Читать книгу Mapping the Social Landscape - Группа авторов - Страница 85

Cathy Wu and her husband John are both software engineers in their forties. They have two children, aged 12 and 8. Cathy and John first came to the United States for graduate school and have established a comfortable home in a White-majority suburb north of Boston. Their social lives center on the Taiwanese immigrant community. Every Sunday afternoon, while their children attend Chinese-language class, Cathy and John gather with other parents in the school cafeteria, chatting about their children’s education and recent news from Taiwan. After the school activities end, Cathy’s family likes to join other immigrant families for a heartwarming dinner at an authentic Chinese restaurant.

Cathy and John prefer to keep their interactions with American colleagues professional. Recognizing the structural constraints they face as immigrants, they argue that they earned their career achievement by working “twice as hard” and being “twice as good.” Cathy says of the first generation, “this is just the truth, and I can’t complain about it,” and, of the second generation, born in the United States, it’s “The same. People can’t tell if you are the first or second generation. They only look at your face. [My children] might not have to be twice as good, maybe one and a half times.”

The majority of Chinese immigrants I interviewed felt pessimistic about their children’s entrance into the U.S. racial hierarchy. They believe that their children, despite being born and raised in the United States, will still face a future shadowed by immigrant stigma and institutional racism. Though most of my informants disapprove of the extreme “Tiger Mom” style, many also see their White neighbors as too lax or lenient with their children. They question the value of indulging children with excessive praise. To them, permissive parenting and its uncertain consequences are evidence of White privilege that immigrant families cannot afford.

I use the term “cultivating ethnic cultural capital” to describe how these parents manage to instill the values, language, culture, lifestyle, networks, and resources associated with their immigrant background in their children for the pursuit of success and mobility. It is important to remember that “ethnic cultural capital” does not refer to a parcel of values and customs that newcomers bring directly from their homeland, but a dynamic process of cultural negotiation in which immigrant parents selectively mobilize their cultural heritage, sometimes mixing-and-matching it with values and practices in the new country.

Immigrant parents selectively draw on Chinese cultural traditions to guide children away from what they perceive as the negative influence of American culture, including consumer materialism, radical individualism, and excessive freedom for children. Lareau describes a “sense of entitlement” as an outcome of American middle-class parenting—children learn to be assertive about their rights and privileges. To Cathy, it is, instead, a cultural force of moral corruption. She explained why she and John stopped throwing birthday parties for their children: “American children are very entitled and they think that everything is supposed to be fun…. Our kids understand that everything costs money. They should not be wasteful…. Working hard is a given, you shouldn’t expect a bonus prize for doing something you are supposed to do.”

Although most immigrant parents appreciate American schools’ emphasis on holistic development, they are also concerned about the light homework load and underdeveloped curriculum, especially in the subjects of math and science. They worry that their children will not be able to surpass the “Asian quota” in college admissions if they only learn from the American curriculum. That is, the “normal” American educational standards might be “alright” for White students, but Asian students must outperform Whites and compete with one other.

Moreover, the decline of the U.S. economy after the 2008 Financial Crisis has shattered these parents’ confidence in the American Dream. The rise of China further stirs their anxieties about the emerging global order. A growing number of Asian Americans are “returning” to their ancestral homelands to grasp opportunities in the rising economies of Asia and to escape racial inequality in American workplace. Professional immigrant parents suspect their children will face broader competition in the global labor market. Some look to the Asian middle class as a reference group in their selection of educational strategies.

For example, Tony’s grandmother, a retired school principal in China, lives with the family in Boston for about six months every year. She gives Tony daily homework to strengthen his Mandarin vocabulary and math skills. Tony complained to me, “It takes 15 minutes for me to finish the homework from American school, but I need to spend one or two hours to finish grandma’s homework!” Tony’s mother told me how she handled his discontent: “We often tell him how diligent Chinese children are, how much more they have learned [than American children], so he becomes scared of that.”

Immigrant parents with similar concerns seek additional education or home tutoring for their children. After-school programs with foreign origins, such as the Japanese program Kumon and the Russian School of Mathematics, are widely popular among Chinese immigrants. Some parents import learning kits for math and science from Taiwan or China, because they prefer the challenge and repetitive practice in the Asian curriculum. If their children cannot read Chinese well, their parents order English-language versions of the materials published in Singapore. When hiring instructors or trainers, parents prefer immigrants—if they cannot find Chinese tutors, they hire Russians or Indians.

Resourceful families also send their children to summer school in Taiwan or China as a more effective way of cultivating ethnic cultural capital. Several institutions in Taiwan offer Chinese-learning summer programs or SAT preparation courses that target second-generation children. Additionally, some parents hope to instill ethnic values such as respecting teachers and parents by sending their children to attend school in their ancestral homeland.

Immigrant parents seek to escape the intensive academic pressure of their home countries, but their concern about the dubious existence of an Asian quota in U.S. college admissions drives them to reproduce the Chinese educational culture. While these parents pressure their children to acquire immigrant toughness as an advantage in the pathway to social mobility, their validation of ethnic traits may lead to the paradox of racial otherization. The focus on selective extracurricular activities, such as the “Asian instruments” of piano and violin, reinforces stereotypes that Chinese children do not pursue personal interests and lack “individuality” or “creativity.” College admission officers are inclined to treat Chinese-language ability as an inherited trait, rather than a “hard-earned” skill, or to reduce the students’ academic excellence to the outcome of tiger parenting.