Philly’s Maia Weintraub — Olympic fencer, NCAA champion, and scholar — is the product of the consummate ‘Tiger Mom’

Nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work. … Once a child starts to excel at something — whether it’s math, piano, pitching, or ballet — he or she gets praise, admiration, and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

— Amy Chua, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”

PRINCETON — Maia Weintraub, the 2022 NCAA women’s foil champion and a member of the 2024 U.S. Olympic team, bopped down University Place here one sticky morning in May, her smile warm and wide. At one intersection, two Princeton students across the street recognized her and called out, “Hi, Maia!” She waved to the women. It was typical carefree college stuff. Alumni had flooded back to campus for a reunion weekend and shopped at the stores along Nassau Street. Students did, too. Finals had ended the previous week, not that it mattered much to Weintraub, 21, a Friends Select grad. After her sophomore spring semester, she had taken a year off from school to focus exclusively on fencing, though she still lived in an apartment just off campus. Two days earlier, someone had asked her what her greatest contribution to the U.S. national fencing team was. “I laugh a lot,” she said. “I would like to think I bring a little joy.”

When you’re meandering through a neighborhood like Princeton’s — or the neighborhood around just about any Ivy League institution — you become hyperaware that you’re probably just a few steps away from encountering someone who has accomplished something extraordinary. The woman thumbing through Gone Girl at the bookstore might be a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. The impatient fellow behind you in the Wegmans checkout line may have been the first physicist to observe the universe’s gravitational waves. And the bouncy and bubbly young woman walking by might be one of the best fencers in the world. Weintraub loves that aspect of the place. She prefers to blend in.

“There are so many amazing people here,” she said. “There’s always somebody who has the same or better achievements, and it’s really cool learning about that and seeing those sorts of people. My freshman year, we were in orientation groups, and we were talking about athletics and being able to identify an athlete — backpack, scooter, all this stuff — and I asked them, ‘Do I look like an athlete?’ And they were like, ‘No.’ And I was like, ‘Cool.’

“I think I would rather not have the attention. Fencing doesn’t seem like something that is extraordinary, but maybe that’s me feeling impostor syndrome. It’s something I do because I enjoy it.”

She always has, even the most grueling and demanding parts, even the anecdotes that might compel you to recoil a bit and think, Really? Here’s one: From fifth grade on, Weintraub would wake up every morning at 5, her mother stirring her out of bed to have her run on a treadmill for 30 to 40 minutes.

Why?

“My mom’s pretty intense,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ve heard of the stereotypical Asian Tiger Mom. That is her. But I don’t think I would have gotten here without that.”

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In her popular and controversial 2011 book, Chua created, or at least identified, a parental archetype, the mom or dad who pushes a child perhaps too far in the pursuit of excellence. But what if the child — the student, the musician, the dancer, the athlete — relished the pressure and pushing, absorbed it, and rarely was bothered by it? What if the child, from the start of her journey toward expertise and mastery to its completion, never stopped enjoying herself, even as her skills got better and the stakes got higher? What if it was always fun?

Maia Weintraub is the perfect test case. She’s the Happy Tiger Kid.

Weintraub’s parents met me at a cafe near Washington Square Park in June. Her father, Jason, is an entomologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences; bald and unassuming, he specializes in moths and butterflies, which, to be more accurate about it, makes him a lepidopterist. Her mother, Elizabeth Surin, petite and peppy, recently retired from her career as an immigration attorney. Our server approached the table. Jason ordered a coffee and a croissant. Elizabeth?

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m talking.”

Words were her living. They gush from her, including, early in our conversation, these:

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m a Tiger Mom.”

She had it all planned even before her daughter, an only child, was born: Maia would speak Spanish and Mandarin, because those are such popular and useful languages, and she would learn the violin. “That is what I wanted,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t care what he wanted. That was what I wanted.”

She was kidding, but only a little. Starting when she was a year-and-a-half old, Maia attended Chinese school every Saturday. “Other parents would talk about how their child didn’t want to get up,” Elizabeth said. “I thought, ‘Oh, I have it easy.’ Maia enjoyed it.” When Maia was 3, Elizabeth and Jason found her a good violin teacher. And when she was 4, the receptionist in Elizabeth’s law office, who spoke fluent Spanish, became Maia’s tutor. And when Maia was 9, while she was playing little league soccer, she was admitted to Temple’s Center for Gifted Young Musicians. And at 11, she took up the viola, and perhaps the Curtis Institute of Music or Juilliard would have been in her future had she not decided that fencing was her purest passion, the pursuit that would last.

Funny enough, it was Jason and his side of the family who introduced her to it. A Detroit native, he headed off to Harvard for his undergrad degree and Cornell for his Ph.D., and after he left, his two younger brothers, Josh and Adam, took up fencing. Their mentor in the sport was Istvan Danosi, a legendary coach who fled to the U.S. in the late 1950s during the Hungarian Revolution, took a job as a janitor, and constructed a fencing dynasty at Wayne State University.

Josh and Adam fenced at Harvard, and they suggested to Jason that Maia, who wasn’t yet 9 years old, might enjoy the sport as much as they did. In fact, they told him, it might be worth contacting their friend Mark Masters, the master and founder of the Fencing Academy of Philadelphia, to enroll her in some beginners’ classes. She took to it immediately. She had her advantages.

Her string-instrument training had given her a measure of manual dexterity that many of her opponents couldn’t match. “Little did we know,” Jason said, “we’d been preparing for fencing success.” As she competed in more regional, national, and international tournaments, she faced dozens of Asian American fencers, many of whom were Chinese, many of whom had Chinese coaches, many of whom shouted instructions and strategies to their athletes in Mandarin, none of whom had any idea that their opponent — this tiny, brown-haired girl whose father was Jewish and whose mother was an immigrant from Singapore — understood every word they were saying. And Friends Select’s administrators and teachers accommodated Maia’s jam-packed schedule, allowing her to attend classes via Zoom and video conferences — long before anyone had heard the term “COVID-19″ — once she started traveling to tournaments in Europe and Asia for weeks at a time … in sixth grade. “They want you to pursue your passion,” she said. “It gave me the confidence to continue.”

What most separated Weintraub from her competitors, however, was her demeanor, her ability to maintain her composure and cool throughout a match, even when she was teetering on the edge of defeat.

“She is a money player,” Masters said. “She fences better under the pressure of the battle. She’s behind? That does not really get her to worry. She fences better from behind sometimes.”

Just last May, for instance, in the semifinals of the World Cup in Hong Kong, Weintraub trailed Arianna Errigo — a two-time individual world champion — in their semifinal bout, 8-1. She rallied to beat Errigo, 15-13, then won the tournament.

This superpower of hers confounded and frustrated her mother for years, though. It wasn’t just that Maia could remain unflustered at a match’s tensest moments. It was that losing never seemed to bother her that much, if at all. Once, at a local competition when she was 11, Maia finished a match and, grinning, scurried over to Elizabeth.

Oh, you won? Elizabeth asked.

No, Maia said.

Then why are you smiling?

“Obviously, I cared about my fencing, and everyone wants to do well,” Maia said. “I’m sure this isn’t what I was thinking when I was a little kid. This is me reflecting on it. But I just really enjoyed the sport and being in an environment around people. That was fun for me, so I knew all I could do is try my best.”

Did Elizabeth know that? Not at first. From the instant Maia’s fencing career began, Jason was the calm one. Jason stayed on the perimeter of Maia’s matches and stayed silent, taking photos. Elizabeth was not nearly as unobtrusive. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Elizabeth had grown up in Singapore feeling stifled, wanting to study the humanities and seeing no options, and what had she done to fix her problem? She researched colleges in the U.S., in the UK, in Canada. She handwrote an application to Wellesley College in Massachusetts — her typewriter had broken — mailed it, was accepted, and performed so well academically that she went on to law school at Penn. Hell, hadn’t she earned the right to be obtrusive?

Besides, at fencing matches, parents and coaches don’t have to stand on a sideline or sit in the bleachers, removed from the action. They can root themselves right alongside the competition strip. Which Elizabeth did.

“She was a very enthusiastic supporter,” Masters said, “but her cheering was a distraction for Maia.” So was her pacing. So were the times she removed herself from the fencing area so conspicuously that Maia couldn’t help but notice. “She would take it very personally,” Maia said. “She wouldn’t understand, ‘Why did you lose? What happened? What are you thinking?’ That not-understanding made it hard for her to enjoy it. Obviously, it would stress me out that she was frustrated.”

Masters eventually had to say to Elizabeth what he says to many fencing parents: You’re disturbing your child. Your presence is causing her to underperform. Either be quiet or go away. Between Maia’s 13th and 17th birthdays, Elizabeth did not attend a single one of her daughter’s tournaments.

“Yeah, that was when she first started,” Elizabeth said in the cafe, “but I decided on my own, ‘Maybe this is not so good.’ The first competition of hers I went to, I thought, ‘What is going on?’”

“That was when you told her, ‘Second place …’” Jason said.

Elizabeth made a motion with her hands to tell him to pipe down: “There’s nothing I want to hear from you about that.”

“You emphasized the need to win,” he said.

“I did not,” she said. “I knew she would lose. But I didn’t want her to be losing all the time.”

Jason tried to interject.

“Let me talk!” Elizabeth said. “I’ve failed in my life. When I’ve failed, I’ve carried on. I just get up and do it.

“How would I know when to stop? I would watch. If Maia had my personality and tenacity, I could tell. If she could take what I was dishing out, I would carry on. If she didn’t and she was more like” — she nodded her head to the left, to Jason — “then I would slow down or pull back or stop.

“I’m not stupid. You don’t torture your child.”

When Maia turned 18, she told Elizabeth that she could start attending her matches again. Mommy, she said, if you want to come you can, because I’m at the stage that you wanted me to be at when I was 9. Now, Elizabeth often brings a book with her to Maia’s tournaments and Jason will text her the scores.

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At the risk of falling too deeply into stereotypes and generalizations, fencers are high-achieving and can be high-strung. In 2018, the NCAA collected research to determine which Division I athletes entered college with the highest high school grade point averages. Among male athletes, it was fencers. Among female athletes, it was fencers.

Maia declined to reveal her GPA, but it’s probably enough to know that she has been an NCAA champion, a world champion, and an Olympian while majoring in ecology and molecular biology at Princeton. Just before winning worlds in Hong Kong, she said: “I felt like I had a slump. I wasn’t in a good place.”

She spoke to a sports psychologist for the first time.

“Then, I won, which was insane,” she said. “It was a very big help. It wasn’t a physical thing. But the mental part is such a big thing when you get to the really high level. That’s what makes or breaks people, and that shows how important it was. I was feeling so terribly, then gave it attention, and it made a difference.”

Jason and Elizabeth flew to Paris and will be on hand when Maia competes. They are as proud as parents can be, of course, and Elizabeth finds watching her daughter easier than it once was. If Maia happens to lose a match, Elizabeth will ask her, What happened? And Maia will say, Mom, it’s OK. Nothing is the end of the world.

“I can see it,” Maia said. “I’m older. This is kind of like my job. She doesn’t have to have full control anymore. She doesn’t have to guide me. She can put in more faith and trust that I know what I’m doing, and she can enjoy it more. She can watch the fruits of her labor.”

The women’s foil tournament takes place Thursday at the Grand Palais. May the best Tiger Kid win. The happiest one will smile either way.