An overflow crowd of more than 200 people packed the Hillside Club in Berkeley Thursday night to hear Amy Chua, a Yale law professor and El Cerrito High alum, defend her intensely debated new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

The petit author dressed in a short black skirt and red cardigan was introduced by KPFA veteran Aimee Allison, who opened the talk by asking how many in the audience had read the Jan. 8 Wall Street Journal article that made Chua suddenly famous and dismayed Chua because of the headline placed on the article by the newspaper, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.”

At the mention of the article, Chua’s first comment was non-verbal — she raised her hands and gave an energetic two-thumbs-down gesture. She then characterized her recent experience as “a little surreal.”

She stressed more than once that the message, intent and humor of her book have been largely lost in the extraordinary outpouring of public debate and vitriol that have filled the mass media in the past two weeks.  Her book, she said, is a not a how-to guide on parenting but a personal memoir about a woman who started out raising her daughters under a very strict “Chinese parenting” regimen but ended up being changed and, as the book’s dust jacket says, being “humbled by a thirteen-year-old.”

“It’s been completely overwhelming, obviously,” she said of the tremendous reaction to the book. “… I knew this book would be provocative, but it’s a memoir, not a parenting book, so I thought how provocative can a memoir be? Like my dad, when I told him a year ago that I was doing this, he said, ‘Who would want to read a memoir by you?’”

Allison interjected, “Is that more of that Chinese parenting thing?”

The sympathetic audience laughed, as they did often during the evening as Chua — prompted by light quips from Allison as well as serious questions from Allison and audience members — offered a lively, sometimes humorous and sometimes emotionally stirring account of how she raised her daughters in the way she was brought up, and how she was forced to give it up when she realized that her single-minded method was alienating her daughter.

Chua acknowledged that the book is completely different from everything else she’s written as an academic.

“I actually write books about foreign policy and rise and fall of powers, and I did not write this book with that in mind,” Chua said. “I spent eight years researching my first book, five years the second. I did zero research for this book. I don’t know anything about this subject.”

Chua read a part of the book that includes the wrenching scene where her younger daughter, Lulu, and Chua have their ultimate confrontation that ends by Chua telling her daughter that they’re giving up the violin, and “Going West” where Chua comes clean about her doubts regarding “Chinese parenting.”

 To a question from the audience — “If you had to do it over again with Sophie and Lulu, what would you do differently?” — Chua answered, “I would have paid more attention to the different personalities of my kids … and given them more breathing room and more choices, I think. But not entirely.” After the laughter subsided, Allison added, “Maybe cello?”  (Chua had insisted that her daughters play piano and violin.)

Chua also fretted about the blowback she’s getting from Asia, where she said the Wall Street Journal feature, with its “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” headline, had “gone viral.” She said she felt helpless in trying to correct the misunderstanding there because the book has been published only in English at this point. “Things are getting better here since at least the book is out,” she said.

 “On the cover of the book, it says the opposite,” she said, referring to the dust jacket. “It says, ‘This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.’” She continued, “[In Asia] it’s now called 'Amy Chua’s article.' It’s not even known as an excerpt, and people read it straight. I get angry emails from Asia saying, 'You don’t represent us.’” The article consisted of book excerpts, which Chua said gave a misleading impression of the book’s message and intent.

When she was asked if the book could be used as a road map for someone to succeed at a higher level, she paused and repeated that the book was a story about her family, a memoir, not a how-to-guide that has a targeted audience. “I like the book,” she continued. “I think it’s an unusual book. I think it’s a little bit 'clever.' Some people get it, some people really don’t. A lot of people say, ‘I can’t figure out what’s funny, what’s not. It’s really confusing.’ It doesn’t work for a lot of people.” She stressed that “it really isn’t a parenting book at all. I wrote it as a memoir, more as a literary thing.”

“But it’s not being taken that way at all,” commented Allison.

“No,” acknowledged Chua. “That’s one of my disappointments.”

“That is my biggest unhappiness with the excerpt — that it entered the conversation in this way," she continued. "And I don’t know if anybody will ever read it, because it’s now the kind of thing that’s being read by psychologists.”

“I’ve always loved books with unreliable narrators," she said, mentioning Nabokov's Lolita, Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo, and Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius among other works. "I like these books where you read the narrator, and you can’t quite believe everything they’re saying. You have to piece it together. And I think my book is like that, because you have to see what my kids are saying.”

When asked what’s next, Chua quickly replied, “Definitely not a sequel to this.”