yep.
…
Its breathless business-lit prose notwithstanding, The Triple Package is an altogether calmer book than Tiger Mother. There is none of the latter’s demented narcissism. The self-servingness here is only implicit. But that the later volume is the earlier writ large is unmistakable. The best gloss on Tiger Mother is The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller’s classic study of the miseries inflicted by the kind of status-oriented parenting that Chua practices. The “gifted” or accomplished child, Miller says, is one who learns to satisfy her parents’ need for gratification through achievement. But the demand is insatiable, because its satisfaction is always provisional. The child is “never good enough,” so she tries to be perfect. And thus she swings between the poles of grandiosity and depression: the delusion of supremacy and the self-disgust that ensues upon its inevitable collapse. Superiority, inferiority. As for self-control—or rather, self-erasure—the child’s desires are neither validated nor acknowledged, so she simply learns to ignore them.
This is the exact dynamic that we find in Tiger Mother. The book is like a novelized version of The Drama of the Gifted Child, only narrated from the parent’s perspective. (Imagine Moby-Dick as told by Ahab.) It’s no surprise that when you squint a little at the Triple Package—whose elements can be glossed as self-glorification, self-loathing, and self-effacement (all of them neatly captured in the Asian parents’ stereotypical question, which Chua and Rubenfeld seem so fond of, “Why only a 99?”)—you see the same pathologies at work. Representative products of the contemporary zeitgeist, Tiger Mother and The Triple Package are instruction manuals in how to be a rich, arrogant, miserable asshole. More here.