by Amy Chua
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.
They tend to believe: See, e.g., Louie, Compelled to Excel, pp. 47–8; Grace Wang, “Interlopers in the Realm of High Culture: ‘Music Moms’ and the Performance of Asian and Asian American Identities,” American Quarterly 61, no. 4 (December 2009), pp. 892–4, 896; Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity, p. 89; Maryam Daha, “Contextual Factors Contributing to Ethnic Identity Development of Second-Generation Iranian American Adolescents,” Journal of Adolescent Research 26, no. 5 (2011), pp. 543, 560–1.
When on mission: See Bushman, Contemporary Mormonism, pp. 63–4: Keith Parry, “The Mormon Missionary Companionship,” in Marie Cornwall, Tim B. Heaton, and Lawrence A. Young, eds., Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 182, 183–85; Benedict, The Mormon Way of Doing Business, pp. 1–21.
binge-drinking culture: In a recent national study, 37 percent of American college students reported heavy drinking. Lloyd D. Johnston, Patrick M. O’Malley, Jerald G. Bachman, and John E. Schulenberg, Monitoring the Future: National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975–2012, vol. 2 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, 2012), p. 27.
institutions rather than culture: Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012).
geography ultimately explains: See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999); Jared Diamond, “What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?” New York Review of Books, June 7, 2012.
Triple Package cultures tend to focus: See, e.g., Bloom, Prodigal Sons, p. 17 (noting that among early-twentieth-century Jewish immigrant families “material worth became the tangible sign of American success”); Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity, p. 91 (South Asian Americans “often emphasize achievement in terms of a narrow range of white-collar careers in medicine, technology, law, and the sciences”); Mitra K. Shavarini, Educating Immigrants: Experiences of Second-Generation Iranians (New York: LFB Scholarly 2004), p. 148 (stressing the importance to Iranian Americans of “symbolic status” as well economic status); Daha, “Contextual Factors Contributing to Ethnic Identity Developme
nt of Second-Generation Iranian American Adolescents,” pp. 560–1; Lisa Sun-Hee Park, “Ensuring Upward Mobility: Obligations of Children of Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” in Benson Tong, ed., Asian American Children: A Historical Handbook and Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), p. 126.
“teach us how to make a living”: James Truslow Adams, “To ‘Be’ or To ‘Do’: A Note on American Education,” Forum LXXXI, no. 6 (June 1929), pp. 321, 325.
nothing-is-ever-good-enough mentality: See. e.g., Zhou, Contemporary Chinese America, p. 195.
America’s persistently low-income groups became poor: See, e.g., Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 5–14; Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee, The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 8–24.
little reason to engage in impulse control: Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri, and Richard N. Aslin, “Rational Snacking: Young Children’s Decision-Making on the Marshmallow Task Is Moderated by Beliefs About Environmental Reliability,” Cognition 126 (2013), pp. 109–14.
American Huguenot community: See Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 80–6, 96–100, 122–3, 132.
extremely high out-marriage rates: Alixa Naff, “Lebanese Immigration into the United States: 1880 to the Present,” in Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi, eds., The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies and I.B. Tauris & Co., 1992), pp. 159–60; Andrzej Kulczycki and Arun Peter Lobo, “Patterns, Determinants, and Implications of Intermarriage Among Arab Americans,” Journal of Marriage and Family 64, no. 1 (2002), pp. 202–10.
WASP economic dominance in the United States declined: See, e.g., Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005); Robert C. Christopher, Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), pp. 17–8; Peter Schrag, The Decline of the WASP (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971); Ronald W. Schatz, “The Barons of Middletown and the Decline of the North-Eastern Anglo-Protestant Elite,” Past & Present 219 (2013), pp. 165, 197–200; James D. Davidson et al., “Persistence and Change in the Protestant Establishment, 1930–1992,” Social Forces 74, no. 1 (1995), pp. 157–75; E. Digby Baltzell, “The Protestant Establishment Revisited,” The American Scholar 45, no. 4 (1976), pp. 499–518.
Jews may feel less insecure: See, e.g., Charles E. Silberman, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today (New York: Summit Books, 1985), p. 23 (“Americans Jews now live in a freer, more open society than that of any Diaspora community in which Jews have ever lived before”).
precipitous drop: See Unz, “The Myth of American Meritocracy” (noting that the number of Jewish top scorers on the high school Math Olympiad appears to have dropped from roughly 40 percent in the 1970s to 2.5 percent today).
2.6 times out of 10: Clay Davenport, “Baseball Prospectus Basics – About EqA,” Feb. 24, 2004, http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=2596 (referring to “the all-time major-league batting average of .262”). Williams hit .406 in 1941. Bill Pennington, “Ted Williams’s .406 Is More Than a Number,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 2011.
narcissistic personality disorder: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), pp. 265–6 (quoting Tina Redse).
“chip on his shoulder”: Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon, iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), p. 7.
an especially strong parent or even grandparent: Oprah Winfrey has described her grandmother as filling just such a role. “I am what I am because of my grandmother. My strength. My sense of reasoning. Everything. All that was set by the time I was six. . . . I was raised with an outhouse, no plumbing. Nobody had any clue that my life could be anything but working in some factory or a cotton field in Mississippi. Nobody—nobody. . . . Thank goodness I was raised by my grandmother the first six years.” Janet Lowe, Oprah Winfrey Speaks: Insight from the World’s Most Influential Voice (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998) (inner quotations omitted), pp. 6, 8.
stereotype threat and stereotype boost: The seminal article on stereotype threat is Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 (1995), but there is now a voluminous literature on the topic. For an excellent comprehensive treatment, see Michael Inzlicht and Toni Schmader, eds., Stereotype Threat: Theory, Process, and Application (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), which includes a discussion of the converse phenomenon, stereotype boost. Both stereotype threat and stereotype boost will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3 of this book.
“ethnic armor”: see Zhou, “The Ethnic System of Supplementary Education,” p. 232; Ogbu and Simons, “Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities,” pp. 170–2.
groundswell of studies: See chapter 8 and especially p. 213.
two of the leading twentieth-century studies: Victor Goertzel and Mildred George Goertzel, Cradles of Eminence (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), pp. vii–viii, 55, 60–7, 131 (stating that the authors’ study of 400 eminent individuals confirms theory that “contented,” “untroubled” people tend to have “low aspirations for themselves and for their children”), 174, 183, 214–6, 272–3, 302–49; Howard Gardner (in collaboration with Emma Laskin), Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (New York: BasicBooks, 1995), pp. 1–9, 32–3, 249–53. See also Angela L. Duckworth, David Weir, Eli Tsukayama, and David Kwok, “Who Does Well in Life? Conscientious Adults Excel in Both Objective and Subjective Success,” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (Sept. 2012), pp. 1, 5–6 (nationwide study of 9,646 American adults found that “more agreeable adults actually earned and saved less money”).
“the twinge of adversity”: Gardner, Leading Minds, p. 33 (quoting Winston Churchill).
“willpower” and “grit”: Baumeister and Tierney, Willpower, pp. 1–17; Duckworth, “The Significance of Self-Control,” pp. 2639–40; Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly, “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” pp. 1087–1101; 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), p. 12; Sullivan and Thompson, The Plateau Effect, pp. 57–74; 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. 439–51.
“marshmallow test”: For the original studies, see 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; 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.
Kids with more impulse control go on: Baumeister and Tierney, Willpower, pp. 10–13 (summarizing studies); Duckworth, “The Significance of Self-Control,” p. 2639 (“self-control . . . during the first decade of life predicts income, savings behavior, financial security, occupational prestige, physical and mental health, substance use, and (lack of) criminal convictions . . . in adulthood. Remarkably, the predictive power of self-control is comparable to that of either general intelligence or family socioeconomic status”). For more detail, see chapter 5.
better predictors of grades and future success: Baumeister and Tierney, Willpower, p. 11; Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly, “Grit
,” p. 1098; Duckworth, “The Significance of Self-Control,” p. 2639; Duckworth, Quinn, and Tsukayama, “What No Child Left Behind,” p. 445; Angela L. Duckworth and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents,” Psychological Science 16 (2005), no. 12, pp. 939, 941.
Syrian Jewish enclave in Brooklyn: Jeffrey S. Gurock, ed., American Jewish Life 1920–1990, American Jewish History (New York and London: Routledge, 1998) vol. 4, pp. 112–3 (noting that most Syrian Jews in America live in Brooklyn, that they “are more business-oriented, and fewer attend college,” and that “[w]hen the young marry, they often choose to resettle in the community”); see also Morris Gross, Learning Readiness in Two Jewish Groups (New York: Center for Urban Education, 1967), pp. 32–5; Hayyim Cohen, “Sephardi Jews in the United States: Marriage with Ashkenazim and Non-Jews,” Dispersion and Unity (Jerusalem) 13-14 (1971/72), pp. 151, 152–3: Zev Chafets, “The Sy Empire,” New York Times, Oct. 14, 2007.
relatively closed to intellectual and scientific inquiry: Bowman, The Marmon People, p. 180 (mid-twentieth-century Mormonism was dominated by a “theological conservatism rejecting enthusiasm for science and reason in favor of a strict emphasis on scripture”); Gregory A. Prince and Wm. Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005), p. 160 (quoting LDS Church president David McKay saying “Character is the aim of true education; and science, history, and literature are but means used to accomplish this desired end”).
“men of God first”: President Spencer W. Kimball, “Education for Eternity” (address delivered at Brigham Young University, Sept. 12, 1967) (in part quoting then-BYU president Ernest L. Wilkinson), http://education.byu.edu/edlf/archives/prophets/eternity.html.