Basic social processes, such as the development of common ways of looking at things, usually cross the honorific lines drawn in a society. Discussing culture in this fashion may seem awkward or impudent, but the warrant for doing it comes from the increased understanding the procedure gives us of the processes that lie under all our activities, honorable and otherwise.
Reading 11 Raising Global Children Across the Pacific
Pei-Chia Lan
Sociologists are interested in how culture limits our free choice and shapes social interaction. Because each of us is born into a particular culture that has certain norms and values, our personal values and life expectations are profoundly influenced by our culture. Moreover, as we grow up, we often participate in a variety of subcultures that may complement or be in opposition to the dominant culture. In this reading, the second of three to explore culture, Pei-Chia Lan examines one aspect of global culture, how Taiwanese parents and first generation ethnic Chinese parents in the United States pursue different cultural resources in raising their children. Lan, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University, shares findings from her interview research about how global parents ensure their children have the cultural capital needed to be global and cosmopolitan citizens. Research was originally published in Lan’s 2018 book, Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the U.S. This excerpt is taken from Lan’s 2019 article in the sociology journal Contexts.
Janice Chan is a forty-something Taiwanese mother living in Taipei. She was an HR manager and now a full-time homemaker. Speaking about her upbringing, she laments her struggle with rote learning at school and economic shortage at home. Today, she is determined to safeguard a happy childhood for her two sons. Every other year, Janice brings them to attend a summer camp in California as an opportunity to practice their English skills and to increase their cosmopolitan exposure. They stay with her cousin who works in Silicon Valley as an engineer. On a recent trip, Janice was surprised when the cousin’s wife asked her to bring over Taiwanese textbooks on math and physics.
Yet this request was not unusual among immigrant parents there. Many are concerned about the depth of American public education; some also send their teenaged children back to Taiwan during the summer to improve their SAT scores and Mandarin language skills.
Why do wealthy Taiwanese parents seek cultural inspiration and educational opportunities in the United States for their children, while their immigrant counterparts pursue cultural resources in a reverse direction? Despite sharing similar ethnic backgrounds and class positions, why do these two groups of parents identify different sources of risk and insecurity in their children’s future and enact distinct strategies to raise children as global and cosmopolitan citizens?
Source: Lan, P.-C. (2019). Raising Global Children across the Pacific. Contexts, 18(2), 42–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504219854717
For my new book from Stanford University Press, Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the U.S., I interviewed over a hundred parents, including middle-class and working-class Taiwanese and middle-class and working-class ethnic Chinese immigrants in the Boston area. My research design allowed me to disentangle the intersection of ethnic culture and social class that shapes these parents’ childrearing practices.
Here, I focus on a group I identify as “professional middle-class” families—in this group, at least one parent had a four-year college or postgraduate degree and held a professional position or a job with managerial authority. About half of my informants belong to this group; they work as engineers, lawyers, medical doctors, financial workers, and business managers in Taiwan or Boston.
The academic excellence of Asians and Asian Americans is widely credited to “Confucian heritage cultures” that emphasize hard work, filial piety, and strong family ties. These popular stereotypes reduce ethnic culture to static, unchanging “traditions” and overlook class variations among Asians and Asian Americans. Instead, Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou argue that the emphasis on academic success is actually a “class-based mindset” that highly educated Asian immigrants in the post-1965 stream selectively imported from their home countries and recreated in the United States.
Sociologists have long studied childrearing as a process of delivering social class privilege or disadvantage. Professional middle-class parents raise children in the style of what Annette Lareau calls [this] “concerted cultivation.” Through careful consideration and planning, they arrange a wide variety of enrichment programs and extracurricular activities for children’s holistic development. However, U.S. studies of unequal childhood are generally confined to a single society and overlook the influence of global forces and transnational contexts.
I compare the professional middle class in Taiwan and their immigrant counterparts in the United States to examine how parents enact different childrearing strategies to negotiate cultural boundaries and mobilize educational resources across borders. The cross-Pacific comparison demonstrates distinct strategies of concerted cultivation through which parents try to mitigate their anxieties and perceived risks in both their local societies and the global economy.
Cultivating Western Cultural Capital
Jessica Chang is a 39-year-old full-time homemaker with a master’s degree from an American university. Her husband, Vincent Huang, works as a sales manager in an IT company. Like many Taiwanese professionals and managers, they have acquired overseas degrees and established careers and wealth through Taiwan’s global economy participation. Capital outflows to China and Southeast Asia since the 1990s have increased the cross-border mobility of such people, whether they take an overseas post or fly back and forth frequently.
Vincent and Jessica view globalization, including the booming Chinese market, as a source of both opportunities and risks. In particular, Vincent worries if Taiwanese children, portrayed by the local media in Taiwan as being “sheep-like” for their “mild” personality, can survive against Chinese youngsters who are positioned as having “wolf-like” aggression.
Envisioning the fierce competition their children will face in the future, Vincent and Jessica believe that their children can only develop their edge on the basis of individuality and creativity. They view exposure to Western education and culture as a necessity for cultivating these desired qualities. They hope to instill “Western cultural capital” in their children, which not only refers to Western degrees and credentials, but also involves embodied cultural capital, such as familiarity with upper-middle-class Western ways of thinking and living.
As soon as they knew they were pregnant, Jessica and Vincent began taking steps to prepare their children for a globalized future. Jessica traveled to Los Angeles to give birth to her two children so they could acquire U.S. passports. She also arranged a variety of non-orthodox learning activities during their preschool years, including a “brain-development” class at the age of three and a board-game class at the age of four. The children, now seven and eleven, attend a private elementary school. A British tutor visits them at home twice a week for English conversation and uses Lego bricks to instruct them in physics, math, and engineering. Every summer, Jessica takes the children to summer camps in California.
Many other wealthy Asian families have arranged split family migration to advance their children’s education. These include Taiwan’s “parachute kids,” who came to the United States in the 1990s to study alone or live with a caregiver, and the “goose families” of South Korea, in which mothers accompany children studying overseas while the breadwinner father stays behind. To avoid the sacrifice of family separation, the current generation of Taiwanese parents prefers “studying abroad at home” by acquiring foreign passports so their children can attend international
