amy chua book tour

Amy Chua says her hard-boiled detective also is a bit of a ‘tiger mom’

Just over a decade ago, law professor Amy Chua — who, up until that point, had mostly written about legal matters and international relations — shook up the public with her memoir, “ Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother .” It told a coming-of-age story, about Chua’s strict child-rearing philosophy and her clashes with her daughters. It was launched with a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “ Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior .” The term “tiger mom” permanently entered our cultural lexicon.

Chua followed it up in 2014 with another eyebrow-raiser about immigrant culture and ambition, “ The Triple Package .” Co-written with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, the book posited that a trio of specific traits (“superiority complex,” “insecurity” and “impulse control”) explained the upward social mobility of some ethnic groups. Her 2018 book, “ Political Tribes ,” elaborated further on the theme of society’s underestimation of the power of culture, arguing that American foreign policy has failed to adequately account for the role of ethnic identity in politics.

“ The Golden Gate ,” Chua’s first book since she was last in the headlines — when Yale Law School removed her from teaching a class of first-years, igniting a media frenzy in 2021 — might surprise readers in a different way. It’s a crime novel set in the 1940s: Al Sullivan, a detective of Mexican ancestry who has been passing as White, has been assigned to solve a murder at the Claremont Hotel. The case takes him inside San Francisco’s high society, into Chinese immigrant communities — and, of course, forces him to confront his own secrets.

Chua and I met for coffee while she was in Washington on book tour. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What made you want to write fiction?

A: I’ve actually always wanted to write fiction. My parents were tiger parents — the original tiger parents — and we weren’t allowed to do a lot of super-crazy socializing. So I was just a huge bookworm, and I would walk to the El Cerrito Public Library and come back with all the Nancy Drew books; Agatha Christie books when I got older.

I went to this Wall Street law firm [after college and law school]. I was miserable. I sunk into this whole quasi-depression. I tried to write a novel. It was going to be a mother-daughter Chinese immigrant story. Then “ The Joy Luck Club ,” by Amy Tan, came out.

Q: So you didn’t have that model, when you were trying to write.

A: No! In fact, I felt so jealous of her. It was great, I loved it, but I thought: “That’s what I was trying to do! She scooped me!”

Then in 2011, as you know, I wrote the tiger mom book, which, even though it’s nonfiction, was really the beginning of this. People so misunderstand that book. My model was, like, Nabokov’s “ Pale Fire .”

Q: Really? In what sense?

A: I love unreliable narrators. And the book is all about storytelling. Every chapter is a little story. And it’s got a voice and this unreliable narrator. It drove people crazy, this crazy voice. Some people got the tongue in cheek; other people took it literally. My two daughters are the heroines, and I’m the villain in it. That was really the beginning: My editors asked, “Why can’t you write all your nonfiction books like this?”

So that brings me to “The Golden Gate.” When covid hit, I just had all this time on my hands. I was visiting my parents’ house, and the idea for the plot just hit me. The idea of an unreliable narrator: the grandmother, who is told from the beginning that one of her three granddaughters is a murderer, but they don’t know which one.

It’s the most fun thing that I’ve ever done. It was difficult. But it’s not un-lawyerly. To do a thriller like this, you need a timeline, and it has to fit together logically.

Q: With “Tiger Mother,” and to a certain extent with “The Triple Package,” there was an air of, “We’re going to say things out loud that are not ordinarily said in polite society, like ‘Certain ethnic groups have certain cultural traits’ or, ‘These are the parenting techniques that get your kids certain markers of success.’” Your new book has been out for a few weeks now. Is there anything that people are responding to in it that gets under their skin?

A: No! I had really prepared myself because, you know, I’ve been controversial, right and left, unintentionally.

Q: What were you nervous about?

A: Everything. I was worried about more tiger mom stuff coming out, I was worried about “Triple Package” stuff. There was some goofy scandal three years ago, which was horrible at the time, but I feel vindicated now. I’ve tried to stay very, very uncontroversial.

Q: But there was nothing in the book that made you nervous in itself?

A: I was worried about whether it would be possible to write a character who’s not Asian American. There is a very important and interesting issue of cultural appropriation: Can a Caucasian author write a novel where the main character is Latinx or African American or Chinese, and I actually see all sides of it. But I thought that with Detective Sullivan and his ethnic background, it’s exactly my children’s background, you know? They’re half-Jewish. I thought about making an Asian American detective. Problem? It was completely historically inaccurate. On the Berkeley police force, there were no women, there were no minorities.

I was a little bit worried about that. I had very, very good agents and editors, and one of them said to me: “For nonfiction, controversy sells. But for fiction, it’s anathema.” And I was like, “Really?” I would never have thought.

Q: So that historical impossibility is what gave rise to Al as a character?

A: Yeah, and I actually see a lot of myself in him. He’s an immigrant who wants to rise. He’s White-passing, so he fits the Sam Spade [image], but underneath he’s this mutt, an outsider. On the outside, he’s this classic hard-boiled 1940s character. But on the inside, he’s like drilling vocab cards with [his young niece] Miriam, and that’s like me saying, “You’ve got to rise, you’ve got to work hard.”

Q: “ You have to get into the nice school.” Why were you interested in racial passing, psychologically or socially?

A: I’ve always been interested in it. I think it’s not racial passing so much as the broader phenomenon of what your generation calls “code-switching,” or what my former colleague Kenji Yoshino calls “covering.” People who are in some way not mainstream — because of gender identification or skin color or accent — feeling like they need to suppress some aspects of their identity because that’s not what it takes to rise in America.

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Original Jurisdiction

Tiger Mom Turned Novelist: An Interview With Amy Chua

Welcome to  Original Jurisdiction , the latest legal publication by me,  David Lat . You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its  About page , and you can email me at [email protected]. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking on the button below. Thanks!

As a new academic year gets underway, many of us are wondering: what law-school scandals lie in store? To discuss current hot-button issues facing legal academia, including free speech, intellectual diversity, and affirmative action, I could think of no better podcast guest than Professor Amy Chua. As a longtime member of the Yale Law School faculty, she’s had a front-row seat to—and personal involvement in—several of YLS’s recent controversies.  

Yale Law insanity aside, there was another reason I wanted to interview Amy, the author of two New York Times bestsellers—most notably, her 2011 memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). This month, Minotaur Books, Macmillan’s mystery- and thriller-focused imprint, is publishing her first novel, The Golden Gate . I devoured it in two days, and I can attest that it’s a great read—a historically rich page-turner that will teach you about California history while keeping you on the edge of your seat.

One other thing: loyal listeners might notice this episode is going up on Thursday rather than its usual day of Wednesday. There’s a good reason for that: my sound engineer Tommy Harron and his wife just welcomed their second child to the world. Congratulations to them on this great news.

Show Notes:

Amy Chua bio , Yale Law School

The Golden Gate , Amazon

All About Amy (Chua), The Law Professor We Can't Stop Talking About , by David Lat for Original Jurisdiction

Prefer reading to listening? For paid subscribers, a transcript of the entire episode appears below.

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TLC Book Tours

The Sky's The Limit...

Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, on tour January/February 2011

November 23, 2010 By trish Leave a Comment

About Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

• Hardcover: 256 pages • Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (January 11, 2011)

An awe-inspiring, often hilarious, and unerringly honest story of one mother’s exercise in extreme parenting, revealing the rewards—and the costs—of raising her children the Chinese way .

All decent parents want to do what’s best for their children. What Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother reveals is that the Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that. Western parents try to respect their children’s individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions and providing a nurturing environment. The Chinese believe that the best way to protect your children is by preparing them for the future and arming them with skills, strong work habits, and inner confidence. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother chronicles Chua’s iron-willed decision to raise her daughters, Sophia and Lulu, her way—the Chinese way—and the remarkable results her choice inspires.

Here are some things Amy Chua would never allow her daughters to do:

• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin

The truth is Lulu and Sophia would never have had time for a playdate. They were too busy practicing their instruments (two to three hours a day and double sessions on the weekend) and perfecting their Mandarin.

Of course no one is perfect, including Chua herself. Witness this scene:

“According to Sophia, here are three things I actually said to her at the piano as I supervised her practicing:

• Oh my God, you’re just getting worse and worse.
• I’m going to count to three, then I want musicality.
• If the next time’s not PERFECT, I’m going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them!”

But Chua demands as much of herself as she does of her daughters. And in her sacrifices—the exacting attention spent studying her daughters’ performances, the office hours lost shuttling the girls to lessons—the depth of her love for her children becomes clear. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is an eye-opening exploration of the differences in Eastern and Western parenting—and the lessons parents and children everywhere teach one another.

About Amy Chua

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability , a New York Times bestseller, was selected by both The Economist and the U.K.’s Guardian as one of the Best Books of 2003. Her second book, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall , was a critically acclaimed Foreign Affairs bestseller. She lives with her husband, two daughters, and two Samoyeds in New Haven, Connecticut.

Amy’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS

Tuesday, January 11th: Book Club Classics!

Thursday, January 13th: Lisa’s Yarns

Monday, January 17th: Bloggin’ ‘Bout Books

Wednesday, January 19th: Overstuffed

Thursday, January 20th: Pickles and Cheese

Tuesday, January 25th: Chocolate & Croissants

Wednesday, January 26th: Books, Movies, and Chinese Food

Tuesday, February 1st: Simply Stacie

Wednesday, February 2nd: Divine Secrets of a Domestic Diva

Tuesday, February 8th: Susan Heim on Parenting

Wednesday, February 16th: BookNAround

Thursday, February 17th: Family Volley

Wednesday, February 23rd: Peaceful Parenting

Monday, February 28th: Flower Patch Farmgirl

Tuesday, March 8th: In the Next Room

An awe-inspiring, often hilarious, and unerringly honest story of one

mother’s exercise in extreme parenting, revealing the rewards—and

the costs—of raising her children the Chinese way

All decent parents want to do what’s best for their

children. What Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother reveals

is that the Chinese just have a totally different

idea of how to do that. Western parents try to

respect their children’s individuality, encouraging

them to pursue their true passions and providing

a nurturing environment. The Chinese believe

that the best way to protect your children is

by preparing them for the future and arming

them with skills, strong work habits, and inner

confidence. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother chronicles

Chua’s iron-willed decision to raise her daughters,

Sophia and Lulu, her way—the Chinese way—and

the remarkable results her choice inspires.

Here are some things Amy Chua would never

allow her daughters to do:

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• not be the #1 student in every subject

except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano

• not play the piano or violin

The truth is Lulu and Sophia would never

have had time for a playdate. They were too busy

practicing their instruments (two to three hours

a day and double sessions on the weekend) and

perfecting their Mandarin.

Of course no one is perfect, including Chua

herself. Witness this scene:

“According to Sophia, here are three things

I actually said to her at the piano as I supervised

her practicing:

1. Oh my God, you’re just getting worse

2. I’m going to count to three, then

I want musicality.

3. If the next time’s not PERFECT,

I’m going to take all your stuffed animals

and burn them!”

But Chua demands as much of herself as she

does of her daughters. And in her sacrifices—the

exacting attention spent studying her daughters’

performances, the office hours lost shuttling

the girls to lessons—the depth of her love for

her children becomes clear. Battle Hymn of the

Tiger Mother is an eye-opening exploration of the

differences in Eastern and Western parenting—

and the lessons parents and children everywhere

teach one another.

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THE GOLDEN GATE

by Amy Chua ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2023

Satisfyingly twisty, highly educational, and lots of fun.

An old-fashioned detective novel set in 1940s San Francisco, with an injection of contemporary concerns.

In her fiction debut, Chua, best known for Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother  (2011) and several books about immigration and politics, pays tribute to the mystery novels she loved growing up, incorporating extensive research on topics ranging from the architecture of San Francisco to the Chinese Exclusion Act to the biographies of Wendell Willkie and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. When presidential hopeful Walter Wilkinson is found shot dead with his pants down in his room at the Claremont Hotel, the prime suspects are three young women: Isabella Stafford and her cousins, Nicole and Cassie Bainbridge. Unfortunately, the Mexican housekeeper who saw one of them coming out of Wilkinson’s room can’t tell one blond white girl from another. On the case is hard-boiled homicide detective Al Sullivan, originally Alejo Gutiérrez, a member of the Berkeley police force who is half Mexican, half Nebraskan, and part Jewish on his Mexican side, who's been passing as white for many years. Among the many complications he faces in his investigation is the fact that Isabella’s 7-year-old sister, Iris, died at the Claremont 10 years earlier under circumstances that remain unclear. The novel opens with the deposition of the girls’ grandmother, Genevieve Bainbridge, who controls the fortune to which they are heir. She’s been told that if she doesn’t give up the killer, all three will take the rap—and while she won’t do that, she has plenty to reveal, and her testimony is parceled out in sections throughout the book. The many threads of the plot as well as the author's concerns about race, class, and other matters come together in the cleverly imagined character and voice of her detective.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023

ISBN: 9781250903600

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | HISTORICAL MYSTERY | SUSPENSE | HISTORICAL THRILLER | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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More by Amy Chua

BOOK REVIEW

by Amy Chua

by Amy Chua ; Jed Rubenfeld

More About This Book

DAUGHTER OF MINE

by Megan Miranda ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2024

Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.

The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.

When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”

Pub Date: April 9, 2024

ISBN: 9781668010440

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

More by Megan Miranda

by Megan Miranda

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

More by Kathy Reichs

by Kathy Reichs

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J.D., Harvard Law School, 1987

A.B., Harvard University, 1984

• International Business Transactions

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Chua received both her A.B. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University. While at Harvard Law School, Professor Chua was Executive Editor of the Harvard Law Review . She then clerked for Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and, prior to entering academics in 1994, practiced with the Wall Street firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Professor Chua joined the Yale Law School faculty in 2001. Her expertise is in international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law. Her first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability was a New York Times bestseller and selected by both The Economist and the U.K.’s Guardian as a Best Book of 2003. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — and Why They Fall,  the 2011 memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , and the  New York Times bestseller, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups , coauthored with Jed Rubenfeld. Her latest book is Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (Penguin, 2018)  

Professor Chua has appeared on  Good Morning America ,  The Today Show ,  The Colbert Report ,  Charlie Rose , and  Real Time with Bill Maher . She has addressed numerous government and policymaking institutions, including the Brookings Institution, the CIA, the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul. In 2011, Professor Chua was named one of  Time  magazine's 100 most influential people, one of the  Atlantic Monthly 's Brave Thinkers, and one of  Foreign Policy 's Global Thinkers. She also received the Yale Law School's "Best Teaching" award.

• Publications

How the English Language Conquered the World

John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law Amy Chua reviews  The Rise of English by Rosemary Salomone.

How to end America's politics of hate and polarization

John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law Amy Chua is quoted in a USA Today commentary about why America is experiencing increasing political polarization.

The Threat of Tribalism — A Commentary by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law and Jed Rubenfeld is the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

Our Own Idiosyncratic Version of the Same Ethno-Nationalist Dynamic: Talking to Amy Chua

John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law Amy Chua was interviewed about her latest release, “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.”

How Billionaires Learned to Love Populism-A Commentary by Amy Chua

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

Amy Chua on how tribalism is tearing America apart

John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law Amy Chua was interviewed on a podcast, where she discussed her book, "Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations."

The Destructive Dynamics of Political Tribalism—A Commentary by Amy Chua

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. 

Have our tribes become more important than our country?

A review of "Political Tribes," the latest book by John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law Amy Chua.

Professor Amy Chua Publishes Book on Political Tribes

Amy chua: by the book.

John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law Amy Chua is interviewed about books and what she's reading.

Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018)

The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America (2014)

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ( The Penguin Press, 2011)

Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—And Why They Fall (Doubleday, 2007)

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (Doubleday, 2003 (made The New York Times and Business Week bestseller lists; selected by both The Economist and The Guardian as one of the best books of 2003; featured on C-Span’s Booknotes and PBS’s The Jim Lehrer News Hour; translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Italian, and Spanish)  

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About the author

Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and author of debut novel THE GOLDEN GATE, coming 9/19/23. She is also the bestselling author of several nonfiction books, including World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--and Why They Fall (2007), The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain The Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America (2013), Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018), and her runaway international bestselling memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), which has been translated into over 30 languages.

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Amy Chua Books In Order

Publication order of standalone novels, publication order of non-fiction books.

Amy Chua Amy Chua was born in Champaign, Illinois on October 26, 1962 to ethnic Chinese-Filipino parents with Hoklo ancestry that emigrated from the Philippines. She grew up speaking Hokkien.

Her mom was born in China in 1936, before she moved to the Philippines when she was two. She later converted to Catholicism during her high school years and graduated from the University of Santo Tomas, with a degree in chemical engineering, summa cum laude.

Her dad, Leon O. Chua, is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Quanzhou, Fujian is his ancestral hometown.

Amy was also raised Catholic and lived in West Lafayette, Indiana. At the age of 8, her family moved to Berkeley, California.

Amy has described herself as being an “ugly child” during her school days; getting bullied in school for her foreign accent (which she has lost) and was the target of some racial slurs from several of her classmates. She attended El Cerrito High School, where she graduated as the valedictorian in her class.

During college, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude with an AB in Economics in 1984 from Harvard College, where she was named a John Harvard Scholar and an Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Scholar. She got her JD cum laude in 1987 from Harvard Law School, where she was the first Asian American officer of the Harvard Law Review, serving as the executive editor.

After her time spent in law school, she clerked for Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald on the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.

“World on Fire” was selected by The Economist as one of the Best Books of 2003 and was a New York Times bestseller. Tony Giddens called it one of the “Top Political Reads of 2003”.

Amy taught JD Vance during at least his first year of Yale Law. She was the one that persuaded him to pen “Hillbilly Elegy”, his memoir, which became a movie starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams and was a New York Times bestseller.

“World on Fire” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2003. The reigning consensus is that the combo of democracy and free markets would transform the third world and sweep away the ethnic hatred and religious zealotry associated with underdevelopment. In this revelatory investigation of globalization’s true impact, Amy explains why many developing countries are actually consumed by ethnic violence after they adopt free market democracy.

She shows how in non-Western countries all around the world, free markets have concentrated starkly disproportionate wealth in the hands of a resented ethnic minority. These “market-dominant minorities” Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, Chinese in Southeast Asia, whties in Latin America and South Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Indians in East Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia, become objects of violent hatred.

At the same time, democracy empowers the impoverished majority, which unleashes confiscation, ethnic demagoguery, and sometimes genocidal revenge. She also argues that the US has become the world’s most visible market dominant minority, which is a fact that helps explain the rising tide of anti-Americanism all around the world. Amy is a friend of globalization, however she urges everybody to find ways to spread its benefits and curb some of its most dangerous of aspects.

“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2011. At once laugh out loud funny and provocative, this ignited a global parenting debate with its tale about a mom’s journey in strict parenting. Amy argues that Western parenting attempts to nurture and respect children’s individuality, as Chinese parents usually believe that arming kids with strong work habits, skills, and inner confidence prepares them best for the future.

This chronicles Chua’s iron-willed choice to raise Lulu and Sophia (her own daughters) the Chinese way and the remarkable, sometimes heartbreaking results her decision inspires. Profoundly challenging and achingly honest, this book is one of the most talked about books from our times.

This is a courageous and thought provoking read, and it gets breathtakingly personal at times. This tale of Amy’s is just as compelling as a good thriller. Amy delivers the most stimulating book on the subject of child rearing since Dr. Spock. It’s a funny, smart, honest, and just a little heartbreaking of a read.

“The Golden Gate” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2023. This is an evocative, compelling, and sweeping historical thriller which paints a vibrant portrait of a California buffered by the turbulent crosswinds of this world at war and a society that’s about to undergo some massive change.

In 1944, in Berkeley, California, Homicide Detective Al Sullivan just left the swanky Claremont Hotel after one drink in the bar when a presidential candidate gets assassinated in a room upstairs. Walter Wilkinson, who was a rich industrialist with some enemies among the anarchist factions on the far left, could have been target by any number of groups. However oddly, Sullivan’s investigation brings up the specter of another tragedy happening at the Claremont, some ten years ago: the death of Iris Stafford (just seven years old at the time), who was a member of the Bainbridge family, one of the wealthiest in San Francisco. Some say that she is still haunting the Claremont.

The many threads of this case continue leading Sullivan back to the three remaining Bainbridge heiresses, all now adults. Iris’s cousins Nicole and Cassie. And her sister, Isabella. Determined to not allow anything distract him from finding out the truth, not the interest of China’s First Lady Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, or the powerful influence of the Bainbridges’ grandma, or the political aspirations of Berkeley’s district attorney, in his findings, he follows this investigation to its devastating conclusion.

This page turning debut novel brings to life a historical era rife with turbulent social forces and groundbreaking forensic advances, when class and race defined the very essence of justice, power, and sex. And it introduces a fascinating character in Detective Sullivan, who is a mixed race ex-Army officer that is still reckoning with his own history.

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