Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation

CHAPTER 4: “BEING PRACTICAL” OR “DOING WHAT I WANT”: THE ROLE OF PARENTS IN THE ACADEMIC CHOICES OF CHINESE AMERICANS

CHAPTER 4 “BEING PRACTICAL” OR “DOING WHAT I WANT”: THE ROLE OF PARENTS IN THE ACADEMIC CHOICES OF CHINESE AMERICANS* Vivian Louie My mom and dad kind of want me and my brother to become doctors to carry on the family business. My brother and I would say that the only professions in my mother’s eyes that were worthy were either a doctor or a lawyer. —Victoria, eighteen-year-old Ivy League student and daughter of a doctor Growing up, parents keep on saying, “What are you going to do? Doctor, lawyer?” And when I was in high school, it was pharmacy school in particular . Everybody was going to pharmacy school—my cousins, it was pharmacy school. Parents push for something more practical, or applicable. And you can’t get anything more practical than pharmacy and medical school or law school. —Robert, twenty-one-year-old student at a public commuter university and son of a retired chef and nurse’s aide supervisor Despite coming from nearly opposite socioeconomic ends of Chinese migration flows to New York, Victoria and Robert relayed a common experience of confronting parental pressure to follow a “practical” professional path. In this chapter, I explore how second-generation Chinese American college students understood the expectations of their Chinese immigrant parents as they were choosing what to study and pursue as a career. Across 79 *All names of individuals reported throughout the chapter are pseudonyms. class and gender, my respondents heard the same message from parents: not only is education important—with the bachelor’s degree seen as the minimum level of attainment (Louie 2001)—but the end goal of education is a stable, high-paying job, and the key to this is studying “practical” and “safe” fields. Media and research accounts have depicted Asian Americans as overachievers in technical fields, and my respondents too understood this to be an ethnic phenomenon. As I show in this chapter, however, class matters in several key dimensions: in how students respond to their parents’ views on the most appropriate fields of study for them to pursue; in how they make their decisions in very different institutions of higher learning; and, along with gender, in how parental pressures are often transmitted and experienced differently. The very different life histories of Victoria and Robert reflect the great variety of socioeconomic trajectories among the 361,000 Chinese who make their home in New York City (according to the census of 2000), particularly those who arrived after 1965. Victoria’s family, headed as it was by two highly educated and professionalized parents who made their home in the suburbs, belonged to what social scientists have called the “uptown Chinese.” Victoria ’s father had left Taiwan in 1979 after graduating from the prestigious National Taiwan University to train as a doctor in the United States; her mother came to earn a master’s degree in international relations. Instead of returning to Taiwan, the couple settled in a wealthy Long Island suburb and enrolled their children in its highly ranked public school system. Victoria in particular excelled academically. It came as no surprise to Victoria’s parents, then, that she was admitted to an Ivy League school, Columbia College. Robert’s parents were part of a working-class immigrant stream of manual laborers who typically worked in restaurants and garment factories in an ethnic economic enclave described as the “downtown Chinese.” Robert’s parents left southern China in the 1960s and discovered that their limited education (his father had some high school, and his mother finished grade school) gave them few options in the United States aside from the ethnic economy. Robert’s father waited on tables and cooked in Chinese-owned restaurants while his mother, a nurse’s aide supervisor, worked mainly with Chinese clients. Eventually the couple moved to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. In high school Robert could be found cutting classes and hanging out with friends more often than studying. After some run-ins with his parents, he straightened out, graduated from high school, and, much to his parents’ relief, entered Hunter College, a public university. Because of all these differences, it was unlikely that Victoria and Robert would come across one another, even though their families lived only twenty miles apart and they went to colleges in the same city. Nor were they likely to 80 Becoming New Yorkers meet in an ethnic church. As Karen Chai Kim documents...