Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US by Pei-Chia Lan

Author:Pei-Chia Lan [Lan, Pei-Chia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

5

Immigrant Working Class

Reframing Family Dynamics

A DOZEN IMMIGRANT PARENTS in their thirties or forties, mostly mothers and some fathers, attended the first seminar of the parental education workshop held by a nonprofit in Boston’s Chinatown. The instructor, an immigrant woman from Hong Kong, asked the attendants what they most wanted to learn. The parents eagerly responded: “Discipline! How do we get our children to listen to us and not talk back?”

The instructor suggested that the issue of “identity affirmation” was more important than discipline. Citing research by an Ivy League professor, the instructor asked the attendants in Mandarin: “Guess which type of immigrants are the most successful in the US? First-generation, one and a half, or the second generation?” Most had no answer; a few guessed the second generation. When the instructor revealed that first-generation immigrants were usually the most successful, the class looked surprised. They shook their heads: “How can each generation do worse than the previous [generation]?!” One of the parents speculated on the cause: “American education is too free and children become lazy!” Another nodded: “American children are too happy, no homework! You can even walk around freely in class!”

Immigrant parents with working-class jobs in the US face far more financial constraints and cultural challenges than their middle-class counterparts. Despite their concerns about “too much freedom” in American schools and society, they are generally hopeful about their children’s prospects of attending college and achieving social mobility. What troubles them most is intergenerational relations at home—they have lost parental authority in the new country and the old ways of discipline are not legal or valid for their US-born children.

This chapter examines how working-class immigrants raise their children in response to their conflicting experience of mobility and shifting family dynamics. Although they are seemingly achieving the “American dream” in the eyes of friends and relatives back home, they generally suffer downward mobility because of the lack of recognition for their human and cultural capital in the new country. The US state’s intervention, including low-income welfare programs and parental education, may empower socially disadvantaged immigrants in their daily battle for survival, but it can also conflict with their family realities and weaken their upward mobility.

These parents creatively use various strategies of cultural and transnational mobility to cope with their loss of authority at home and to maintain their particular version of family security. Some try to project an “American” outlook on their family lives by either interpreting the reversed dynamics of parent-child relations as an indicator of cultural assimilation or attending parenting seminars to learn about American knowledge and techniques of childrearing. The others seek resources from immigrant communities or transnational kin networks to sustain the cultural practices of education, care, and discipline.

Downward Mobility and Welfare Entrapment

Unlike middle-class professionals who mostly immigrated through employment, lower-class immigrants came to the US largely through family reunification. This study defines immigrants’ class position according to their occupations in the US.1 Of the 17 working-class informants (4 men and 13 women), 9 immigrated through sponsorship by parents or siblings and 7 women reunited with their husbands.

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