Episode 248: “The Golden Gate: Power, Sex, Class and Justice in 1940s California” with Amy Chua

In this episode of the Bill Walton Show, my conversation is with Amy Chua,  a provocative and original thinker about culture, world politics, and political tribes. Our main topic is her latest book, The Golden Gate, is a novel set in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1930s and 1940s.

 

Best known for her Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a memoir about her parenting journey using strict Confucianist child rearing techniques, she is a highly accomplished professor at Yale Law School, and has been named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people, The Atlantic's “Brave Thinkers” and Foreign Policy's “Global Thinkers.”

The Golden Gate is compelling historical thriller that paints a portrait of a California from another era beset by the crosswinds of a world at war and an American society about to undergo massive changes in how race and class define the essence of power, sex, and justice. It’s also filled with fascinating details, like groundbreaking forensic advances, the story of the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the presence of China’s Madame Chiang Kai-shek in Berkeley in the 1940’s

Amy brings to this book - and our conversation - her depth of understanding about class structures, culture and ethnic divisions seen in her non-fiction writings. 

Her first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, explored the ethnic conflict caused in many societies by "market dominant minorities.”

In her Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall examined seven major empires and the theory that their success depended on their tolerance of minorities.

Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, examined how group loyalty often outweighs any other ideological considerations and argues that the failure to recognize the place of group loyalty has played a major role in the failure of US foreign policy.

The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America was called by the Financial Times’ Lucy Kellaway, “the best universal theory of success I've seen."

This is a wide ranging and fun conversation. Highly enjoyable. Listen in.