newyorker | 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.”
