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.
Anxieties and Strategies
I have compared the professional middle class in Taiwan and their immigrant counterparts in the United States to examine how and why the practice of raising global children unfolds differently across social contexts, despite shared ethnic backgrounds and class positions. My research reveals two major factors that shape parental anxieties and strategies: First, the two groups of ethnic Chinese parents face different opportunity structures in local societies (ethnic majority in Taiwan vs. ethnic minority in the United States). Secondly, they identify different risks in today’s global economy that shadow their children’s future (competition with PRC youngsters vs. the decline of Western economic dominance).
Parents across the Pacific are inclined to seek transnational references—class peers around the globe—to define their meaning of security and to imagine their children’s globalized future. The upwardly mobile Taiwanese project a romanticized image about American immigration and childhood, and they seek membership in the global middle class by consuming childrearing and educational styles they perceive as fitting a Western ideal. Meanwhile, immigrant parents feel largely satisfied with their suburban American lives by comparing this version of a “happy childhood” with pressured middle-class childhood in Asia. Yet, they feel increasingly anxious about the new global order and thus look to the Asian middle class to help set a higher bar for their children’s academic performance.
These strategies for raising global children are not only rising among middle-class families in Asia, but also among North American and European parents who fear the possibility that their children might fall off the class ladder in the new global economy. Popular books pressure ambitious parents to “raise children to be at home in the world” by acquiring new tools and knowledge to discover the wisdom of “parenting without borders.” Children are encouraged to attend bilingual education or spend a “gap year” abroad to acquire “multicultural capital” or “transnational cultural capital.”
While distinct approaches to raising global children aim to open up a cosmopolitan future for the next generation, they may paradoxically reduce culture to essential qualities and create unintended negative consequences. For example, Taiwanese parents who cultivate Western cultural capital often idealize and glorify Western education, overlooking its friction and rupture with local institutions. Other immigrant parents idealize and reify their cultural heritage and create tension and conflict across generations. All parents strive to keep their children safe and successful in an increasingly connected and competitive world. Yet, their strategies intensify anxiety and insecurity not only among themselves but also among less resourceful families.
Recommended Resources
Sören Carlson, Jürgen Gerhards, and Silke Hans. 2017. “Educating Children in Times of Globalisation: Class-specific Child-rearing Practices and the Acquisition of Transnational Cultural Capital.” Sociology 51(4). Examines how Dutch parents raise adolescent children to become cosmopolitan citizens.
Angie Chung. 2016. Saving Face: The Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant Family Myth. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Portrays how second-generation Asian Americans negotiate their conflicted feelings toward their family responsibilities and upbringing.
Annette Lareau. 2003 (2011). Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Oakland: University of California Press. Demonstrates how class-specific childrearing styles reproduce class privilege or disadvantage across generations.
Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou. 2015. The Asian American Achievement Paradox. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Identifies the social class origin of the cultural framework that shapes Asian Americans’ achievement.
Aihwa Ong. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Examines how Asian elites engage in “flexible capital accumulation” on a transnational scale.
Reading 12 LOVELY HULA HANDS: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture
Haunani-Kay Trask
Many U.S. racial-ethnic groups, including Native Americans, Latina/os, and African Americans, have experienced cultural exploitation. Exploitation occurs when aspects of a subculture, such as its beliefs, rituals, and social customs, are commodified and marketed without the cultural group’s permission. This selection by Haunani-Kay Trask explores the cultural commodification and exploitation of Hawaiian culture. Trask, a descendant from the Pi‘ilani line of Maui and the Kahakumakaliua line of Kaua‘i, is a professor
