Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American American Identities (review)

Nazli Kibria's qualitative study is an important and welcome addition to the growing body of work on second-generation Asian Americans. Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities is also a nuanced and provocative intervention into debates about the racialization of Asian Americans, the limits and possibilities of pan-ethnic identity, and the workings of the model minority myth. Kibria states at the outset that her findings suggest that "the Asian American experience of the ethnic American model is centrally marked by a confrontation with its largely hidden and unstated racial character" (4). The book's introduction frames this problematic as the "puzzle of the new immigrant integration," but it becomes clear that Kibria's analysis also sheds light on the fundamental "puzzle" of conceptualizations of race in the United States. The tensions and contradictions in notions of race and ethnic identity are revealing, for I think they point to the ways in which the problematic of "race" is one in which Asian American studies is still embroiled. That is, it is one that Asian American Studies needs to address clearly through a theory that accounts for its simultaneous ideological and material character, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant have attempted to do, while grappling with the centrality of race politics to Asian American studies as a movement and as an academic field.

The strength of this sociological study lies in the fact that its insights are embedded in interview narratives; Kibria grounds her analysis throughout in the often poignant voices of her informants. This study is based on 64 in-depth interviews with second-generation Chinese and Korean Americans conducted in the Los Angeles and Boston metropolitan areas. The sample consists largely of middle-class adults between the ages of 21 and 40 years who were born in the United States or came here at the age of twelve or younger.

One of the valuable arguments in Kibria's study is her acknowledgment of the ways in which processes of "race socialization" in families pass on important "messages," as she calls them—"the lessons, ideas, and strategies of race" (41). Rather than viewing Asian American families simply as crucibles for contestations over tradition, Kibria sees them as a site for race education, a dynamic and interactive process. She astutely points out that the emphasis on academic achievement by Asian immigrant parents as a strategy to counter racial discrimination encodes a fundamental contradiction, for on the one hand, it suggests a belief that the "American dream" is available through meritocratic achievement, while on the other hand it implicitly recognizes the "intransigence of racial barriers" in U.S. society (61).

Kibria's study closely examines in very illuminating ways the daily social interactions and forms of agency practiced by Asian Americans in the face of ambiguous, confining, or malleable notions of race and ethnicity that are tied to classed and gendered experiences. She offers the notion of "racial identity play," which she defines as the "self-conscious manipulation . . . of the marker of race and the assumptions and meanings about identity . . . in order to turn the tables on the labelers," potentially serving "an educative function" (83). Kibria also analyzes the ways in which her middle-class informants used their "ethnic identity capital" (98) to benefit from others' perceptions of ethnic authenticity in the workplace, for example, and to combat the constraints of the glass ceiling. She acknowledges the constraining as well as advantageous aspects of these essentialist notions of "Asianness." One could also take this point further by arguing that ethnic identity capital is part of the dangerous trap of U.S. multiculturalism, which is embedded in the racialized hierarchy of the United States even as it celebrates "diversity" (98).

Kibria's analysis does imply that racial identity play can be used to subvert essentialized, even Orientalized, notions of ethnic authenticity. She cites a particularly amusing example from a Chinese American recalling his college days in...