The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

  My grandparents were Holocaust survivors who literally met each other on the way to Auschwitz. Their entire families were wiped out (with the exception of one uncle). It was odd for anyone in my parents’ generation to have grandparents. Food was not to be left on our plates. If we intermarried, we were finishing Hitler’s work. The Holocaust was omnipresent.

  The precarious nature of the Jewish people was often emphasized during my youth. Would America just spit us out if it became convenient? Would Israel be wiped off the map with one push of a button? Did that police officer give my father a ticket just because he was wearing a yarmulke?

  The fiercely protective, defensive attitude so many Jews hold toward Israel is probably due in large part to Israel’s near-mythic status (among Jews) as a bulwark against worldwide anti-Semitism—the one country on earth that will never turn on its Jews, the one place where Jews can really be at home. With Triple Package indefatigability, Jews have gained in wealth and power, but the fear underlying it all should not be minimized. Radio host Dennis Prager says:

  Jews are probably the most insecure group in the world. This may come as a surprise to most non-Jews since Jews are widely regarded as particularly powerful. But Jews’ power and Jews’ insecurity are not mutually contradictory. In fact, Jews’ power derives in large measure from their insecurity. The stronger the Jews’ influence, Jews believe, the less likely they are to be hurt again.

  If insecurity is a spur to Jewish success, it comes at a psychological price.

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  SO FAR WE’VE EXAMINED pathologies associated with extreme insecurity and (in the case of some Asian Americans) impulse control. The pain these pathologies inflict is typically suffered by the individuals afflicted with them, like the child made miserable by internalizing too much parental pressure. By contrast, the harms associated with superiority complexes tend to be inflicted on others, which makes this element of the Triple Package potentially the most nefarious. Group supremacy claims have been an unrivaled source of oppression, war, and genocide throughout history.

  To be sure, a group superiority complex somehow feels less ugly when it serves as an armor against majority prejudices and hostility. America’s disproportionately successful groups are all ethnic or religious minorities; it’s easier to get away with a superiority complex when your group is a minority in a society that harbors lingering hostility or suspicion toward you. America’s Triple Package groups are fighting fire with fire, so to speak. But the dark underside of their superiority feelings shouldn’t be forgotten.

  Being “deeply proud of Chinese culture” can easily shade into “We’ll disown you if you marry someone non-Chinese.” Anti-Zionists such as Noam Chomsky point out that early-twentieth-century Jewish settlers in Palestine viewed the Arab population with contempt, calling them “half-savage peoples,” “wild men,” “dishonest,” and “cowardly.” Persian superiority implies the inferiority of all other Middle Easterners. The insistence by many Cubans that they are “not Hispanic” is loaded with unspoken premises. West Indian and African immigrants are often accused of looking down on American blacks.

  Superiority complexes don’t have to be invidious. They don’t have to espouse notions of innate group differences. But the unfortunate reality is that many members of immigrant groups in the United States have embraced all-too-familiar racist attitudes. “[T]he move into mainstream America,” Toni Morrison writes, often “means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American.”

  The Mormon superiority complex is no more invidious than any other—in some ways much less, because Mormonism has opened its doors to individuals of all races and made millions of converts all over the world—but it highlights a feature worthy of special attention. A group’s superiority complex isn’t always distributed equally among all group members. It can raise one class of people over another within the group.

  Officially, Mormonism holds that women and men are spiritual equals, but as in Catholicism, women are excluded from the priesthood and therefore from the higher offices of Church leadership. No woman has ever served in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a primary governing body of the LDS Church, or in the First Presidency, the highest Church body of all. The Church has not been reticent about its expectations for women. In 1987, Church president Ezra Taft Benson preached, “In the beginning, Adam—not Eve—was instructed to earn the bread by the sweat of his brow. Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mother’s calling is in the home, not the marketplace.”

  In the 1990s, several women professors who criticized Church positions on women’s issues were forced out of Brigham Young University. A few Mormon women have been excommunicated because of their feminist views. In 1995, the Church issued a “Proclamation to the World,” regarded as near-scripture by most Mormons, stating that “[m]arriage between man and woman is essential to [God’s] eternal plan,” and that “[b]y divine design, fathers are to preside over their families” and “are responsible to provide the necessities of life,” while “[m]others are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.”

  Joanna Brooks, author of The Book of Mormon Girl, writes movingly of her position as a faithful Mormon whose belief that women should have the same opportunities and aspirations as men put her at odds with her Church:

  For years, I cried every time I set foot in a Mormon ward house.* . . . Crying that the Church had punished women like me, people like me, leaving us exiled among our own. . . . How badly I wanted to belong as I had when I was a young Mormon girl, to be simply a working part in the great Mormon plan of salvation, a smiling exemplar of our sparkling difference. But instead I found myself a headstrong Mormon woman staking out her spiritual survival . . . .

  Mormonism by no means forbids professional success to women—there are many prominent Mormon women in academia and the arts—and recently the Church took steps to create more opportunities for young women in missionary work. In 2012 the Church announced that women could begin serving missions at age nineteen (previously it was twenty-one), and a new leadership position was created for women missionaries (“sister training leaders”). Nevertheless, Mormon patriarchy still exists, adding an extra layer to the superiority complex of Mormon men. According to the theory of the Triple Package, this should help Mormon men succeed, but it can potentially come at some expense to Mormon women.

  If sex inequality in Mormonism seems backward to modern Americans, it should be remembered that inequality and even intolerance characterize virtually all of America’s successful groups. The ugly corollary of a superiority complex is all too often a propensity toward bigotry, exclusivity, insularity, or parochialism—an intolerance of other groups and other ways of life.

  In fact, such intolerance in many cases is a condition of the group’s very existence. At the most concrete level, ethnic or religious groups can maintain their identity only by condemning marriage “outside the tribe.” For just this reason, many American Jews, who as a group out-marry at very high rates, worry that Jews will out-marry themselves into oblivion. East Asian and Indian cultures traditionally had strong taboos against marrying outside one’s group, although in the United States such traditions are hard to maintain. (For Chinese who still remembered the Rape of Nanjing, marrying a Japanese was anathema; today, especially in California, inter-Asian marriages are becoming more and more common.) In their values, beliefs, self-conception, and marriages, these groups survive only by being intolerant, by denying the complete equality of all mankind; and the groups with the strongest superiority complexes have the best chance of surviving.

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  EVEN WHEN THE TRIPLE PACKAGE works relatively unproblematically as an engine of success, without causing obvious harms or neuroses, it can still be imprisoning—because of the way it defines success.

  Triple Package cultures tend to channel people into convent
ional, materialistic careers. This is a direct result of the insecurity that drives them. The “chip on the shoulder,” the need to show the world or prove yourself—these typical Triple Package anxieties tend to make people crave obvious tokens of success such as top grades, merit badges, high salaries, luxury cars, and “respectable” careers.

  Triple Package cultures often seem like they’re in a defensive crouch, more concerned with avoiding failure than promoting meaningful, fulfilling, or path-breaking success. The floor that Triple Package cultures impose on acceptable achievement—a selective college, respectable graduate school, good professional job—may inadvertently create a ceiling as well. If you’re aiming to do well by conventional standards, there’s a reasonably clear path; a kind of box-checking approach might be all you need. Get good grades: check. Be a diligent student: check. Be polite to powerful people who can help you: check. The path isn’t easy, but it’s clear. If, however, you want to be an innovator or artist, if you’re looking for meaning rather than money—if you want to make a difference in the world—there’s no predetermined path. On the contrary, getting there may require flouting convention, taking risks, and infuriating authority figures—not the sort of values embraced by most Triple Package cultures.

  To be crystal clear, there’s nothing wrong with a high salary or a luxury car. “Respectable” professions are often the most socially valuable. To state the obvious, doctors save lives; even lawyers occasionally help people. A Nobel Prize is certainly a merit badge, but that doesn’t make it degrading to win one. (Conversely, there’s a lot of conventionality in what is considered an “unconventional” career.)

  The danger, rather, is judging your own worth solely by external measures—allowing your life to be defined not by values, interests, or aspirations of your own, but by others’ expectations, or more precisely by the fear of failing to satisfy those expectations. Unfortunately, promoting this fear and those external measures of self-worth is another Triple Package specialty. “When I was younger, I thought achievement had to do with gaining approval from other people—my parents, my teachers, then higher-ups,” says Amy Tan. “That was what achievement was. . . . People would give you the feedback and tell you if you had done the achievement.” Children raised this way may well, as they grow up, make important life decisions based primarily on parental and social expectations. “[T]hey won’t have the guts,” one young Indian American woman commented, referring to her peers’ unwillingness to reject career paths selected by their parents. “[A] lot of them will always have other interests in other things, [but] they won’t be willing [to pursue those things]. A lot of them will be like, I might as well just do this, make money and all, because I want to make my parents happy.” The result, observes an Indian American sociologist, “is often self-denial, guilt, and frustration.” Another result can be a sense of not having lived your own life—of having spent your whole life striving for goals you didn’t even want.

  Which is why the best thing about the Triple Package may be that it can empower people to break out of it.

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  BORN TWO WORLD WARS and a hemisphere apart, the novelist Saul Bellow and the filmmaker Ang Lee had something in common: a father contemptuous of his son’s chosen occupation. Bellow’s father wanted him to be a businessman. “You write, and then you erase,” he said disdainfully. “You call that a profession? Was meinst du ‘a writer’?” Lee’s father wanted him to be a professor. When Lee won an Academy Award, his father told him there was still time. “You’re only 49,” he said. “Get a degree and teach in universities, and be respectable.”

  Bellow and Lee shared something else too. They both grew up in extremely demanding, high-expectation, Triple Package households. Lee’s father, the principal of a prestigious high school in Taiwan, imposed on Lee at a young age the strictures of Confucian discipline; “the only purpose in life,” Lee’s younger brother would later recall, was to succeed academically. “I didn’t know what I wanted from life,” Lee has said, “but I knew I had to please my father.” According to biographer James Atlas, Bellow’s mother was a “devout believer in the gospel of self-improvement”; her husband’s failure “only intensified her aspirations for her youngest son.” Like many Jewish immigrant parents of that era, she forced on Bellow an exacting regimen of classical music practice:

  She was always nagging him to practice—a typical scenario on the Northwest Side of Chicago circa 1927. . . . Once a week, Bellow got on the trolley with his violin and made the long trip down to the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue, where he was subjected to the harsh tutelage of Grisha Borushek, a stout, gloomy refugee from Odessa who trained his pupils “by whipping them on the buttocks with his bow.”

  Both men rebelled against their family’s expectations. Bellow, escaping from what he would later describe as the “suffocating orthodoxy” of his childhood, got himself fired from the family’s coal business and began writing stories and novels. Even when published, these stories barely paid his rent, forcing him to ask his brothers for money. The derision this provoked in his family would last a long time. After he won the National Book Award in 1954 (for The Adventures of Augie March), his older brother commented, “[M]y name won’t go down in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but I have money, and he doesn’t.”

  Much to the embarrassment of his father, Lee enrolled in a three-year arts program in Taiwan after twice taking, and twice failing, the national university entrance exam. “I had a lot of guilt,” says Lee, “that I didn’t follow his path.” He then came to America and studied film at New York University, where he worked on the crew of a movie made by fellow student Spike Lee. After graduation, he “struggled through six years of agonizing, hopeless uncertainty”; he sent one of his screenplays to more than thirty production companies, only to be rejected by all of them. After his in-laws offered his wife money so that he could start a restaurant—she refused—he very nearly gave up filmmaking.

  Bellow and Lee are almost textbook Triple Package types. A friend of Bellow’s from the 1940s remembered him as “carrying a chip on his shoulder.” Bellow’s son Greg has written about his father’s “insecurities” and describes him “throwing down the gauntlet to the American literary establishment personified by Ernest Hemingway.” And Bellow was famously “disciplined.” Lee too has spoken of his family’s “insecurity”; as the “first son,” he recalls, he “felt everything rested on my shoulders.” Lee’s need to prove himself powered him through years of failure and rejection that would surely have derailed most.

  Both men would of course go on to groundbreaking achievement—groundbreaking in both content and in relation to their own ethnic identity. Bellow was “the first Jewish-American novelist to stand at the center of American literature,” as the influential critic Leslie Fiedler put it in 1957—and that was before his Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. Other successful American novelists had been Jewish (Norman Mailer’s 1948 Hemingwayesque The Naked and the Dead became a sixty-two-week New York Times bestseller), but Bellow was the first to break through to a large readership “without departing from an American Jewish idiom”—opening the door for a whole generation of Roths and Hellers who would follow. Lee was the first Chinese to win the Acadamy Award for best director even once, much less twice, and his films have spanned a head-spinning diversity of genre and subject matter that lesser men would never have dared.

  In short, both Bellow and Lee kicked away the ladder—but not before having climbed it. The Triple Package had been instilled into them as children, producing its strange combination of confidence and insecurity, its relentless drive, its discipline—and the unquenchable need to prove themselves. In this sense, they never left the Triple Package entirely behind. On the contrary, they attained their heights of achievement only because of the qualities it imparted to them. Yet both men, because they had these qualities, were able to defy the constraints on the kind of life, the kind of success, they were expected to pursue. Th
e Triple Package empowered them to break free from its confines—and write their own, original scripts.

  America is a central player in this story too. For both men, it was America that released their creativity and galvanized their self-invention. Both Bellow and Lee were immigrants; both would eventually become naturalized U.S. citizens. Yet both, importantly, found themselves doubly outsiders—first in their own families, then in the United States.

  “I never belonged to my own family,” Bellow once recalled; “I was always the one apart.” His Jewish protagonists may proclaim their Americanness (“I’m an American, Chicago-born” are the first words of Augie March), but Bellow himself described Jews in the United States as “métèques”—outsiders or “resident aliens.” Lee has made similar remarks: “I’m a drifter and an outsider. There’s not one single environment I can totally belong to,” he has said. “Every movie I make, that’s my hideout, the place I don’t quite understand but feel most at home.”

  In America, individuals raised in Triple Package cultures occupy a strange position, pulled simultaneously by the demands of their home culture and by the allure of American freedom. Poised on the edge of both worlds, they belong fully to neither. This cultural edge has its own price, exacting its own psychological toll, but it may be one of the most liberating and creatively productive places a person can inhabit.

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  A SIGN OF THIS LIBERATING POTENTIAL is the intense opposition to “model minority” stereotypes that has become widespread among young Asian Americans. A growing number of Asian college students in the United States major in the humanities and want nothing to do with math or classical music. Many are finding their role models in breakout Asian American stars who have gone against type, like John Cho and Kal Penn (a.k.a. “Harold and Kumar”), Mindy Kaling (of “The Office” and “The Mindy Project”), YouTube sensation Freddie Wong, stand-up comic Aziz Ansari, basketball player Jeremy Lin, and celebrity fashion designer Jason Wu (who designed Michelle Obama’s inaugural ball gown).