The Triple Package (41 page)

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Authors: Amy Chua,Jed Rubenfeld

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BOOK: The Triple Package
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“Proclamation to the World”
:
LDS Church, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation.

“For years, I cried”
:
Brooks,
The Book of Mormon Girl
, p. 149.

The terms “ward house”
:
C. Mark Hamilton,
Nineteenth-Century Mormon Architecture & City Planning
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 165.

“sister training leaders”
:
Joseph Walker, “Sister LDS Missionaries Will Have Key Role in New Mission Leadership Council,”
Deseret News
, Apr. 5, 2013, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865577611/Sister-LDS-missionaries-will-have-key-role-in-new-Mission-Leadership-Council.html?pg=all.

out-marry themselves into oblivion
:
See Alan M. Dershowitz,
The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), pp. 30–1, 72.

strong taboos against marrying outside one’s group
:
See Donald L. Horowitz,
Ethnic Groups
in Conflict
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), p. 62 (noting that “[v]irtually everywhere in Asia . . . endogamy is the norm”).

inter-Asian marriages
:
See Rachel L. Swarns, “For Asian-American Couples, A Tie That Binds,”
New York Times
, Mar. 30, 2012; see also Richard D. Alba and Victor Nee,
Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 265.

obvious tokens of success
 . . . “respectable” careers:
see, e.g., Bandana Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity: Second Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational World
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 91; Mei Tang, Nadya A. Fouad, and Philip L. Smith, “Asian Americans’ Career Choices: A Path Model to Examine Factors Influencing Their Career Choices,”
Journal of Vocational Behavior
54 (1999), pp. 142, 142–6; S. Alvin Leung, David Ivey, and Lisa Suzuki, “Factors Affecting the Career Aspirations of Asian Americans,”
Journal of Counseling & Development
72 (March/April 1994), pp. 404, 405; see also Min Zhou, “Assimilation the Asian Way,” in Tamar Jacoby, ed.,
Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to Be American
(New York: Basic Books, 2004), pp. 139, 146–7; Maryam Daha, “Contextual Factors Contributing to Ethnic Identity Development of Second-Generation Iranian American Adolescents,”
Journal of Adolescent Research
26, no. 5 (2011), pp. 560–1.

a defensive crouch
:
We owe the insights in this paragraph to Renagh O’Leary; see also David Brooks, “The Empirical Kids,”
New York Times
, Mar. 28, 2013; David Brooks, “The Organization Kid,”
The Atlantic
, Apr. 2001.

“When I was younger”
:
Amy Tan interview, Academy of Achievement.

“[T]hey won’t have the guts”
:
Maira,
Desis in the House
, p. 76.

“You write, and then you erase”
:
James Atlas,
Bellow: A Biography
(New York: Random House, 2000), pp. 42, 60.

“You’re only 49”
:
“Ang Lee,”
Interview
, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/ang-lee
(interview by Liev Schreiber).

“the only purpose in life”
:
Clifford W. Mills,
Ang Lee
(New York: Chelsea House, 2009), p. 31; see also ibid., pp. 27–9; “Ang Lee—Top 25 Directors,” Next Actor, http://www.nextactor.com/ang_lee.html (Lee grew up in a home that “put heavy emphasis on education and the Chinese classics”).

“I knew I had to please my father”
:
Michael Berry,
Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 329.

“devout believer”
 . . . “She was always nagging him”:
Atlas,
Bellow
, p. 24.

“suffocating orthodoxy”
:
D.J.R. Bruckner, “A Candid Talk with Saul Bellow,”
New York Times
, Apr. 15, 1984.

got himself fired
:
Atlas,
Bellow
, p. 3.

“[M]y name won’t go down”
:
Ibid., p. 219.

“I had a lot of guilt”
:
Berry,
Speaking in Images
, p. 329; “Ang Lee—Top 25 Directors.”

fellow student Spike Lee
:
Mills,
Ang Lee
, p. 43.

“six years of agonizing”
:
Irene Shih, “Ang Lee: A Never-Ending Dream,” What Shih Said.com, Feb. 26, 2013, http://whatshihsaid.com/2013/02/26/ang-lee-a-never-ending-dream.

“carrying a chip on his shoulder”
:
Atlas,
Bellow
, p. 112 (quoting William Barrett, an editor of the
Partisan Review
).

“throwing down the gauntlet”
:
Greg Bellow,
Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 54.

Bellow was famously “disciplined”
:
See Karyl Roosevelt, “Saul Bellow Is Augie, Herzog and Henderson—and of Course the Hero of His Latest Book,”
People
, Sept. 8, 1975 (describing Bellow as “highly disciplined” with hard to match “powers of concentration”).

“insecurity”
 . . . “first son” . . . “everything rested on my shoulders”:
Mills,
Ang Lee
, p. 28.

“first Jewish-American novelist”
:
Leslie A. Fiedler,
A New Fiedler Reader
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), p. 110; see also generally Bloom,
Prodigal Sons
, pp. 296–7.

sixty-two-week
New York Times
bestseller
:
Dwight Garner, “Inside the List,” Sunday Book Review,
New York Times
, Feb. 11, 2007.

“without departing from an American Jewish idiom”
:
Earl Rovit,
Saul Bellow
(St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), p. 5.

first Chinese to win the Acadamy Award for best director
:
David Barboza, “The Oscar for Best Banned Picture,”
New York Times
, Mar. 12, 2006. Lee’s first best director Oscar was for
Brokeback Mountain
; his second was for
Life of Pi
. Nicole Sperling, “Oscars 2013: Ang Lee Wins Best Director for ‘Life of Pi,’”
Los Angeles Times
, Feb. 24, 2013.

“I never belonged to my own family”
:
Atlas,
Bellow
, p. 8; see also p. 32 (“never felt American”).


métèques

:
Saul Bellow, “A Jewish Writer in America,”
New York Review of Books
, Oct. 27, 2011, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/27/jewish-writer-america.

“I’m a drifter”
:
Rick Groen, “Ang Lee: An Outsider Who Found the Perfect Story for His Gifts in Life of Pi,”
The Globe and Mail
, Feb. 23, 2013; see also David Minnihan, “Ang Lee,” Senses of Cinema, http://sensesofcinema.com/2008/great-directors/ang-lee.

A growing number of Asian college students
:
See Mitchell J. Chang, Julie J. Park, Monica H. Lin, Oiyan A. Poon, and Don T. Nakanishi,
Beyond Myths: The Growth and Diversity of Asian American College Freshman, 1971–2005
(Los Angeles: UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, 2007), p. 18; Jennie Zhang, “Breaking Out of the Mold: Pursuing Humanities as an APA,”
Bamboo Offshoot: USC’s Asian Pacific American Magazine
, Jan. 1, 2012, http://bamboooffshoot.com/2012/01/01/breaking-out-of-the-mold-pursuing-the-humanities-as-an-apa.

role models in breakout Asian American stars
:
See, e.g., Caleb Li, “Hikaru Sulu: Hollywood’s Asian American Trailblazer,” Fresh Patrol, http://freshpatrol.com/hikaru-sulu-hollywoods-asian-american-trailblazer; Louis Peitzman, “‘Pitch Perfect’ Breakout Utkarsh Ambudkar Takes on ‘The Mindy Project,’” BuzzFeed, Jan. 8, 2013, http://www.buzzfeed.com/louispeitzman/pitch-perfect-breakout-utkarsh-ambudkar-takes-on; 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.

celebrated in the Indian American community
:
Soon after he graced the cover of
Time,
Bharara was selected as the 2011
India Abroad
Person of the Year by the most widely circulated
desi
newspaper. See “Preet Bharara, the Man Who Makes Wall Street Tremble, Is India Abroad Person of the Year 2011,” Rediff News, June 30, 2012, http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-preet-bharara-is-india-abroad-person-of-the-year-2011/20120630.htm.

consternation and shame
:
Anita Raghavan,
The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund
(New York and Boston: Business Plus, 2013), pp. 381, 415.

over $80 million
:
Kevin Roose, “Why the Rajat Gupta Trial Is a Big Deal,”
New York Magazine
, June 4, 2012.

state dinner at the White House
 . . . “The Court can say without exaggeration”:
Raghavan,
The Billionaire’s Apprentice
, pp. 1–6, 410.

CHAPTER 7: IQ, INSTITUTIONS, AND UPWARD MOBILITY

“Horatio Alger Is Dead”
:
David Frum, “Horatio Alger Is Dead,” Daily Beast, Feb. 9, 2012 (noting that upward mobility has declined among men but not women).

Obituaries reporting the demise of upward mobility
:
See, e.g., Josh Sanburn, “The Loss of Upward Mobility in the U.S.,”
Time
, Jan. 5, 2012; Timothy Egan, “Downton and Downward,”
New York Times
, Feb. 14, 2013; Timothy Noah, “The Mobility Myth,”
The New Republic
, Feb. 8, 2012; Rana Foroohar, “What Ever Happened to Upward Mobility?,”
Time
, Nov. 14, 2011.

42 percent of people raised in the lowest economic quintile
:
Julia B. Isaacs, “Economic Mobility of Families Across Generations,” in Julia B. Isaacs, Isabel V. Sawhill, and Ron Haskins,
Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America
(Washington, DC: Economic Mobility Project, The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2008), p. 19; see also Sanburn, “The Loss of Upward Mobility in the U.S.”

two-thirds of Americans
:
Bhashkar Mazumder,
Upward Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the United States
(Washington, DC: Economic Mobility Project, The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2008), pp. 7, 11.

Rising remains the rule
:
Isaacs, “Economic Mobility of Families Across Generations,” pp. 17–8.

cited repeatedly
:
See, e.g., Egan, “Downton and Downward”; Foroohar, “What Ever Happened to Upward Mobility?”

In Denmark
:
See Julia B. Isaacs, “International Comparisons of Economic Mobility,” in Isaacs et al.,
Getting Ahead or Losing Ground
, p. 40 and Table 1. Note that international comparisons can be misleading: rising from the bottom to just the
middle
quintile in the U.S. could actually be a greater gain than rising from the bottom to the
top
in a country with less inequality compression. See Jason DeParle, “Harder for Americans to Rise from Lower Rungs,”
New York Times
, Jan. 4, 2012 (reporting estimate that “a Danish family can move from the 10th percentile to the 90th percentile with $45,000 of additional earnings, while an American family would need an additional $93,000”).

“[i]mmigrant families are not included”
:
Isabel V. Sawhil, “Overview,” in Isaacs et al.,
Getting Ahead or Losing Ground
, p. 6; see also Isaacs, “International Comparisons of Economic Mobility,” p. 38. The 2008 Pew Study, like many other American mobility studies, relies on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), an extraordinary longitudinal data set tracking a sample of families since 1968. Isaacs, “Economic Mobility of Families Across Generations,” p. 15. As a result, the Pew sample consisted solely of “individuals who were between the ages of 0 and 18 in 1968,” Isaacs et al.,
Getting Ahead or Losing Ground
, p. 105, which wholly excludes “the large number of immigrants who have arrived since 1968” and their children. Isaacs, “Economic Mobility of Families Across Generations,” p. 22 n. 3. Although the PSID added a sample of immigrant families in the 1990s, to date these immigrant families have still been excluded from upward mobility studies “because they lack historical family and economic data originating with the PSID in 1968.” The Pew Charitable Trusts,
Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations
(Washington, DC: The Pew Charitable Trusts, July 2012), p. 28.

more than 40 million immigrants
:
U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2012 3-year dataset); U.S. Census, Table P022: Year of Entry for the Foreign-Born population (2000 SF3 sample data (fewer than 3.3 million of America’s foreign-born population as of 2000 had entered the country before 1965).

“American dream is alive and well”
:
Isaacs, “Economic Mobility of Families Across Generations,” p. 6.

experience strong upward mobility
:
See e.g., Pew Research Center,
Second-Generation Americans: A Portrait of the Adult Children of Immigrants
, (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, February 7, 2013), p. 7; Ron Haskins, “Immigration: Wages, Education, and Mobility,” in Isaacs et al.,
Getting Ahead or Losing Ground
, pp. 81–8; Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz,
Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans,
Assimilation, and Race
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008), pp. 144–7; Lingxin Hao and Han S. Woo, “Distinct Trajectories in the Transition to Adulthood: Are Children of Immigrants Advantaged?”
Child
Development
83, no. 5 (2012), pp. 1623, 1635; Rubén G. Rumbaut, “The Coming of the Second Generation: Immigration and Ethnic Mobility in Southern California,”
The Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science
620 (November 2008), pp. 196, 205, 219; Rubén G. Rumbaut, “Paradise Shift: Immigration, Mobility, and Inequality in Southern California,” Working Paper No. 14 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, KMI Working Paper Series, October 2008), pp. 6–9, 30–1; Rubén G. Rumbaut et al., “Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA),” Russell Sage Foundation, http://www.russellsage.org/research/Immigration/IIMMLA.

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