by Amy Chua
Even foreign is not a bad thing. I was just at a hotel a few weekends ago, and there was a French lady at the front desk. . . . It gives some, you know, flavor to the place; it’s cool to me. . . . You’re not going to get that [impression] from an Indian, no way.
Such prejudice is a painful reality for many Indian Americans, but once again, the perverse combination of superiority and insecurity can be a powerful motivator. Turning down plum jobs offered to him in India after graduating from IIT Delhi, Rajat Gupta came to the United States in 1971 to attend Harvard Business School. Gupta, according to journalist Anita Raghavan, was descended from “one of India’s oldest bloodlines.” His father had been British-educated, a distinction enjoyed by only 0.1 percent of India’s population during the Raj. And “[i]n a society where skin color was a defining force, both Rajat and his father, Ashwini, were fair-skinned, a clear advantage that afforded them a natural superiority.” Yet Gupta, despite being at the top of his class at Harvard, was passed over by every firm on Wall Street, including (initially) the consulting giant McKinsey. Twenty years later, he would be McKinsey’s chief executive.
Sociologist Bandana Purkayastha argues that—following a pattern long familiar in immigrant communities in the United States—many Indian American parents “try hard to succeed as ‘model minorities,’” demanding high achievement from their children in order to “distance themselves from those who they see as the ‘real’ minorities,” namely blacks and Hispanics. Other South Asian American parents impose similar demands on their children simply because they believe that nonwhites in the United States have to outperform in order to succeed. Either way, “there is an ongoing pressure on their children to be better, smarter, more high-achieving compared to their white peers.”
Second-generation Indian Americans’ racial attitudes are extraordinarily complex. Young South Asians who date African Americans or Latinos may well experience intense emotional conflict and frustration with their parents. Some who grow up in relatively affluent white suburbs may be more insulated from American racism, but the color line in the United States is difficult to escape, and most young Indian Americans feel an “ethnic anxiety” of one kind or another. Trying to “whiten” their complexion or appearance is a surprisingly common theme among Indian American adolescents. One twenty-three-year-old Indian American professional recalls:
I always thought that because I was brown, had more hair—didn’t look like an Abercrombie boy—I was disadvantaged in the race for women’s affections. Therefore, I had to get their attention in alternate arenas. I settled on academic achievement and success at school politics. . . . In my case, the insecurity as a brown American has been particularly acute post-9/11. The imagery of Abu Ghraib (naked brown male bodies sexually humiliated by white U.S. soldiers) resonated strongly with me.
The superiority complex being passed down to second-generation Indian Americans differs from those their parents brought with them. The cultures of America’s immigrant communities are never pure incarnations of age-old traditions; they are inevitably reconfigured through their confrontation with American society. In the United States, regional and caste distinctions have become much less significant for Indians (although it can still be an issue in marriages). Many younger Indian Americans grow up rarely hearing caste mentioned in their families. Such distinctions are generally viewed as discriminatory; moreover, the experience of being “Indian” (or “South Asian”) in America has united the Indian American community across caste and regional divides.
Instead, Indian Americans have constructed a new “‘superior culture’ narrative.” Part of this new superiority complex has to do with family. Indian American families are extremely tight-knit, with the lowest out-marriage rate among all Asians. According to a recent Pew study, almost 70 percent of Indians in the United States (more than any other Asian group) believe that families from their country are stronger, and embody better values, than American families. A sense of moral or spiritual superiority is often in play as well. Many Indian Americans are emphasizing their Hinduism in new ways (an identity that excludes the approximately 10 percent of Indian Americans who are Muslim as well as the roughly 18 percent Christian, 5 percent Sikh, and 2 percent Jain). A boom in Hindu temple building is taking place across the United States, even though weekly temple-based worship involves a transformation of Hinduism as practiced in India (traditional Hinduism is decentralized, without a fixed liturgical canon or regular services); these temples also serve as social centers, reinforcing a communal Indian identity.
But the most important piece of Indian Americans’ superiority complex today may be the feedback loop from the community’s outsize success. It’s hard to find an Indian in the United States who doesn’t know at some level that Indian Americans are hypersuccessful—more successful than whites. As a result, the Indian American community has developed a strong, if unspoken, belief in their “distinctive and superior family/ethnic culture.” This sense of superiority, combined with persistent ethnic anxiety, is a classic Triple Package recipe for drive.
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INDIAN AMERICANS ARE not the only Asians who experience racism and discrimination, as a recent Pew study confirmed. In New York magazine, Wesley Yang offered this description:
Sometimes I’ll glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what I see. Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-green-toned skin. An expression that is nearly reptilian in its impassivity. . . . Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it. . . . Not just people “who are good at math” and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.
In case it’s not obvious, there’s nothing intrinsically empowering about being the object of discrimination and prejudice. For anyone, including members of groups with a superiority complex, the accumulated weight of having the “wrong” skin color or facial features, the relentless tide of stereotypes and media caricatures, can eventually be too much, crushing the spirit. (Although, for the record, Wesley Yang has plainly not been crushed.) And according to many Asian Americans, “racially gendered stereotypes” have made the situation worse.
In the United States, icons of male leadership—whether in Hollywood films, sports, or corporate boardrooms—are almost never Asian. (This is part of the reason so many Asian Americans were euphoric over Jeremy Lin’s superstar run with the New York Knicks.) Cultural attitudes play a role too. “White people,” said Columbia law professor Tim Wu in an interview with Yang, “have this instinct that is really important: to give off the impression that they’re only going to do the really important work. You’re a quarterback. It’s a kind of arrogance that Asians are trained not to have.” (Self-promotion is not encouraged in Confucian cultures, which view modesty, humility, and self-improvement as core virtues.)
Bullying of East Asian kids at school may be on the rise. A 2004 study of New York City public schools found that attacks on Chinese children, both verbal and physical, far outnumbered those against blacks and Latinos. Reasons for this harassment apparently include not only the physical size differences between Chinese schoolchildren and their peers, but also the perception that Chinese students are high achievers favored by their teachers. In a 2010 incident in Philadelphia, twenty-six Asian students were beaten up by non-Asians; thirteen were sent to a hospital.
Episodes of this kind can have cruel and long-lasting effects. Researchers have found that Chinese American students are not only harassed more, but show higher levels of depressive symptoms. But contrary to the harassers’ intentions, the targeting of smaller and more studious kids can also in some cases be a motivating spur. One variant of this spur is the proverbial “Some day you’ll all be working for me” mind-set. Another, perhaps unique, is Yul Kwon’s.
As a child, Kwon remembers bein
g repeatedly bullied and beaten up at school by kids who called him “chink” or “gook.” Kwon says he became reclusive and suffered from anxiety disorders. But he went on to graduate from Stanford University and Yale Law School—and then to win Survivor in 2006, partly through physical and strategic prowess that earned him the titles “Ringleader,” “Puppetmaster,” and “Godfather.” Selected as one of People magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive, Kwon told an interviewer, “However improbable it might be that I would end up in front of a camera, the underlying roots of my insecurities help to explain how I got here.”
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BEYOND SCORN, fear is a second source of goading insecurity active in America’s disproportionately successful groups—fear of being unable to survive. The dangers are both real and imagined, the fear both rational and irrational, mixing material worries with the deeper anxieties that come from being an outsider.
All of America’s most successful groups today are outsiders in one way or another, and all may suffer this fear to some extent, but Jews are the paradigm case. “Fear of being persecuted and even murdered solely for being a Jew resides in just about every Jew’s psyche,” asserts Dennis Prager, the nationally syndicated talk-radio host. Not all Jews would agree with Prager, but many would probably endorse author Daniel Smith’s only slightly less dramatic expression of the same point:
As a Jew . . . you are forced to live in a world in which you are—for perplexing, unfathomable reasons—not only the object of a widespread psychotic rage but also, as the very consequence of that rage, urged and expected to associate all the more strongly with your heritage. Indeed, you are urged and expected to act as a kind of personal repository for nearly 6,000 years of collective memory and as a bearer of an entire people’s hopes for surviving. . . . You don’t want to be anxious? You don’t want to be neurotic? Tough. You were born into anxiety.
A history of persecution can produce a variety of psychological reactions, including despair, paralysis, surrender, even shame. Another reaction, however, is a compulsion to rise, to get hold of money or power and cling to it—to be so successful that you either can’t be targeted or at least have the resources to escape. Franz Kafka, who was Jewish, wrote in a 1920 letter to a Catholic friend that the Jews’ “insecure position, insecure within themselves, insecure among people,” makes “Jews believe they possess only whatever they hold in their hands or grip between their teeth” and feel that “only tangible possessions give them a right to live.”
Jews are not the only group to fear for their survival. Mormons were long persecuted. Many Cuban Exiles and African immigrants fleeing oppressive regimes had lost everything before they arrived in this country. And in these communities, too, parents often communicate a sense of life’s precariousness to their children. Hence the credo of many immigrant homes: they can take away your home, your business, even your homeland, but never your education—so study harder.
We won’t say more about this dynamic here, because we’re going to explore it in the next chapter. Instead we turn to a very different kind of insecurity, which is even more common among successful groups, but which (like every other kind of insecurity, it seems) is again especially vivid in Jews. This insecurity stems not from persecution, but from parents—although some might say the two are not mutually exclusive.
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IMMIGRANT CHILDREN FREQUENTLY feel a need to redeem their parents’ sacrifices, but in Jewish culture, there seems to be an additional turn of the screw: never-ending guilt.
The stereotypical “Jewish mother” is by now an old and worn-out figure, but one of her best-loved features was her power to induce guilt. In a famous 1960 Broadway sketch, Elaine May and Mike Nichols portrayed a Jewish mother telephoning her scientist son, who has just helped the country launch its first rocket ship, to complain that he never calls. (“Is it so hard to pick up a phone?”) Suffocating devotion is of course on display, but the biggest laugh comes when the mother communicates a different and quite peculiar message. She tells her son she’s been so worried about him that she had to see a doctor so her “nerves” could be “X-rayed.”
“Mother,” he replies, “I feel awful.”
“If I could believe that, I’d be the happiest mother in the world,” she says. “That’s a mother’s prayer.”
Why does the mother in this stereotype want her son to “feel awful”? In part because she wants him to worry about her; in part because she wants to be needed. At the same time, however, the message is that a child should always feel he’s doing something to make his mother unhappy—or to put it the other way, that nothing he does is ever enough. This message is suggested by a different Jewish mother joke recounted by historian Lawrence J. Epstein:
A Jewish girl becomes president and says to her mother, “You’ve got to come to the inauguration, Mom.” The mother says, “All right, I’ll go, I’ll go. What am I going to wear? It’s so cold. Why did you have to become president? What kind of job is that? You’ll have nothing but tsuris.” But she goes to the inauguration, and as her daughter is being sworn in by the chief justice, the mother turns to the senator next to her and says, “You see that girl up there? Her brother’s a doctor.”
There may be a hint of sexism or female competitiveness here, with the mother favoring her doctor son over her president daughter. But the fundamental lesson applies to sons and daughters alike: not even as president should you feel your parents are happy with you. If you become president, you could have been a doctor; if a doctor, you could have been president.
The “domineering” Jewish mother who figures in these jokes and who came famously to life in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint seems to have sprung into existence in the second half of the twentieth century. Previously, the Jewish mother had been a nurturing, matzo-ball mother; according to the cultural critic Martha Ravits, the new incarnation was a “construct developed by male writers in the United States in the 1960s.”
Parental dissatisfaction was also the province of Jewish fathers. In the desperately poor immigrant communities of early twentieth-century New York, Jewish men tended to be distant from their children, and “disappointment” was “often the only thing [they] could clearly communicate.” As countless Jewish authors would later suggest, these fathers’ disappointment with their children, especially their sons, may have been a redirection of their own “self-perception of failure,” their own embarrassment at having to take menial or peddling work, their inability to provide a better life for their families. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman movingly portrays one such father. Isaac Rosenfeld’s widely read 1946 novel Passage from Home describes a son “forever disappointed in my father, just as, I know, he was disappointed in me.”
None of which means that for Jewish parents, the child isn’t also the center of the parental universe, the apple of their eye. Roth may have captured it best:
[W]hat was it with these Jewish parents . . . that they were able to make us little Jewish boys believe ourselves to be princes on the one hand, unique as unicorns on the one hand, geniuses and brilliant like nobody has ever been brilliant and beautiful before in the history of childhood—saviors and sheer perfection on the one hand, and such bumbling, incompetent, thoughtless, helpless, selfish, evil little . . . ingrates, on the other!
Needless to say, not all Jews are insecure, and Woody Allen notwithstanding, not all Jewish stereotypes are racked by doubt, neurosis, and anxiety. “Jewish American Princesses,” for example, are supposed to be just about the opposite of insecure. Many Jewish American mothers and fathers today affirmatively object to making kids feel they have to achieve in order to satisfy their parents. In fact, Jewish insecurity has been lessening on several fronts—Roth’s generation may have been the last to feel that their Jewishness made them existential outsiders in the United States—which, as we’ll discuss in a later chapter, could portend a decline in Jewish success.
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THE JEWISH CAS
E may be the most spectacular—or at least the most satirized, and certainly the most psychoanalyzed—but the phenomenon of children feeling they must succeed in order not to disappoint their parents is of course far broader, with special prominence in immigrant families. Children who have seen their mothers and fathers working double shifts as maids or restaurant workers, devoting all their savings to their kids’ education, often feel an internal pressure to live up to their parents’ dreams and expectations—to make their parents’ sacrifices worthwhile.
Florida senator Marco Rubio, speaking at the 2012 Republican National Convention, poignantly (if self-servingly) recalled his Cuban immigrant father “who had worked for many years as a banquet bartender. . . . He stood behind a bar in the back of the room all those years, so one day I could stand behind a podium in the front of a room.” Rubio amplifies on this theme in his autobiography. When, as a young man, he thought of how much his parents had sacrificed for him, he would pray at night that he could “make them proud. I pray that You let them live long enough so that they can know that all their hard work and all their sacrifices were not in vain.”
In a study of over five thousand immigrants’ children, researchers found “again and again” the same anxiety about redeeming parental sacrifice, driving the second generation to excel:
Perceiving the sacrifices made by their parents, ostensibly on their behalf, not a small amount of guilt tinges the children’s sense of obligation toward their parents and spurs their motivation to achieve—a dynamic that in turn can give immigrant parents a degree of psychological leverage over their children.
