‘The Golden Gate’

By Amy Chua

Minotaur Books, 384 pages

Talk about a springboard for a novel: the former home of the First Lady of Free China, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, at Berkeley, California, makes the perfect one for Amy Chua. The Yale law professor’s latest book, “The Golden Gate,” draws inspiration from what became her parents’ house, where she stumbled upon the idea to write her debut murder mystery. 

“What is the First Lady of China doing in Berkeley, California, by herself in the middle of the Second World War?” Ms. Chua wonders to the Sun on the telephone as she walks through that same house. “There’s a huge mystery.” She notes allegations that Madame Chiang Kai-Shek was having an affair with the 1940 Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Wilkie, who tried unsuccessfully to unseat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In writing her own mystery, a sharp departure from her 2011 best-selling book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Ms. Chua finds inspiration in Mr. Willkie. She begins her novel with the murder of a similar character, a wealthy industrialist and presidential candidate, Walter Wilkinson, at the Claremont Hotel, another Berkeley locale. As a wealthy Bay Area matriarch uncovers which of her three granddaughters is the culprit, the trail leads her to none other than Madame Chiang.

The Sun asks Ms. Chua why she decided to write fiction — after all, her speciality is law. “I have always wanted to write a novel,” she replies. Compared to her previous books, which focus on themes of political polarization and culture clashing in America, “the process was just way more fun,” she says. “I wasn’t like, is this going to be controversial? It was just much more liberating to let your imagination absolutely run.”

The high-profile professor last made headlines for sparking a meltdown at Yale by hosting off-campus dinner parties during the pandemic. Ms. Chua, though, is putting the campus turmoil behind her with this fictional romp, which was selected as one of Amazon’s best books of September, alongside Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk and Stephen King’s latest novel. 

While spun off bizarre historical facts, the book grapples with forces of social disruption and alienation that are relevant to today. “It was a time of a lot of inequality and a lot of the same kind of class and racial and ethnic tensions that we see today,” Ms. Chua says. “I wanted to touch on a lot of the same issues that are just tearing our country apart right now, but almost more as a backdrop, so it’s not so heavy handed.”

The historical thriller invokes the history of Mexican deportation in 1930 and Japanese internment 1940s California, but in a way that is “balanced,” explains Ms. Chua. “My book is not just right wing or left wing.” She says she raises the issues of racial discrimination in the book “more as a backdrop so that people can calmly notice, oh my god, the Japanese internment was really outrageous.” 

One such subtlety surfaces through the character tasked with investigating Mr. Wilkinson’s murder. Detective Sullivan is part Jewish and part Mexican. At one point, Mr. Sullivan talks about how he anglicized his name from “Alejo” to “Al” when he became a cop in order to be “above the suspicion line.” Observing how this change made his life easier, he says, “sometimes I feel guilty — sometimes worse than guilty. But then I tell myself it’s not me, it’s America.”

On the context of Great Depression, the book also explores discrimination against poor white Americans — a theme which is “difficult to talk about, say, at Yale Law School,” Ms. Chua says. “If you try to mention, oh, there’s discrimination against Appalachians, then you immediately get into this race to the bottom,” of comparing people’s levels of oppression.

Literature has the power to remind people of their “common humanity,” Ms. Chua says. “I really think that if anything is going to bring this country together, it’s going to be the arts. It’s certainly not going to be the law and politics.” She says that she doesn’t plan to abandon the fields she knows best but that amid today’s hostile political culture on campuses and throughout the nation, “it’s very depressing to write about political tribalism.”

Ms. Chua has been on the receiving end of such hostility. She came under scrutiny in 2018 over unsubstantiated claims that, a couple years earlier, she had abused her power over the competitive clerkship process and made inappropriate comments to some students. The law school investigated Chua in the spring of 2021 for allegedly violating an agreement not to socialize with students off campus. She denied any wrongdoing, but was banned from teaching small groups. 

Journalists who defended Ms. Chua suggested that the complaints against her were politically motivated, since they came only after she expressed support for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “Part of it was all fallout from my very controversial refusal to denounce Justice Kavanaugh,” Ms. Chua said. “That led to a lot of anger, which I understand.”

Those years were “extremely unpleasant,” Ms. Chua reflects, but she’s moved on. “I stood up for myself and kind of came through it. I’m just happy to put it behind me.” Referencing the phrase that first catapulted her into the headlines, she says, “this is the good side of ‘the tiger.’ My parents definitely taught me grit.”

The professor has bounced back on campus. “I’m a very popular teacher,” Ms. Chua says. Her class this semester has the longest waiting list of any class taught at Yale law school. “I put a big banner on my syllabus that says, this class is committed to lively debate across political divides,” she explains. She tells her students that if they hear a remark they deem sexist or racist or xenophobic in class, “you have to give the other person the benefit of the doubt and talk it out.” 

“I really love teaching at Yale,” Ms. Chua says. The love is palpable in her tone, even across the phone. She says, though, that “our education system is completely broken,” a far cry from what it was when she joined Yale’s faculty in 2001. “Students are afraid to say honestly what they think. They’re just genuinely terrified that they’re going they’ll lose all their friends and nobody will date them,” she laughs.

Ms. Chua offers the example of her immigrant students who feel they can’t voice support for capitalism in class. It’s a fear she attacks in her book through the character of Detective Sullivan, an immigrant who yearns to use the capitalist system to rise through the ranks of society.

Yet the characters Ms. Chua teaches in real life often ask her to read out their response papers anonymously when they’re defending something as ostensibly innocuous as the American dream. Ms. Chua quickly adds, though, that she’s “always the optimist.”

In a show of the coolheaded, cheery attitude that kept Ms. Chua at the school although students filed complaints against her, and that pushed her to explore a genre she had not tried before, she says, “I am hoping that the pendulum has swung too far so far that we’ll go back to the middle.”

I ask Ms. Chua if she has any closing thoughts on her career, on Yale, or if there’s something that she’d like readers to remember. She tells me she wants to end on a positive note. “It’s just funny,” she says, “I was always just a hardworking kid who just wanted to be liked. It’s so interesting to me that I found myself in the middle of so many controversies, but I’m just — honestly, I’m an incredibly lucky person.”