The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

  cream of the intellectual crop: Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), pp. 104–5; David Lague, “1977 Exam Opened Escape Route into China’s Elite,” New York Times, Jan. 6, 2008.

  more likely to be restaurant or factory workers: Fertig, “Around Sunset Park.”

  a majority of Chinese immigrants: In 2010, 54 percent of legal immigrants from mainland China and Hong Kong obtained residence through family-based criteria. Kristen McCabe, “Chinese Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Information Source, January 2012, http://migrationinformation.org/USFocus/display.cfm?ID=876#9.

  “bimodal” . . . exceptional academic success: Rumbaut, “Paradise Shift,” p. 12; Rumbaut, “The Coming of the Second Generation,” p. 208; see also Renee Reichl Luthra and Roger Waldinger, “Intergenerational Mobility,” in David Card and Steven Raphael, eds., Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), pp. 169, 192, 196 (second-generation Chinese show upward educational and occupational mobility “regardless of parental educational background”); Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, “Frames of Achievement and Opportunity Horizons,” in Card and Raphael, Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality, pp. 207, 209–11, 216, 221.

  Chinese Americans’ mean IQ is no higher: James R. Flynn, Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), pp. 60, 77. According to one scholar who purports to have found worldwide racial intelligence differences, Chinese IQ in some countries is significantly higher than white IQ in the United States. See Richard Lynn, “Race Differences in Intelligence: A Global Perspective,” Mankind Quarterly 31 (1991), pp. 264–5 (reporting a median Chinese IQ of 101 in China, but 110 in Singapore and 116 in Hong Kong). But even if Lynn’s findings are credible, his own estimate of the median IQ of East Asians in North America is 103, almost indistinguishable from white Americans (101–2). Ibid. Moreover, as has been acknowledged even by IQ-proponents Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, Lynn’s higher Chinese IQ numbers did not incorporate certain important corrections for temporal shifts; when “such corrections were made,” Lynn’s own data showed Chinese IQ to be generally comparable to North American white IQ. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1994), pp. 272–73 (citing Lynn, “Race Differences in Intelligence”). Reevaluating Lynn’s data and other sources, Flynn found that Chinese Americans’ mean IQ appeared to be slightly below white Americans’. Flynn, Asian Americans, p. 1.

  more bang for their intelligence buck: Richard E. Nisbett, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Culture Count (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009), p. 157; Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), p. 195.

  “If Asian students”: Laurence Steinberg, Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 87.

  “probably 95 out of 100 Chinese students”: Fertig, “Around Sunset Park”; see also Nisbett, Intelligence and How to Get It, p. 158 (“Asian and Asian American achievement is not mysterious. It happens by working harder”).

  NAACP Legal Defense Fund: Baker, “Charges of Bias in Admission Test at Eight Elite Public High Schools”; Kyle Spencer, “For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 2012.

  $5,000 a year: Fertig, “Around Sunset Park.”

  free tutoring . . . study “excessively” . . . “This is the easy part”: Spencer, “For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones.”

  “Most of our parents”: Ibid.

  about half of Kentucky and Tennessee: For the Appalachian Regional Commission’s boundary definition of the region, see http://www.appalachiancommunityfund.org/html/wherewefund.html.

  “[G]et out, stay out of people’s lives” . . . “[Y]our elite group”: See Roger Catlin, “What’s on Tonight: Diane Sawyer in Appalachia; ‘Dollhouse,’” Hartford Courant, Courant .com, Feb. 13, 2009, http://blogs.courant.com/roger_catlin_tv_eye/2009/02/whats-on-tonight-diane-sawyer.html (comments).

  “non-welfare drawing, non–Mountain Dew guzzling”: “Does Diane Sawyer Get Appalachia?,” The Revivalist, Apr. 1, 2010, http://therevivalist.info/does-diane-sawyer-get-appalachia (quoted text slightly edited by authors).

  contradictory impressions: See, e.g., Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 6–7; Kai T. Erikson, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), pp. 84–9; Silas House and Jason Howard, Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), pp. 1, 59, 133–5; John O’Brien, At Home in the Heart of Appalachia (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), pp. 3–5.

  “southern mountain folk”: Harkins, Hillbilly, p. 4.

  crystal meth addicts: Zhiwei Zhang et al., An Analysis of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Disparities and Access to Treatment Services in the Appalachian Region (Appalachian Regional Commission and the National Opinion Research Center, August 2008), p. 2.

  Rates of cancer . . . fewer than 12 percent: Appalachian Regional Commission, Economic Overview of Appalachia–2011, http://www.arc.gov/images/appregion/Sept2011/EconomicOverviewSept2011.pdf.

  42 percent rural: Appalachian Regional Commission, “The Appalachian Region,” http://www.arc.gov/appalachian_region/TheAppalachianRegion.asp.

  neighboring Kentucky counties: See Potts, “Pressing on the Upward Way.”

  America’s one hundred lowest median-income counties: U.S. Census Bureau, “Small Area Poverty and Income Estimates” (2010 U.S. and all States and Counties data file), http://www.census.gov/did/www/saipe/data/statecounty/data/2010.html; Appalachian Regional Commission, “Counties in Appalachia,” http://www.arc.gov/counties; see also Housing Assistance Council, “Central Appalachia,” http://www.ruralhome.org/storage/documents/appalov.pdf, p. 58 (“Over 43 percent of Central Appalachia’s counties experienced poverty rates of 20 percent or more in 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000”).

  far more socially acceptable: See Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 15; Harkins, Hillbilly, p. 8.

  “Our magazines and sitcoms”: Goad, The Redneck Manifesto, pp. 15, 100; see also Harkins, Hillbilly, especially chaps. 1 and 2; Anne Shelby, “The ‘R’ Word: What’s So Funny (and Not So Funny) About Redneck Jokes,” in Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford, eds., Back Talk from an American Region: Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), pp. 153–4.

  “just to go along” . . . “anger”: Shelby, “The ‘R’ Word,” p. 154.

  “counter the ‘dumb hillbilly’ stereotype”: Phillip J. Obermiller, “Paving the Way: Urban Organizations and the Image of Appalachians,” in Billings et al., Back Talk from an American Region, pp. 251, 258.

  perhaps contributing to the stereotypes: See 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. 13–4 (critiquing “culture-of-poverty” theories for “blatant stereotyping and victim blaming” and noting that even richer theories embrace “perjorative views about mountain people”).

  “defeatism,” “dejection”: Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962), pp. 79, 346, 392; see also Jack E. Weller, Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), pp. 2, 20, 37.

  “Appalachian fatalism”: O’Brien, At Home in the Heart of Appalachia, p. 24.

  “We’re a reli
gious bunch”: House and Howard, Something’s Rising, pp. 52, 59.

  “helpless before the God”: Erikson, Everything in Its Path, p. 85; see Weller, Yesterday’s People, p. 104.

  working two and three jobs: Potts, “Pressing on the Upward Way.”

  undermined by government welfare: Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012), pp. 170–81, 216–9; see Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, pp. 275–6.

  Obesity is common: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Estimated County-Level Prevalence of Diabetes and Obesity—United States, 2007,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 58, no. 45 (2009), p. 1259 (reporting over 30 percent obesity rates in West Virginia and Appalachian Kentucky and Tennessee).

  “As kids, we never learned”: J. D. Vance, manuscript on file with authors (New York: HarperCollins, forthcoming 2014).

  abuse rates of prescription opioid painkillers: See “Prescription Drug Abuse in Appalachia,” http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/04/03/us/DRUGS.html; Appalachian Regional Commission, “ARC Study: Disproportionately High Rates of Substance Abuse in Appalachia,” August 2008, http://www.arc.gov/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=113; Lisa King, “Oxycontin Is the Drug of Choice of Appalachian Addicts, The Washington Times, June 9, 2012.

  “pillbillies”: “Editorial: ‘Pillbilly’ Addicts,” The Charleston Gazette, Oct. 10, 2012.

  1 in 10 newborns tested positive: Sabrina Tavernise, “Ohio County Losing Its Young to Painkillers’ Grip,” New York Times, Apr. 19, 2011.

  highest teen pregnancy rates: Commonwealth of Kentucky, Department for Public Health, Division of Women’s Health, Teen Pregnancy Prevention Strategic Plan (Cabinet for Health and Family Services, Commonwealth of Kentucky), p. 1. The New Hampshire rate is from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Births: Final Data for 2010,” National Vital Statistics Reports 61, no. 1 (Aug. 28, 2012), p. 7, Table B.

  a version of the “resource curse”: The “resource curse”—a term coined by Richard Auty in 1993—refers to the idea that societies with too much oil, gold, or other extremely valuable resources typically end up mired in poverty. Subsequent research has broadly confirmed Auty’s thesis. See Richard M. Auty, Sustaining Development in Mineral Economies: The Resource Curse Thesis (New York: Routledge, 1993); Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph E. Stiglitz et al., Escaping the Resource Curse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Thomas L. Friedman, “The First Law of Petropolitics,” Foreign Policy, May/June 2006. For empirical studies finding evidence of the resource curse thesis as applied to Appalachian poverty, see Annie Walker, “An Empirical Analysis of Resource Curse Channels in the Appalachian Region,” Feb. 19, 2013, http://www.be.wvu.edu/econ_seminar/documents/12-13/walker.pdf; Mark D. Partridge, Michael R. Betz, and Linda Lobao, “Natural Resource Curse and Poverty in Appalachian America,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 95, no. 2 (2013), pp. 449–56.

  Traditional industry . . . Salt and timber . . . mechanized: Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, pp. 243, 264–9; Housing Assistance Council, “Central Appalachia,” p. 58; Christopher Price, “The Impact of the Mechanization of the Coal Mining Industry on the Population and Economy of Twentieth Century West Virginia,” West Virginia Historical Society Quarterly 22, no. 3 (2008), pp. 2–3; Amanda Paulson, “In Coal Country, Heat Rises over Latest Method of Mining,” The Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 3, 2006, p. 2.

  Mountaintop removal: See, e.g., House and Howard, Something’s Rising, pp. 1–2, 12–3; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, p. 243; Paulson, “In Coal Country, Heat Rises over Latest Method of Mining,” p. 2.

  “double jeopardy”: Christopher Bollinger, James P. Ziliak, and Kenneth R. Troske, “Down from the Mountain: Skill Upgrading and Wages in Appalachia,” Journal of Labor Economics 29, no. 4, October 2011, p. 843.

  catastrophic industrial accidents: House and Howard, Something’s Rising, p. 9; Erikson, Everything in Its Path, p. i (describing a 1972 industrially caused “avalanche of black water and mine waste” in West Virginia and its aftermath). Some of the Buffalo Creek victims did eventually win a lawsuit and receive damages. Ibid., pp. 247–8.

  marshmallow test: 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.

  reran the test with a new wrinkle: Celeste Kidd et al., “Rational Snacking: Young Children’s Decision-Making on the Marshmallow Task Is Moderated by Beliefs About Environmental Reliability,” Cognition 126 (2013), pp. 109–14.

  childhood poverty and abuse: See, e.g., W. R. Lovallo et al., “Early Life Adversity Contributes to Impaired Cognition and Impulsive Behavior: Studies from the Oklahoma Family Health Patterns Project,” Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 37, no. 4 (2013), pp. 616–23. One researcher theorizes that this result is due to long-term change in brain functioning. William R. Lovallo, “Early Life Adversity Reduces Stress Reactivity and Enhances Impulsive Behavior: Implications for Health Behaviors,” International Journal of Psychophysiology (in press), abstract available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23085387.

  Girls who become pregnant: Rumbaut, “Paradise Shift,” pp. 23–4, 33–4.

  “growing concern”: Cathy Brownfield, “Abuse Is Devastating in Appalachia,” Salem News, Mar. 11, 2012, http://www.salemnews.net/page/content.detail/id/552029.

  roughly two hundred thousand: Joe Mackall, Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), pp. 5, 7.

  Renno Amish: Richard A. Stevick, Growing Up Amish: The Teenage Years (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 10–1, 43; “Indiana Amish,” Amish America, http://amishamerica.com/indiana-amish (“Swiss Amish only travel by open buggy”).

  Beachy Amish . . . Swartzentruber Amish: Mackall, Plain Secrets, pp. xxi–xxii.

  “when they are in diapers”: Stevick, Growing Up Amish, pp. 41, 47, 55, 62, 81, 106–7, 112–3.

  unconditional compliance: John A. Hostetler, Amish Society (4th ed.) (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 77.

  Fairy tales, science fiction: Stevick, Growing Up Amish, p. 72.

  conducted in “high” German: Ibid., p. 22.

  “usually keep to the task”: Ibid., p. 106.

  extreme humility . . . “Do not be haughty”: Hostetler, Amish Society, pp. 77, 247.

  taught to abhor any effort by one individual to rise: Mackall, Plain Secrets, pp. 40–1; Stevick, Growing Up Amish, p. 43.

  “high school and higher education produce Hochmut”: Stevick, Growing Up Amish, p. 61.

  Nietzsche . . . Christianity . . . reverse superiority: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998) (1887), pp. 16–7 (describing Christianity as motivated by a “desire for revenge” and as consummating Judaism’s “slave morality,” which proclaims that “the poor, powerless, lowly alone are the good . . . whereas you, you noble and powerful ones, you are in all eternity the evil”); see also James Q. Whitman, Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 21 (according to Nietzsche, the horrific punishments in the afterlife contemplated by Christianity offered people “the immense satisfaction of witnessing the torments of the damned, and being thereby confirmed in their own blessed superiority”).

  “not highly ethnocentric” . . . accept other people: Hostetler, Amish Society, p. 77.

  don’t even believe they are saved: Mackall, Plain Secrets, p. 8.

  “contaminat[ed]”: Stevick, Growing Up Amish, p. 63; see also Hostetler, Amish Society, pp. 75–6.

  “Letting children go unsupervised”: Stevick, Growing Up Amish, p.
109.

  “to be separate from the world”: Ibid., pp. 7–8.

  try to suppress the kind of thinking: Ibid., pp. 43–4.

  “spirit of competition” . . . “when batting and catching”: Ibid., p. 112.

  the Amish have their worries: See, e.g., Hostetler, Amish Society, pp. 119–20.

  aren’t worried about proving themselves in America’s eyes: See, e.g., Stevick, Growing Up Amish, pp. 55–6.

  “love of money” . . . “last shall be” . . . “camel”: Timothy 6:10; Matthew 20:16; Matthew 19:24.

  “remarkable” fact: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 35.

  Calvinist doctrine taught: Ibid., pp. 93–106; Guy Oakes, “The Thing That Would Not Die: Notes on Refutation,” in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth, eds., Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Washington, DC: Cambridge University Press, German Historical Institute, 1993), p. 286.

  “The question, Am I one of the elect”: Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 110 (italics added).

  “doctrine of proof”: Ibid., p. 122.

  “calling”: Ibid., pp. 160–2.

  “could measure his worth”: Max Weber, “Anticritical Last Word on the Spirit of Capitalism,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 5 (1978), p. 1124, quoted in Malcolm H. MacKinnon, “The Longevity of the Thesis: A Critique of the Critics,” in Lehmann and Roth, Weber’s Protestant Ethic, pp. 211, 224; see also Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 176–7; Oakes, “The Thing That Would Not Die,” pp. 285, 286–9.

  They had to show everyone: Oakes, “The Thing That Would Not Die,” pp. 287–8.

  Inherited wealth . . . national differences . . . minorities or majorities: Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 35–46.

  geography can shape: See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999).