The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

  Capital is never enough for success in a capitalist society; drive is equally essential, and resentment can fuel drive. No emotion is cleverer than resentment, as Nietzsche scholar Robert Solomon wrote. It is “the one dependable emotional motive, constant and obsessive, slow-burning but totally dependable and durable.” For groups who arrive in America with a superiority complex, the sudden—sometimes traumatic—experience of disrespect and scorn can be a powerful motivator. Iranian Americans are another case in point.

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  IN THE UNITED STATES—and the West generally—antiquity means classical Greece and Rome. Ancient Persia is seen, if at all, through a Greek lens. Because the earliest Persian rulers left virtually no written histories of their own empire, most of what we know about Achaemenid Persia comes from a very limited number of Greek sources, including Xenophon’s Anabasis, Aeschylus’s Persians, and most important, Herodotus’s Histories. But the Greeks and Persians were bitter enemies, so Greek authors weren’t exactly impartial; imagine Saddam Hussein writing A History of the United States, 1990–2006. Greek historians refer to Persians as “the barbarians of Asia,” frequently portraying the ancient Persian kings as unctuous and decadent.

  To the ire of Iranians in America and around the world, Hollywood recently did the same. In the 2007 blockbuster film 300, the Spartan king Leonidas (played by Gerard Butler) exudes integrity and heroic masculinity, whereas the Persian king Xerxes is depicted as effeminate, corrupt, and monstrously body-pierced. As one Iranian American blogged, “I just can’t get over the humiliation that this stupid movie has brought us.”

  The film was humiliating to Iranians because they identify so deeply with the glories of ancient Persia. Many Americans may not know it, but Iran is Persia (Iran was called Persia in the West before 1935), and Persia once ruled the world.

  Founded around 500 BC, Achaemenid Persia was “a superpower like nothing the world had ever seen,” governing a three-continent-wide territory larger even than Rome’s would be. At its height, Persia ruled up to 42 million people—nearly a third of the world’s population at the time. This grand history is taught to every Iranian child and underlies what Middle East experts often refer to as the Persian “superiority complex.” “All Iranians,” says one Iranian American writer, “learn about their great empire.” They are taught that “Iran was the equal, if not the better, of Rome and Athens.” As Middle East analyst Kenneth Pollack observes, history is “a source of enormous pride” to Iranians:

  It has given them a widely remarked sense of superiority over all of their neighbors, and, ironically, while Tehran now refers to the United States by the moniker “Global Arrogance,” within the Middle East a stereotypical complaint against Iranians is their own arrogant treatment of others.

  Iran’s superiority complex has powered through the centuries, even in the face of stubborn historical realities. Alexander the Great may have conquered the Achaemenids in 324 BC, but Iranians turned this defeat into a source of cultural pride. As explained by Hooman Majd, grandson of an ayatollah and now a U.S. citizen, Iranians think of Alexander as:

  such a brute and ignoramus that he burned magnificent libraries along with the greatest city in the world, Persepolis, to the ground. But in a good example of the Persian superiority complex, even this villain is shown to have ultimately had the wisdom to recognize the superiority of the Persians by settling down (until his death) in Persia and marrying a blue-blooded Persian. What could be a better endorsement of the greatest civilization known to man?

  The Arab conquest of Persia in the mid-seventh century was another blow to Iranian pride, but once again not insurmountable. For hundreds of years afterward, Iranian literature depicted Arabs as “savage bedouins” who eat nothing but “camel’s milk and lizards” and “constantly fight among themselves.” With European domination of the Middle East, Iranian intellectuals were able to blame Iran’s backwardness on the Arab-Islamic destruction of Persia’s glorious civilization. In the novels of Iran’s most famous modern author, Sâdeq Hedâyat, Arabs were likened to “locusts and plague”; they were “black, with brutish eyes, dry beards beneath their chins, and ugly voices.” For much of the twentieth century, Iranian writers “equated Arab domination of Iran (and hence the advent of Islam) with Iran’s political and cultural downfall and glorified the pre-Islamic heritage of Iran.”

  Even today, a millennium and a half after the Arab conquest, Iranians insist they’re not Arab—they speak Farsi, not Arabic—and Iranian condescension toward Arabs remains strong. “Iranians don’t like being called Arabs,” says one Iranian American, self-critically, in an online Iranian newspaper. “If you call them Arabs by mistake, you might as well be calling them trash.”

  But centuries of subjugation and upheaval have taken their toll. Alongside the Iranian superiority complex, Middle Eastern experts have long observed a “tremendous sense of insecurity that runs right through the Iranian psyche.” This insecurity is particularly acute in relation to the West, which as Robert Graham has written, causes Iran to show two very different faces: “with its immediate neighbours . . . a sense of superiority,” while “with the West . . . a sense of not wanting to look inferior.” Historian and Yale professor Abbas Amanat, a native Iranian, believes this insecurity fuels Iran’s contemporary foreign policy; Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, he argues, is “in effect a national pursuit of empowerment” driven by “the mythical and psychological dimensions of defeat and deprivation at the hands of foreigners.”

  Thus, in addition to a deeply ingrained superiority complex, insecurity, too, was part of the cultural inheritance carried by Iranian immigrants to the United States. In America, this insecurity was exacerbated. Status loss, anxiety, resentment, and even trauma have been dominant themes of the Iranian experience in the United States, beginning with the hostage crisis in 1979.

  Like the Cuban Exiles, many Iranians suffered a precipitous status collapse when they fled to this country after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Professionals, scientists, and once powerful figures suddenly found themselves poor and almost unemployable. Particularly for the men, this was a traumatic loss of stature, which Hollywood has twice captured: in the tragic figure of Colonel Massoud Behrani in House of Sand and Fog (played by Ben Kingsley), who puts on a suit every morning so that his wife won’t know he works as a trash collector; and in the Iranian shopkeeper in Crash, whose medical student daughter barely saves him from committing a terrible, racially motivated crime.

  Moreover, Iranian Americans have frequently encountered severe prejudice and animus. When American hostages were seized in the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iranian flags were burned in public, and demonstrators carried signs saying, GO HOME DUMB IRANIANS, 10 IRANIANS EQUAL A WORM, and GIVE AMERICANS LIBERTY OR GIVE IRANIANS DEATH. This was a bitter irony for those Iranians who had fled to the United States precisely to escape the Islamic Revolution.

  Twenty years later, anti-Iranian hostility surged again in the United States when terrorists brought down the twin towers. One young Iranian American woman working in New York remembers thinking, “God, please don’t let them be Muslim or Iranian or Arab.” After 9/11, Iranian identity “became a stigma to be hidden,” causing feelings of “insecurity and even feelings of self-hatred and shame among second-generation Iranian-Americans.” For the last decade, Iranian Americans have had to deal with being lumped together with Arab terrorists and branded part of the “axis of evil.” Some Iranian parents tell their children not to volunteer their Iranian ancestry; in a hilarious, self-parodying Internet video, confident Iranians refuse to identify themselves as Iranian, claiming instead to be Italian. In the words of Iranian sociologist Mohsen Mobasher, who came to the United States in 1978, Iranian Americans feel like outcasts both from their home country and in their host country, where they have been “stigmatized and humiliated.”

  Young Iranians in the United States rankle painfully under this scorn and suspicion, as a recent su
rvey of second-generation Iranian Americans in Northern California confirmed. “When I say ‘I’m Iranian,’ they say, ‘You are [an] Iraqi?’” complained one eighteen-year-old. Others reported being called “Middle Easterners” and “hairy terrorist.” Negative portrayals of Iranians in the media are especially grating. Persians are “the kindest people,” said one fifteen-year-old girl, “but [the media] depicts us as vicious animals and we are not. They put Iran down so much in the news.”

  All this has led Iranians in the United States to feel an intense need to distinguish themselves, to acquire visible badges of accomplishment and respect. Study after study portrays the Iranian American community as extraordinarily status-conscious, valuing markers of prestige more even than income. “In Southern California,” one Iranian American reported, “every Mercedes you see belongs to an Iranian person. They can live in a little shack yet go out and buy themselves a Mercedes and drive around.” This status-consciousness is what television shows like Shahs of Sunset exploit, while paying much less attention to the hard work and drive that has allowed Iranian Americans to succeed. Iranian Americans often explicitly describe their motivation to succeed—and their parents’ determination for them to succeed—in terms of a need for prestige and respect. As one college student put it:

  The American ideal is to study what you want. . . . [T]he Iranian way is to pick something that is guaranteed to make money or guaranteed to be prestigious[;] study is done as a means to an end, not as an end unto itself. The Iranian parent or parents pick a few professions that their peers’ children have done well at. . . . Tara’s father wanted . . . her to be a dentist. My father wanted me to become a doctor, a pharmacist or at least a nurse.

  America has intensified Iranians’ attraction to a Persian identity, which among Iranian Americans today not only separates them from Arabs but also from the Islamic Republic of Iran. In one study, 95 percent of second-generation adolescent Iranian Americans said that Persian culture was “a central element in their sense of self.” Over 80 percent called themselves “Persian,” while only 2 percent said “Iranian.” Over half had taken Farsi language classes; many speak Farsi with their parents. Almost invariably, they were taught that Persian culture is older, richer, and deeper than American culture. Second-generation Iranians may be “confused as to exactly what constitutes” Persian culture, but they are “certainly sure” that it was “far superior” to American culture.

  They are also sure that succeeding is a requirement for Persian Americans. “All Iranians are successful,” said one boy. Academic achievement is taken for granted. “If you don’t get an A,” your parents “get upset with you.” This drive to succeed—a classic Triple Package mixture of confidence in their abilities and a need to prove themselves in the United States—is widespread and well internalized. There is “no problem,” said an eighteen-year-old, putting in “that extra effort to have the bigger house, it is like a form of sacrifice. Do the sacrifice and be ok with it and become successful. [That is how] I look at it.” Or in the words of a college sophomore, “We have to prove it . . . we have to carry the torch and show Americans that we are not terrorists.”

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  DESPITE THE RICHNESS and antiquity of their civilization, Indians in the United States, as in India itself, don’t focus so much on magnificent-history narratives, at least by comparison to Persians or Chinese. Instead, Indian superiority complexes tend to be rooted in the highly stratified nature of Indian society, with its bewildering array of caste, regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and other distinctions. The great majority of Indian immigrants in America come from the upper echelons of India’s social hierarchy.* In the United States, however, they suddenly find themselves outsiders, not fully accepted, often the objects of discrimination. As a result, Indian American sociologists have written about an “ethnic anxiety” widespread in their community, and this anxiety helps explain the extraordinary drive that has made them, by any number of measures, the most successful Census-tracked ethnic group in the country.

  Although hard numbers are impossible to find, it’s widely agreed that most Indian Americans, apart from Sikhs and Muslims, hail from the three highest traditional Hindu “castes” (or varna): Brahmans (priests, scholars), Kshatriyas (warriors, royalty), or Vaishyas (merchants). For centuries, some say millennia (everything about caste is controversial, from its origins to its basic nature), caste was all-important in India. Those at the bottom, the out-caste or “untouchables,” were barely considered human beings. Fit only for such unclean occupations as removing sewage, cleaning latrines, handling animal carcasses, and disposing of corpses, they were forbidden to touch members of the upper castes; they could even be “required to place clay pots around their necks to prevent their spit from polluting the ground.” One step up were groups such as the low-caste Nadars, who could not wear shoes or use umbrellas in the rain; the “master symbol of their inferiority” was the requirement that their women bare their breasts in public.

  For obvious reasons, virtually all of modern India’s most famous names have been high-caste. Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, and (Nehru’s daughter) Indira Gandhi were Brahman; Mohandas Gandhi was born into the Vaishya caste. Even today, the high-caste, who represent about a third of the population, still dominate Indian society. “Just try and check how many brahmins there are as Supreme Court judges,” commented novelist Arundhati Roy in 2000, “how many brahmins there are who run political parties.” Although the Indian Constitution has formally abolished untouchability and prohibits caste-based discrimination, high-caste status remains in India a deeply ingrained source of superiority.

  But what Westerners know as “caste” only scratches the surface of Indian social stratification. Many Indian subgroups have deep-seated, often cross-cutting superiority claims. Bengalis pride themselves on being India’s intellectuals. (Luminaries Amartya Sen and Siddhartha Mukherjee are both from Bengali Brahman families.) Gujaratis, perhaps the largest Indian group in America, are famous not only in India but all over the world as businessmen; in 2008, a Gujarati website noted triumphantly that two of the top three, and four of the top ten Indian billionaires were Gujaratis. Sikhs, who number about 200,000 in the United States, have their own superiority story as, historically, the armed protectors of Hinduism—a reputation so strong that, according to Ved Mehta, the eldest sons of Hindu families in Punjab used to be raised as Sikhs, so that they could serve as protectors of their families. There are also competing north/south snobberies, in which supposedly fairer-skinned “Aryans” look down on the mostly southern, darker-skinned “Dravidians,” who in turn think they’re smarter and more academically successful. On top of all this, many Indian immigrants in America are graduates of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, which are like the Ivy League—only far more competitive.

  Some of these sources of Indian superiority can be, simultaneously, sources of insecurity as well. At least since the beginning of the twentieth century, perceived “Brahman dominance” has provoked resentment and fueled anti-Brahman movements, including among high-caste, non-Brahman leaders. But the sting of Brahman dominance pales in comparison to the insecurity and resentment generated by centuries of British colonial rule, with its famous condescension, high-handed oppression, cooption of elites, and “white man’s burden.” When Tagore renounced his knighthood after the Amritsar massacre in 1919, he was only one of many Indians to protest the “glaring” “shame” and “humiliation” inflicted by England on his countrymen, who “suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.”

  Thus most Indian immigrants to the United States bring with them double or even triple layers of simultaneous superiority and insecurity. In America, they run headlong into a totally different set of social hierarchies, in which their old superiority narratives don’t matter even as their insecurity intensifies. The experience of exclusion, scorn, even contempt has been a powerful theme for many Indian Americans, at all social levels.r />
  “I always felt so embarrassed by my name,” remembers Pulitzer Prize–winner Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, who now goes by Jhumpa; “you feel like you’re causing someone pain just by being who you are.” The popular claim that America is a “Christian country,” built on “Judeo-Christian values,” puts Indians on the outside, and Indian Americans are occasionally teased about “worshipping cows.” Academic superstars back home, Indian university students sometimes report a very different reception in America:

  If there’s an Indian student who just cooked, and then gone to the office, and he’s smelling like curry, professors have actually singled people out and told them, ‘Why don’t you shower?’ And ‘why don’t you spray some cologne or something before you come to class because you smell like curry all the time’ and I found that very funny, but at the same time very demeaning as well.

  After 9/11, South Asians of all faiths became targets of American anti-Muslim, anti-Arab suspicion and violence. With their turbans, Sikh men are especially likely to be singled out, pegged as “terrorists” instead of protectors. (“You fucking Arab rag-head, you’re all going to die, we’re going to kill every one of you,” a white man shouted at a Sikh in one post-9/11 episode.) Indian cabdrivers report being spat on and called “Arabs.”

  Racially, Indians in the United States today are regarded as Asian, although for a long time they were considered Caucasian, but the overriding fact is that they are perceived as nonwhite. (In 1923, the Supreme Court managed to hold that a native Punjabi “of high-caste Hindu stock,” although perhaps “Caucasian,” was not “white” and therefore ineligible for the privileges of “free white citizens.”) Many Indian Americans attest to the continuing prejudice their community faces. To attract more business, Indian American hotel owners typically “whiten” their lobbies—hiring whites as desk clerks. “I think you have to,” said one owner. “If you’re running an upscale hotel with an Indian at the front desk, you know, unfortunately we still live in a society that, uh, doesn’t look upon us kindly at times.” Another observed that a European manning the front desk was better than an Indian: