the last decade.
David Guo and his wife are both corporate lawyers in their forties with U.S. law degrees. English language skills are critical tools in their practice involving foreign partners or clients, and they do not want their children to repeat any shortcomings they might have had early in their careers. David explained why he chose an international school for their only daughter, Monica, “When you do this line of work, your English becomes an instant problem. It was a very painful experience. When I first started at a multinational company, it was like I was on another planet. I couldn’t understand a thing…. If you wait until you’re older [to learn English], the accent will never go away.”
So, to equip their daughter with Western linguistic and cultural capital and to escape exam-centered local schools, David and his wife decided to “buy” a foreign passport before Monica reached school age. Through an immigration consulting company, they invested roughly $40,000 USD in a shopping mall in Burkina Faso in exchange for three passports for the entire family. When I asked David if he had ever been to Burkina Faso, he shrugged and smiled. The immigration consultants, he said, “just showed us a picture of this mall being built. They stopped contacting us after that.” With her foreign passport, Monica is able to enroll in an international school with an annual tuition of $15,000 USD. Half of her classmates are Taiwan-born “fake foreigners” holding second passports from countries in Africa or the Carribean islands.
David is proud of Monica’s crisp British accent and knowledge of European culture and history—when the family traveled in Europe last summer, Monica served as their knowledgeable guide. He is optimistic about a bright future marked by cultural flexibility and global skill circulation: “Many people talk about the ‘brain drain.’ I don’t object to that…. You let [your child] explore the outside world for 10 or 20 years, she will eventually come back. So we think it’s important that [Monica] identifies with the homeland but, with the language skills, she can go wherever she wants. I think the future world will be like that.”
Anthropologist Aihwa Ong coined the term “flexible citizenship” to describe how such upper-class Asian families acquire multiple passports to help the next generation to accumulate capital and social prestige in the global arena. However, among professional middle class parents, who enjoy financial comfort but not extravagant wealth, I found more anxiety than confidence in raising global children. Instead of viewing parents as interest maximizers who pursue childrearing as a calculative action of class reproduction, I saw childrearing as a set of class-specific coping strategies meant to minimize uncertainty and insecurity in the globalized world.
Only a few families in my study could afford the expensive options of overseas study or international school. The for-profit education industry in Taiwan offers less costly ways for children to have access to Western education: parents can enroll children in all-English kindergartens or arrange for them to go abroad for summer camps or stay with relatives abroad for a short period. If parents cannot afford expensive trips to North America or Europe, they send their children to Singapore or the Philippines at half the cost. All-English summer camps in Taiwan provide an even more economical way for children to get a virtual experience of transnational mobility.
Parents who have limited experience abroad and weak English skills often struggle to evaluate whether these global enrichment programs are authentic or effective. Some mothers nervously asked me, “Should I send my child to study in the Philippines? His English is terrible. Will it work?” or “Do we really need to start fostering an international perspective at a young age? Is it too late if we start in elementary school?” Other parents were disappointed to learn that their children frequently speak Chinese at the all-English camps. One perplexed mother said, “I don’t think they learned anything there. Do American children simply play like that?”
In addition, many parents find it challenging to reconcile the cultivation of Western cultural capital with their local institutional contexts. They are concerned about whether their outspoken and opinionated children, who have acquired such habits in Western curriculums, can adjust well to adult life in Taiwanese workplaces that still emphasize loyalty, hard work, and respect for authority.
Even in those families that aim for their children’s future migration, parents worry about the consequence of cultural estrangement. For instance, David feels ambivalent about what Monica may have missed out on by attending an international school: Chinese language skills, local social networks, and knowledge about Taiwan’s history and culture. He can only hope that family ties help to maintain her cultural identity and keep return migration as an ultimate option for his daughter.
Cultivating Ethnic Cultural Capital
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
