My mom and dad met in college, in 1974. He was a Jewish guy, with roots on the Lower East Side; she was a Chinese girl from Malaysia who had won an academic scholarship to America. My dad’s parents had never pictured their son with an Asian girlfriend, and they were surprised when they met my future mom. But, they decided, the relationship wasn’t a big deal; it might even be a good thing. Chinese people were smart, hardworking, and had a long tradition of academic achievement. Like the Jews, they were from a proud but diasporic civilization with an ancient history. “The Chinese are the Jews of the East!” my grandfather declared. A few years later, I was born.

That line, “The Chinese are the Jews of the East!,” was a fixture of my childhood, repeated endlessly in my family to comic effect. Now, it’s the thesis of a much-discussed new book, “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America,” by the Yale Law School professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, who are also a Chinese-Jewish couple. (Chua was the author, in 2011, of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” the Asian-parenting manifesto; Andrew Marantz spoke with one of their daughters, Sophie Chua-Rubenfeld, in this week’s magazine.) Why, Chua and Rubenfeld ask, do some “cultural groups”—they’re careful never to refer to ethnicities or races—seem to outperform others in terms of academic achievement or career success? Their answer is that many Jews, Mormons, and Cuban-, Asian-, Indian-, Iranian-, Nigerian-, and Lebanese-Americans share the same psychological makeup. Many parents in these groups, they claim, teach their children three linked habits of mind: a “superiority complex,” combined with “insecurity” and “impulse control.” Essentially, you feel destined for great things, but personally inadequate, and so you work like a maniac to prove yourself. Even as you struggle with the “pathologies” to which this upbringing can lead—anxiety, guilt, jealousy, anger, and a constant sense of never being good enough—you find yourself outperforming your less-focussed peers.

Many reviewers have accused Chua and Rubenfeld of racism. In my experience of the book, that’s not fair: the idea isn’t that Asian-Americans, for example, are genetically predisposed to succeed, but that Asian immigrant culture encourages it. (In fact, Chua and Rubenfeld warn, drive fades with time, as immigrant cultures assimilate.) Still, the book is profoundly regressive—grandparentish, as it were—in the way in which it generalizes so freely about the inner lives of millions of people, always in a stereotypical way, while reducing the twists and turns of history to pop-psychological fate. My family, in proposing its wacky theory about the Chinese and the Jews, at least did so with a wink. But Chua and Rubenfeld are comically enamored of their idea and, like Mario with his hammer in Donkey Kong, they run around swinging their Triple Package at everything. Why do so many Nigerians earn doctorates? The Triple Package. Why did Bernie Madoff steal all that money? The Triple Package. (“At the extreme, the longing to rise can become desperate or monomaniacal.”) Why did the United States prosper so much during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? “America was for a long time the quintessential Triple Package nation.”

The fact that Chua and Rubenfeld can use the Triple Package to explain so much is a warning sign. It’s an idea so general that it can’t be contained. They want to declare the I-feel-special-but-also-inadequate part of the Triple Package the property of only a few select cultures. But, as Freud could have told you, pretty much everybody feels simultaneously special and inadequate. Lots of people, from all sorts of places, are pressured and judged by their parents, and end up slightly weird as a result. Chua and Rubenfeld point to America’s discourse of self-esteem and self-help, which, they write, encourages “embracing yourself as you are” and “feeling secure about yourself,” as evidence that non-immigrant Americans are relatively free of parent-induced neuroses. But that’s exactly the wrong conclusion to draw: if self-help is so pervasive, it’s because there are few feelings more common than insecurity. Fighting to realize or resist parental expectation is just part of the family experience.

Chua and Rubenfeld are drawn to psychological explanations because they can’t accept the idea that the third part of their Triple Package—”impulse control,” by which they basically mean working hard in school—could really be doing all the heavy lifting. Stuyvesant, one of New York’s most selective public high schools, uses a standardized admissions exam; last year, they write, the school admitted “nine black students, twenty-four Hispanics, a hundred seventy-seven whites and six hundred twenty Asians.” What, they ask, could possibly account for that outcome? Why didn’t all sorts of families, and not just Asian ones, send their kids to cram school to study for the Stuyvesant entrance exam? They regard the usual explanation, that Asian-Americans have an “education culture,” as circular. (Where does that “education culture” come from?) “The challenge is to delve deeper and discover the cultural roots of this behavior—to identify the fundamental cultural forces that underlie it,” they write. The Triple Package seems like a plausible candidate for such a force.

The thing is, though, that, often, cultures really are circular. All the time, communities judge their members by standards that are, on some level, arbitrary. In some families, what matters is military service. In others, it’s religious adherence. There are communities in which the family drama of aspiration and achievement is played out on the athletic field, with families spending evenings and weekends driving from game to game. To understand why a dad yells at his kid at Little League, you don’t have to point to a “fundamental cultural force” that makes him care so much about baseball. You just have to know that parents are very invested in their children, and that a community is a group of people who happen to care about the same things—sometimes for good reasons, and sometimes for no reason. Ask the Little League dad why sports are so important, and you’re likely to hear some hocus-pocus about the values of teamwork and good sportsmanship. The most accurate answer, probably, is “just because.”

The hocus-pocus still matters, of course. Sporty chestnuts like “toughness,” “teamwork,” and “leadership” might not be the ultimate reason a family cares about sports, but they’re still meaningful, because they’re how the family understands its own predilections. They provide a kind of guiding metaphor, in which parents are coaches and kids are athletes. (You can see that dynamic at work in “Thicker Than Water,” Tad Friend’s story, in this week’s magazine, about a seafaring family from Nantucket.) “The Triple Package” might not be convincing as an argument about “the rise and fall of cultural groups in America,” but it’s valuable in another way: it offers a fascinating window onto a particular interpretation of family life. In this interpretation, parents see themselves as dangerous risk-takers (“tiger parents”) who, like Jack Bauer in interrogation mode, push their children right up to the edge (but not too far!), while children come to see themselves as hardened survivors, burdened with the ultimate decision: unleash hell upon their own kids, or give in to weak-willed Westernization? It’s a very exciting way to understand two decades’ worth of studying and piano lessons.

The persistent rhetorical excess in “The Triple Package” is the tip-off that the book is more of a performative self-interpretation than a sociological argument. It’s not just that Chua and Rubenfeld quote luminaries like Saul Bellow and Amy Tan talking about their unhappy childhoods. (They’re attracted to Dickensian details: we learn how, at the funeral of a friend who had died of leukemia, Tan’s mom led her to the side of the coffin and said, “This is what happens when you don’t listen to your mother.”) It’s that everything in the book is presented in the harshest light possible. Triple Package parents are said to instill in their children both a “superiority complex” and an “anxious uncertainty about [their] worth.” But why not say, instead, that Triple Package children are taught that they have potential, and that they will have to struggle to reach it? It amounts to much the same thing. But to advocate this sensible middle ground—to say that success comes from a combination of ambition, humility, and self-discipline—wouldn’t serve the book’s performative purpose, which is to present parents and children as players in a “Wuthering Heights”-like drama of Romantic destruction and transcendence.

There are, undoubtedly, benefits to thinking of one’s family in this way. (As a tiger cub myself, I have some idea.) Certain mistakes are easier to forgive, while certain freedoms are easier to grant. The attraction to the immoderate in tiger parenting can balance out the boredom of sustained self-discipline; it can also make inevitable interpersonal conflicts feel more normal. (“Of course we’re fighting: we’re a Tiger Family!”) Similarly, a certain humble-braggadocio—“I know I’m messed up, but I guess that’s just the price of being a striver!”—can make us more willing to enjoy the company of difficult people. Who knows: this particular interpretation of family life may actually, in some small way, be well-suited to inspiring academic achievement—or, at the very least, to making sense of the private, unglamorous sacrifices required to secure it.


Photograph by Bob Riha Jr/WireImage/Getty.




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