Across Generations: Immigrant Families in America

1. Conflict, Coping, and Reconciliation Intergenerational Relations in Chinese Immigrant Families

21 1 Conflict, Coping, and Reconciliation Intergenerational Relations in Chinese Immigrant Families Min Zhou Relations between parents and children in Chinese immigrant families are characterized by intense bicultural and intergenerational conflicts.1 In the United States, most children of Chinese immigrants live in twoparent , nuclear families, with a smaller number in extended or transnational families. In these various immigrant households, a modified version of Confucian values emphasizing filial piety, education, hard work, and discipline serve as normative behavioral standards for socializing the younger generation. Many immigrant parents feel they have sacrificed for their children’s better future in America. They have clearly articulated expectations that their children will attain the highest levels of educational and occupational achievement possible, help elevate the family to middleclass status, and, most importantly, take care of parents when they are old and frail. Deviation from these expectations is considered a family shame or failure and is thus negatively sanctioned by the family and the ethnic community. It is not easy, however, for immigrant parents to enforce these behavioral standards and guarantee that familial expectations are met owing to vulnerabilities associated with the parents’ foreign birth, bicultural and intergenerational conflicts, and the different pace of acculturation between parents and children. Often times, children regard their immigrant 22 Min Zhou parents as lao-wan-gu (old sticks-in-the-mud or stubborn heads from the old world) and parental ways as feudal or old-fashioned—and a rebellion against tradition almost inevitably results. Parents are convinced that their own ways are the best recipe for success, and they constantly worry that their children are becoming too Americanized too soon. Yet these strains rarely break families apart, even when they are manifested in young people’s rebellious behavior. Other studies have pointed to factors that lead to conciliation, including children’s bonds of affection, loyalty, and obligation to parents.2 These studies have tended to stress dynamics within immigrant families. My emphasis is different. I argue that involvement in the institutional environment in the ethnic community plays an important role in reducing tension in Chinese immigrant families . Not only do ethnic social and cultural institutions reinforce parental standards, but they also provide socially acceptable places where young people can meet and interact—and commiserate and let off steam. While the bulk of this chapter focuses on conflict, coping, and conciliation when parents and children live together, I also consider intergenerational relations in the context of an altogether new type of living arrangement that has arisen in the Chinese immigrant community: “parachute kids.” These are children who have come to the United States on their own, usually in their early teens, for a better education and are therefore separated from their parents in the key adolescent years. I draw on a combination of U.S. census data and my own qualitative fieldwork data collected in the Chinese immigrant communities in Los Angeles and New York between 1996 and 2002. Chinese Immigration in the Post-1965 Era Chinese Americans are by far the oldest and largest ethnic group of Asian ancestry in the United States. Their long history of migration and settlement dates back to the late 1840s, including some sixty years of legal exclusion . With the lifting of legal barriers to Chinese immigration during World War II and especially following the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which abolished the national-origins quota system and emphasized family reunification and the importation of skilled labor, the Chinese American community increased dramatically—from 237,000 in 1960 to more than three million (including half a million mixed-race persons) in 2005. Much of this extraordinary growth is due to immigration. Between 1961 and 2005, Conflict, Coping, and Reconciliation 23 more than 1.8 million immigrants were admitted to the United States as permanent residents from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.3 The foreign born accounted for more than two-thirds of the ethnic Chinese population in the United States. Today’s second generation is still very young and has not yet come of age in significant numbers.4 The 2000 Current Population Survey indicates that 44 percent of the U.S.-born Chinese are under the age of eighteen and another 10 percent are between eighteen and twenty-four.5 After 1965, the Chinese American community was transformed from a bachelors’ society to a family community. There have been other significant changes as well. Unlike earlier Chinese immigrants, post-1965 Chinese...