San Joaquin Valley Town Hall

San Joaquin Valley Town Hall

Celebrating our 75th Year

Fossil Threads in the Web of Life

Amy Chua
Amy Chua

January
Amy Lynn Chua

Amy Lynn Chua (born October 26, 1962), also known as "the Tiger Mom",is an American corporate lawyer, legal scholar, and writer. She is the John M. Duff Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School with an expertise in international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization. She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School for seven years. Prior to teaching, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton.

Chua was born in Champaign, Illinois, to ethnic Chinese-Filipino parents with Hoklo ancestry who emigrated from the Philippines. Her parents raised her speaking Hokkien. Her father, Leon O. Chua, is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.His ancestral hometown is Quanzhou, Fujian. Chua's mother was born in China in 1936, before moving to the Philippines at the age of two. She subsequently converted to Catholicism in high school and graduated from the University of Santo Tomas, with a degree in chemical engineering, summa cum laude.

Chua has written five books: two studies of international affairs, a parenting memoir, a book on ethnic-American culture and its correlation with socio-economic success within the United States, and a book about the role of tribal loyalties in American politics and its foreign policy. 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, and named by Tony Giddens in The Guardian as one of the "Top Political Reads of 2003", examines how globalization and democratization since 1989 have affected the relationship between market-dominant minorities and the wider population.