by Amy Chua
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IN JUNE 2012, the Pew Research Center released a report called The Rise of Asian Americans, describing Asians as “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.”
We’ll use “Asian American” the same way the Census Bureau (as well as Pew) does, covering all U.S. residents “having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent.” But for our purposes, “Asian American” isn’t a very useful classification. It embraces vastly disparate groups with entirely different cultures, including two of the most successful groups in the nation (Indian and Chinese Americans) and several of the poorest (such as Hmong, Laotian, and Cambodian Americans).*
Among the most successful Asian American groups, one well-known phenomenon is the breathtaking accomplishment of their youth, who top list after list of prestigious awards and competitions. For example, over the last five years, twenty-three of the fifty top prizewinners of the Intel Science Talent search—a nationwide high school competition that George H. W. Bush called the “Super Bowl of science”—were Asian Americans, overwhelmingly of Indian, Chinese, and to a lesser extent Korean heritage.
The résumés of these Intel winners are terrifying to even your run-of-the-mill Tiger Mom. Take Amy Chyao of Richardson, Texas, a 2012 finalist. By attaching a nitric oxide donor to titanium dioxide nanotubes, Amy “synthesized a nanoparticle,” as the New York Times reported, which “essentially is a remotely triggered bomb that attacks cancer cells,” offering a potential noninvasive alternative to chemotherapy for deep tumors. The pretty seventeen-year-old is the co-author of two articles in peer-reviewed journals, has perfect ACT scores, was first in her high school class of 1,473, is an accomplished cellist, and founded a nonprofit organization to teach immigrant children spelling. Dozens of similar bios can be found among the Intel winners: for example, the saxophone-playing Chinese American teen who developed “a treatment for phenylketonuria” while serving as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, or the Indian American teen who “gave the first non-trivial analytic lower bound for odd perfect numbers” and was also crowned homecoming king.
Asians and Asian Americans constitute 30–50 percent of the student bodies at the country’s leading music programs. At the Juilliard School of Music, they make up more than half the students; the two largest groups are Chinese and Korean violinists and pianists. The quadrennial International Tchaikovsky Competition, perhaps the most prestigious music competition worldwide, has a junior section awarding prizes to young musicians in violin, piano, and cello. Since 1992, precisely four Americans have won first prizes in any instrument; their names were Emily Shie, Jennifer Koh, Sirena Huang, and Noah Lee.
Indians, meanwhile, have cornered the market in spelling bees. In 1999, the winner of the nationwide Scripps National Spelling Bee was Nupur Lala, a fourteen-year-old from Tampa, Florida, with an Indian mother and a Pakistani Indian father. After the documentary Spellbound made Nupur famous—and ESPN began broadcasting the Bee finals live—America’s Indian community got serious about competitive spelling. In 2012, the champion and first two runners-up were all Indian Americans; it was the fifth consecutive year an Indian American took first prize.
And lest it be thought that Asian Americans dominate only in fierce but narrow single-discipline endeavors, consider the United States Presidential Scholars, honoring one young man and woman from each of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, as well as thirty-seven others, not only on the basis of academic success, but also artistic excellence, community service, leadership, and commitment to high ideals. In 2012, of the 141 well-rounded winners of this award, approximately 48 were Asian American; in 2011, it was 52. Again, the overwhelming majority of these were Chinese and Indian.
Unsurprisingly, these hypersuccessful Asian American teens are outperforming other groups on standardized tests and in admissions to elite universities. Overall, Asian American SAT scores are 143 points (out of 2400) above average, including a 63-point edge over whites, with the gap apparently increasing. About 5 percent of the U.S. college-age population, Asians make up 19 percent of the undergraduates at Harvard, 16 percent at Yale, 19 percent at Princeton, and 19 percent at Stanford. Indeed, if admissions were based solely on National Merit Scholarship and SAT scores, these percentages would be even higher, and some believe that there is an implicit “anti-Asian admissions bias” in the Ivy League. At CalTech, said to base admissions solely on academic criteria, nearly 40 percent of the students are Asian.
Turning to adults, Indian Americans have the highest median household income of any Census-tracked ethnic group in the United States: $90,500 per year (the figure for the entire U.S. population is $51,200). An extraordinary 44 percent of Indian American households make over $100,000 a year—again, the highest rate of any ethnic group—with 12 percent over $200,000. (The nationwide figures are 21 percent over $100,000 and 4 percent over $200,000.) Meanwhile, Chinese Americans are not too far behind, with exceptionally high median household income and strongly disproportionate representation in the higher income brackets. In fact, Taiwanese Americans have the second highest household income of any ethnic group in the country, just below Indians; their median individual income is even higher than Indians’.
Indian and Chinese American success has tended so far to be relatively conventional and prestige-oriented, starting with National Merit Scholarships, valedictorian titles, and brand-name schools. It’s no coincidence that East Asian American musical virtuosos typically play classical music, as opposed to jazz or rock. Their professional successes have similarly been concentrated in fields perceived as practical, stable, “respectable,” and “impressive.” Clichéd as it sounds, there are in fact a disproportionate number of Asian Americans in engineering and the sciences, although career aspirations are beginning to change among the young. Since 1965, Indian Americans have won three Nobel Prizes, and Chinese Americans have won six.
Although many Chinese and Indian American families place a special premium on scholarliness, both groups have achieved remarkable business success. Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, Guitar Hero cofounder Kai Huang, and venture capitalist Alfred Lin are all Chinese American. The Indian American list is even more impressive. The Bose Corporation was founded by Amar Gopal Bose, son of a Bengali immigrant, whose 2011 net worth was estimated at $1 billion. Indra Nooyi, a first-generation Indian immigrant, is the CEO of PepsiCo. Other companies with Indian Americans as their present or recent CEOs or presidents include: Sun Microsystems, MasterCard, United Airlines, Motorola, Adobe Systems, Citigroup, Citibank, HSBC North America, McKinsey, and US Airways.
Indian Americans also appear to be bigger high-finance risk takers than other Asian Americans. Another billionaire, Vinod Khosla, came to America from India for graduate school, cofounded Sun Microsystems, and became a partner at the legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Khosla is just one of dozens of Indian American Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. In fact, Indians have founded more Silicon Valley start-ups than any other immigrant group—more than the four next immigrant groups (British, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese) combined.
To a greater extent than any other Asian group, Indian Americans are prominent in politics, the public sphere, and the media. Bobby Jindal—who got into both Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School but opted to attend Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar—is the governor of Louisiana. Nikki Haley, the daughter of immigrant Sikh parents, is the governor of South Carolina. Featured on the cover of Time magazine as the man “busting Wall Street,” Preet Bharara is the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. With their own TV shows, former Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria and Emmy-winning Dr. Sanjay Gupta are household names. Other Indian American public intellectuals include New Yorker contributor Dr. Atul Gawande and Pulitzer Prize winner Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee (at an awards ceremo
ny in Boston 2012, the former introduced the latter by joking, “I thought I had the Indian-Rhodes-Scholar-Harvard-Medical-School thing cornered”).
By contrast, Chinese American success has been more restricted in scope. There are not many (or possibly any) prominent Chinese American talking heads, and Chinese Americans are conspicuously underrepresented at the top levels of corporate America. As of 2013, there were five Indian American CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, but no Chinese Americans.
In part, discrimination and stereotyping may explain the shortage of Chinese Americans in leadership positions. But as several Asian activists have argued, part of the problem may also lie in a tendency within East Asian culture to encourage deference to authority, while discouraging the self-promotion and quarterback mentality said to be necessary to leadership success in America.
We’ll have much more to say about all this later, but the bottom line is that, for all their differences, both Indian and Chinese Americans are paradigmatic Triple Package groups. In both cases, it’s been Triple Package insecurity—not only economic, but also social and racial—that has driven these groups toward narrowly defined, prestige-oriented avenues of success. And it’s a Triple Package dynamic that will put pressure on these constraints going forward.
The Triple Package has an arc. Basically, Chinese and Indian Americans are today where Jewish Americans were two or three generations ago. Over 65 percent of Chinese Americans and 87 percent of Indian American adults are foreign-born; over 90 percent of both these groups are either immigrants or their children. (By contrast, only about 15 percent of American Jewish adults are foreign-born.) Chinese and Indian parents are hardly the first immigrant parents to want their children to be doctors, not poets. But as we’ll discuss, the inner dynamic of the Triple Package, as it interacts with American society, will lead young Chinese and Indian Americans increasingly to balk and bridle at the conformity their parents try to impose on them.
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TURNING, THEN, TO THE JEWS: it’s generally much harder to talk about Jewish wealth than that of any other group. Exaggerated or even patently false claims of Jewish economic “control” have in the past led to discrimination, ghettoization, and some of the worst atrocities in history. As a result, while one can relatively freely explore the phenomenon of, say, a 3 percent Chinese minority owning 70 percent of a country’s corporate wealth (as was true of Indonesia in the 1990s), it is far more difficult to ascertain or even discuss the extent of Jewish economic influence. The U.S. Census Bureau used to compile data on religion, but this was largely discontinued after World War II, and today the Census is barred by law from asking mandatory questions about individuals’ faith.
But the fact is that Jews are the quintessential successful minority. Jews do not appear to have been particularly economically successful in antiquity—but that’s about the last time they weren’t, at least when left alone to pursue their livelihoods. Today, about 43 percent of the world’s Jews (5.9 million) live in Israel, and about 40 percent (5.4 million) in the United States, making Jewish Americans about 1.7 percent of the U.S. adult population.
American Jews are disproportionately successful by pretty much any economic measure, except maybe something like “fortunes amassed through golf.” (Of the ninety players in the 2010 Masters, roughly zero were Jewish.) Four of the country’s top ten highest-paid CEOs in 2011 were Jewish: Disney’s Robert Iger; Coach’s Lew Frankfort; Polo’s Ralph Lauren; and Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg. (For purposes of comparison, no Mormons or Asian Americans made the top ten.) But these CEOs are wage slaves compared with the ten top-earning hedge fund managers, four of whom in 2011 were also Jewish: Jim Simons (2011 earnings: $2.1 billion); Carl Icahn ($2 billion); Steve Cohen ($600 million); and Bruce Kovner ($210 million).
In 2009, a reporter counted the Jews on the Forbes 400: 20 of the top 50 were Jews, as were 139 overall. Of the people on the 2011 Forbes list who made their fortunes in real estate, 60 to 70 percent were Jewish. Almost twenty of the forty billionaires who have pledged to leave half their estates to charity are Jewish, including New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, media mogul Barry Diller, and Diller’s fashion-designer wife Diane von Fürstenberg (formerly Diane, Princess of Fürstenberg, but born Diane Halfin to a Jewish Romanian father and a Jewish Greek Holocaust survivor mother).
Jewish success extends well beyond commerce and finance. The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre, better known as the Tony, was first given out in 1947. Since then, 69 percent of the Tony-winning composers and 70 percent of the lyricists have been Jewish. Many of America’s best-loved comics—not Charlie Chaplin, contrary to popular belief, but the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Bette Midler, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, and more recently Andy Samberg, Jon Stewart, Adam Sandler, and Sarah Silverman—have been Jewish. Winners of the Academy Award for best director: 37 percent Jewish. Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction: 51 percent Jewish (for fiction: 13 percent).
Certain professions seem to be particularly attractive to Jews. In 2007, Reuters reported that 29 percent of America’s psychiatrists were Jewish, as were 13 percent of its physicians. As early as the 1930s, Jews already filled New York City’s law offices; by one estimate, 65 percent of New York’s lawyers were Jewish at that time. Today, three of the nine justices on the United State Supreme Court are Jewish. Architecture superstars Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and Louis Kahn are Jewish. Advice-giving is another favorite Jewish occupation. Ann Landers was born Esther Pauline Friedman; Abigail Van Buren (“Dear Abby”) was her identical twin sister, Pauline Esther Friedman; Miss Manners was born Judith Perlman.
Because the Census does not track religion, there’s no authoritative measure of overall Jewish income. Poverty certainly exists among American Jews and may be rising; according to a recently released United Jewish Association report, nearly one in four Jewish households in New York City is poor. Nevertheless, numerous studies confirm that, overall, Jewish income is higher than that of any religious group or Census-tracked ethnic or national-origin group in the country. Jewish median household income in 2010 was probably in the range of $97,000 to $98,000, almost twice the national median. (Indian Americans, the highest-earning Census-tracked group, had a 2010 median household income of about $90,500.) Research dating back decades indicates that Jewish income exceeds that of Protestants by up to 246 percent and of white Catholics by up to 243 percent. According to Pew, 46 percent of Jewish households in 2006 were making at least $100,000 a year (again, the highest rate for any religious or ethnic group in the country). For Reform Jews, 55 percent had incomes of $100,000 or more in 2006; for the nation as a whole, the figure was 18 percent.
Jewish intellectuals have been influential in American public life on all sides of the political spectrum. Both the 1960s New Left and the neoconservative movement a few decades later were heavily influenced by Jewish thinkers (in some cases, the same thinkers). Three of the leading opinion writers for the New York Times today are Jewish: Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, and Paul Krugman. The extraordinary Jewish contribution to American academia, from the sciences to the liberal arts, has been well documented. “[I]t is impossible,” concludes one author, “to find an academic domain in which Jews have not played a disproportionate role.”
Jews are also awkwardly prominent in Hollywood, a fact that many Jews prefer not to highlight, an exception being journalist Joel Stein, who in 2008 noticed that:
When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago . . . , the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Execut
ive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan.
Worldwide, though Jews make up only about 0.2 percent of the total population, a fifth of all Nobel laureates have been Jewish. As of 2007, of the forty-two U.S. winners of the Nobel Prize for economics, twenty had been Jewish, and several more have won since, including Mr. Krugman. Roughly 2 percent of the U.S. population, Jews account for an estimated 36 percent of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded to Americans.
But perhaps the most important contribution made by Jewish scientists in America came in the 1940s, after anti-Semitic persecution had led to a flight of incalculable scientific talent out of Europe. America became home to some of the greatest physicists of all time, including Edward Teller (known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb”), John von Neumann (a founder of game theory as well as a principal member of the Manhattan Project), and of course Albert Einstein. Together with Robert Oppenheimer, a native-born Jewish American, these men played a critical role in enabling the United States to win the race for the atom bomb.
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IRANIAN AND LEBANESE AMERICANS are also among the nation’s most successful national-origin groups in terms of median household income. In later chapters, we’ll discuss these groups in more detail. Here is a snapshot.
Iranian immigration to America does not track European immigration. From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, the number of known Iranian immigrants in the United States was 130. Only in the latter part of the twentieth century did they begin to arrive in significant numbers, mostly as students before the 1979 Revolution, followed by a flood of exiles and refugees, including royalists as well as persecuted minorities. In all, according to the Census, their population is about 450,000.
