Excellent piece, Jonah. Here’s an anecdotal supplement.

The Derbs went to Washington last weekend to see the cherry blossoms. We stayed Saturday night with some old friends, mainland-Chinese, 10 yrs in the USA, two kids. Well, the kids both play chess. They wanted to play me. I stink at chess, but I thought “Hey, they’re just kids,” so I played them.

The 12-year-old cleaned my clock in less than 10 minutes while doing three other things at the same time. What really hurt, though, was losing to the 5-year-old. In under 20 minutes.

Our friends just recently moved down to DC. Their main worry, his wife told my wife, was finding a good violin teacher for the 12-year-old.