The Triple Package (25 page)

entrepreneurial Igbo
:
Chinua Achebe,
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
(New York: Penguin Press, 2012), pp. 74–6; Donald L. Horowitz,
Ethnic Groups in Conflict
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 27–8, 154–5, 164–6, 243–9; Amy Chua,
World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
(New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 108–9.

Jews are the “chosen”
:
See generally Avi Beker,
The Chosen: The History of an Idea, and the Anatomy of an Obsession
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008); David Novak,
The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Daniel H. Frank, ed.,
A People Apart: Chosenness and Ritual in Jewish Philosophical Thought
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Arnold M. Eisen,
The Chosen People in America: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).

a moral people, a people of law
:
See, e.g., Louis Dembitz Brandeis, “The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It” (speech delivered in June 1915), reprinted in Steve Israel and Seth Forman, eds.,
Great Jewish Speeches Throughout History
(Northvale, NJ, and London: Jason Aronson Inc., 1994), pp. 69, 74; Patai,
The Jewish Mind
, pp. 8–9, 324, 339; Nathan Glazer,
American Judaism
(2d ed.) (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 136–7.

To be an immigrant
:
See, e.g., Nancy Foner,
From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 72, 90; Eleanor J. Murphy, “Transnational Ties and Mental Health,” in Ramaswami Mahalingam, ed.,
Cultural Psychology of Immigrants
(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2006), pp. 79, 81; Vivian S. Louie,
Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity Among Chinese Americans
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 123–5.

diagnostically recognized symptom
:
American Psychiatric Association,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(4th ed., Text Revision)
(Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Assn., 2000), p. 720.

Freud speculated
:
Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” in James Strachey, ed. and trans.,
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
(London: Hogarth Press, 1986), vol. 9, p. 186 (“Generally speaking, our civilization is built up on the suppression of instincts”).

youth culture
:
See Jed Rubenfeld,
Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 34; Jon Savage,
Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture
(New York: Viking, 2007); see also Patricia Cohen,
In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age
(New York: Scribner, 2012), p. 168.

large marble pig
:
Amy Chua,
Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 38; Anthony R. Birley,
Hadrian: The Restless Emperor
(London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 276.

filthy and degenerate
:
Irving Howe,
World of Our Fathers
(New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 51 (“human garbage”), 230 (“slovenly in dress, loud in manners, and vulgar in discourse”).

“chip on the shoulder”
:
Stephen Birmingham,
“The Rest of Us”: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews
(Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), p. 17; see also Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 82 (describing “Jewishness” for Proust in
Remembrance of Things Past
as “at once a physical stain and a mysterious personal privilege”).

New York intellectuals
:
See Richard M. Cook,
Alfred Kazin: A Biography
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 32–3 (describing what Kazin called the “humiliation” he suffered at the hands of those with “a long-bred talent for sociability,” which he never outlived and which made him “bitter, bitter”); Peter Manso,
Mailer: His Life and Times
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), pp. 340–1 (quoting Rhoda Lazare Wolf as saying that Norman Mailer wanted “to conquer the world. He doesn’t want to be the boy from Crown Street”); Ross Wetzsteon,
Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910–1960
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 491 (describing how Delmore Schwartz “flipped . . . from grandiose self-esteem to histrionic self-loathing”); Greg Bellow,
Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 54 (describing his father, Saul Bellow, as “an unknown Jewish novelist” who—whatever his “personal insecurities”—threw “down the gauntlet to the American literary establishment personified by Ernest Hemingway”); James Atlas,
Bellow
(New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 10, 23, 32, 50; Florence Rubenfeld,
Clement Greenberg—A Life
(New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 83 (“Although [Greenberg] appeared confident, his arrogance concealed a self-doubt that had to be hidden at all costs, especially from himself”); Wetzsteon,
Republic of Dreams
, p. 533 (describing Clement Greenberg as “arrogant and insecure”); Norman Podhoretz,
Making It
(New York: Random House, 1967), p. 5 (“my ‘noblest’ ambitions were tied to the vulgar desire to rise above the class into which I was born . . . [and] to an astonishing extent . . . were shaped and defined by the standards and values and tastes of the class into which I did not know I wanted to move”) and p. 38 (describing the “disdain” he encountered at Columbia from “those whose wealth was inherited”); see also Alan M. Wald,
The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 34 (noting that Lionel Trilling “was acutely sensitive to the way in which society attempted to exclude Jews,” that “he felt a special antagonism toward . . . genteel German Jews who were proud of their high degree of acculturation”); see generally Alan Bloom,
Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 308 (“Essential” to the “success of the New York Intellectuals was their desire to achieve something in the society which had excluded their parents”); and pp. 17, 21–23, 27, 155.

Nietzsche taught
:
See Friedrich Nietzsche,
On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo
(Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), pp. 54, 73, 124 (describing “
ressentiment
” as “inexhaustible and insatiable”), 126–8; see also Robert C. Solomon, “Nietzsche and the Emotions,” in Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald Lehrer, eds.,
Nietzsche and Depth Psychology
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 127, 142.

moving up the economic ladder
:
Foner,
From Ellis Island to JFK
, p. 91.

steep fall in status
:
See Susan Eva Eckstein,
The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the US and Their Homeland
(New Haven, CT, and London: Routledge, 2009), p. 83; David Rieff,
The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), pp. 48, 81; Gonzalez-Pando,
The Cuban Americans
, pp. 34–6; Tara Bahrampour, “Persia on the Pacific,”
The New Yorker
, November 10, 2003; see also Foner,
From Ellis Island to JFK
, p. 91.

high academic expectations
:
See, e.g., Jin Li,
Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and
West
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 71; Rebecca Y. Kim,
God’s New Whiz Kids? Korean American Evangelicals on
Campus
(New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), p. 79; Zhou,
Contemporary Chinese America,
pp. 194–5; see also Richard R. Pearce, “Effects of Cultural and Social Structural Factors on the Achievement of White and Chinese American Students at School Transition Points,”
American Educational Research Journal
43, no. 1 (2006), pp. 75, 94–5; Wenfan Yen and Qiuyun Lin, “Parent Involvement and Mathematics Achievement: Contrast Across Racial and Ethnic Groups,”
The Journal of Educational Research
99, no. 2 (2005), pp. 116, 120–1; Bandana Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asian Americans
Traverse a Transnational World
(New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 91, 93; Clara C. Park, “Educational and Occupational Aspirations of Asian American Students,” in Clara C. Park, A. Lin Goodwin and Stacey J. Lee, eds.,
Asian
American Identities, Families, and Schooling
(Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2003), pp. 135, 149–50.

Comparisons to cousin X
:
See Li,
Cultural Foundations of Learning
, p. 207 (noting that Chinese parents seek out “good students in the community” and “refer their own children to them often, in clear comparative terms, urging their children to emulate these models”); Jin Li, Susan D. Holloway, Janine Bempechat, and Elaine Loh, “Building and Using a Social Network: Nurture for Low-Income Chinese American Adolescents’ Learning,” in Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Niobe Way, eds.,
Beyond the Family: Contexts of Immigrant Children’s Development
, no. 121 (2008), pp. 9, 18 (in a study of low-income Chinese American adolescents, 77 percent of the children said their parents frequently compared them to higher-achieving relatives or peers); see also Lee and Lee Zhou, “Frames of Achievement and Opportunity Horizons,” p. 216.

lower- and higher-income
:
Louie,
Compelled to Excel
, pp. 97–8; Lee and Zhou, “Frames of Achievement and Opportunity Horizous,” p. 216; Li et al., “Building and Using a Social Network,” pp. 15, 18–20; Kyle Spencer, “For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones,”
New York Times
, Oct. 26, 2012.

“In Chinese families”
:
Ruth K. Chao, “Chinese and European American Mothers’ Beliefs about the Role of Parenting in Children’s School Success,”
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
27, no. 4 (1996), pp. 403, 412; see also Louie,
Compelled to Excel
, p. 48 (noting that in Confucian-influenced cultures, “the accomplishments of the individual are strongly grounded in familial obligations and prestige”); Peter H. Huang, “Tiger Cub Strikes Back: Memoirs of an Ex-Child Prodigy About Legal Education and Parenting,”
British Journal of American Legal Studies
1, no. 2 (2012), pp. 21–3 (“My mother was not amused . . . She told me that I had not only embarrassed myself, but also her, my entire immediate family, all Chinese people, all Asian people, all humans, and in fact all carbon-based life forms”).

“It was not for myself alone”
:
Alfred Kazin,
A Walker in the City
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), p. 21.

“If there were Bs”
:
Cook,
Alfred Kazin
, p. 13; see also Kazin,
A Walker in the City
, p. 21 (recalling from his Brooklyn childhood that “anything less than absolute perfection in school always suggested to my mind that I might . . . be kept back in the working class forever”).

Mormon teenagers are less likely to drink
:
See Bushman,
Contemporary Mormonism
, p. 47 (citing the four-year National Study of Youth and Religion).

two hundred thousand people in poverty
:
U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group code 013 – Asian Indian) (showing a poverty rate of 8.2 percent and a population of over 2.7 million).

“Let me summarize my feelings”
:
Wesley Yang, “Paper Tigers,”
New York Magazine
, May 8, 2011.

“[H]e will never become World Champion”
:
Natalia Pogonina, “The Art of Defense,” Chess.com, March 22, 2011, http://www.chess.com/article/view/art-of-defense.

psychological armor
:
See Min Zhou, “The Ethnic System of Supplementary Education: Nonprofit and For-Profit Institutions in Los Angeles’ Chinese Immigrant Community,” in Marybeth Shinn and Hirokazu Yoshikara, eds.,
Toward Positive Youth Development: Transforming Schools and Community Programs
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 232; John U. Ogbu and Herbert D. Simons, “Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural Ecological Theory of School Performance with Some Implications for Education,”
Anthropology and Education Quarterly
29, no. 2 (1998), pp. 155–88.

“Yes, I am a Jew”
:
Beker,
The Chosen
, p. 85 (quoting Benjamin Disraeli).

resilience, stamina, or grit
:
See Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney,
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
(New York: Penguin Press, 2011); Angela L. Duckworth, “The Significance of Self-Control,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
108, no. 7 (2011), pp. 2639–40; Angela L. Duckworth, Christopher Peterson, Michael D. Matthews, and Dennis R. Kelly, “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
92, no. 6 (2007), pp. 1087–1101; see also Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson,
The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success
(New York: Dutton, 2013), pp. 68–74.