In January 2011, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua was in the middle of her book tour, in her hotel room in Seattle, when an email came in from the future vice president of the United States.
Her book—Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother—had just come out, and she was getting pummeled in the media for demanding that her daughters get straight A’s and play the piano or violin. She was called the “worst mother ever.” There were death threats.
“I’m not a crier, but I was so depressed,” Chua told me. “I was there by myself—I had bodyguards—and I get an email from J.D. Vance.”
The first-year law student had a question about his upcoming exam in Chua’s Contracts class. She had been mentoring Vance and quickly replied.
“Three hours later, probably after a beer, he writes me another email, and he’s like, ‘You know what? I should be studying, but I’m so curious about all this furor, so I went to Barnes & Noble, and I read it,’ ” she said, referring to her book. “He’s like, ‘I do not know why this is controversial.’ ”
Then, he told her, “You remind me of Mamaw”—Vance’s grandmother, who raised him with the same tough love that courses through Tiger Mother.
Vance added that he “felt a little bit bad” for giving her the impression that he came from an intact family, saying things were “more complicated” back home. He attached a document to the email, “and it’s the opening of Hillbilly Elegy,” Chua said, “and even though I was in trauma about my own situation, I read this thing, and I said, ‘J.D., you have to write your own book.’ ”
Which, of course, he did.
Chua connected Vance with her agent, and in June 2016—just over four months before Donald Trump was elected to the White House for the first time—the book was published. Progressive America loved it. They thought of Vance as their in-house anthropologist, the man who could explain these sad, strange people who had just voted for The Great Satan.
“She helped create the origin story for the person who’s the future vice president of the United States,” a former student, who is now an attorney in New York, told me. “That’s classic Amy Chua.”