The Triple Package (16 page)

We push our children too much. After school they study music, go to Talmud Torah. Why sacrifice them on the altar of our ambition? Must we get
all
the medals and scholarships? Doctors will tell you about students with shattered nerves, brain fever. Most of them wear glasses. Three to five hours of studying a day, six months a year, are better than five to twelve hours a day for ten months a year.

Music practice—especially piano practice—played a significant role in these children’s lives, as revealed by another critical essay in the
Forward
:

[A] piano in the front room is preferable to a boarder. It gives spiritual pleasure to exhausted workers. But in most cases the piano is not for pleasure but to make martyrs of little children, and make them mentally ill. A little girl comes home, does her homework, and then is forced to practice under the supervision of her well-meaning father. He is never pleased with her progress, and feels he is paying fifty cents a lesson for nothing. The session ends with his yelling and her crying. These children have not a single free minute for themselves. They have no time to play.

Thus the two million Eastern European Jews who immigrated to America in the early 1900s brought with them habits of heightened discipline, religious prohibitions, and hard work that they not only practiced themselves but passed down to their children. Later waves of Jewish immigration—for example, during and after the Second World War—would reinfuse Jewish American culture with the same ethos. The anxiety Jews felt as a result of anti-Semitism in the United States for much of the twentieth century
probably strengthened their
impulse control, as Kant thought it did in Germany. In the face of such prejudice, the disproportionate success twentieth-century American Jews eventually achieved in professions and careers requiring long years of study or practice—medicine, science, law, music—is testimony to their habits of discipline and perseverance.

Today, it’s no longer clear that impulse control is a defining element of Jewish American culture. Orthodoxy has waned, as has anti-Semitism. Contemporary Jewish parents in the United States are much more ambivalent about “pushing” their children (at least openly), especially at upper income levels. The transformation in some circles of
bar and bat mitzvahs into $250,000 coming-out parties for thirteen-year-olds is not evidence of a culture of restraint or temptation resistance. (At one early twenty-first-century event, with an estimated seven-figure price tag, the catsuit-clad bat mitzvah girl descended into her party at Cipriani on Wall Street hanging by a wire from the ceiling, and was then “serenaded by Jon Bon Jovi for 45 minutes.”) Whether Jewish culture in the United States today has lost its impulse control—and therefore the Triple Package—is a subject to which we’ll return.

—

A
MERICA IS THE GREAT
wrecker of impulse control. Chinese upbringing traditions, with their emphasis on drilling, obedience, and discipline, survived two thousand years of dynastic cycles, communist upheaval,
even the Cultural Revolution with its anti-Confucian, anti-intellectual thrust. But it seems the one thing they can’t survive is—America. After a single generation in the United States,
traditional strict parenting in Chinese American households softens; parental
expectations drop, and a sharp fall-off in academic performance occurs between the second and third generations.

It’s hardly news that modern America today is not big on strictness in childhood or impulse control in general, at least as compared to traditional societies. We’ll return to this point, too, later on, but the short of it is that American culture today celebrates a powerful live-in-the-moment message.

The not-so-secret truth, however, is that successful people typically don’t live that way. On the contrary, the successful are often the ones profiting from the people who do live that way. Executives at America’s
junk-food corporations are notorious for assiduously avoiding their own products. At some level, American media obviously recognizes and extols the value of impulse control. Interviews with sports heroes often stress their work ethic and resilience. Two of the most popular TV series in recent history are
The Wire
(subject of a Harvard college course) and
Breaking Bad
(winner of multiple Emmys), the former situated in inner-city Baltimore, the latter in Albuquerque. Both are about drugs and addiction, and a common theme is that the kingpins who make the millions—the successful ones—don’t “use.” Both shows stress the discipline, self-restraint, and perseverance exercised by the drug lords and their best employees, in stark contrast to their dissolute, hand-to-mouth customers.

Nevertheless, the reality of American culture is that it runs acutely counter to the traditional high-discipline parenting and other elements of impulse control characteristic of successful groups. Which once again underlines and explains the fact that America’s most successful groups tend to be cultural outsiders. Success in America today comes more often to groups who resist today’s dominant American culture.

Thus, impulse control is yet one more point on which America’s successful groups aren’t listening to the piper. Here’s what America likes to tell Americans: Everyone is equal; feel good about yourself;
live in the moment. Meanwhile, America’s successful groups tell their members something different: You are capable of great things because of the group to which you belong; but you, individually, are not good enough; so you need to control yourself, resist temptation, and prove yourself.

THE UNDERSIDE OF THE TRIPLE PACKAGE

H
AVING LAID OUT
its three elements and their combustible interaction, having seen the Triple Package in operation in America’s most successful groups, we turn now to the critical question of whether the Triple Package is a blessing or curse. Is it something one should aspire to re-create in one’s own life and family, or something to be avoided?

The Triple Package always comes at a price. It carries with it certain characteristic pathologies, which this chapter will explore in detail. In assessing whether this price is worth paying, there’s a simple answer we could give, which wouldn’t be false. Namely: the Triple Package works by making people very good at attaining conventional success, so everything depends on how much you think conventional success is worth. For some—poor immigrants, for example, or inner-city parents struggling to give their children opportunities they never had—it can surely be worth a great deal. Indeed, debating the value of conventional success is a luxury many can’t afford.

But there’s a more complicated answer, too, expressing a deeper
truth. The Triple Package is worth aspiring to
precisely in order to break out of it
. Its strictures can take people to a place where they can write their own scripts—conventional or unconventional, achieving success however they define it—provided they’re able to cast aside the constraints of the Triple Package once they get to that place. In other words, the Triple Package is like
Wittgenstein’s paradoxical ladder: you have to throw it away after you’ve climbed it.

We’ll come back to this more complicated side of the story at the end of this chapter. First we turn to the most glaring Triple Package pathologies.

—

T
RIPLE
P
ACKAGE CULTURES
take a view of childhood that’s out of fashion in youth-obsessed America, a view that conflicts with deeply held contemporary American ideals of what childhood is for and what it should be like.

The celebration of youthfulness may go all the way back to the beginnings of American history, part of the contrast between the “New” and “Old” Worlds. (“
The youth of America is their oldest tradition,” quipped Oscar Wilde. “It has been going on now for three hundred years.”) But since the 1960s, and accelerating with the digital revolution, America’s obsession with being or seeming young, along with its disrespect of being or seeming old, has intensified.
America is a youth culture, where youth means freedom, creativity, pleasure, happiness—and age the opposite of all these things.

Idealizing childhood goes along with this reverence for youth. Childhood is imagined as the stage in life before the constraints, denials, inhibitions, self-doubts, and discontents of adulthood kick in. Childhood was or should have been the happiest time of our lives. In short, childhood should be fun. Learning should be fun. Good
parents try to smooth the way for their children, to make their lives as painless, carefree, and unencumbered as possible.

Triple Package groups take a very different view, at least when they are on the rise. Triple Package parents see childhood as a time of investment, training, preparation for the future. In this view, childhood comes encumbered. Often, children feel a sense of indebtedness to their parents. “I studied nonstop in school,” the attorney daughter of Ethiopian immigrants recalls, “because I was well aware that my privilege came at tremendous cost to my parents.
I was burdened to excel so that my parents’ hardworking past wouldn’t be in vain.” For many immigrants’ children, as one study found, “
happiness has to take a back seat.” Success means “hard work and monetary gains, rather than . . . an emotional sense of fulfillment.” Upward mobility is not just a dream for these children. It’s a duty.

In Chinese (and other East Asian) American families, the idea of an encumbered childhood is deeply rooted in the Confucian philosophical and moral tradition. In this tradition, as sociologist and
Confucian expert Jin Li explains, every child is to “willingly” and “gladly” show his parents filial piety in exchange for the parents’ “unconditional love” and “total commitment.” All human morality begins with these obligations, which “endure for life.” In the Confucian worldview, there is no idealized carefree childhood. The highest purpose of life is moral self-improvement through learning, and children are expected as a moral matter to cultivate the core learning virtues—diligence, enduring hardship, striving for self-perfection—from a very early age.

There is a harmonious logic here, but if the elements of parent-induced insecurity and impulse control in the Confucian approach to childhood are taken to extremes, the result can be intense pain. When it goes wrong, or sometimes even when it goes right, the East Asian version of the Triple Package can make life feel like a prison—a
prison of expectations that can never be met. Asked why his mother had never been to one of his runway shows, fashion designer Phillip Lim explained, “You know, I think it comes back to that Asian cultural aspect where you’re never good enough. You know what I mean? It’s like an ‘A’ is not good enough, you have to be an ‘A+’ and
I’ve never felt ready to receive her.”

In the Confucian outlook, there is literally no achievement a child can attain that could not be improved on. Celebrity designer Vera Wang—who’s made wedding dresses for Uma Thurman, Ivanka Trump, Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Kim Kardashian, and Chelsea Clinton—still remembers letting her mother down when she didn’t make the U.S. Olympic team as a figure skater. She also speaks painfully of her father’s refusal to accept her career choice. Up to the day he died, notwithstanding her fame, she never got “a vote of approval or a ‘hurrah for you’ or any of that” from him. “If I were to say at any point that I feel really confident or really in control, that would be a mistake. Because I don’t.
I always see where I didn’t do things the right way.”

In addition to the pressure, Triple Package children may come to feel that their parents merely instrumentalize them. “
I feel like I’m just an investment good for my parents,” one young Chinese American put it. “I have to build on the achievements of the first generation—do even better than them—to bring my parents honor, to lift the family from lower-middle to middle to upper class. One always carries the burden of the family’s expectations and fortunes.” Sometimes the feeling is of being valued only for “bragging rights.” As another Chinese American said, “My grandparents are actually proud of me, but
they’re only proud of me because they can boast about the name of my school.” And of course it’s much worse if you’re the one they
can’t
boast about. “If you don’t achieve that, it’s like, ‘
Okay, well, then, I’m garbage.’” In the most aggravated cases,
genuine trauma or even worse can ensue. Here is novelist Amy Tan describing her childhood:

[
My parents] just didn’t understand. They didn’t know who I really was. They didn’t know how much the smallest amount of recognition would have meant to me and how the smallest amount of criticism could undo me. . . .

I remember once one of my playmates from around the corner died, probably of leukemia. My mother took me to this funeral and took me up to see Rachel. And I saw Rachel’s hands clasped over her chest, and her face was bloodless, and her hands were flat, and I was scared, because this was the little girl I used to play with. My mother leaned over to me and she said, “This is what happens when you don’t listen to your mother.”

Talk about pressure. Here was a little girl who didn’t listen to her mother. According to my mother, she should have washed her fruit and she didn’t. . . . Pesticides might have led to leukemia and killed this little girl. . . . [F]ear was the way to control children for their own good. That’s what I grew up with. . . .

I grew up thinking that I would never, ever please my parents. That is a difficult thing to grow up with. . . . It’s a horrible feeling, especially when you experience what you think is your first failure and you think your life is over. No more chances. . . .

I reached a point where I had infuriated my mother so much we nearly killed each other. Literally. And I was sick to my stomach, literally. I had dry heaves, and the pain was so enormous that at one point . . . I thought I was going to die.

Empirical research sheds some light on how frequently Asian American Triple Package parenting leads to psychological problems, and how severe these problems can be. But the picture is surprisingly
complicated. In 1995, Asian American adolescent girls were found to have “
the highest rates of depressive symptoms of all racial groups,” and several recent studies confirm that Chinese American students report
higher levels of stress and anxiety than white Americans. One
study of high-achieving ninth graders in a highly selective East Coast high school found that Chinese American students reported “higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms,” and that these problems were associated with higher levels of family conflict.

On the other hand, as noted earlier,
rates of alcohol abuse and substance dependency—frequently associated with emotional problems—are much lower among Asian American youth. Moreover, a
2010 nationwide psychiatric survey of 6,870 white Americans and 1,628 Asian Americans found that Asian Americans had significantly
lower
rates of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Similarly,
a 1990s study found that Chinese Americans had substantially lower rates of major depressive episodes than the national average. In part these findings may reflect reluctance to acknowledge psychological symptoms (mental illnesses are still considered shameful by many Asians), but Asian American suicide rates are also lower than the national average. Despite widespread media reports to the contrary, the Asian suicide rate in the U.S. is less than half the white rate.
*

Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly a psychological underside to the
Asian American Triple Package. As mentioned earlier, Asian American students report the lowest self-esteem of all racial groups even while outperforming others academically. This divergence strikes many as puzzling; as one family-studies professor puts it, “
If you’re doing well, you should be feeling good.” But a core insight of the Triple Package is precisely that
not
feeling good about yourself—or not feeling good enough—is part of what drives success.

—

“
F
IVE PERCENT OF
J
EWS
are mildly depressed,” runs a Jewish joke. “The rest are basket cases.” You might think that the Triple Package pathologies of Jewish Americans would be just like those of Asian Americans, given certain obvious similarities. For example, the commandment to honor your parents is just as central to Judaism as it is to East Asian culture.
Guilt, including the feeling that you’re never doing enough to satisfy your parents, is another common trope. Parents getting “bragging rights” from their children’s success is so widespread in Jewish culture that there’s a word for it:
naches
.

But in fact the characteristically Jewish pathologies differ in revealing ways. Perhaps because Jews have a long tradition of questioning authority, a tradition with roots in the Talmud and the Old Testament itself (the Book of Job, for example), a Confucian-style reverence for one’s parents, and deference to their authority, is not the norm. In a play by Jules Feiffer, a young Jewish man describes his debt to his parents: “I grew up to have my father’s looks—my father’s
speech patterns—my father’s posture—my father’s walk—my father’s opinions—
and my mother’s contempt for my father.”

The Jewish
propensity to challenge authority has produced extraordinary, sometimes revolutionary new ideas in philosophy, social theory, and science, but it has figured in Jewish family unhappiness as well. At least since Freud began diagnosing them, Jewish neuroses have stereotypically featured children with—to put it mildly—attitudes less than reverent toward their parents. Children who defy parental authority are common figures in Jewish American culture, often celebrated, but often also causing painful strife and irreparable family rupture;
Fiddler on the Roof
is just one of many examples.

In more extreme cases, Jewish Triple Package striving seems to give rise to a destructive competitiveness between parents and children. Sons may want to outdo their fathers (as Freud saw it), or fathers may be jealous of their more successful sons, a theme that pops up with regularity in Jewish culture—as in Joseph Heller’s
Good as Gold
or the 2011 prizewinning Israeli film
Footnote
,
about father and son Talmudic scholars—but rarely if ever in East Asian culture.

Particularly for early-twentieth-century Jewish immigrants to America, the acute scorn and discrimination they faced, even as it spurred drive in classic Triple Package fashion, exacerbated conflict between fathers and sons. Sons in many families came to see their tradition-bound fathers, who barely scratched out a living as peddlers or shop clerks, as disappointments, embarrassments, or hindrances to their own success. “In my time,” writes Lionel
Trilling, “we all were trying to find a release from our fathers.” Conversely, if these fathers felt like failures themselves, their stinging resentment was occasionally directed against their own sons, triggered when the son threatened to become more successful than the father had ever been. (Hollywood’s first “talking” feature,
The Jazz Singer
, played on this
theme.) Either way, for the “bulk of Jewish immigrants,” Daniel Bell has written, the “anxiety” felt about making it in America “was translated into the struggle between fathers and sons.”

In twenty-first-century America, these intense immigrant generational struggles have a dated, Lower East Side feeling for many Jews. The Oedipal conflict that so dominated twentieth-century Jewish American life and culture just doesn’t seem as central any longer (which may explain the waning of Freudianism). Extremely few American Jews under the age of thirty today are in a position to be embarrassed by having had a peddler for a father. The opposite problem is more likely: having hyper-successful parents who rose from very little—a frustratingly hard act to follow.