The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

  “Who is strong?”: Erica Brown, Spiritual Boredom: Rediscovering the Wonder of Judaism (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2009), p. 84 (quoting Pirkei Avot, 4:1). Josephus, the Jewish scholar of ancient Rome, “stresse[d] that gentile religious practices lead to a lack of self-control,” as compared to the “great discipline the Jewish law requires.” Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 64.

  “and the organs below the belly”: Maren Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), p. 94 (quoting Philo, 2 Spec. 195); Stowers, A Rereading of Romans, p. 58 (nothing that Philo and other Jewish writers of that era viewed Judaism as a “philosophy for the passions, a school for self-control”); Hans Svebakken, Philo of Alexandria’s Exposition of the Tenth Commandment (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), p. 14; for the Stoic influences on Philo’s concept of enkrateia, see Carlos Lévy, “Philo’s Ethics,” in Adam Kamesar, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philo (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 146, 150, 159.

  the Shulchan Aruch: Written by Rabbi Joseph Karo, the Shulchan Aruch was a mere “handy reference” work, to which Karo turned only after spending twenty years on a multivolume, encyclopedic compilation of Talmudic law. Sol Scharfstein, The Five Books of Moses: Translation, Rabbinic and Contemporary Commentary (Jersey City, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 2008), p. 547. For a translation of parts of the Shulchan Aruch, see Gersion Appel, The Concise Code of Jewish Law: Compiled from the Kitzur Shulhan Aruch and Traditional Sources, vols. 1–2 (New York: KTAV Publishing, 1977, 1989). For a list of other partial translations, see Phyllis Holman Weisbard and David Schonberg, eds., Jewish Law: Bibliography of Sources and Scholarship in English (Littleton, CO: Fred B. Rothman & Co., 1989), p. 19.

  “Jews . . . do not get drunk”: Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006) [1798], p. 63.

  largely German: Ofer Shiff, Survival Through Integration: American Reform Jewish Universalism and the Holocaust (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), p. 33; Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, “From Diaspora Jews to New Jews,” in Laurence J. Silberstein, ed., Postzionism: A Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), p. 350 (“German Jews made up the bulk of Jewish immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century” and imported the “Reform movement”). On the German origins of Reform Judaism, whose leading figure declared that the “Talmud must go,” and “the Bible . . . as a divine work must also go,” see Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 91.

  Circumcision . . . a “remnant of savage African life”: Richard Rosenthal, “Without Milah and Tevilah,” in Walter Jacob and Moshe Zemer, eds., Conversion to Judaism in Jewish Law: Essays and Responsa (Pittsburgh: Rodef Shalom Press, 1994), p. 110.

  the bar mitzvah an obsolete ritual: Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 55; Jerold S. Auerbach, Rabbis and Lawyers: The Journey from Torah to Constitution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 79–80.

  the menu included littleneck clams: John J. Appel, “The Trefa Banquet,” Commentary, Feb. 1966, pp. 75–78. Other sources list the offending items at Hebrew Union’s famous 1883 banquet as “oysters, shrimp and crabmeat.” Auerbach, Rabbis and Lawyers, p. 78.

  brought with them an orthodox Judaism: See, e.g., Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 169–70, 193–94 (noting conflict between the orthodoxy of the new immigrants and the Reform Judaism of the “German Jews”).

  1914 book about Jewish life: Israel Cohen, Jewish Life in Modern Times (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1914), p. 18.

  “bound and shackled” . . . “tend even to forsake”: Ba’al Makhshoves, “Mendele, Grandfather of Yiddish Literature,” quoted in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 32, 37. Makhshoves was the pen name of the Kovno-born Israel Isidor Elyashev (1873–1924), a pioneer in Yiddish literary criticism.

  Jewish Sabbath . . . a highly disciplined regimen: Appel, The Concise Book of Jewish Law, vol. 2, pp. 224, 239–81, 326; “The Shabbat Laws,” Chabad.org, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/95907/jewish/The-Shabbat-Laws.htm.

  “I hadda chance to make a dollar”: Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run? (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 237.

  “We push our children too much” . . . “[A] piano in the front room”: Howe, World of Our Fathers, p. 261 (quoting The Forward, Jan. 20, 1911, and July 6, 1903).

  probably strengthened their impulse control: See Charles E. Silberman, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today (New York: Summit Books, 1985), p. 29 (describing the “fundamental rule” on which the author’s generation of American Jews was raised in the 1930s as “Be quiet!—Do not call attention to yourself. . . . In talking about a Jewish subject in public we lowered our voices automatically, and we were careful never to read a Hebrew book or magazine . . . when riding on a subway or bus”).

  bar and bat mitzvahs: See Stefanie Cohen, “$1 Million Parties—Have NYC Bar Mitzvahs Gone Too Far?,” New York Post, Apr. 18, 2010; Ralph Gardner Jr., “Bash Mitzvahs!,” New York Magazine, Mar. 9, 1998, p. 20.

  even the Cultural Revolution: See Li, Cultural Foundations of Learning, pp. 341–2. Professor Li writes that “[i]f the senseless Cultural Revolution did . . . manage[] to dent the family system, it did not destroy it permanently. It would be hard to imagine any force that would succeed in eradicating Confucian family relationships and child-rearing practices after they have survived for thousands of years.”

  traditional strict parenting . . . softens: Bryan Strong, Christine DeVault, and Theodore F. Cohen, The Marriage and Family Experience: Intimate Relationships in a Changing Society (11th ed.) (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2011), p. 97.

  expectations drop . . . sharp fall-off: Suet-ling Pong, Lingxin Hao, and Erica Gardner, “The Roles of Parenting Styles and Social Capital in the School Performance of Immigrant Asian and Hispanic Adolescents,” Social Science Quarterly 86 (2005), pp. 928, 942, 944, 946; Yanwei Zhang, “Immigrant Generational Differences in Academic Achievement: The Case of Asian American High School Students,” in Park, Goodwin, and Lee, Asian American Identities, Families, and Schooling, pp. 204, 209; see also Lingxin Hao and Han S. Woo, “Distinct Trajectories in the Transition to Adulthood: Are Children of Immigrants Advantaged?,” Child Development 83, no. 5 (2012), pp. 1623, 1635.

  junk-food corporations: Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (New York: Random House, 2013), p. 341.

  The Wire: Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson, “Why We’re Teaching ‘The Wire’ at Harvard,” Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2010, p. B2.

  Breaking Bad: Patrick Radden Keefe, “The Uncannily Accurate Description of the Meth Trade in ‘Breaking Bad,’” The New Yorker, July 13, 2012.

  CHAPTER 6: THE UNDERSIDE OF THE TRIPLE PACKAGE

  Wittgenstein’s paradoxical ladder: The ladder appears on the last page of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1922), p. 189; one must climb the ladder of philosophy, Wittgenstein suggests, in order to see that philosophy is “senseless.”

  “The youth of America is their oldest tradition”: Oscar Wilde, “A Woman of No Importance” (1894), Act 1.

  America is a youth culture: See, e.g., Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (New York: Viking, 2007); Patricia Cohen, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age (New York: Scribner, 2012), p. 166 (“Our digital world incessantly assails us with artificially maintained images of youth”; in a 2005 Harris survey “[h]alf of those polled agreed that a youthful appearance is necessary for professional s
uccess and for personal happiness”); Martha Irvine and Lindsey Tanner, “Youthfulness an American Obsession at What Cost?,” Associated Press, Dec. 7, 2008. Youth culture is of course not uniquely American. See Jed Rubenfeld, Freedom and Time (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 34 (“Modernity adores youth because it imagines youth as exquisitely unburdened by temporal engagements . . . To be young is to live in the present”).

  Idealizing childhood: See, e.g., David Gettman, Basic Montessori: Learning Activities for Under-Fives (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 37 (adults suffering “from their own adult pressures and anxieties” often “believe that early childhood should be fun and carefree”); Kay Sambell, Mel Gibson, and Sue Miller, Studying Childhood and Early Childhood: A Guide for Students (2d ed.) (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2010), pp. 18–9 (noting the tendency to idealize childhood, imagining it as “carefree,” “fun,” and “perpetually happy”); Christina Schwarz, “Leave Those Kids Alone,” The Atlantic, Feb. 24, 2011 (describing childhood as “those first, fresh experiences of the world, unclouded by reason and practicality”; “[c]hildren have a knack for simply living that adults can never regain”); Linda F. Burghardt, “A Symbol of Carefree, Innocent Fun? Not in Oyster Bay,” New York Times, May 28, 2006 (describing a Long Island carousel as “a potent symbol of the happy, carefree childhood that parents want to give their youngsters”).

  “I was burdened to excel”: E-mail to Amy Chua, May 22, 2012 (on file with authors); see also Rubén G. Rumbaut, “Children of Immigrants and Their Achievement: The Role of Family, Acculturation, Social Class, Gender, Ethnicity, and School Contexts,” p. 1, http://www.hks.harvard.edu/inequality/Seminar/Papers/Rumbaut2.pdf; Lisa Sun-Hee Park, “Ensuring Upward Mobility: Obligations of Children of Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” in Benson Tong, ed., Asian American Children: A Historical Handbook Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), pp. 123, 129 (in a study of Chinese and Korean immigrants’ children “[a]ll the respondents expressed a need to ‘repay’ their parents” and “believed that their parents purposely stunted their own growth so that their children might prosper”).

  “happiness has to take a back seat”: See Park, “Ensuring Upward Mobility,” pp. 125, 128.

  Confucian expert Jin Li explains: Jin Li, Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 38, 73–4, 90–2.

  “I’ve never felt ready to receive her”: “Talk Asia: Interview with Fashion Designer Phillip Lim,” CNN.com (aired Mar. 23, 2011), http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1103/23/ta.01.html.

  “I always see where I didn’t do things the right way”: Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, “The Vera Wang Interview: Made of Honor,” Harper’s Bazaar, Mar. 24, 2011.

  “I feel like I’m just an investment good”: E-mail to Amy Chua, Mar. 14, 2013 (on file with authors); see also Vivian S. Louie, Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity Among Chinese Americans (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 48; Ruth K. Chao, “Chinese and European Mothers’ Beliefs About the Role of Parenting in Children’s School Success,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 27, no. 4 (1996), pp. 403, 412.

  “they’re only proud of me because they can boast”: Louie, Compelled to Excel, p. 91; see also Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (New York and Boston: Business Plus, 2010), p. 8.

  “‘Okay, well, then, I’m garbage’”: Louie, Compelled to Excel, p. 93.

  “[My parents] just didn’t understand”: Amy Tan interview, Academy of Achievement, June 28, 1996, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/tan0int-5 (accessed Mar. 25, 2013); see also Kim Wong Keltner, Tiger Babies Strike Back: How I Was Raised by a Tiger Mom but Could Not Be Turned to the Dark Side (New York: William Morrow, 2013).

  “the highest rates of depressive symptoms”: Cathy Schoen et al., The Commonwealth Fund Survey of the Health of Adolescent Girls (The Commonwealth Fund, Nov. 1997), p. 21.

  “higher levels of stress and anxiety”: Desiree Baolian Qin et al., “Parent-Child Relations and Psychological Adjustment Among High-Achieving Chinese and European American Adolescents,” Journal of Adolescence 35, no. 4 (2012), pp. 863–73; Desiree Baolian Qin et al., “The Other Side of the Model Minority Story: The Familial and Peer Challenges Faced by Chinese American Adolescents,” Youth & Society 39, no. 4 (2008), pp. 480–506; Carol S. Huntsinger and Paul E. Jose, “A Longitudinal Investigation of Personality and Social Adjustment Among Chinese American and European American Adolescents,” Child Development 77, no. 5 (2006), pp. 1309–24; Paul E. Jose and Carol S. Huntsinger, “Moderation and Mediation Effects of Coping by Chinese American and European American Adolescents,” Journal of Genetic Psychology 166, no. 1 (2005), pp. 16–44.

  study of high-achieving ninth graders: Qin et al., “Parent-Child Relations and Psychological Adjustment Among High-Achieving Chinese and European American Adolescents,” p. 870.

  rates of alcohol abuse and substance dependency: “In 2011, among persons aged 12 or older, the rate of substance dependence or abuse was lower among Asians (3.3 percent) than among other racial/ethnic groups. The rates for the other racial/ethnic groups were 16.8 percent for American Indians or Alaska Natives, 10.6 percent for Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders, 9.0 percent for persons reporting two or more races, 8.7 percent for Hispanics, 8.2 percent for whites, and 7.2 percent for blacks.” Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Results from 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Summary of National Findings (2012), http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2k11Results/NSDUHresults2011.htm. Moreover, Asian American rates for alcohol “heavy use” or “binge drinking” are much lower than that of other groups. Ibid.

  2010 nationwide psychiatric survey: Anu Asnaani et al., “A Cross-Ethnic Comparison of Lifetime Anxiety Disorders,” Journal of Nervous Mental Disorders 198, no. 8 (2010), pp. 551–5.

  a 1990s study: David T. Takeuchi et al., “Lifetime and Twelve-Month Prevalence Rates of Major Depressive Episodes and Dysthymia Among Chinese Americans in Los Angeles,” American Journal of Psychiatry 155, no. 10 (1998), pp. 1407–14; see also Li, Cultural Foundations of Learning, pp. 66–7.

  Asian American suicide rate: All data in the footnote are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Web-based Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS), Fatal Injury Reports, National and Regional, 1999–2010 (manner of injury: suicide) (years: 2000–2010) (age-adjusted rate), http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.html. Looking solely at 2010 (the most recent year for which data are available) shows a slightly higher suicide rate for both Asian Americans (6.2 per 100,000) and white Americans (13.6 per 100,000). It has been widely reported that “Asian-American women ages 15–24 have the highest suicide rate of women in any race or ethnic group in that age group.” E.g., Elizabeth Cohen, “Push to Achieve Tied to Suicide in Asian-American Women,” CNN, May 16, 2007, http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/05/16/asian.suicides/index.html. As the CDC data indicate, this is not true; nor was it true in 2007, the year of the report just cited. See also American Psychological Association, “Suicide Among Asian-Americans,” http://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-health/asian-american/suicide.aspx (calling it a “myth” that “[y]oung Asian-American women [aged 15–24] have the highest suicide rates of all racial/ethnic groups”). U.S.-born Asian American women may have rates of suicidal ideation and attempted suicide higher than that of American women in general, see Aileen Alfonso Duldulao et al., “Correlates of Suicidal Behaviors Among Asian Americans,” Archives of Suicide Research 13, no. 3 (2009), pp. 277–90, but this finding does not appear to apply to Asian American women overall. See Janice Ka Yan Cheng et al., “Lifetime Suicidal Ideation and Suicide Attempts in Asian Americans,” Asian American Journal of Psychology 1, no. 1 (2010), pp. 18–30; M. Mercedes Perez-Rodriguez et al., “Ethnic Differences in Suicidal Ideation and Attempts,” Primary Psychiatry 15, no. 2 (2008),
pp. 44–53, Table 1.

  Asian American . . . self-esteem: Douglas S. Massey et al., The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 118–9, 122; Carl L. Bankston III and Min Zhou, “Being Well vs. Doing Well: Self-Esteem and School Performance Among Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Racial and Ethnic Groups,” International Migration Review 63, no. 2 (2002), pp. 389–415, especially p. 401.

  “If you’re doing well, you should be feeling good”: Stephanie Pappas, “Study: ‘Tiger Parenting,’ Tough on Kids,” LiveScience, Jan. 19, 2012, http://www.livescience.com/18023-tiger-parenting-tough-kids.html (quoting Desiree Baolian Qin).

  Guilt: See Devorah Baum, “Trauma: An Essay on Jewish Guilt,” English Studies in Africa 52, no. 1 (2009), pp. 15–27; Simon Dein, “The Origins of Jewish Guilt: Psychological, Theological, and Cultural Perspectives,” Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health 15, no. 2 (2013), pp. 123–37; Joyce Antler, You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 2, 137–8.

  naches: Leo Rosten, The New Joys of Yiddish (rev. ed.) (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), p. 262 (“Jews use naches to describe the glow of pleasure plus pride that only a child can give to its parents”).

  “and my mother’s contempt for my father”: See Jules Feiffer, Hold Me! An Entertainment (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1977), p. 44.

  propensity to challenge authority: See, e.g., Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 295 (“it is one of the glories of the Jews that they do not meekly submit to their own appointed authorities. The Jew is the eternal protestant”); Raphael Patai, The Jewish Mind (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), p. 332 (describing Thorstein Veblen’s view that Jewish scientists’ skepticism gave them “the prerequisite of immunity from the inhibitions of intellectual quietism”).