Today’s Chinese and Koreans work hard not because of Asian values. Rather, people tend to work hard when they are poor and then suddenly enter a system that lets them get richer through hard work. That’s what happened in postwar Germany and Japan, in Korea after its war, in China after Mao, and to countless immigrants in the US. However, once people have some money, they want to chill. In the typical immigrant trajectory, the first generation runs a corner shop, the second generation is a dentist and the third works part-time in an aromatherapy shop in Santa Fe. As Chua and Rubenfeld say: “Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations.”
