Reserving Judgment on "The Triple Package": Some Perspective on Tiger Mom Amy Chua

In preparing to write anything like a defense of Yale Law professor Amy Chua, one has to understand the following: most people on the internet hate this woman. Not dislike or disdain or disapprove of but hate. I'm hardly a sensation on Twitter with just 160 followers, but I've been around the Facebook block for three and a half years and the vilification of Chua is breathtaking even in an era when civility has gone the way of girdles and chastity belts.

And I get it. Like many in literate America, I too hated her after the viral Wall Street Journal piece, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." More on this journalistic travesty shortly, but as the only daughter of externally permissive parents and an academic high achiever whose first “failure” was the inability to complete an overly ambitious philosophy and literature dissertation about George Eliot, I was appalled by the account of her parenting methods. I even used the “A” word on and off FB after reading the excerpts from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in 2011. 

And then I changed my mind.

I heard Chua on Michael Medved's radio show and a few months later, I attended her lecture at UCSB, after which I asked a question she graciously answered. I even—gasp!--read some of the book. This is what responsible adults do: they form opinions based on the information available to them at a given point in time, and then when confronted by new evidence, they adjust their opinions accordingly.

Am I grateful beyond measure that she wasn't my mother? Of course. Do I believe that I would have emerged from that “childhood” (no sleepovers, no TV, no trips with friends) deeply damaged? Absolutely. Do I endorse the extreme methods and overarching philosophy of Tiger Moms? Hardly. 

But do I believe Chua is a monster or now, as so many are claim, a racist? No. As I noted to a successful female lawyer I know on FB, one can be a terrific wife, professor, colleague, friend, citizen and human being without being a great mother. Motherhood is hard and it's easier to botch than it is even to hit the D.W. Winnicott “good enough” mark, much less achieve excellence or perfection. 

This blog is not a review of the book, which was released this week (February 4th). Nor is it a systematic refutation of the best case against the new book, by NYU's Suketa Mehta. It is, rather, a plea to reserve judgment and offer some perspective about The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America. 

1. A commitment to reserving (blind) judgment does not constitute an endorsement of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother or the draconian parenting style described therein.

No piece I've read about The Triple Package bothers to note that Battle Hymn was not a how-to manual. As Chua explained both on Michael Medved's show and on her national lecture tour, she nearly sued the Wall Street Journal. “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" was not her title, first of all.

More important, the Journal committed the cardinal (and in my view unforgivable) sin of any textual review: they failed to contextualize the excerpts from the book and note that the first third of the book is Tiger Mom philosophy, and the second, a re-thinking of the philosophy in the wake of her second daughter's dramatic rebellion.

And for all the talk of Chua's arrogance and reliance on Ivy pedigree (she's from Champaign-Urbana, by the way, hardly a bastion of privilege or luxury as I learned on last year's visit to a place you can buy a lovely home in a good area for $130,000!), Chua is refreshingly self-deprecating and warm. 

She never thought she'd be brought to her knees by a 13-year-old girl and forced to reconsider all her assumptions about herself, her life, and her family. Years later, I always know when someone hasn't read the book or heard Chua speak because they don't know the backstory of the Journal piece or the percentage of the book which questions the methods outlined in the beginning.

2. Envy underlies much of the hatred of Chua and The Triple Package.

It's natural, I suppose, to compare books of the same genre by the same author. But leaving aside that The Triple Package has two authors, not one like her first book for a mass audience, one is a memoir and the other a hybrid work of social science. So why should Chua be standing trial, as it were, for the first book?

Well, part of the answer is of course that many women envy her. Amy Chua, like her husband, is a tenured Yale Law professor (with a chair). Countless lawyers I know would give up a limb (or at least a couple fingers and toes) to stop practicing and start teaching at a place that paid well enough to live nicely. As one whose Yale single in Berkeley College was 50 or so yards from Yale Law, I can attest that it's a special place with a culture quite different from, say, Harvard Law or other top schools.

Chua has a long, happy marriage and two accomplished daughters who survived the regimen she imposed. She's popular among students, and as if all that weren't enough, she's extremely attractive and looks at least a dozen years younger than she is, with what looks to me the same size 2 figure she had when young. Being a 2 (or a 4!) is fabulous and I miss it, but post-40 being that skinny requires measures I'm unwilling to adopt. Those with unfortunate hair may even envy her lustrous, thick and long locks. (I'm only half-kidding; for years, a relative of mine resented me in part for my hair inherited from a half-Mexican mother.) 

I've long maintained that a woman can get away with being two, but not three, of the following: extremely attractive/slender, educated and smart, and solvent (whether through work, marriage, or family). God forbid you be all three, especially if you presume to encroach on the territory of mommy bloggers and take strong positions about parenting. Only guns, abortion, race and perhaps Israel arouse a comparable level of hysteria and irrationality.

In the present book, Chua and Rubenfeld encroach on the terrain of sociologists, who have at times struck me as a touchy and slightly defensive bunch, perhaps because many in the hard sciences and humanities--particularly philosophy and English, at least before Cultural Studies left my former discipline in ruins--regard them as intellectual inferiors. Many lawyers I knew growing up often said they preferred to hire philosophy or English majors on the theory that these students have tackled difficult texts and learned to write about them well.

When I made this point on Facebook, a friend brought up Max Weber. Well, Weber wrote a long time ago and cannot therefore be taken as representative of the politicized field of today. And how many people outside the academy can cite distinguished work by five sociologists?

Michelle Obama's at best lightweight and at worse sloppy and embarrassing Princeton sociology thesis (which Politico posted a few years ago) surely did the discipline no favors in the popular imagination, even among Democrats like myself. This, I thought, is the culmination of a Princeton education? It's more like a memoir blog I'd write, I hope more engagingly, on Victorian Chick between Yelp reviews and dance classes.

Without having read Triple Package, most bloggers and journalists—not to mention the self-proclaimed Nobel Laureates on Twitter who seemed to have majored in outrage in college (the same people hurling invective and the “T” word at Scarlett Johannsen)--have concluded the couple's theories represent half-baked and shoddy scholarship with no methodological or empirical foundation.

Alas, my pre-ordered copy arrived in Santa Barbara on January 30th, five days in advance of the February 4th release date after I arrived in LA, but the book has nearly 1000 endnotes spanning some 100 pages. Quantity never equals quality, but both Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus, I have learned, regard the book as a work of scholarship, not mere anecdote. 

Call me old-fashioned, but unless you're the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde--who famously said, "I never read a book I must review; it prejudices one so"--I think you should read a text before railing against it.

3. The concept of the “triple package” is at least worth pondering for a moment or two, even if it's incomplete or too broad.

I see no reason to ascribe nefarious motives to Chua and Rubenfeld (both of whom could have made vast sums of money in Biglaw if they chose), even if they are Yale hotshots. That used to be a plus, but in our age of Ivy-bashing, class warfare and reverse snobbery, it might be better if the couple taught at a strong public law school. Anything but an Ivy. 

We should, moreover, take Chua and Rubenfeld at face value when they say at the outset of "What Drives Success”: “These facts don't make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot beequated with a well-lived life.” It might have helped if they had written “not morally superior” to underscore this, but what more can you do than make your point in clear English? The authors recognize it's taboo to single out the eight successful groups they do--Jews, Chinese, Iranians, Lebanese, Cuban exiles, Mormons, Nigerians, and Indians--but sensibly argue that "blindness" to facts is never a "good policy."

Of course other measurements of success matter, including happiness, kindness, compassion, and civic consciousness. But this objection amounts to reading the first chapter of my Eliot dissertation and complaining that I don't take up John Donne. Well, it was a dissertation about 19th-century ethics and aesthetics in Eliot's fiction, not the poetics of Donne and the Metaphysical poets. 

The “triple package”--superiority, insecurity, and impulse control--is an interesting, though obviously not exhaustive or absolute, interpretive tool with which to understand the success of the eight groups they single out. Indeed, the thesis is so simple as an explanation of bewilderingly complex socioeconomic phenomena, the charges of reductiveness should surprise no one. In an era when humanities and social science journals are littered with theoretical jargon, the lucid, spare and often quite beautiful style of two legal scholars will undoubtedly ruffle some feathers: “Why doesn't my prose sound like that?” 

4. The “triple package” captures much about Jewish psychology and achievement.

Based on two pages of excerpts I received via email, I think the discussion of Jews may well be the strongest in the book. It was, not surprisingly, the most poorly analyzed by Suketa Mehta in her long and excellent essay in Time.

The idea of “chosenness” in Judaism is one far too large for a blog, but it encompasses much more than religious belief. Secular Jews have achieved at the highest levels of law, medicine, science, academia and the arts; it's worth glancing at the Wikipedia list of famous Jewish agnostics and atheists. But Mehta merely says (after having read the nuanced discussion I did) that the authors locate the sense of Jewish superiority merely in their status as God's “chosen” ones. That's misleading and simplistic. 

As the daughter of a secular Jewish father, first-generation American on one side and second-generation (but not by much) on the other, I recognize much of my family in Chua's and Rubenfeld's account. My grandfather came to Ellis Island with his two younger brothers and father. All three boys made it in America, though my great-uncle became something of a real estate mogul, while my grandpa did well in business and his brother became a dentist.

Born in 1924, my father was just five when the stock market crash in 1929.  Like many, my father's small family was very poor throughout the Depression, but was solidly middle class by the late 1930s and comfortable by the late 1940s. My Jewish grandmother, the only one of four grandparents born in America, was the baby of ten and lived in bone-crushing poverty which left her scarred for life, even after she became well-off.

As a result, my father grew up with a corrosive insecurity not significantly mitigated by considerable success, first as a trial lawyer and then as federal bankruptcy judge and national bankruptcy panelist. A B 24 pilot at 19 who flew 18 missions over Germany and Nazi-occupied France, he did not graduate from UCLA. When the GI Bill sent him to USC Law, he was poorly prepared, surrounded as he was by what he considered rich boys who had attended the best colleges and high schools. What got Dad through it (though, much to his regret, he narrowly missed law review)? Discipline.

Dad knew he was smart and his parents, at least by WWII, reinforced his specialness. They adored their only child (“My mother loved me enough to kill me,” he has said) but from a young age, his father browbeat him with the question, “How you going to make a living?” Interestingly, for Grandpa Barney, extraordinary academic achievement wasn't the key to financial security. After all, his brother was a wealthy businessman who lived on a Bel Air estate, and no one remembers if he went to college or not.

But smarts weren't the primary key to Dad's success, at least not by his lights. Dad became a star in his field through discipline and an almost superhuman power of will--what Chua and Rubenfeld call “true grit.” 

My father is extremely intolerant of those who cannot or will not exercise discipline: this includes those who cannot control their eating or other “self-destructive conduct.” It's not PC, but my father doesn't understand why people are fat. “Why don't they just stop eating?” Dad asks. (He's better on why people are alcoholics, I feel bound to note, in the wake of the tragic death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman.) In short, my father could be a poster child for Chua's and Rubenfeld's thesis. 

But even if The Triple Package is flawed or incomplete (or both) and its authors don't get it all right, it doesn't follow that they get it all wrong. Still less does it follow that they are racists, even of a more subtle kind, perpetuating “pernicious” stereotypes.

I cannot here do justice to Mehta's long, detailed and interesting case against the book. Perhaps the authors give short shrift to history, particularly in their discussion of Nigerians, who certainly benefited from Affirmative Action, the result of hard-won struggles by African-Americans and Civil Rights leaders. 

I am prepared to grant that the analysis of India and Indians downplays or omits the crucial role of networking, but I did see the page on which they explain how they came to choose the eight groups they did. As I suspected, they never claim these are the only groups they might have chosen. The few pages I have read lead me to believe that Chua and Rubenfeld address many of the objections critics raise, but that no amount of qualification or clarification matters in the face of those determined to disagree and worse, demonize. 

And I wholeheartedly agree with Mehta that “conformity” is not what makes America great. I urge all to read the moving story about her uncle with which she concludes, a man who embodies all that is great about America.

5. Americans have become so touchy and polarized that no one can discuss race or ethnicity without provoking outrage.

The blogosphere has made much of the fact that Chua and Rubenfeld are members of two of the eight groups in the book, usually with a lot of snark. So if you discount everything they say because they're Ivy elites and then further disqualify them because she's Chinese and he's Jewish, who, precisely, is allowed to express an opinion about those groups? 

The recent Nation article, "Feminism's Toxic Twitter Wars" makes abundantly clear that the constantly bickering spokeswomen for this so-called “marginalized group” (women, that is) have lost all rationality and civility in their quest for equality. Vivia Chen seems a lone voice in the cacophony of condemnation, but she gets it precisely right in her recent Time piece, "Why the Tiger Mom's New Book Makes You Nervous." Now, it seems, Rubenfeld can't write about Jews because he's Jewish, or Chua about the Chinese experience becauseshe's Chinese? 

Maybe we need altogether to re-think the notion of authority and authenticity relative to voice, because at this point the only creatures who can express a point of view without offending someone appear to have four legs: I can say unequivocally that our labrador and cat have never offended anyone on my politically diverse Facebook page.