Secrets of Success
‘The Hybrid Tiger’ and ‘The Triple Package’By SANDRA TSING LOH JAN. 31, 2014
Continue reading the main story Quanyu Huang’s new book, “The Hybrid Tiger: Secrets of the Extraordinary Success of Asian-American Kids,” may sound like yet another flogging for hapless Western parents, but it’s not.
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Confessions of a Tiger CoupleJAN. 29, 2014 You can’t blame American mothers for still smarting from Amy Chua’s best-selling 2011 book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” In breathtaking and bold calligraphic strokes, she laid out her argument: American parents overindulge their children, allowing them sleepovers, video games and laughable extracurricular activities like playing Villager Number Six in the school play, as they collect trophies for being themselves in a self-esteem-centered culture. By contrast, Chinese parents strictly limit television, video games and socializing, accept no grades but A’s and insist on several hours a day of violin and piano practice, regardless of their children’s complaints. As a result, Chinese-parented kids play Carnegie Hall at 14, get perfect scores in science and math, and gain early admission to Harvard while their floundering American counterparts wonder what on earth hit them.
Chua did some hasty backpedaling shortly thereafter, but Tiger Mom was forever out of the box. Now Quanyu Huang, a Chinese-born professor at Miami University of Ohio, proposes a kinder, gentler blending of East and West in what he calls the Hybrid Tiger. Because apparently the Chinese have their own educational woes.
As early as the late 1970s, post-Cultural Revolution officials were already comparing American classrooms with their own. In contrast to tightly run Chinese schools (where students had nearly double the class time and much more homework), America’s chaotic classrooms were “carnivals” of rude children counting on their fingers and administrators “prattling on about meaningless subjects such as personal growth, self-esteem, individuality and creativity.” Triumphantly, the Chinese predicted that in 20 years China would lead the world in science and technology, and America would sink like Atlantis, a conclusion horrified American delegates agreed with. But no. Even today, while Chinese students still excel in test-taking, China has yet to produce a single Nobel Prize winner in the sciences or a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates (although, of course, American computer parts are made in China).
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From this stunning throw-down, Huang continues his intriguing contrarian analysis, offering a perplexed yet loving native son’s humanizing perspective on Chinese culture. Yes, he says, the Chinese invented paper, gunpowder, the compass and printing press — but for what ends? They used gunpowder for fireworks and compasses for feng shui, never thinking to mass-produce books or dreaming that Westerners would eventually attack them with their own inventions. The Chinese’s fifth invention, though, was the standardized test. Dating back to the seventh century (Sui Dynasty), it was less punishment than a marvelously democratizing tool through which lowborn citizens were able to advance their position. This is the DNA beneath a centuries-old reverence for education; it’s why Chinese children attend school from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. with such fervent dedication.
Continue reading the main story And it’s those sheer hours, Huang argues, with his own parental examples, that make the difference. Chinese kids are not allowed to quit studying when it’s not “fun.” By contrast, “American children are scared of math, not because they lack the ability to think logically in abstract terms, but because of their attitude toward studying.” Is Tiger Mother right, then? Surprisingly, Huang says no, arguing that she is not even very Chinese: “Her harsh, anachronistic methods are out of date and far outside of what is acceptable and encouraged in mainstream society in China today” (not to mention that real Chinese parents would insist on their child playing not just piano and violin but Chinese instruments). When he presented mainland Chinese parents with the Tiger Mother’s harsh child rearing methods (which readers will recall included threatening to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals), they were stunned. “The Tiger Mother is a creature of confusion,” Huang writes. “She is a mix of Amy Chua’s interpretation of what Chinese mothers do, Western egocentrism and plain, simple sensationalism.”
Regardless of how purely “Chinese” Chua is, though, she’s ba-a-ack. This time she has written, with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, a fellow Yale law professor and popular suspense novelist, “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.” The title refers to psychological characteristics shared by all of America’s overachieving subgroups: a group superiority complex, insecurity about one’s personal worth or status, and impulse control, i.e., the ability to resist temptation, particularly the temptation to surrender when the going gets tough. Aside from Chinese, Indians and Jews, potential surprises on the American subgroup success list include Mormons (except fundamentalists), Cubans and Nigerians. The Triple Package’s flip side is that, taken too far, these qualities can create “deep pathologies” (extreme insecurity, hyper-materialism).
That’s the Triple Package as a thesis. “The Triple Package” as a book is a real head-scratcher, though — its own puzzling triple package. It’s part sociological study, part national call to arms (a once strong, now instant-gratification-addicted America has apparently lost its Triple Package) and even part self-help book (to gain success, we can all create our own Triple Package). Connecting these far-flung dots seems to require, first of all, a lot of repetition of the phrase “Triple Package” (on one page it appears seven times). What’s curious, though, for two authors whose books, savory or not, can be real page turners (Rubenfeld’s novels feature everything from murder to erotic asphyxiation; even Chua’s scholarly work “World on Fire” opens with a hair-raisingly riveting account of her aunt’s throat being cut), is how dull the prose is. “That certain groups do much better in America than others — as measured by income, occupational status, test scores and so on — is difficult to talk about.” “Successful people tend to feel simultaneously inadequate and superior.” “It’s hard to write or talk about Appalachia even if you’re from there.” But, always, the authors somehow heroically surmount these politically correct difficulties by noting that even though the Kentucky-born Diane Sawyer drew heat when covering rural poverty in the state, poor white Appalachians do lack the Triple Package. Impulse control is an issue, and some have termed the region’s inhabitants — and our authors are just the messengers — “pillbillies.”
The continual restatement of the thesis (which is a kind of truism — who actually expects addiction and complacency to be success markers?), and the winners-versus-losers emphasis, makes reading this book feel like being slugged over and over again by a bully wearing kid gloves. While Tiger Mom was ruthless, here the claws are perfectly sheathed. One is tempted to say Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but there’s a more interesting question at hand. As opposed to Chinese Tigers robotically assembling Apple products, isn’t it more wondrous to behold the specter of two Chinese-Jewish Ivy League law professor/successful author Hybrid Tigers who’ve fashioned Yale student research (from a 2008 project) into a dull but probably lucrative book? Such are the rewards of our American meritocracy. It’s reason enough to prod our own Villager Number Sixes into putting more hours into math and violin, if not those Chinese instruments.
THE HYBRID TIGER
Secrets of the Extraordinary Success of Asian-American Kids
By Quanyu Huang
Correction: February 23, 2014
A review on Feb. 2 about “The Hybrid Tiger,” by Quanyu Huang, and “The Triple Package,” by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, two books about the levels of achievement by the country’s various cultural groups, referred incorrectly to the news anchor Diane Sawyer. While her birthplace, Barren County, Ky., is in a rural part of the state, it is not part of Appalachia; therefore she is not “Appalachian-born.”
Sandra Tsing Loh’s new memoir, “The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones,” will be published in May.
