Amy Chua

Amy Chua
Chua in 2011
Born	(1962-10-26) October 26, 1962 Champaign, Illinois, United States
Alma mater	Harvard College (A.B.) Harvard Law School (J.D.)
Occupation	The John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School
Notable work	2003 World on Fire 2007 Day of Empire 2011 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother 2014 The Triple Package
Spouse(s)	Jed Rubenfeld
Children	Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld Louisa Chua-Rubenfeld
Parent(s)	Leon Chua
Website
AmyChua.com

Amy L. Chua (traditional Chinese: 蔡美兒; simplified Chinese: 蔡美儿; pinyin: Cài Měi'ér, born October 26, 1962, in Champaign, Illinois), is an American lawyer, writer, and legal scholar. She is the John M. Duff Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School for seven years. Prior to starting her teaching career, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. She specializes in the study of international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law and is noted for her parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

Biography

Early life

Chua was born in Champaign, Illinois, to ethnic Chinese from the Philippines of Hoklo parents who raised her in the Hokkien dialect of Fujian, China.^[1] Amy's father, Leon O. Chua, is an electrical engineering and computer sciences professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a writer on nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks, and is the discoverer of the memristor.^[2] His ancestral hometown is Quanzhou, Fujian.^[3] Chua's mother was born in China in 1936, before relocating to the Philippines at the age of 2.^[1] She subsequently converted to Catholicism in high school and graduated from the University of Santo Tomas, with a degree in chemical engineering, magna cum laude.^[1] Chua's parents lived in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation in World War II and were liberated by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and his troops.^[4]

Amy was raised as a Roman Catholic and lived in West Lafayette, Indiana.^[5] When she was 8 years old, her family moved to Berkeley, California.

Chua described herself as the ugly kid in school, she was bullied in school for her accent and her donning of glasses and braces, and she received racial slurs from several classmates.^[6] Chua went to El Cerrito High School and graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in economics from Harvard College in 1984, where she was named Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Scholar and John Harvard Scholar. She obtained her J.D. cum laude in 1987 from Harvard Law School, where she was the first Asian American officer of the Harvard Law Review, serving as executive editor.^[7][8] She clerked for Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Washington, D.C.

Books

Chua has written four books: two studies of international affairs, a memoir, and her most recent on ethnic–culture and its correlation with socio-economic success within the United States.

Her first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), explores the ethnic conflict caused in many societies by disproportionate economic and political influence of "market dominant minorities" and the resulting resentment in the less affluent majority. World on Fire, which was a New York Times bestseller, selected by The Economist as one of the Best Books of 2003,^[9] and named by Tony Giddens in The Guardian as one of the "Top Political Reads of 2003,"^[10] examines how globalization and democratization since 1989 have affected the relationship between market-dominant minorities and the wider population.

Her second book, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall (2007), examines seven major empires and posits that their success depended on their tolerance of minorities.

Her third book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, published in January 2011, is a memoir about her journey in the strict Confucianist child rearing parenting techniques, which she describes as being typical for Chinese immigrant parents.^[11] The book received a huge backlash and media attention and ignited global debate about different parenting techniques and cultural attitudes that foster such techniques.^[12] Furthermore, the book provoked uproar after the release where Chua received death threats, racial slurs, and calls for her arrest on child-abuse charges.^[6]

Her latest book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, was published on February 4, 2014.^[13] The book received mixed reviews because of what purport to be cultural stereotyping.^[14][15][16]

Personal life

Chua lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and is married to Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld. She has two daughters, Sophia and Louisa ("Lulu"), who both currently attend Harvard College.^[17] Chua, whose husband is Jewish, has stated that her children can speak Mandarin Chinese (Chua herself speaks Hokkien),^[1] and they have been "raised Jewish."^[18] She is the eldest of four sisters: Michelle, Katrin, and Cynthia. Katrin is a physician and a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.^[19] Cynthia, who has Down Syndrome, holds two International Special Olympics gold medals in swimming.^[19][20]

Bibliography

• World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. 2002. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0385512848
• Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall. 2009. Anchor. ISBN 978-1400077410
• Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. 2011. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0143120582
• The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America. 2014. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-1594205460

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Amy Chua.

• Official website
• Yale Law School profile
• Leigh Bureau speaker profile
• Booknotes interview with Chua on World on Fire, February 9, 2003.

Books by Amy Chua International affairs World On Fire (2003) Day of Empire (2007) Ethnic-American culture Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011) The Triple Package (2014)