The Triple Package Read Free

on to become famous writers and critics.
    This chip on the shoulder, this “I’ll show them” mentality, is a Triple Package specialty, the volatile product of a superiority complex colliding with a society in which that superiority is not acknowledged. It’s remarkable how common this dynamic is among immigrant groups: a minority, armed with enormous ethnocentric pride, suddenly finds itself disrespected and spurned in the United States. The result can border on resentment—and resentment, asNietzsche taught, is one of the world’s great motivators.
    A particularly intense variant involves status collapse. Typically, immigrants to the United States aremoving up the economic ladder, achieving a better standard of living. In some cases, however, they experience the opposite: asteep fall in status, wealth, or prestige—an especially bitter experience when their new society is wholly unaware of the respect they formerly commanded. Several of America’s most successful immigrant groups have suffered this additional sting. As we’ll discuss later, the Cuban Exiles offer a vivid example, and so too Iranian Americans.
    Superiority and insecurity can combine to produce drive in a quite different but equally goading way: by generating a fierce, sometimes tormenting need to prove oneself not to “the world,” but within one’s own family.
    In many Chinese, Korean, and South Asian immigrant families, parents impose exorbitantlyhigh academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”). Implicit in these expectations are both a deep assumption of superiority (we know you can do better than everyone else) and a needling suggestion of present inadequacy (but you haven’t done remotely well enough yet).Comparisons to cousin X, who just graduated as valedictorian, or so-and-so’s daughter, who just got into Harvard, are common—and this is true in bothlower- and higher-income families.
    To further pile on, East Asian immigrant parents often convey to their children that their “failing”—for example, by getting a B+—would be a disgrace for the whole family. “In Chinese families,” one Taiwanese American mother explained in a recent study, “the child’s personal academic achievement is the value and honor of the whole family. . . . If you do good, you bring honor to the family and [do] not lose face. A lot of value is placed on the child to do well for the family. It starts from kindergarten.”
    The East Asian case may be the most conspicuous, but the phenomenon of extravagant parental expectations, with the same double-message of superiority and inadequacy, is common to many immigrant communities. Sixty years ago, Alfred Kazin wrote, “It was not for myself alone that I was expected to shine, but for [my parents]—to redeem the constant anxiety of their existence.” In Kazin’s Jewish immigrant neighborhood, “If there were Bs” on a child’s tests or papers, “the whole house went into mourning.” This dynamic recurs in various forms in almost every Triple Package culture, creatingenormous pressure to succeed. The result can be anxiety and misery, but also drive and jaw-dropping accomplishment.
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    B EFORE GOING ON, because we use terms like “East Asian parents,” we need to say a word about cultural generalizations and stereotypes. Throughout this book, we will never make a statement about any group’s economic performance or predominant cultural attitudes unless it is backed up by solid evidence, whether empirical, historical, or sociological (see the endnotes for sources). But when there
are
differences between groups, we will come out and say so. It’s just a statistical fact, for example, thatMormon teenagers are less likely to drink or have premarital sex than other American teenagers. Of course there will be exceptions, but if the existence of exceptions blinded us to—or censored us from talking about—group differences, we wouldn’t be able to understand the world we live