Downsides of the “Tiger” Culture

In this thoughtful Chronicle of Higher Education article, Stephen Asma (Columbia College/Chicago) comments on The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and ... by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld. “These days, only the simplest minds would argue that cultural superiority is innate, racial, or genetic,” says Asma, “but the idea that specific social habits and psychological tendencies create ascendancy is, at the least, compelling and worthy of investigation. It is no trivial matter, for example, that fire-starting (culturally transmitted and sustained) helped some early human populations outcompete other groups… A cultural skill like fire-starting opens the door to better nutrition, defense, and warmth, to safer childhoods, and to technological development… What was true then is true now. Specific cultural traditions (transmitted horizontally across group members and vertically down through generations) may predispose groups to success and failure.” 

Asma lives in two of the cultures discussed in The Triple Package – according to whose theory, one is gaining ground (his wife was raised in mainland China) while the other is slipping (he’s a Dutch-American). Their biracial son has experienced a lot of “tiger mother” childrearing, so Asma is well acquainted with that approach. It stems, he believes, from a fundamental attitude toward childhood among the Chinese. “For them, childhood is the training ground for adulthood,” he says. “Being born into a tiger family is like being drafted into the military. Boot camp starts as soon as you can walk. If the child doesn’t like this life of endless academic drilling and discipline, well, so what? Childhood is not for the child… When you are a child, you are not living for yourself, you are training for your future self.”

Why do Chinese-American children tend to be successful in the most demanding academic fields – science, math, engineering? Asma believes it’s because of a longstanding Confucian belief that intense effort builds character and skill and opens every door, so why not take on the toughest challenges? Confucius made a point of rejecting another Chinese tradition – mysticism and meditation. “I once spent a whole day and night in meditation,” said the sage. “I wish instead that I had spent this time in study.” 

A second reason for the focus on the STEM curriculum is that these subjects are politically neutral, whereas the humanities can get you in trouble in ideologically and politically volatile times. “Math, engineering, and science are always useful,” says Asma. “Marxists, capitalists, theocrats, democracy proponents, even dictators all need bridges, buildings, and information highways.” 

Chinese people sometimes proudly refer to themselves as the “Jews of Asia,” and indeed, there are many similarities: strong family bonds, emphasis on schooling, the ability to flourish wherever they land, and financial know-how. But there’s an important difference, says Asma: humor. There isn’t a Chinese version of the Marx brothers or the Three Stooges. “Chinese culture is serious,” he says. “It rarely cracks a smile. It rarely makes fun of itself. It doesn’t know how to relax and enjoy life. It is strong and determined but highly inflexible.” Chinese humor is mostly semantic wordplay. Jewish humor, by contrast, “calls us to remember the absurdity of life – it gives a breather between the strife and struggle for excellence, and reminds us to enjoy. It forms a cultural counterweight to balance the intensity of constant work… Playfulness and humor act like siestas that are intrinsically rewarding but also refresh us for further labors.” 

“Give me the siesta life any day,” says Asma, “and not because I’m lazy but because life is more than work. I am more than my job. We are all more than our jobs. Worker productivity is not the best measure of human success, and the goal of education is not to create the highest-wage managers… It’s a short step, even for a whole culture, to move from highly disciplined to neurotically masochistic. If happiness is always deferred, then life becomes asceticism.” 

Another downside of the Chinese “tiger program” is parents unwittingly giving their children the feeling that they’re never good enough. “It’s the opposite problem of American parenting,” says Asma, “which over-coddles and affirms everything our kids do. American kids make up for their lack of skills with boundless self-esteem. That makes them fragile when failures eventually come along. Chinese kids are tough, and modest about their own copious skills, but they also never feel entirely accepted, acknowledged, or esteemed.” This may be one reason Christianity is expanding so rapidly in China, he suggests – the message is that you are somebody, that Jesus loves you no matter what.

What about African Americans, who are not on the Triple Package list of rising cultures? Asma agrees with Chua and Rubenfeld’s hypothesis that institutional racism and the victim narrative implicit in the Civil Rights Movement have often prevented American blacks from seeing themselves as superior, despite heroic survival and tremendous cultural contributions. 

Asma concludes with a cautionary note on over-generalizing about culture. There isn’t a “ladder of higher and lower cultures,” he says, “but a mosaic of adaptive and maladaptive traits. Like my own son, who’s a mix of genetic and cultural lineages, we all might be able to forge a new educational culture from the best fire-starters around the world.”

“The Trouble with Tiger Culture” by Stephen Asma in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 7, 2014 (Vol. LX, #21, p. B10-B13),

https://chronicle.com/article/The-Trouble-With-Tiger-Culture/144267/