Mother-Daughter Relationships (Amy Chua & Amy Tan)

In Amy Chua's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," excerpted from "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," she compares and contrasts the different way Chinese parents raise and restrict their children from the way Western parents do.  

 I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years.(Chua).

To make sure that her daughter learned a piece for a piano recital, Chua threatened her daughter with no food, presents, or parties.  Her daughter wanted to give up on the piano piece and stomped off, but Chua still ordered and forced her to get back to the piano and practice the piece until it was perfect by the next day.  Her parenting technique was to threaten and order her daughter to do what she wanted her to do, or else there would be a consequence that the daughter would not want.  She uses words to make her daughter do things, rather than physical force.

In Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, in the second section, "The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates," she explores the topic of mother-daughter relationships, and the way they raise their daughters and things they often do to influence them.  In "Rules of the Game," written from Waverly Jong's perspective, her mother tells her family, 

"We not concerning this girl.  This girl not have concerning for us."

 after Waverly came home at night after running away from her mother because she was angry at her mother for always using her to show off.  Her mother understood it differently, and thought that she was embarrassed to be her mother.  When she got home, her family was sitting at the dinner table, with the remains of a fish on the table, and the mother spoke these words to make Waverly feel guilt through her words, and she chose her words to strike Waverly's emotions, to ensure that something similar wouldn't be likely to happen again.  Because Waverly's mother felt like Waverly didn't care for her family, she told her family to ignore her, since Waverly was so careless towards them, and did not care about them as she should.