The Triple Package (18 page)

She was always nagging him to practice—a typical scenario on the Northwest Side of Chicago circa 1927. . . . Once a week, Bellow got on the trolley with his violin and made the long trip down to the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue, where he was subjected to the harsh tutelage of Grisha Borushek, a stout, gloomy refugee from Odessa who trained his pupils “by whipping them on the buttocks with his bow.”

Both men rebelled against their family’s expectations. Bellow, escaping from what he would later describe as the “
suffocating orthodoxy” of his childhood,
got himself fired from the family’s coal business and began writing stories and novels. Even when published, these stories barely paid his rent, forcing him to ask his brothers for money. The derision this provoked in his family would last a long
time. After he won the National Book Award in 1954 (for
The Adventures of Augie March
), his older brother commented, “[
M]y name won’t go down in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, but I have money, and he doesn’t.”

Much to the embarrassment of his father, Lee enrolled in a three-year arts program in Taiwan after twice taking, and twice failing, the national university entrance exam. “
I had a lot of guilt,” says Lee, “that I didn’t follow his path.” He then came to America and studied film at New York University, where he worked on the crew of a movie made by
fellow student Spike Lee. After graduation, he “struggled through
six years of agonizing, hopeless uncertainty”; he sent one of his screenplays to more than thirty production companies, only to be rejected by all of them. After his in-laws offered his wife money so that he could start a restaurant—she refused—he very nearly gave up filmmaking.

Bellow and Lee are almost textbook Triple Package types. A friend of Bellow’s from the 1940s remembered him as “
carrying a chip on his shoulder.” Bellow’s son Greg has written about his father’s “insecurities” and describes him “
throwing down the gauntlet to the American literary establishment personified by Ernest Hemingway.” And
Bellow was famously “disciplined.” Lee too has spoken of his family’s “
insecurity”; as the “first son,” he recalls, he “felt everything rested on my shoulders.” Lee’s need to prove himself powered him through years of failure and rejection that would surely have derailed most.

Both men would of course go on to groundbreaking achievement—groundbreaking in both content and in relation to their own ethnic identity. Bellow was “the
first Jewish-American novelist to stand at the center of American literature,” as the influential critic Leslie Fiedler put it in 1957—and that was before his Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. Other successful American novelists had been Jewish
(Norman Mailer’s 1948 Hemingwayesque
The Naked and the Dead
became a
sixty-two-week
New York Times
bestseller), but Bellow was the first to break through to a large readership “
without departing from an American Jewish idiom”—opening the door for a whole generation of Roths and Hellers who would follow. Lee was the
first Chinese to win the Acadamy Award for best director even once, much less twice, and his films have spanned a head-spinning diversity of genre and subject matter that lesser men would never have dared.

In short, both Bellow and Lee kicked away the ladder—but not before having climbed it. The Triple Package had been instilled into them as children, producing its strange combination of confidence and insecurity, its relentless drive, its discipline—and the unquenchable need to prove themselves. In this sense, they never left the Triple Package entirely behind. On the contrary, they attained their heights of achievement only because of the qualities it imparted to them. Yet both men, because they had these qualities, were able to defy the constraints on the kind of life, the kind of success, they were expected to pursue. The Triple Package empowered them to break free from its confines—and write their own, original scripts.

America is a central player in this story too. For both men, it was America that released their creativity and galvanized their self-invention. Both Bellow and Lee were immigrants; both would eventually become naturalized U.S. citizens. Yet both, importantly, found themselves doubly outsiders—first in their own families, then in the United States.

“
I never belonged to my own family,” Bellow once recalled; “I was always the one apart.” His Jewish protagonists may proclaim their Americanness (“I’m an American, Chicago-born” are the first words of
Augie March
), but Bellow himself described Jews in the United States as “
métèques
”—outsiders or “resident aliens.” Lee has
made similar remarks: “
I’m a drifter and an outsider. There’s not one single environment I can totally belong to,” he has said. “Every movie I make, that’s my hideout, the place I don’t quite understand but feel most at home.”

In America, individuals raised in Triple Package cultures occupy a strange position, pulled simultaneously by the demands of their home culture and by the allure of American freedom. Poised on the edge of both worlds, they belong fully to neither. This cultural edge has its own price, exacting its own psychological toll, but it may be one of the most liberating and creatively productive places a person can inhabit.

—

A
SIGN OF THIS LIBERATING POTENTIAL
is the intense opposition to “model minority” stereotypes that has become widespread among young Asian Americans.
A growing number of Asian college students in the United States major in the humanities and want nothing to do with math or classical music. Many are finding their
role models in breakout Asian American stars who have gone against type, like John Cho and Kal Penn (a.k.a. “Harold and Kumar”), Mindy Kaling (of “The Office” and “The Mindy Project”), YouTube sensation Freddie Wong, stand-up comic Aziz Ansari, basketball player Jeremy Lin, and celebrity fashion designer Jason Wu (who designed Michelle Obama’s inaugural ball gown).

Still others are looking at public-interest careers, which is also unconventional from a Triple Package point of view. Immigrant parents may be dismayed by the prospect of their children taking relatively low-paying jobs with the government or nonprofit organizations, which they view as neither prestigious nor financially secure. Here too America—because of its strong encouragement to public service, especially for young people—is a large part of the story. Moreover,
immigrant communities may come to take pride in their members who forgo riches and work instead for a greater good. When the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, the first Asian American to become a U.S. Attorney, gained fame for taking on high-level Wall Street corruption, like the billion-dollar insider trading scandal at the Galleon Group hedge fund, he was
celebrated in the Indian American community (and in India as well).

But the very same Galleon insider trading scandal also brought
consternation and shame to the Indian American community. One of the defendants U.S. Attorney Bharara brought down in that case—former McKinsey head Rajat Gupta—was himself Indian American. Which brings us to a final Triple Package pathology: the pathology of drive itself.

Triple Package striving is by nature insatiable; it has no built-in limit. Whatever arena you’re competing in, there’s almost always someone higher than you are, and even if you managed to make it to the top, the fear of losing that spot would keep pushing you on. As a result, the Triple Package can make some individuals prone to overweening ambition and greed. At the extreme, the longing to rise can become desperate or monomaniacal, oblivious to law, ethics, or the harm caused to others. Gupta and Bernie Madoff are just two of hundreds of names exemplifying this Triple Package disease.

Often people find a mystery in these cases. Many have wondered why Gupta, whose estimated net worth was already
over $80 million, who attended a
state dinner at the White House, and who was revered in his community, would engage in illegal information-trading for benefits that even now remain unclear. “The Court can say without exaggeration,” pronounced the judge at Gupta’s sentencing hearing, “that it has never encountered a defendant whose prior history suggests such an extraordinary devotion, not only to humanity writ
large, but also to other individual human beings in their time of need.” But perhaps for some, the urge for more and more recognition—the ceaseless chip on the shoulder, the need to show the world by rising higher and higher—becomes irresistible.

Even in much less virulent forms, Triple Package drivenness by definition makes it difficult to live a nondriven life. A simple, decent existence—with no scrambling to climb any ladders, without caring whether anyone thinks you’re successful enough—may be the most admirable life of all. But it is rarely available to people afflicted with the Triple Package.

IQ, INSTITUTIONS, AND UPWARD MOBILITY

“
H
ORATIO
A
LGER
I
S
D
EAD
”:
so proclaimed a
Daily Beast
headline in 2012.
Obituaries reporting the demise of upward mobility in America are ubiquitous; they have become the new mythology of American upward mobility. And while the new myth, that mobility in America no longer exists, contains important kernels of truth, it is just as misleading as the old myth, that America is a classless society.

The central statistic cited when American upward mobility is pronounced dead—found in a 2008 Pew study—is that
42 percent of people raised in the lowest economic quintile remain there as adults. The first point to observe about this figure should be obvious. If 42 percent stay in the lowest income bracket, 58 percent don’t. In other words, a
majority
of Americans born to the poorest families in the United States escape such poverty. (A different Pew study, using a larger data set, found that
two-thirds of Americans born in the lowest quintile rose to a higher quintile as adults.)
Rising remains the rule in America, not the exception.

The 42 percent figure has also been
cited repeatedly to show that
America compares badly on the upward mobility front with other developed countries.
In Denmark, one study found, only 25 percent of men born in the poorest quintile remain there as adults. What’s more, according to the same study, only 8 percent of American men rose from the bottom fifth to the top fifth, as compared, say, with 12 percent in Britain. Thus America isn’t a country of exceptional rags-to-riches opportunity; it’s a country where rising from poverty to wealth is exceptionally difficult and rare.

These statistics can be found everywhere today, online and in print. What’s infrequently mentioned is that these studies largely
exclude immigrants.
(As the Pew Foundation explains, when researchers examine intergenerational mobility in a given country, “[
i]mmigrant families are not included in the surveys for the simple reason” that immigrants’ “parents were born in another country.”) In America’s case, this omission is quite substantial; there are
more than 40 million immigrants in the United States. The overwhelming majority arrived after 1965, but they
and their children
are almost entirely excluded by the upward-mobility studies conducted thus far. Indeed, the same Pew study repeatedly cited for the death of upward mobility in the United States expressly cautions that its findings do not apply to “immigrant families,” for whom “the
American dream is alive and well.”

America offers exceptional upward mobility to an exceptional number of immigrants and their children (which is why so many people want to come here). This is true across the board—the children of poor Hispanic, African, and Asian immigrants generally
experience strong upward mobility on a variety of measures—although it’s especially pronounced in certain Asian groups. This phenomenon demands attention and substantially complicates the claim that upward mobility is dead in the United States.

Shrinking upward mobility in America is a serious problem, and being born to rich parents is of course a huge advantage. If you’re
born with the proverbial silver spoon, you can grow up to be wealthy without hard work, discipline, drive, or any other Triple Package quality. (The Triple Package is not a prerequisite to wealth; someone wins the lottery every week.) But to the extent that a group passes on its wealth that way, it’s likely headed for decline.

At the other end of the spectrum, for many nonimmigrant groups in America, poverty
is
deeply entrenched. For example, Owsley County, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, called a “
pauper county” in the 1890s, remained in 2010 one of the poorest counties—
according to some,
the
poorest county—in the continental United States.

This chapter is about upward mobility and the Triple Package. Much of this book has been about America’s most successful groups and what they have in common. But what about America’s poorest groups? This chapter looks at some of America’s persistently low-income groups. It shows not only that these groups lack the Triple Package, but that immigrant upward mobility (as well as the recent dramatic rise of Mormons) is a quintessential Triple Package phenomenon.

This chapter is also about other causes of success and nonsuccess. The Triple Package is a set of cultural forces, but culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Below we’ll explore how the Triple Package stands in relation to other theories and determinants of differential group performance—including IQ, immigrant selection, institutions, and class rigidity—reinforcing some of them, working independently of others, and explaining important phenomena the other theories can’t account for.

—

B
Y STATUTE,
S
TUYVESANT
H
IGH
S
CHOOL
in Lower Manhattan accepts students based solely on standardized test scores. Although
tuition is free, Stuyvesant is one of the best high schools in the country. Like Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire (tuition: $35,750),
Stuyvesant reportedly sends upwards of 25 percent of its graduates to Ivy League or other top-tier universities. In 2013,
the school’s new admittees consisted of 9 black children, 24 Latinos, 177 whites, and 620 Asians. At
Bronx Science, another of New York City’s superelite public high schools, 64 percent of the students are Asian American.

It bears emphasizing that many of the Asian kids getting into these schools are from poor immigrant families. In 2012, more than three hundred students got into Stuyvesant and New York City’s other selective public high schools from three Brooklyn zip codes covering neighborhoods like
Sunset Park, with heavily immigrant Chinese American populations and average incomes low enough to make schoolchildren eligible for a free lunch. Higher-income neighborhoods like Manhattan’s Upper West Side supplied most of the other students.

The lower working-class background of these Chinese students is significant because Asian success in the United States is frequently explained as a simple by-product of the
head start that Asian immigrants bring with them. Since 1965, America has granted a large percentage of entry visas on the basis of technical skills and educational attainment. Asian immigrants are much more likely to have gained entry this way than are, say, Mexican immigrants, who more often come in under the “
family reunification” program, as relatives of U.S. citizens. This gives some Asian immigrants a big leg up economically.

For example, many Indian immigrants graduated from that country’s incredibly competitive Institutes of Technology, arriving in America with highly marketable technical skills. Some Chinese immigrants were top scorers on China’s nationwide university exam—
the
cream of the intellectual crop. It’s hardly surprising when members of this cohort go on to get PhDs and become professionals or academics in the United States. Thus immigrant selection criteria have contributed substantially to Indian and Chinese American success.

But not all Indian and Chinese immigrants fall into this category. The Chinese parents in Sunset Park sending their children to Stuyvesant don’t tend to have PhDs; they’re
more likely to be restaurant or factory workers. (In fact,
a majority of Chinese immigrants do not obtain entry visas under the skills or education criteria.) The same phenomenon has been documented across the country. In Los Angeles, as elsewhere in the United States, the Chinese immigrant community is “
bimodal”: one segment came from highly educated backgrounds, while another arrived with only an elementary school education. Yet the children of both groups are enjoying exceptional academic success, outperforming their peers. Starting their lives in working-class households, these children are on their way to professional, high-skill jobs.

Thus immigrant selection criteria can’t fully explain Chinese success in the United States. It can’t explain the upward mobility of second-generation Chinese Americans whose parents came to this country with no educational or economic advantages. As a result, some have claimed that IQ must be the answer. But the data don’t support this notion either. In a comprehensive review of fifty years of studies, IQ expert James Flynn found that higher IQ could not explain disproportionate Chinese American success. According to Flynn, notwithstanding their economic and academic outperformance of white Americans,
Chinese Americans’ mean IQ is no higher than that of white Americans.

Rather, Chinese Americans are getting
more bang for their intelligence buck: Chinese Americans with an IQ of (say) 103 get significantly better grades in school, scores on tests, and ultimately
higher-paying jobs than do white Americans with an IQ of 103. This is true even with respect to performance in math, which many consider the most IQ-correlated; thus Chinese Americans have been found to score significantly higher on calculus, analytic geometry, and SAT math tests than white Americans
of the same IQ level
. Which is to say: IQ is not the differentiating factor. As one developmental psychologist quips, “
If Asian students were truly genetically superior to other students, they would not be spending twice as much time on homework each week as their peers in order to outperform them.”

The real explanation of how Chinese American families in Brooklyn are sending their children to Stuyvesant and Bronx Science isn’t complicated. They’re working harder at it. Visit Sunset Park’s Chinatown on a Saturday afternoon, and you’ll find that the kids aren’t enjoying a day off from lessons. They’re studying math and English, often attending tutoring sessions offered by test preparation companies. Tutoring takes place not only on weekends, but during the summer. “I would say, in this area,
probably 95 out of 100 Chinese students attend one of these programs,” said the associate director of one such company.

Asian studying habits and their disproportionate admission to New York’s elite public schools have provoked considerable backlash. In 2012, the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a federal complaint against the city, objecting to the vast underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics, and claiming that admitting students solely on the basis of test scores was racially discriminatory. Some call Asian success unfair because other groups can’t afford the test-prep programs. Still others object to the whole practice of sending kids to after-school and weekend tutoring, saying that Asians study “excessively” and that the regimen is too hard on children.

These objections are all understandable, but it’s difficult to fault
Asian families for what they’re doing. Many Chinese parents who pay for tutoring—which can cost $2,000 and up for a single student—are poor, like the couple who worked every day to send their three kids to tutoring, at a cost of $
5,000 a year despite their combined income of only $26,000. Moreover, New York City offers
free tutoring programs for poor families; roughly 43 percent of those taking advantage of these sessions are Asian (although Asian Americans make up only 14 percent of the city’s public school students). As to the charge that they study “excessively,” Chinese parents often say their kids are being blamed for having a good work ethic and good values; they disagree with the notion that they’re working their kids too hard. One Bensonhurst parent of Chinese heritage said her daughter’s tutoring sessions were nothing compared to what she had seen growing up: her father and brothers starving to death in Cambodia; her mother’s struggles as a garment worker in America when they emigrated. “This is the easy part,” she said.

Other Asian Americans in New York City express similar attitudes. “
Most of our parents don’t believe in ‘gifted,’” said a Bangladeshi American boy of fifteen, a student at Bronx Science who had spent summers as well as weekends at a storefront “cram school,” improving his math and reading. His immigrant parents, a taxi driver and a drugstore cashier, had instilled in him the familiar message of how much they had endured, both in their native country and in America. “You try to make up for their hardships,” he said. “It’s all about hard work.”

In other words, Asian American success at New York’s elite public schools is a classic example of Triple Package success. Both parents and children, with the usual combination of superiority, insecurity, and impulse control, are driving themselves to make it. It’s also a classic example of old-fashioned American Dream upward mobility—
of rising from relative poverty to relative affluence, and not through luck or connections, but through hard work. Upward mobility is alive and kicking in the United States; it’s just that not all groups are equally able to take advantage of it.

—

O
NE PLACE WHERE MANY
are not upwardly mobile is Appalachia, particularly Central Appalachia—a region that includes
about half of Kentucky and Tennessee.

It’s hard to write or talk about Appalachia even if you’re from there. When in 2009 Diane Sawyer, who was born in southern Kentucky, did a
20/20
segment on poverty in Appalachia, she received not only national praise and a Peabody Award, but also an onslaught of furious criticism from the region she was trying to help. While some appreciated the documentary, far more reviews read like this: “[
G]et out, stay out of people’s lives.” Or this: “[Y]our elite group is so condescending.” (For some, once you leave Appalachia, you’re no longer Appalachian.) Or: “Why don’t you plan a trip to meet some of us with Master’s Degrees, Professional Degrees, or advanced certifications. There are plenty of us here who are health conscious, self-sufficient,
non-welfare drawing, non–Mountain Dew guzzling, non-addicted, intelligent, educated, and still have our natural teeth who would be willing to speak with you and show you the REST OF APPALACHIA!!!!!!!!!”

If you ask Appalachians where they’re from, they don’t tend to use the term Appalachia. They’re more likely to name a state or part of a state, like West Virginia or Perry County, Kentucky. And they often describe deeply
contradictory impressions. On the one hand, the aching beauty of mountain streams and rolling hills; on the other, the ugly reality of dying towns and derelict trailers, of mountains
decapitated for strip mining. On the one hand, resentment at the negative stereotypes of rednecks, hicks, and white trash; on the other, a tendency to embrace those terms defiantly. Historian Anthony Harkins, of Western Kentucky University, has observed that “
southern mountain folk” have both condemned the word
hillbilly
“as a vicious slur and embraced it in defense of their value system and in celebration of their cultural heritage.”