The Triple Package (36 page)

“suffer a degradation not fit for human beings”
:
Dutta and Robinson,
Rabindranath Tagore
, p. 216.

“I always felt so embarrassed by my name”
:
Benjamin Anastas, “Inspiring Adaptation,”
Men’s Vogue
, March/April 2007, p. 113; see Julia Leyda, “An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri,”
Contemporary Women’s Writing
5, no. 1 (2011), p. 66.

The popular claim
 . . . “worshipping cows”:
Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity
, p. 39.

“smelling like curry”
:
Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin,
The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism
(Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), p. 70.

Sikh men
:
Sidhu and Gohil,
Civil Rights in Wartime,
pp. xiii–xv, 48, 64–8.

“You fucking Arab rag-head”
:
Prashad,
Uncle Swami
, pp. 4–5.

Indian cabdrivers
:
Sidhu and Gohil,
Civil Rights in Wartime
, p. 65; Palash Ghosh, “South Asian Taxi Drivers: Victims and Perpetrators of Racism,”
International Business Times
, June 22, 2012, http://www.ibtimes.com/south-asian-taxi-drivers-victims-perpetrators-racism-705690.

although perhaps “Caucasian,” was not “white”
:
United States v. Thind
, 261 U.S. 204, 210, 214–6 (1923).

Many Indian Americans attest
:
Prashad,
Uncle Swami
, pp. 3–7; Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity
, pp. 27–31, 38–41.

“whiten” their lobbies
 . . . “Even foreign is not a bad thing”:
Dhingra,
Life Behind the Lobby
, pp. 126–9.

Rajat Gupta came to the United States
:
Raghavan,
The Billionaire’s Apprentice
, pp. 40–2, 46.

“oldest bloodlines”
 . . . “natural superiority”:
Ibid., p. 11.

passed over by every firm
:
Ibid., pp. 78, 82–4.

McKinsey’s chief executive
:
Ibid., p. 123.

“‘model minorities’”
 . . . “‘real’ minorities”:
Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity
, p. 93; see also Maira,
Desis in the House
, p. 72 (“[t]he anti-Black prejudices of South Asian immigrants are reinforced by the Black/White lines of American racial formations”); Vijay Prashad,
The Karma of Brown Folk
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 157, 178–9 (arguing that many Indian immigrants accept anti-black racism as part of a need to enhance their own foothold in their new country), pp. 97–8 (noting “obsession with skin color” prevalent in India); see also Mahalingam, Philip, and Balan, “Cultural Psychology and Marginality,” pp. 160–62.

“better, smarter, more high-achieving”
:
Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity
, p. 93.

Young South Asians who date African Americans
:
Maira,
Desis in the House
, pp. 71–2.

may be more insulated from American racism
:
See Prashad,
Uncle Swami
, p. 13.

“whiten” their complexion
:
See, e.g., Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity
, pp. 33–4.

“naked brown male bodies”
:
E-mail to Amy Chua, Dec. 4, 2012 (on file with authors).

reconfigured through their confrontation with American society
:
Karen Leonard, “South Asian Religions in the United States: New Contexts and Configurations,” in Rajan and Sharma,
New Cosmopolitanisms
, pp. 91, 94–6.

caste distinctions have become much less significant
:
John Y. Fenton,
Transplanting Religious Traditions: Asian Indians in America
(New York: Praeger, 1988), p. 34; Fisher,
The Indians of New York City
, pp. 52–3; Rhitu Chatterjee, “Beyond Class Part V—Indians in America—Caste Adrift,”
The World
, Public Radio International, May 23, 2012, http://pri.org/stories/2012-05-23/beyond-class-part-v-indians-america-caste-adrift?utm_source=rss&utm_ medium=rss&utm_campaign=india-caste-us; Joseph Berger, “Family Ties and the Entanglements of Caste,”
New York Times
, Oct. 24, 2004. Even in India, the importance of caste varies greatly in different contexts and in different regions. It is very common for Indians in the United States (as in India) to interact and socialize across caste lines. For this reason, it would be both politically incorrect and inconsistent with common practice for an Indian American to openly express a belief that he or she is superior because of his or her caste background.

generally viewed as discriminatory
:
See, e.g., Chatterjee, “Beyond Class” (describing caste as “discriminatory and outdated”).

across caste and regional divides
:
Rayaprol,
Negotiating Identities
, p. 76; Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity
, p. 97; Prashad,
Uncle Swami
, pp. 13–4; Fisher,
The Indians of New York City
, pp. 74–5.

“‘superior culture’ narrative”
:
Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity
, pp. 89–90.

lowest out-marriage rate
:
Only 14 percent of Indian American newlyweds in 2008–10 married outside their ethnic group, compared to 64 percent Japanese Americans, 54 percent Filipinos, 39 percent Koreans, and 35 percent Chinese. See Pew Research Center,
The Rise of Asian Americans,
p. 106.

almost 70 percent of Indians
:
Ibid., p. 128.

emphasizing their Hinduism
:
Leonard, “South Asian Religions,” p. 98; Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity
, pp. 96–9. Professor Purkayastha says that this Hindu emphasis is part of “a new ideology of superiority” among (Hindu) Indian Americans. Ibid., p. 97.

10 percent of Indian Americans who are Muslim
:
Percentages are from Pew Research Center,
Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths
(Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2012), p. 16. On Muslim Indian Americans, see also Aminah Mohammed-Arif,
Salaam America: South
Asian Muslims in New York
, trans. Sarah Patey (London: Anthem Press, 2002), p. 33 (estimating that in 1990, there were approximately 80,000 Muslim Indian Americans out of a total Indian American population of 815,447). The Pew report found that 51 percent of Indian Americans identify themselves as Hindu and that 59 percent say they were raised Hindu. But see “So, How Many Hindus Are There in the US?,”
Hinduism
Today
(Jan., Feb., Mar., 2008), http://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/2008/1-3/61_swadhyay%20pariwar.shtml (suggesting that 80 percent of Indian Americans are Hindu).

Hindu temple building
 . . . transformation:
Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity
, p. 97.

also serve as social centers
:
Ibid., pp. 97–98.

feedback loop
 . . . “superior family/ethnic culture”:
Ibid., pp. 89, 91–7; see also Gupta, “Hidden in Plain Sight” (noting that Indian American culture is often self-depicted as the “‘best of both worlds’: American independence, determination and self-reliance coupled with Indian morals, religious beliefs and family values”).

not the only Asians who experience racism
:
A 2012 Pew survey found that 21 percent of Chinese Americans, 20 percent of Korean Americans, 19 percent of Filipino Americans, 18 percent of Indian Americans, 14 percent of Vietnamese Americans, and 9 percent of Japanese Americans “have personally experienced discrimination.” Pew Research Center,
The Rise of Asian Americans
, p. 114.

“Sometimes I’ll glimpse”
:
Wesley Yang, “Paper Tigers,”
New York Magazine
, May 8, 2011.

“racially gendered stereotypes”
:
Nancy Wang Yuen, “Performing Race, Negotiating Identity: Asian American Professional Actors in Hollywood,” in Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, eds.,
Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity and Ethnicity
(New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 251, 266.

“You’re a quarterback”
:
Yang, “Paper Tigers” (quoting Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu). On the male Asian American reaction to Jeremy Lin, see, e.g., Deanna Fei, “The Real Lesson of Linsanity,” Huffington Post, Feb. 16, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deanna-fei/jeremy-lin-asian-americans_b_1281916.html; Adrian Pei, “Jeremy Lin & Asian American Male Sexuality,” Next Gener.Asian Church, Feb. 9, 2012, http://nextgenerasianchurch.com/2012/02/09/jeremy-lin-asian-american-male-sexuality.

Bullying of East Asian kids
:
See Jin Li,
Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 214–16; Desiree Baolian Qin, Niobe Way, and Meenal Rana, “The ‘Model Minority’ and Their Discontent: Examining Peer Discrimination and Harassment of Chinese American Immigrant Youth,” in Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Niobe Way, eds.,
Beyond the Family: Contexts of Immigrant Children’s Development
, no. 121 (2008), pp. 27, 29–36.

Yul Kwon’s
:
Alexis Chiu and Cynthia Wang, “Master Strategist Yul Kwon Wins
Survivor
,”
People
, Dec. 18, 2006; “Yul Kwon, from Bullying Target to Reality TV Star,” NPR, May 15, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/05/16/152775069/yul-kwon-from-bullying-target-to-reality-tv-star.

“chink” or “gook”
 . . . “However improbable it might be”:
“Opinion: Red Chair Interview: Why Yul Kwon Ditched Law for TV,” CNN in America, Nov. 16, 2011, http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/16/red-chair-interview-yul-kwon.

“Fear of being persecuted and even murdered”
:
Dennis Prager, “Explaining Jews, Part III: A Very Insecure People,” Townhall Magazine, Feb. 21, 2006, http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2006/02/21/explaining_jews,_part_iii_a_very_insecure_people/page/full.

“You were born into anxiety”
:
Daniel Smith, “Do the Jews Own Anxiety?,”
New York Times
, Opinionator, May 26, 2012.

A history of persecution
:
Ancient Egypt enslaved its Jews (if the Bible is to be believed) and killed their newborn sons; Hadrian drove the Jews out of Jerusalem; England expelled its Jews in 1290; France did so in 1306, 1322, and 1394; Germany’s Jews were massacred in 1298, 1336–38, and 1348; Spain expelled them in 1492; Pope Pius V expelled them from the Papal States in 1569; over 50,000 Jews were killed in Poland between 1648 and 1654. And all this was before the rise of modern anti-Semitism. Chua,
Day of Empire
, pp. 38, 130, 134, 138; J. H. Elliott,
Imperial Spain, 1469–1716
(London: Edward Arnold, 1963), p. 98.

Franz Kafka
:
Daniel L. Medin,
Three Sons: Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), p. 22. In a similar vein, Walter Isaacson writes that “[l]iving as a Jew under the Nazis” left Henry Kissinger with an insecurity that fueled his ambition: “Confidence coexisting with insecurities, vanity with vulnerability, arrogance with a craving for approval: the complexities that were layered into Kissinger’s personality as a young man would persist throughout his life.” Walter Isaacson,
Kissinger: A Biography
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 56.

“That’s a mother’s prayer”
:
Joyce Antler,
You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1, 135 (citing
An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May
, original cast recording, Polygram Records, 1960).

“A Jewish girl becomes president”
:
Paul Mazursky, in Abigail Pogrebin, ed.,
Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish
(New York: Broadway Books, 2005), pp. 79–80, cited in Antler,
You Never Call!
, p. 5.

“construct developed by male writers”
:
Martha A. Ravits, “The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular Culture,” in Harold Bloom, ed.,
Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint
(Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004), p. 163; Antler,
You Never Write!
, p. 145. For those who haven’t read
Portnoy’s Complaint
, Sophie Portnoy is the mother of the protagonist, Alexander Portnoy, and “the definitive article: she cleans up after the maid, worries endlessly about what goes into Alex and what comes out of him, and exists to protect him from gentiles and manhood.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Jew,”
New York Times
, Feb. 18, 1969.

“often the only thing [they] could clearly communicate”
:
Robert Warshow, “Poet of the Jewish Middle Class,”
Commentary
, May 1946, p. 20, quoted in Alexander Bloom,
Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 19.

“self-perception of failure”
:
Bloom,
Prodigal Sons
, p. 18.

“forever disappointed in my father”
:
Isaac Rosenfeld,
Passage from Home
(New York: Dial Press, 1946), p. 7.

“[W]hat
was
it with these Jewish parents”
:
Philip Roth,
Portnoy’s Complaint
(New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 119.

“worked for many years as a banquet bartender”
:
Marco Rubio,
An American Son: A Memoir
(New York: Sentinel, 2012), p. 100; transcript of speech by Marco Rubio delivered at Republican National Convention, Aug. 30, 2012, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80493.html.

“Perceiving the sacrifices made by their parents”
:
Rubén G. Rumbaut, “Children of Immigrants and Their Achievement: The Role of Family, Acculturation, Social Class, Gender, Ethnicity, and School Contexts,” p. 1, http://www.hks.harvard.edu/inequality/Seminar/Papers/Rumbaut2.pdf.

almost a third
:
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 (July 1996), pp. 403, 412.

“familial obligation and prestige”
:
Vivian S. Louie,
Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity Among Chinese Americans
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 48. See also 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 (2012), pp. 297, 300–1. Quantitative psychological studies have confirmed that a sense of family obligation is more prevalent in Hispanic and Asian American families than in white American families and have found evidence that, in Asian American adolescents, a strong sense of family obligation acts as a buffer against the negative impact of low socioeconomic status on academic performance. See Lisa Kiang and Andrew J. Fuligni, “Ethnic Identity and Family Processes Among Adolescents from Latin American, Asian, and European Backgrounds,”
Journal of Youth and Adolescence
38, no. 2 (February 2009), pp. 228–41; Lisa Kiang et al., “Socioeconomic Stress and Academic Adjustment Among Asian American Adolescents: The Protective Role of Family Obligation,”
Journal of Youth and Adolescence
42, no. 6 (June 2013), pp. 837–47.

a child’s best—perhaps only—protection
:
See, e.g., Louie,
Compelled to Excel
, pp. 54, 57, 60–1; Beloo Mehra, “Multiple and Shifting Identities: Asian Indian Families in the United States,” 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. 27, 45–6; Jamie Lew, “The Re(construction) of Second-Generation Ethnic Networks: Structuring Academic Success of Korean American High School Students,” in Park et al.,
Asian American Identities
, pp. 157, 166–7.

“Harvard #1!”
:
See, e.g., Tony Hsieh,
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
(New York and Boston: Business Plus, 2010), p. 8 (“Harvard yielded the most prestigious bragging rights”); Louie,
Compelled to Excel
, pp. 42, 107; Lew, “The Re(construction) of Second-Generation Ethnic Networks,” p. 166; Tracy Jan, “Chinese Aim for the Ivy League,”
New York Times
, Jan. 4, 2009.

“Why just an A”
:
See, e.g., Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, “Frames of Achievement and Opportunity Horizons,” in David Card and Steven Raphael eds.,
Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), pp. 206, 216 (“Asian respondents described the value of grades on an Asian scale as ‘A is for average, and B is an Asian fail’ . . . the stakes have risen so that an A minus is now an Asian fail”); Louie,
Compelled to Excel
, p. 46 (“Why not 100?”), p. 109 (“she always expected 100s”).

“Koreans
 . . . they take it to another level”:
Rebecca Y. Kim,
God’s New Whiz Kids? Korean American Evangelicals on Campus
(New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), p. 79.

pointed comparisons
:
See, e.g., Lee and Zhou, “Frames of Achievement and Opportunity Horizons,” p. 216; Louie,
Compelled to Excel
, pp. 97–8; see also Li,
Cultural Foundations of Learning
, p. 207; 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 Yoshikawa and Way,
Beyond the Family
, pp. 9, 18.

“my parents thought I was a bad girl”
:
Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity
, p. 92.

“average” but not “great”
 . . . “better if I was first or second”:
Lee and Zhou, “Frames of Achievement and opportunity Horizons,” pp. 216, 217.

lowest
self-esteem of any racial group
:
Douglas S. Massey et al.,
The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 120–1; Carl L. Bankston III and Min Zhou, “Being Well vs. Doing Well: Self-Esteem and School Performance Among Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Racial and Ethnic Groups,”
International Migration Review
36, no. 2 (2002), pp. 389–415.

“intensely proud”
 . . . “descendants of the ancient Phoenicians”:
Joseph J. Jacobs,
The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Family, Culture, and Ethics
(San Francisco: ICS Press, 1991), pp. 13–16, 21.

singled out the Phoenicians
 . . . alphabet, arithmetic, and glass:
See Benjamin Isaac,
The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 324–8; J.P.V.D. Balsdon,
Romans and Aliens
(London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1979), pp. 63, 67; Elsa Marston,
The Phoenicians
(New York: Benchmark Books, 2002), p. 60; Sabatino Moscati, ed.,
The Phoenicians
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), pp. 551–52, 558. In the elder Pliny’s
Natural History
, a mammoth encyclopedia written in the 70s
AD
, he literally says, “The Phoenicians invented trade.” See Isaac,
The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity
,
pp. 324–8.

“greedy knaves”
 . . . “greed and luxury”:
Isaac,
The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity
, pp. 324–8.

“the original Christian disciples”
:
Jacobs,
The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur
, p. 13–14.

“look up at the Christians”
:
Kristine J. Ajrouch and Abdi M. Kusow, “Racial and Religious Contexts: Situational Identities Among Lebanese and Somali Muslim Immigrants,”
Ethnic and Racial Studies
30, no. 1 (2007), pp. 72, 83.

“Having no one to speak for us”
:
Jacobs,
The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur
, pp. 16–7.

“need to please my mother”
:
Ibid., pp. 29-35.

“I meant your
own
store!”
:
Ibid., pp. 28–9.

“doubly driven to succeed”
:
Ibid., p. 17.

self-esteem-centered
 . . . popular psychology:
See, e.g., Lori Gottlieb, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,”
Atlantic Monthly
, July/Aug. 2011 (questioning “self-esteem” that “comes from constant accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment”). We discuss the self-esteem movement in more detail in chapter 8.

CHAPTER 5: IMPULSE CONTROL

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots”
:
Eric Zorn, “Without Failure, Jordan Would Be False Idol,”
Chicago Tribune
, May 19, 1997.

large and growing body of research
:
See, e.g., Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney,
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
(New York: Penguin Press, 2011); Carol S. Dweck,
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
(New York: Random House, 2006); Angela L. Duckworth, Christopher Peterson, Michael D. Matthews, and Dennis Kelly, “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
92, no. 6 (2007), pp. 1087–1101. See also Kelly McGonigal,
The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It
(New York: Avery, 2012).

“marshmallow test”
:
Walter Mischel, Ebbe B. Ebbeson, and Antonette Raskoff Zeiss, “Cognitive and Attentional Mechanisms in Delay of Gratification,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
21, no. 2 (1972), pp. 204-18; Baumeister and Tierney,
Willpower
, pp. 9–11; Jonah Lehrer, “The Secret of Self-Control,”
The New Yorker
, May 18, 2009.

Mischel followed up
 . . . doing much better academically:
Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Monica L. Rodriguez, “Delay of Gratification in Children,”
Science
244, no. 4907 (1989), pp. 933–8; Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, and Philip K. Peake, “Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-Regulatory Competencies from Preschool Delay of Gratification: Identifying Diagnostic Conditions,”
Developmental Psychology
26, no. 6 (1990), pp. 978–86; Inge-Marie Eigsti, Vivian Zayas, Walter Mischel et al., “Predicting Cognitive Control from Preschool to Late Adolescence and Young Adulthood,”
Psychological Science
17, no. 6 (2006), pp. 478–84.

numerous studies
:
Baumeister and Tierney,
Willpower
, pp. 10–3; McGonigal,
The Willpower Instinct
, p. 12.

better predictor than SAT scores
:
Baumeister and Tierney,
Willpower
, p. 11; Duckworth et al., “Grit,” pp. 1098, 1099; Angela L. Duckworth and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents,”
Psychological Science
16, no. 12 (2005), pp. 939–44; Angela L. Duckworth, Patrick D. Quinn, and Eli Tsukayama, “What
No Child Left Behind
Leaves Behind: The Roles of IQ and Self-Control in Predicting Standardized Achievement Test Scores and Report Card Grades,”
Journal of Educational Psychology
104, no. 2 (2012), pp. 439–45.

researchers in New Zealand tracked
:
Terrie E. Moffitt et al., “A Gradient of Childhood Self-Control Predicts Health, Wealth, and Public Safety,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America
108, no. 7 (2011), pp. 2693–8. For a summary, see Baumeister and Tierney,
Willpower
, pp. 12–3.

Willpower and perseverance can be strengthened
:
See, e.g., Baumeister and Tierney,
Willpower
, pp. 11, 124–41; Dweck,
Mindset
, pp. 71–4; Mark Muraven, Roy F. Baumeister, and Dianne M. Tice, “Longitudinal Improvement of Self-Regulation Through Practice: Building Self-Control Through Repeated Exercise,”
Journal of Social Psychology
139, no. 4 (1999), pp. 446–57; see also Heidi Grant Halvorson,
Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals
(New York: Plume, 2012), pp. xvii–xxi; M. Oaten and K. Cheng, “Improved Self-Control: The Benefits of a Regular Program of Academic Study,”
Basic and Applied Social Psychology
28, no. 1 (2006), pp. 1–16; Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng, “Longitudinal Gains in Self-Regulation from Regular Physical Exercise,”
British Journal of Health Psychology
11, no. 4 (2006), pp. 717–33; Lori Gottlieb, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,”
The Atlantic
, July/August 2011.

Blaine’s feats
:
John Tierney, “If He Starts Nodding Off, Try Another Million Volts,”
New York Times
, Oct. 1, 2012; “David Blaine Nears Final Hours of ‘Shocking’ Stunt,”
USA Today
, Oct. 8, 2012.

“[F]or once”
:
Chris Britcher, “David Blaine’s Latest Trick: Making Mountains Out of Molehills,” Kentnews.co.uk, Oct. 8, 2012, http://www.kentnews.co.uk/blogs/david_blaine_s_latest_trick_making_mountains_out_of_molehills_1_1592494.

“hunger artist”
:
Franz Kafka,
A Hunger Artist and Other Stories,
trans. Joyce Crick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

two-thirds of today’s Chinese Americans
:
U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group code 016 – Chinese) (showing that 69 percent of Chinese Americans are foreign-born).

China’s massive superiority complex
:
See, e.g., John K. Fairbank, “China’s Foreign Policy in Historical Perspective,”
Foreign Affairs
47, no. 3 (1969), pp. 449, 456–63; Q. Edward Wang, “History, Space, Ethnicity: The Chinese Worldview,”
Journal of World History
10, no. 2 (1999), pp. 285, 287–8, 291. See also Yingjie Guo,
Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China
(New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 83–4 (tracing emergence of “Chinese superiority complex” at least as far back as Confucius); Larry Clinton Thompson,
William Scott Ament and the Boxer Rebellion: Heroism, Hubris and the “Ideal Missionary”
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008), p. 67 (referring to the “overweening Chinese superiority complex”); Unryu Suganuma,
Sovereign Rights and Territorial Space in Sino-Japanese Relations: Irredentism and the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), p. 15 (“Chinese superiority complex”).

combined to make China an extreme case
:
see Amy Chua,
Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 62.