TIGER COUPLE ROARS AGAIN
Amy Chua re- ignites controversy by arguing that America has lost its mojo and cultural groups like Indian Americans now better embody the sense of exceptionalism
No matter how successful a woman, nothing gets her as excited as the achievements of her children. So it is no surprise that Amy Chua, co-author of The Triple Package, is at her animated best when speaking from her home in Connecticut of her older daughter, a junior at Harvard who spent last summer at a school for underprivileged on the outskirts of Delhi. “I am proud of how I raised my girls. Nothing gives me greater joy.” This is despite being slam bang in the middle of another controversy, familiar ground for the Yale law professor. The Triple Package: What Really Determines Success chronicles the success of eight distinct cultural groups—Jews, Indians, Chinese, Iranians, Lebanese, Nigerians, Cubans, and Mormons—and ascribes it to three attributes: Superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control.
Part self-help book and part cultural study, the book has raised hackles across America from critics who call it racist. Indian writer Suketu Mehta has been most prominent among those leading the assault, and that upsets Chua. “I am a great fan of his work,” she says. Perhaps Chua still has traces of the chubby, bespectacled Asian girl in Indiana who was the butt of all jokes in school and sought acceptance. “I was called slanty eyes. My mother told me to combat it by saying we come from a much older civilisation.” That fighting spirit has carried Chua far. It has made her a leading figure in the parenting debate, contrasting her Tiger Mom style of alpha parenting with the more child-friendly American style of putting happiness before success. With The Triple Package, written with husband Jed Rubenfeld, also a professor of law at Yale, she is now at the forefront of the debate on the changing American Dream.
What does the American Dream mean? To the
Outsider, it means using success at any cost. It means using humiliation as a source of strength, to believe in one’s destiny, to have a persistent uncertainty about one’s worth and be able to defer gratification to get ahead, all three elements of the Triple Package community. To the Americans it means embracing yourself as you are. “There will always be a trade-off between achievement and happiness,” says Chua. In fact, one of the reasons for the outrage over their work is probably because it is implicitly critical of America’s instant gratification disorder, and highlights the death of upward mobility among Americans. There is a school of thought, spearheaded by Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, which suggests that if you dream something, you can do it. Chua and Rubenfeld argue that success is tough, and once achieved, can be a cold and lonely place. As they say about The Triple Package at one point, “this may teach us how to make a living, not how to live oneself”.
But as they point out, certain cultural groups have been able to make a living rather more successfully than others—evidenced this week yet again with the appointment of Satya Nadella as Microsoft CEO. Indian-Americans, they point out, have the highest income of any Census-tracked ethnic group in the US, almost twice the national average. Chinese, Iranian and Lebanese-Americans are not far behind. And as they point out, over 65 per cent of ChineseAmericans and 87 per cent of Indian-Americans are foreign-born; over 90 per cent of both these groups are either immigrants or their children. They single out many Indian-Americans in the book—from billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vinod Khosla to Emmy winning CNN anchor Dr Sanjay Gupta.
There is enough elbow room for questioning their argument and they welcome it, pointing to the existence of the Triple Package individual, like Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, the child of Puerto Rican immigrants who powered her way out of poverty with all the attributes of the Triple Package community. And why not? As President Barack Obama said, America is a nation where the son of a single mom can become president and the son of a barkeep can become Speaker.
Chua and Rubenfeld have also been criticised for perpetuating elites, in that the groups that migrate to the US tend to have higher incomes, but they have enough research to show that several successful Chinese-Americans come from the working class. They also make the point that these groups are not permanent. Some can dissipate and fall by the wayside within a generation. Also, their thesis is not inconsistent with experiences of immigrants in other nations. Or indeed with different ways of succeeding—it could be Sheryl Sandberg’s jungle gym, as opposed to the ladder; or Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of practice which is embodied by the Outliers.
Like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which was part memoir and part self-help treatise, The Triple Package is both a self-affirming anthem for those who need it as well as an anthropological exercise to understand what is going wrong with post-millenial America. They are also careful to point out the pathologies that come with Triple Package success— deep insecurity often leads to neurosis.
Chua and Rubenfeld’s working style is easy. “I write very early morning, he writes at night. I like to run research, he is a big picture guy.” He is Jewish, she is of Chinese extraction. They have successful careers, two bright and beautiful daughters. In one fell swoop, they are both a Tiger Couple and the Triple Package. But even perfection has a crimp. When the girls were younger, says Chua, her husband could spend more time outside the house just having coffee with friends. Now that they’re older, Daddy is still the best. “They think he’s so brilliant because he discusses Foucault with them. I get the bad end of it,” she laughs. Tiger Mom as Miffed Mom? No, she’s the Triple Package Mom.
The book will be available from February 20