There’s Something about Amy

Two weeks ago, Amy L. Chua ’84, better known to the world as the Tiger Mother, and her husband Jed Rubenfeld paid a visit to Cambridge to talk about their new book, “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.” There has been much controversy about this book, both among actual scholars and among me and my friends.

So when I heard that these two were coming to campus, I knew that it was my responsibility as a stereotypically successful Chinese-American man to go and check it out.

The book delineates eight groups of Americans that seem to be really good at capitalism (Chinese-Americans and Jewish-Americans, of course, given the authors’ own identities, plus Nigerian-Americans and Cuban-Americans just for good measure, to deflect those pesky accusations of racism).

It then posits that these groups all share three characteristics that help to explain why they’re so good at capitalism—a superiority complex, a sense of insecurity, and strong impulse control. You need to believe that your people are better than everyone else, but also paradoxically need to have a chip on your shoulder and feel like you have something to prove. You need to be able to spend long hours working hard and deferring instant gratification for future rewards. This sounds much like the advice Kanye West gave us back on his debut album, “The College Dropout.”

It would be a bold move to try to explain American social inequities with the claim that some groups are just inherently more Kanye-like than others, ignoring other possible explanations like slavery, the failure of public education, the prison industrial complex, etc.

Chua and Rubenfeld recognized this much, so they prefaced their talk with a candid acknowledgement that structural forces are always at play, but that their book is not technically about that. They articulated that they’re not trying to why explain Asians and Jews are more successful than poor black and brown folks, because much has already been written on the oppression of the latter—they’re only trying to explain why Asians and Jews seem to be more successful than their white counterparts.

But even if we take Chua and Rubenfeld at their word and assume that this book is about what ordinary white people can learn from successful minority groups, the question remains: Are these cultural traits sufficient to catalyze social and economic mobility? If members of oppressed groups adopted the triple package (superiority, insecurity, and impulse control), would they suddenly ascend to Kanye-esque levels of awesomeness vis-a-vis capitalism? Or at least escape crippling poverty and break the cycle? I remain unconvinced.

If you asked Chua and Rubenfeld this question, they might respond that structural changes are indeed necessary and that good parenting alone is unlikely to reverse institutionalized racism and classism.

People forget that we’re not talking about Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh here. We’re talking about Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld—two wealthy, well-educated New England liberals who probably really want to say and believe the right things about humanity.

But you should still be concerned about Chua and Rubenfeld.

Because even if we assume that their hearts are in the right place, the arguments they make in their book are too easily co-opted by folks who want to place responsibility (and the flip side of that coin—blame) solely on individuals rather than on society as a whole. The O’Reillys and the Becks and the Limbaughs of this world are going to use these arguments—issued by two professors at Yale Law School, no less—as ammunition, whether you like it or not. As responsible citizens, we should be concerned about this.

In her talk at the Harvard Book Store, Chua related a classic social experiment about impulse control—the Stanford marshmallow experiment, done back in the 60s. Little five-year-old kids were given a marshmallow and told that they could take the marshmallow now or wait 15 minutes and receive a second marshmallow. The experimenters followed these kids and the ones with stronger impulse control ended up being more successful 20 to 30 years later.

In a variation of this experiment, dubbed “the reverse marshmallow experiment,” some of the children were lied to and not given the second marshmallow after 15 minutes. In repeat studies, these children immediately pounced on the first marshmallow. It was a poignant commentary on how people who feel betrayed by their society might internalize counterproductive behaviors.

It suggests that no culture exists in a vacuum, but that most traits regarded as “cultural” are more likely just learned responses to the way things are. Culture is about waiting for the second marshmallow. Structure is about making sure it gets there.

Chua and Rubenfeld are urging people to wait for that second marshmallow, which is all well and good if our society does indeed deliver after 15 minutes, or 15 years, or even 15 generations. And that’s where I’m not so sure.

Kai Huang is a third-year student at Harvard Medical School.