Saving Face

Angie Y. Chung

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813572819
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études asiatico-américaines

Tiger Mom. Asian patriarchy. Model minority children. Generation gap. The many images used to describe the prototypical Asian family have given rise to two versions of the Asian immigrant family myth. The first celebrates Asian families for upholding the traditional heteronormative ideal of the “normal (white) American family” based on a hard-working male breadwinner and a devoted wife and mother who raises obedient children. The other demonizes Asian families around these very same cultural values by highlighting the dangers of excessive parenting, oppressive hierarchies, and emotionless pragmatism in Asian cultures.   Saving Face cuts through these myths, offering a more nuanced portrait of Asian immigrant families in a changing world as recalled by the people who lived them first-hand: the grown children of Chinese and Korean immigrants. Drawing on extensive interviews, sociologist Angie Y. Chung examines how these second-generation children negotiate the complex and conflicted feelings they have toward their family responsibilities and upbringing. Although they know little about their parents’ lives, she reveals how Korean and Chinese Americans assemble fragments of their childhood memories, kinship narratives, and racial myths to make sense of their family experiences. However, Chung also finds that these adaptive strategies come at a considerable social and psychological cost and do less to reconcile the social stresses that minority immigrant families endure today.   Saving Face not only gives readers a new appreciation for the often painful generation gap between immigrants and their children, it also reveals the love, empathy, and communication strategies families use to help bridge those rifts.   

Chapter 1

The Asian Immigrant Family Myth

In 1995, New York Magazine published as its cover story a piece on Korean immigrants and their American-born children titled “The Overachievers.” In the article, the reporter Jeffrey Goldberg compares the historical evolution of Koreans and Jewish immigration and generational change in the United States, concluding that “Korean history in New York reads like an abridged version of the Jewish [by] skipping whole chapters as they suburbanize and assimilate.”¹ His comparison centers on the two groups’ propensity to raise well-educated and talented children, their entrepreneurial conflicts with black consumers, and an overall sense of racial and class marginalization in America. In addition, Goldberg remarks on similar ambitions among Korean immigrants to use entrepreneurship as a way to achieve the American Dream and have their children replicate their extraordinary educational achievements without losing their ethnic ancestral heritage, as did Jewish immigrants before them.

In presenting Koreans as the next immigrant success story, the mythical narrative that Goldberg constructs in this article signifies a broader shift in the racial visibility and positioning of Asian Americans in the post–civil rights era. The caption on Goldberg’s cover page proclaims that “the city’s super-immigrants slaved and scraped to give their children the American Dream. There’s only one catch—the kids are turning into Americans.”² Although the comparison is focused primarily on Korean and Jewish immigrants, the general racial imagery it evokes has many parallels with other Asian model minority figures in feature stories throughout this era, such as the Japanese success story, the Chinese American whiz kids, and, more recently, the South Asian Indian national spelling bee winners. The overall impression is that immigrant parents may have encountered many hardships in coming to America, but this sacrifice has enabled their children to succeed—perhaps even a little too well—in school.

What makes Goldberg’s article particularly intriguing and arguably nuanced from other similar media coverage of the time is the way he touches on the mixed emotional context of the Korean immigrant family experience as they rigorously pursue the American Dream. The article offers an interesting starting point for discussing the emotional experiences of Asian American families in several ways: On the one hand, it highlights the ways in which many Korean immigrants seem to view their situation as comparable with white immigrants before them based on similar immigrant ideologies about hard work and success. Despite the many challenges, disappointments, and failures they may have endured, reaffirming these values and having faith in the American Dream allow immigrants to justify everything they have lost in voluntarily coming to the United States. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Koreans want to express their emotional affinity with Jewish immigrants, who they believe used the same tools of education, entrepreneurship, and religion to achieve similar goals of educational success without losing their ethnic roots. Although media pundits tend to associate optimism with success, these similarities in norms and values do not necessarily mean that both Jewish and Asian immigrants and their American-born children face the same challenges and achieve the same outcomes; however, they do show how immigrants emotionally process their hardships and seek social connectedness with others’ experiences in order to make sense of their life decisions.

Goldberg suggests that despite their many achievements, Koreans seem to harbor a profound sense of unease and self-consciousness as a result of their struggles that ironically intensifies their “dependency” on the mere idea of a “Jewish success story.” Beneath all these outward expressions of hope, optimism, and faith in the American Dream, Goldberg also sensed a deep and growing doubt and anxiety among Korean immigrant parents. He notes, “This sudden vulnerability is causing some first generation Koreans to register a more fundamental anxiety: Why are they here at all? Many Koreans say that they feel essentially powerless; powerless in their own homes, as they watch America turn their children into people they don’t fully understand—that is, Americans; powerless outside their homes, in the unnavigable world of coalition politics; and powerless in their own businesses, where they find they don’t control the largest levers of economic success.”³ In many ways, the struggles, aspirations, and self-consciousness among Korean immigrants also pervade the worldview and experiences of other immigrant groups, who voluntarily leave all that they know back in the homeland in the hopes of a better life in America with all its real and overidealized expectations. The costs are magnified in the case of racial minority groups who must navigate not only the harsh realities of immigrant life but also the obstacles that come with racial marginalization.

Jeffrey Goldberg is an Israeli American, but he picks up on a comparison that is often made among Asian immigrants and their American children. As I will discuss, references to the “Jewish American experience” regularly emerge throughout the narratives of Korean and Chinese Americans in this study. As a youth, I remember overhearing similar discussions among my relatives excitedly discussing their commonalities and differences from Jewish Americans and what Koreans needed to do to follow the Jewish path to success. Like many other Korean immigrants who took over businesses formerly owned by Jews, my father also got his start at his own firm by learning the business model from Jewish acquaintances in the lighting industry. He eventually became a successful entrepreneur, building what began as a small import-export business into a large nationally recognized company. Through the imperfect medium of family gossip, I also get the sense that despite pride in his achievements, he feels some remorse over what this success cost him in terms of his family life.

Of course Goldberg focuses on the first generation of immigrants, who arrived with little English proficiency, nontransferable educational credentials, and the hopes of a better life through entrepreneurship. He says much less about the emotional conflicts of second-generation Korean Americans, who appear as one-dimensional caricatures of the model minority.⁴ As the potential carriers for their parents’ dreams, the American-born children of immigrants face a very different social terrain marked by its own opportunities and challenges. Does the emotional context of their parents’ migration have any influence on the worldviews of the American-born children who are expected to carry the weight of their parents’ sacrifices and attain the American Dream? If the pressures and burdens that immigrant families face have changed in this new economic era, then have they also shaped how immigrants and their children perceive sentimental attachments, negotiate the emotional dynamics of parent-child relationships, and communicate across generational barriers? How do second-generation Korean and Chinese Americans use emotion work to navigate and make sense of the responsibilities and expectations of these shifting family roles within the context of their public lives? And in the processes of engaging and managing these feelings, how have second-generation Asian Americans viewed and carried on their ethnic identity and parents’ ancestral culture as they reach adulthood?

This book establishes the family as the site for both the production and the enactment of emotion work, while situating these processes within broader social and economic contexts. The main goal of this book is to understand how different types of intimate relationships and emotion work between parent and child have informed the way these American-born children view and practice ethnicity and culture in their own adult lives. Challenging the mainstream portrayal of Asian immigrant families as cold, homogeneous, and timeless relics of the past, I explore how emotions are managed and expressed in adaptation to family roles and structural constraints, the way they are conveyed across generational and cultural differences, and how they condition the ethnic worldviews of the second generation. I also discuss how second-generation Korean and Chinese Americans negotiate the social costs and benefits of being both valorized and dehumanized by the racial imagery of the model minority family. In the end, the book seeks to problematize the notion of the one-dimensional “Asian American family experience” and reconsider how these complex experiences have influenced the ethnic identities of second-generation Korean and Chinese Americans.

THE MYTH OF THE MODEL MINORITY FAMILY

The time period and social context within which Goldberg’s article was published are particularly salient in that the stereotypical image of Asian Americans as the “model minority” was by then firmly entrenched in the American racial imaginary. At the core of the myth is the claim that Asian Americans use hard work, strong cultural and family values, and entrepreneurial thrift to overcome racial barriers and achieve extraordinary success in America, just like Jewish immigrants before them. As evidence of this, scholars and pundits point to the high educational attainment levels of Asian Americans as a whole and their increasing presence in prestigious universities and well-paying white-collar professions.⁵ First coined by sociologist William Petersen in a 1966 feature story on Japanese Americans in New York Times Magazine,⁶ the image of Asian Americans as good citizens and obedient workers offered a suggestive and deliberate contrast to America’s “problem minority”—African Americans—months after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the outbreak of rioting in inner-city black ghettoes.⁷ Within a year of Petersen’s publication, U.S. News & World Report more pointedly stated, “At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese Americans are moving ahead on their own—with no help from anyone.”⁸

Supporting the idea that poverty is the result of culture, not discrimination, the term “model minority” has since been broadened to include Jewish Americans and other Asian Americans (mainly Chinese and Koreans) and has caught on like wildfire in media circuits and among scholarly debates as resounding proof of the American Dream. The model minority myth image of Asian American success persists today in the mainstream media, political discourses, and academic circles. Public fascination—and repulsion—with the model minority has also driven the popularity of books such as Chua and Rubenfeld’s book The Triple Package on the cultural superiority of such ethnic groups as Chinese and Jews,⁹ as well as TV shows that highlight the intelligence, competitiveness, passivity, and emotionless rationality of their Asian American characters such as Sandra Oh as the type-A Dr. Cristina Yang from Grey’s Anatomy or B. D. Wong as the soft-spoken forensic scientist George Huang in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Family and the cultural values they pass onto their children are central to this myth. Right before the model minority myth first emerged, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Moynihan published a 1965 report on Negro Families, in which he turned the public spotlight on the growing plight of African American in inner-city ghettoes.¹⁰ Moynihan attributed the poverty, crime, and welfare dependency among African Americans to the general “deterioration of the Negro family” as signified by growing black male unemployment, single-female-headed households, and illegitimate births. Although he described this “dysfunctional” family structure as a legacy of slavery and discrimination in the United States, Moynihan painted a picture of black families as culturally flawed and socially unstable, which he argued contributed to their ultimate self-destruction.

Moynihan was not the only one to perpetuate the image of inner-city black families as culturally deficient. The so-called cultural pathology of poor matriarch-oriented black families has been and continues to be a pervasive theme, including in studies of early twentieth-century scholars like Lloyd Warner, E. Franklin Frazier, and Talcott Parsons and in work by contemporary social scientists like William Julius Wilson and Thomas Sowell. Unlike voluntary immigrants who arrive with intact cultural systems that help to organize family and communal life, native-born African American families are often portrayed as lacking the resources, community support, and cultural value systems to promote the educational achievement and upward mobility of their children, as a result of the long legacy of slavery, segregation, and discrimination that has undermined the foundations of families and communities.¹¹ This cultural explanation for black poverty is used to justify increasing restrictions on financial aid and social services to poor black mothers (e.g., welfare) and inner-city ghettoes.

As a corrective to this approach, Carol Stack argues that black families do not lack social organization and stability but are resilient enough to adapt their family structures to the realities of poverty and racism by relying more heavily on associational networks composed of extended kin.¹² These studies nevertheless agree on the enduring impact of racial discrimination on the family structures of racial minorities. In the United States, immigrant families who are racially profiled as “black” must negotiate their ethnic resources within this restrictive racial environment. Mary Waters finds that “assimilation to America for the second generation black immigrant is complicated by race and class and their interaction, with upwardly mobile second generation youngsters maintaining ethnic ties to their parents’ national origins and with poor inner city youngsters assimilating to the black American peer culture that surrounds them.”¹³

In stark contrast to the stereotypical black family, the model Asian family is viewed as providing the moral training ground and main support system for the unsurpassed educational achievements and social mobility of the children of Asian immigrants. Research studies have consistently shown evidence for the relative cohesion and stability of Asian families based on their higher percentage of traditional one-earner married-couple households, their lower divorce rates, and their lower percentage of children born out of wedlock as compared with most other racial groups.¹⁴ Drawing on these figures, pundits attribute the “success” of second-generation Asian Americans to a deeply rooted Confucian-based culture that emphasizes strong family values, marital stability, filial piety, and reverence for tradition and hard work. They argue that though culturally distinct and foreign, Asian Americans share certain norms and values that complement the middle-class white Protestant work ethic, including “group membership and honor, fear of shame, respect for authority,” and the “suppression of their real emotional feelings, particularly desires of physical aggressiveness,” all of which enable them to achieve success.¹⁵ In response to the wave of criticism that followed his report, Moynihan pointed to the case of Japanese Americans, whose “singularly stable, cohesive, and enlightened family life,” he argued, should “inspire hope in all Americans for the possibility of eradicating black people’s ‘tangle of pathology.’”¹⁶ By demonstrating that traditional family values and hard work can help ethnic minorities overcome all obstacles, the model minority myth validates not only the meritocracy of America, but also the normativity of (white) heterosexual nuclear families; it also implicitly blames the root of all social problems to “deviant” or “culturally pathological” family structures among poor, black, and gay/lesbian households.

There are however two sides to the Asian immigrant family myth: the first praises Asian families for upholding the traditional heteronormative structure and ideal of the “normal (white) American family” based on a hardworking male breadwinner and a family-devoted wife/mother who raises obedient children with proper family values. At the other end of the spectrum, rising economic competition from the Pacific Rim and educational competition with Asian Americans at home have also fueled hostility, fear, and condemnation over these same mythical qualities. The myth presents Asian immigrant parents and their children as objects of societal ridicule and criticism about the dangers of excessive parenting, oppressive hierarchies, and emotionless pragmatism in a monolithic Asian culture. In this portrayal, the sexist oppression of the Asian patriarch and the education-/discipline-obsessed Asian Tiger Mom crea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1. The Asian Immigrant Family Myth
• 2. Education, Sacrifice, and the “American Dream”
• 3. Love and Communication across the Generation Gap
• 4. Children as Family Caregivers
• 5. Daughters and Sons Carrying Culture
• 6. The Racial Contradictions of Being American
• 7. Behind the Family Portrait
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author