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  • Social Science
  • Hung Cam Thai, chair, Anthony Ocampo, and Cara Wong

The committee unanimously and enthusiastically selected Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou's The Asian American Achievement Paradox (Russell Sage Foundation, 2015) for the 2017 Asian American Studies Best Book Award in the Social Sciences. This theoretical breakthrough book offers rigorous empirical evidence, analytical sophistication, and remarkable intervention in national conversations about education, immigration, culture and inequality. Based on survey and interview data from one of the major data sets on second generation immigrants in the United States, Lee and Zhou lucidly integrate structural and cultural arguments to explain the high levels of economic and educational outcomes among Asian Americans. Focusing on Chinese and Vietnamese children of immigrants, the authors foreground the "hyper" and "high" selectivity of national policies that shape who comes to the United States and the economic opportunity structures they experience prior to and after their immigration. Rejecting standard accounts of the "model minority" discussion that underscore either Confucian cultural values or "tiger mom" parenting styles, they demonstrate how culture and structure interact in complex ways to produce specific "success frames" among some Asian American groups. In doing so, they chronicle the complex interactions of social, demographic, historical, cultural, and [End Page 464] psychological attributes that explain mobility patterns among Asian Americans today. The arguments are articulated clearly and systematically with the most important debates crossing sociology, psychology, and Asian American studies.

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