been the only one propelled by a rage to master. “He was showing a lot of passion and motivation. I push him even harder, because he shows me how much he can do, and I believe he can do even better,” she reflected. “But I also believe it has to come from him.” Now Marc was telling her it didn’t, and she was listening. “I wish I had been born a normal boy and you were a normal mom with a nine-to-five job and I went to a normal school,” Marc said once, and then more than once, “Mom, I’m not sure I want to do this anymore.” Chloe had watched grimly intent Shanghai parents who felt they couldn’t turn back—who ordered up beautiful suits, a tailor told her, for graduation performances that were all too likely to be the students’ last outings on stage. Chloe realized that she was relieved, if also devastated, to hear Marc voice doubt.
The decision was wrenching, “the toughest time of our lives,” Chloe said two years later. Well aware that the transition to “normal” wouldn’t be easy either—Marc hadn’t been in a classroom for years—she sought out the antithesis of old-style pedagogy. In the fall of 2010, Marc began sixth grade (on a generous scholarship) at a very progressive private school for gifted students in Hillsborough, California. Proud of “its distinctive inquiry-based interdisciplinary studies, constructivist project-based learning, and its pioneering work in social emotional learning and design thinking,” the Nueva School was too close to Silicon Valley to be laid-back. But for decades the school had emphasized “reflection [as] an essential practice for learning.” As a priority for a recovering prodigy and his mother, it would be hard to improve on “patience with ourselves as we think about what was and look forward to what could be.” Though Marc had a rocky start socially (he and Chloe were regulars in the counselor’s office as they both got used to a radically new life), he pronounced school, and his first sleepovers, “so exciting!” Taking conducting lessons in L.A. and intermittently checking in with a piano teacher, Marc was practicing on his own, much less intensely. Chloe was working on not shouting advice from the kitchen. “Shut up, Mom!” he would yell back. “I know what I’m doing! I’m the pianist.”
Before they went on summer vacation in 2011, Chloe finally read Amy Chua’s best-selling Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which had left parents across America gasping and gossiping at school gatherings and on soccer sidelines, in supermarkets and at dinner parties, ever since it had appeared six months earlier. Shockingly honest about her tactics, Chua had gone public with the kind of exposé usually staged by prodigies themselves, later in life. She outed Chinese-style family pressure in pursuit of children’s high performance, “an inherently closet practice” in the United States, she noted. At the same time, she blasted the queasy hypocrisy of American-style hovering: parents who panicked over missteps and signs of stress in their kids, all the while programming them to overshoot every benchmark of success.
Sounding nothing like a dour scold in the Lang Guoren mold, Chua wrote as a self-mocking iconoclast, an over-the-top “music mom” in a culture of mere soccer moms—not that she actually saw her girls on their way to soloist careers. She was “huggy” and goofy with them. She also bossed and cruelly derided, and dictated grueling practice schedules and zero slumber parties. Her daughters were huggy back and also explicitly hostile (“you’re diseased”) as they sped along. Chua’s hyper regimen ran on a hybrid spirit—far more openly coercive than helicopter parenting and far more openly combative than classic Asian parenting.
Chua’s pursuit of excellence wasn’t simply about stamina or grit. Upstart drive was, somewhat paradoxically, what she aimed to drum into girls blessed with meritocratic credentials in their cradles. (They could all but coast into the Ivy League on their parents’ coattails, thanks to legacies at Princeton and Harvard and faculty pull at Yale.) So Chua was ready—in fact, eager—to explode the filial piety so important to her forebears. She took bold satisfaction in doing what no prodigy-promoting predecessor would have dreamed of: broadcasting a defiant child’s bitter rebellion. Helen Follett had made sure to hide just that, writing a book that portrayed her voyage with Barbara as a daughter-driven adventure, rich in intergenerational bonding, not the embattled ordeal it was.
Three-quarters of a century later, showcasing a fierce struggle for autonomy was more than acceptable. Add pugnacity to stunningly polished precocity, as well as perseverance and passion in pursuit of long-term goals: the blend just might amount to a secret sauce, for East and West. Near the end of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, when Chua let Sophia ease up on the piano after acing her recital in a Carnegie Hall auditorium, Lulu staged her revolt. Now thirteen, she reamed Chua out in the middle of Red Square—“I HATE YOU….You’ve wrecked my life…You’re a terrible mother. You’re selfish. You don’t care about anyone but yourself. What—you can’t believe how ungrateful I am? After all you’ve done for me? Everything you say you do for me is actually for yourself.” She cut back on the violin and took up tennis instead, ordering her mother to butt out. “I don’t want you controlling my life.”
Chloe had been avoiding the book and shrugging off the jokes parents made in passing about her possible tiger-mom tendencies. The school year over, she turned to Chua’s memoir. She immediately sat down and read it again with Marc, who was now twelve. “We cried over each other’s shoulders,” Chloe wrote in an email, “thinking of what we’ve gone through.” (For readers in China, Chua discovered on her book tour, catharsis was a more common response than outrage.) In a phone conversation after they had returned from vacation, Marc said he could hear his own household in the Chua-Rubenfelds’—“all the yelling, screaming,” Chloe added, “lots of pushing, resisting.” For her, it was still raw. Marc seemed to be mustering that key to learning—reflection. “When I was younger,” he said, “I was more like Sophia,” who insisted she had been spurred on less by Chinese-style duress than by her own discipline. “Now that I’m a teenager, I’m getting more like Lulu. I’m more rebellious and more resentful.”
Marc, though, wasn’t ready to lash out at his mother. “I am and will always be grateful for the sacrifices she made for me,” he took care to say. For now, he was also evidently having better luck keeping regrets at bay than Chloe was. Thinking back on their partnership, so intense and insular, she was swamped by second-guessing. “To play professionally has a big price tag on it, a tremendous amount of pressure,” she knew, and she had helped apply it. Yes, Marc had made choices, unlike kids in China. Still, the Shanghai conservatory scene made her rethink warnings she had heard all along. “Isn’t it too risky to put everything on one child and focus so narrowly on the piano and
nothing else?” She had to ask herself, she acknowledged some months later, whether at times she had “compromised my own values to keep Marc’s success intact.” She and Marc had made a habit of speaking openly about the rigors of a quest like theirs, but not the darker dilemmas. Chloe wanted to be honest about the turmoil now—not that she would have been capable of masking it with comic archness, in the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother vein.
Amy Chua never really had to doubt that her daughters would have plenty of options, and stellar CVs, even if she failed in her mission to add musical precocity to their list of accomplishments. To counterbalance her guilt, she could always tell herself that lessons in grit would stand her girls in good stead. Plus they had at least had each other’s company (and their father’s sympathy) in their misery and fury. She heard them fiercely whispering about how crazy she was, when they weren’t saying it to her face. Chua invited them to speak up in the memoir’s “coda,” as she struggled for a way to close the book. They weren’t inclined to help, but Sophia put a key question to her: Was she after truth or a good story? Sophia was ready with a wise response to her mother’s predictable answer. “That’s going to be hard,” she told Chua, “because the truth keeps changing.”