ASAM reading journals paper

45

Mainstream media and academic literature tend to view Asian Americans through a binary racial lens that both extols and dehumanizes Asian parent- child relations based on stereotypical generalizations about their strict disci- pline, passive obedience, and hierarchical orderliness. The model minority myth claims that it is this structural stability that enables immigrant parents to promote traditional family values on filial piety and good work ethic to the next generation. Yet juxtaposed against the middle-class (white) American family, the monolithic Asian immigrant family appears as an emotionally deficient and psychologically dysfunctional space that reinforces patriarchal oppression and sacrifices humanistic values in order to breed obedient over- achievers. Marriages are stoically arranged by parents or matchmakers based on practical considerations as opposed to romantic love, and the parent-child relationship is rigidly structured around discipline and subservience. The common understanding is that the physical intimacy, deep affection, and open, honest communication that are prized in the ideal American family are largely absent in the Asian family—a condition that suggests a misguided prioritization of money and success over love and affection.

The Tiger Mother is perhaps the newest reincarnation of the same myth, but this time it is racially positioned against the gendered ideal of the domes- ticated white American mother: Although both popularized images have been used to underscore the dangers of overparenting, the ideological con- struction of the Asian Tiger Mother stereotype is described more negatively as the diametric opposite of its alter ego, the Pandering White Mother. Where the white mother is conceived to be affectionate, coddling, and completely attentive to the emotional needs of the child, the Asian mother is presented as

Love and Communication

across the Generation Gap

c h a p t e r 3

!

cold, authoritarian, and pragmatic in her parenting approach. In many ways, she is the maternal embodiment of the Asian Dragon Lady, the heartless, con- niving man-eater of twentieth-century films—except this one raises obedient, passive, robotic children who boast outstanding academic credentials but lack leadership ability, interpersonal skills, and original thought. In other words, she is the mother figure of the model minority child.

Karen Pyke argues that second-generation Asian Americans themselves are unwittingly complicit in perpetuating this myth because of the way they internalize racial stereotypes about Asian families and idealized images of “normal American families” in the media. In her interviews with Korean and Vietnamese Americans, she finds that they invoke these stereotypes to both negatively characterize their Asian parents as “overly strict, emotionally dis- tant, and deficient” yet express measured appreciation for cultural values such as filial piety.1 The book Tiger Babies Strike Back by Kim Wong Keltner shows one common way this plays out among American-born Asian Americans. Keltner argues for the need to break some of the myths of the high-achieving Asian overachiever and encourage “Tiger Babies” to get in touch with their emotional self through affection, compassion, and gratitude. In an opinion piece titled “Tiger Moms: Don’t Turn Your Kids into Robots,” she writes, “As the children and grandchildren of immigrants, we may not have been starving for actual food, but we are starved for affection. In the pur- suit of high achievement, our feelings got left by the side of the road, our emotions mistaken as unnecessary baggage. Maybe our parents who escaped war and poverty never expected that later in the journey, we would need emo- tional availability and a sense of humor as flotation devices.”2 Although this article was written as a critique of Chua’s book, her assessment of parental love and communication like Chua’s takes on Chinese parenting reifies and homogenizes Chinese and American culture—this time advocating the “American” philosophy on parenting—and completely misses the wide range of ways Chinese and Chinese Americans interpret and apply different parent- ing philosophies, as this chapter discusses.

Stereotypes like these that essentialize Asian immigrant family traits based on a cultural or generational divide between “Chinese” and “American” often conflate immigrant with native-born families, ignore ethnic and class differ- ences, and fail to factor in the overall social and emotional environment of Asian families including those that stay together. In their study on household arrangements among Mexican families, Van Hook and Glick argue that immigrant family structures may actually reflect not cultural values carried over from the homeland but rather adaptation strategies toward the initial exigencies of the immigration experience.3 Numerous studies on Asian

s a v i n g f a c e 46

immigrant families have noted how the shifting economic responsibilities of spouses and changing power dynamics between parent and child can create intense conflicts and tensions among different family members along gender, class, and cultural lines.4 What these studies suggest is that as opposed to simply reproducing the values of the homeland, Asian families like other immigrant families will selectively preserve those cultural values and house- hold arrangements that help them to adapt to the constraints they face in their new surroundings. Thus, the similarities and differences between immigrant parents and their American-born children may not be as clear-cut as classic assimilation studies would like to assume.

This is not to say that Asian immigrant families do not struggle with emo- tional disconnects and miscommunication as a result of intergenerational differences and economic hardships. Instead, I problematize the way these myths are used to construct a one-dimensional image of Asian families that reaffirms the moral superiority of middle-class white American culture. The dual image of Asian family harmony and intergenerational conflict fails to consider the complex emotional and psychological dynamics underlying parent-child relations and the way different family members including children can play an active role in negotiating these conflicts. As a result, the key to reconciliation or at least individual acceptance lies in the ability of immigrant parents and their children to recognize cultural differences in conveying love, find ways to communicate in a common emotional language, and seek mediation from extended kin and outside institutions.

Contrary to the model minority image of families as sites of discipline and order, this chapter uncovers the complex emotional dynamics of Korean and Chinese parent-child relations that emerges from economic hardship and racial marginalization and how the children of immigrants emotionally man- age these painful experiences. The chapter begins by explaining how the changing context of migration and the power shift between husband and wife and between parent and child shape the daughters’ and sons’ emotional rela- tionships with their mothers and fathers. In order to make sense of marital and intergenerational discord, many second-generation Asian Americans push themselves to think beyond the narrow way in which American culture defines emotions such as love and devotion, even if they choose not to adopt their parents’ values in their own lives. In addition, they seek to nurture their indi- vidual emotional development, reconstruct their unsaid family histories, and create new modes of communication with their extended and immediate fam- ily without the benefit of direct verbal discourse or institutional support. In general, I show how in adapting to the time constraints and emotional avail- ability of their parents, second-generation Korean and Chinese Americans

l o v e a n d c o m m u n i c a t i o n 47

learn to compartmentalize and channel their emotions around different networks of siblings, kin, and fictive kin throughout the life cycle—the emo- tional consequences of which can vary depending on their access to outside resources.5

Love and War in Marriage

When individuals enter the phase in their lives when they start considering issues related to love, marriage, and children, they turn to their parents’ mar- riage and family experiences as a model for understanding the dynamics of relationships and identifying qualities they do and do not want to emulate. For the second generation, this process of retrospective reflection and role modeling is complicated by both the difficult changes brought on by immi- gration as well as the different cultural ways that people cope with such situ- ations. The shift in the power dynamics between husband and wife is perhaps one of the more dramatic changes to occur, especially for traditional East Asian immigrant families influenced by the principles of Confucian culture.

In Confucianism, an individual’s roles, responsibilities, and duties within the state are informed by his or her social status, as defined by age, gender, and class. Contrary to Western misperceptions of Confucianism as empha- sizing notions of superiority and inferiority, Confucianism as practiced in China and South Korea is fixated not as much on difference and dominance as on the accompanying responsibilities and behaviors associated with one’s social roles that inform one’s relationships with others—that is, the obliga- tion of “subordinates” (e.g., children) to show respect and obedience to their “superiors” (e.g., parents), as well as the responsibility of superiors to protect and educate their charges. Centered on the patriarchal authority of the eldest male, the social order of the family is organized around hierarchical relation- ships between husband and wife, father and son, and elder and youth, with women and children expected to show piety and obedience to their male elders and the elders given the ultimate authority and responsibility for taking care of the dependents.6

The structural pressures and cultural subjugation associated with immi- gration and adaptation to U.S. society however challenge these traditional social relationships. Because of the expansion of low-paying, feminized service industries such as garment work, Asian immigrant women generally find greater employment opportunities upon migrating, which help them to compensate for the depressed wages and unemployment of traditionally Asian male breadwinners. In fact, in many Asian families, the wage-earning capacity of immigrant wives becomes central to the economic survival of the

s a v i n g f a c e 48

family, particularly in working-class families where women often become the family’s primary financial supporters.7

The changing economic contributions of women and men in such families open up both opportunities and challenges that alter relationship dynamics among different members of the family. On the one hand, because of their key economic role within the family, immigrant women have more room to nego- tiate for greater equity in the distribution of household responsibilities, more involvement in family decision-making processes, and increased time to devote to their careers.8 Emboldened by their new wage-earning power, women may be able to negotiate new roles within the family based on American norms of individualism and egalitarian gender ideals. Of course, the degree to which the extended economic roles will radically transform the traditional patriarchal practices of immigrant families depends in part on class background.9

In general, greater labor force participation has not necessarily diminished the responsibilities of immigrant women in the home or even undermined the patriarchal ideologies these families bring with them. In addition to their breadwinning role, women are still considered the primary caregivers for dependents and the elderly, especially in immigrant and poor families that cannot afford to pay for domestic care. The gendered nature of care work also explains why Asian mothers are central in both transmitting cultural traditions and facilitating the acculturation of their children into American society. Compounded by the usual hardships of immigrating and settling in a new country, the sudden transition from the traditional patriarchal house- hold inherent in Confucian-influenced East Asian culture to more egalitarian relationships can pose a threat to their husbands’ sense of masculinity.10

Those households that are less able to negotiate and adapt to these changes can fall apart as a result of intense spousal conflicts, domestic violence, and divorce.11 All together, these pressures create a volatile and hostile environ- ment to which children are exposed at an early age, especially during the more difficult stages of immigration and settlement.

Within this context of conflict and change, the views of Korean and Chinese Americans on the quality of their parents’ marriage ranged consider- ably in this study, with some reporting parents who had a warm and support- ive relationship and others reporting constant infighting that in some cases resulted in separation or divorce. However, it is no surprise that many partic- ipants did recall heated confrontations and arguments between their parents, at least during the more difficult years of immigration, which in some cases escalated to excessive verbal abuse and physical violence.

Although some interviewees did have parents who ended up divorcing, it was not a common option even in the unhappiest of marriages because of

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cultural taboos against divorce, financial dependency among immigrant couples, difficulties in getting remarried especially for women, and, most important, the perceived negative effects it would have on their children. In their survey of 1.5- and second-generation Americans in the New York City region, Kasinitz and his colleagues found that divorce rates were relatively lower for Chinese Americans than for other ethnic groups, which they attribute to the Chinese cultural view of marriage as not an affectionate, companionate relationship but rather a pragmatic one focused on economic survival and children’s well-being.12 Indeed, many Asian parents immigrate to and remain in the United States because they want their children to have a better life and access to a quality education. In such cases, parents may delay divorce until their children are financially secure and old enough to take care of themselves.

In order to avoid the ostracism and pain of having their separation for- malized, other parents opted for arrangements other than divorce, such as living separately in different countries or staying married while getting romantically or sexually involved with other people. Oftentimes, this type of arrangement led to ambiguous relationships that perplexed their children. Even if these events occurred very early on in their childhood, these family conflicts were deeply entrenched in the children’s memories and in many cases shaped their general views on marriage. Some of the interviewees who had witnessed more severe or long-lasting feuds between their parents expressed some doubts about the necessity of marriage. Interestingly enough, I found that those who felt this way often did end up getting married but did not always follow the traditional path toward marriage: for example, some got pregnant before they got married, while others waited until they were older, long after they were expected to settle down.

In terms of short-term effects however, the interviewees had to devise other strategies to emotionally cope with the stress of marital friction. Henry, an outwardly tough-acting Korean American contractor and entrepreneur, claimed to have firm control over his parents, rarely giving into their numer- ous pressures, complaints, and arguments if they did not conform to his per- sonal credo. He was even willing to calmly walk out in the middle of dinner with his parents at a restaurant if they insisted on pressuring him about a topic he did not want to discuss. Yet during the interview, there was one subject that seemed to elicit his emotional vulnerability in respect to his parents. When asked if he had any particular problems to deal with during his childhood, Henry responded promptly,

Henry: Parents fought a lot. That to me was a big problem, a big social

stress. They’re just two miserable people.

Angie: Why do you think they’re miserable?

s a v i n g f a c e 50

Henry: Cause they tell me number one. Number two they fight. Like they

can’t be in a room with each other for more than ten minutes before

they start fighting. So you know even today as an adult, even though

I know I could physically separate them and kick the shit out of both of

them if I had to, it scares me. Like there’s that little child that goes

aaaaah, they’re about to fight. I can sense it. And for me, I try to see

them separately whenever possible.

Angie: I’m sorry, are they together?

Henry: No my dad’s in Korea, my mom’s here. However when he comes

here, he stays with her. Again how that works, it’s beyond me. My wife’s

asked me a million times so I tell her, ask my mom. Personally I just

don’t care. I think my wife has a hard time believing that I don’t care.

But seriously I just don’t care. I care more about this drink here, right?

That it tastes kind of eh to me. I care more about this drink than I care

about the problems with their relationship. Just not my problem.

Although he claimed not to care about his parents’ marriage, his unveiled anger, anxiety, and disgust clearly indicate the contrary. His professed indif- ference may be considered a strategy for managing the painful emotions that come with dealing with conflicts among loved ones over which he has little control. Henry explained how he carried over some of the lessons he learned from these feuds into his current marriage. Because his parents fought bitterly over money, he lets his wife handle all the finances and said the only reason he would divorce her is if they fought over money.

As opposed to merely rejecting their parents’ marriage because of cultural differences, other participants tried to make sense of their parents’ many con- flicts within the context of their hardships as immigrants. As the youngest daughter of four, Winnie blocked out a lot of the unpleasant memories of physical altercations that took place between her mother and stepfather until she was able to deal with the memories as an adult. Her seamstress mother and butcher father worked very long hours, so she was raised by her two older sisters, although she says her parents still “made their presence felt.” She tried to get a handle on these difficult memories by reminding herself about the struggles of being an immigrant in a new country.

There was just a brief era of domestic violence. My brother and I shared a room next to our parents’ room and there was a screen door that divided it. We would hear the fighting and we would run to my sister’s room at the end of the hall cause it would scare us. And even my mom, she actually packed up her stuff one time; she was gonna leave us. I don’t exactly know why, something with my father. But I would see bruises on my mom and I would see bruises on my dad. I don’t even think about that stuff. You know

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when they say a child forgets things to protect the mind? I shut down a lot of things that I saw or experienced and when I got older, I guess I was old enough to really be able to say, yes my parents did have that experience where they did hurt each other physically. And I think it was merely because of the whole frustration of being immigrants, having the pressure of having to pay the rent, and taking care of four kids. It’s just difficult. I still sometimes look at my father like okay, you hurt my mom, but I understand also where they’re coming from.

From what she can remember, the fighting between her parents did not last more than a year, and she says she recalls more laughter than pain. This per- haps has helped her to get over the trauma of these memories and sympathize with her parents, especially with the help of her older siblings, who explained to her the context of these struggles.

Other second-generation participants took the more direct and assertive approach of inserting themselves into their parents’ altercations, especially as they got older and found themselves in a better position to exert their author- ity. Oftentimes, this meant siding with one parent over the other. Because mothers were usually the main caregivers and were more vulnerable to finan- cial manipulation and physical/verbal abuse, most children—both sons and daughters—tended to defend their mothers. Daniel, whose father emigrated as a physician from Hong Kong and sponsored his mother who was a nurse, said he lived a fairly “pampered, privileged life” as a child but described how his father held onto a patriarchal view of family and verbally abused his mother. Although he and his sister prodded their mother to get a divorce, he thought she was too traditional to follow through. So as he got older, he explained how he learned to counter his father’s verbal abuse of his mother with equally small but significant acts of sarcasm and condescension:

It was really painful when they’re in public and you can’t yell at someone in front other people, right? But he does these really indirect put-downs. Like recently we were at my sister’s husband’s party and my mom is talking, having a good time and then my dad will say some fucked up shit like don’t listen to her, she just talks a lot, oh she’s just really drunk, and I would get so mad. And she’s being great, she’s being the life of the party, she’s really pretty like everyone’s in love with her. And so I don’t know I get really petty and I start doing the same thing to my dad. I start embarrassing him in public. [short laugh] It gets me so mad so it’s sort of like taste your own medicine, you asshole. So I’ll join the conversation and be like oh dad, remember that time you did this? Or dad, you’re joking, you never did that. Or no, you really don’t know that dad. And he gets a little bothered by it. [whispering] I’m like yes! Now you know how it feels.

s a v i n g f a c e 52

Daniel feels that his intervention along with his mother’s new vocation singing and emceeing at organizational events have improved relations some- what between his parents, although he continues to bristle at his father’s treatment of his mother.

Several of the interviewees also believed that their father’s need to exert his authority over his wife is a way of compensating for his loss in social status as an Asian male in American society. Justine, whose stepmother is not in good health but supports her and her husband with a waitressing job, felt that her father’s inability to support his family both financially and emotionally had largely to do with his inability to overcome his loss of social status and privi- lege since immigrating from Malaysia: “I don’t think he’s lived up to his responsibilities especially in the later years of his life because he’s stuck in this time warp of how things should be and how people should treat him.”

During the hours she spent helping her father out at his machinery shop, Leah, who immigrated at the age of five, was struck by the visible contrast she saw in her father’s life before and after he immigrated from Taiwan. In gen- eral, she viewed her father as a proud, confident man who lived comfortably back in Taiwan and was well respected by his colleagues. However, upon immigrating to the United States, her entire family including her three other siblings all had to live crammed into one tiny house with one of her relatives. Because neither of her parents spoke English, she watched her father toil long hours at work and deal with patronizing white clientele as she painfully reminisced during the interview:

Growing up and seeing him interact with Caucasian clients who may not understand his English and how he struggled through that was difficult. Sitting there and knowing what a fluent American English speaker was try- ing to communicate to my dad but my dad just not getting it and getting frustrated and stumbling through communication was difficult. Cause he’s a very assertive, confident guy but all of a sudden because of the language barrier, he wasn’t able to get his point across. There were times when he was taken advantage of and when people said racially biased remarks and jokes that offended my parents. My mom probably had it worse because my dad’s English became fluent very quickly because he was always at a business place and my mom was a stay-at-home mom. She always wanted to learn English but not having that outlet, she would really struggle with grocery shopping where you would have to speak English to get it done. She was pretty much dependent on me and my older sister.

Although language barriers are certainly an inevitable part of the immigration experience, the humiliation of dealing with white clientele is amplified by the

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racial perception of Asian men as weak, alien, and socially inept. This comes across in Leah’s recollection of racist remarks and jokes made about her father at his expense. At the same time, she also mentioned that her father overcame the language barrier quickly because he was forced to interact with Americans every day at work, whereas her mother’s isolation at home made it difficult to pick up the language and forced her to rely on her children for even simple daily tasks. In this way, we see how race, gender, and nativity all interact in shaping the experiences of Asian immigrant men and women and their relationship with their children in very different ways.

Logan, the oldest brother of two, has fond memories of male bonding with his father when he was young living in Hong Kong but noticed how immi- grating to the United States dramatically undermined his relationship with both his wife and his children. Logan attributed this shift to his father’s struggles trying to recover his status in Hong Kong amid long stints of unem- ployment, while his mother immediately found clerical work in Chinatown. Among other things, his father dabbled in different business ventures such as construction, real estate development, and even pearl diving in order to try to reclaim the status he enjoyed back in Hong Kong. As Logan saw it,

When I was born and he ended up with a son, he became very happy because any young man who has a boy, he feels he has that thing where it’s like, oh I’m gonna teach him all this stuff and so that’s a really beautiful thing. My dad would just physically carry me everywhere like some kind of trophy, and he would take me to a lot of places back in Hong Kong. But once he came here, the relationship changed in a way where it felt very much like a single-parent family home, because it was just me and my sis- ter with my mom all the time cause my dad would try to get jobs my mom got. And my dad couldn’t find a job for various reasons. I think it’s because he was not able to swallow his pride as a man of color in this country. To go into corporate, you really have to swallow your pride and be treated like a piece of crap, and as a man who in Hong Kong was kind of the shit, he could not be flexible in that way. Being an Asian guy in America is very difficult, especially in Brooklyn, in a working-class macho Italian environ- ment. So I feel like my dad and I both had to constantly negotiate our manhood as Asian men and it’s an endeavor that our backgrounds cultur- ally leave us completely ill-prepared for. Because in Chinese culture, there’s not that constant need to prove that you’re a man, whereas in America, it’s never-ending.

Logan still harbored resentment, although intertwined with empathy and an understanding of the broader context of Asian male powerlessness, over his father’s unwillingness to start from the bottom and fight to prove his

s a v i n g f a c e 54

masculinity instead of taking out his anger and frustration on his mother. He said he also lost respect for his father in many ways because of his refusal to protect his mother, who was often poorly treated by his father’s family members.

However, I also found that in other cases, children were able to view their parents’ marriage in more positive ways, even when faced with the challenges of shifting gender roles. The main difference in these families was that both parents were willing and able to do the type of emotion work involved in accommodating to new spousal relations. In her study on transnationally split Filipino families, Rhacel Parrenas observes that even when separated geographically from their children, fathers who made an effort to incorporate nurturing acts and emotional affection into their long-distance relationships with children were better able to ameliorate some of the pain and tension of being separated.13 In other words, both fathers and mothers must be willing to blur the gendered boundaries of masculinity and femininity by sharing maternal responsibilities of care and emotional support. The same concept applies for those whose families are forced to rethink traditional notions of men as financial providers and women as family caregivers.

This transition is smoother when there is a network of men who also validate this flexible approach to manhood. Esther, a twenty-five-year-old Korean American, explained how her mother gave up her dream as a profes- sional opera singer after she got married but then used her business acumen to start up a small but profitable dry cleaning chain in Philadelphia. The resulting shift in breadwinning roles created tensions in the marriage, espe- cially because her father’s family was raised on the belief that “men should be the head of the family and they should be the main provider like my grand- father was.” However, she believed that her father’s sense of frustration and resentment lessened over time as he received support from his network of close male friends, who admired her mother’s achievements.

My mom has a very, very strong business sense but my dad doesn’t have that sort of savvy at all. And whenever my mom went to expand the busi- ness, my dad cannot take a chance and he doesn’t want to risk the money, so he’ll fight her tooth and nail in every single thing—location, machinery, hiring people—and just make it very difficult for her, because I think deep down inside, he knows that in that way, he’s inept. But lately that’s changed because his friends who are all kind of in the same business, their wives are totally pampered and don’t work and in some cases, if they do work, they create problems. They really admire my mom and so my dad is seeing that my mom is kind of special that way and unusual so that he should be thankful as opposed to making things more difficult for her.

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Esther may be projecting some of her personal admiration for her mother onto her parents’ relationship with one another. She herself has strong career aspirations to start her own business also in the garment industry, which developed from her mother’s success in the dry cleaning business. She regu- larly communicates and consults with her mother about issues such as what machine to use for a garment or how to improve her business. Although she is deeply affected by her earlier years as a latchkey child and her parents’ pref- erential treatment for her younger brother, Esther still empathizes with her mother’s struggles with her in-laws and conflicts over traditional gender roles and draws strength from her mother’s ability to overcome these obstacles. Her story reveals how the successful renegotiation of work and family roles among women and men can have a formative impact on the worldviews of their daughters and sons.

Participants also viewed their mothers as central in not only managing the emotions of individual family members but also brokering relations between father and child.14 Tom, the oldest son from a well-off Chinese immigrant family, explained why he still had respect for his father even though he was never home because of his long work hours. “I have friends whose fathers work all the time and they seem to hate their dad. I think part of it is how the mother sets the tone. My mom was always like you can’t make noise, your dad’s sleeping. He works really hard. He does all this for you and your sister. That was the way it was always presented. We didn’t flush the toilets in the morning because we couldn’t afford to wake my dad up, right? Whereas some of my friends that hate their dads, I think the moms set a different tone. It’s like the mom resented how hard the father was working and how he was never home to be with the kids.” Tom recognized how his mother set the emotional tone for the family by managing how they viewed and ameliorated his father’s stressful work life. Of course, this type of approach comes at a considerable social cost to women, who are often forced to justify the physi- cal absence of their spouses and manage their own feelings of loneliness and stress, while juggling both household and work responsibilities. In Tom’s case, both his parents worked: his mother as a teacher and his father as a restaurant owner and real estate developer. It is also possible that his younger sister may view their parents’ marriage differently and have divergent ideas on what made it work. However, the fact that his mother helped to ameliorate relations with his father was clearly meaningful to Tom.

It is interesting how children—both daughters and sons—detect and interpret these subtle gender dynamics between their parents. Angela, the only child of a Chinese immigrant family, relayed to me her concern for her

s a v i n g f a c e 56

mother who she feared will be at a loss when her father passes away because she is completely dependent on her father, even though she handles most of the household chores and finances. However, she also considered her mother the emotional backbone of the relationship in the way she mediates and com- municates her father’s concerns across generational barriers. She said, “My dad is always more stable, but my dad also relies on her a lot for more than he shows. Like when he’ll tell me something, he’ll say well your mom’s really upset, cause you didn’t do this. And I know when he says it, it’s him thinking of it, but he just puts it on my mom cause she’s the emotional one.” To Angela, this type of emotional scapegoating enables her father to convey his personal feelings to her without the awkwardness that comes with emotional expression in this cultural context. Her account reminds us of the key role women play in managing and brokering the emotional dynamics of the family in a way that has a powerful impact on the lives of their children.

Of course, not all participants viewed their parents’ marriages as precari- ous, especially if resources and networks enabled their parents to maintain the same gender roles upon immigrating or, conversely, if they were better able to adapt to new circumstances. Espiritu argues that this transition is generally much easier to make for women in middle-class or upper-class white-collar professions, whose career ambitions and substantial paychecks give them leverage to negotiate relatively more equitable decision-making roles and male assistance with household responsibilities. In contrast, despite the fact that they tend to contribute relatively more to the family income, working-class women are less likely to challenge the patriarchal system because they are mutually dependent on the combined household income for economic survival and place stronger value on male protection and the well- being of the family as mothers and wives over their financial independence.15

Marital conflicts also tend to have less of an impact on younger siblings, who are not witness to the kinds of conflicts that older children are privy to because they were born after their parents had overcome some of the initial hardships of adapting.

Yet whether their parents’ marriage was harmonious or bitter, few partic- ipants characterized their parents as having the kind of romantic marriage that Americans idealized and they aspired for themselves. This was troubling for some because it went against the grain of everything they had learned as Americans about what a good marriage should entail—that is, one built on passion, romance, and visible verbal and physical affection. Yet at the same time, when I probed them further on whether or not their parents had a good marriage, most sons and daughters initially hesitated or wavered in their

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response, as in the following comments by Jinah, a Korean American from New Jersey whose father owns a lucrative dental laboratory business and whose mother who is a homemaker:

Ideal marriage to me would be one that’s based on absolute true love. And I don’t think my parents have that, which is fine. I mean they love and respect each other, but I wanna have that crazy mad passionate love on top of having the good values. And to be honest, I don’t think they married for love. It was just more that it was a convenience and also she liked him and I think he’s always known that he was lucky to have her kind of thing so that’s what makes him work really, really hard. Now that we’re all older, my mother’s still reflecting on her life and she says, your father is such a great man, a honest man, a respected man. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t do any womanizing, he doesn’t gamble. Everything he does is for the family, everything he does is for the right reason. Okay, he’s got a little bit of a bad temper, but when it comes down to it, everyone has a bad tem- per to some degree. Because he is thirteen years older than my mother, he’s doing some estate planning. He realizes that my mother’s going to outlive him at least by thirteen or more years so he’s getting things in order, like he’s buying some property. He says to my mother, I’ve amassed these prop- erties and this house and I’ve got this, do you think that will be enough for you? And my mother’s like [she had some tears in her eyes, the reason is that], he’s realizing I’ve made all this and I want you to live comfortably when I die.16

Although they did not necessarily proclaim love as being the only foundation for a good marriage, females made a stronger distinction between romantic love and friendship than did their male counterparts, perhaps because in American culture women are socialized to be more emotionally expressive and treat the Romeo and Juliet type of romance as central to a happy mar- riage. Men however were more open to the possibility that love can be based on a compatible and practical—as opposed to an emotional and romantic— partnership.

Instead of immediately rejecting their parents’ marriage as ill-suited, most participants tried to explain how their parents’ marriage merely represented a different way of conveying sentimental attachment. They recognized the sub- tle ways in which their parents expressed love for each other—one that pre- served the other person’s dignity but showed concern for their partner’s emotional state and well-being without the song and dance that comes with Western affection. Winnie, the one whose parents had gone through a brief period of domestic violence when she was younger, also recalled how her par- ents would fondly reminisce about how they first met and flirt with each

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other when they thought the children were not looking. When I asked her why her parents hid it from them, she replied simply, “My mom is very much about the face. She’s like there are our kids so they can’t see us doing that.”

John, a twenty-eight-year-old single Taiwanese American proprietary trader and youngest son in his family, also believed his parents had a “good marriage” but struggled to come up with examples that showed they loved one another.

Angie: Do you think that they loved each other then would you say?

John: I think they loved each other.

Angie: Like what made you think that?

John: [long pause] The little things, the way they cared for each other. It’s

hard to come up with an example of those little things, but you know

like my dad has trouble flying so my mom will always make him a

special drink when they travel. They might yell at each other, but he

always wants to be with her every year, and, it’s hard to interpret exactly,

but I feel like, that’s a sign of something serious. Even when you have

argumentative people, but you still want to spend all your time with

them. It’s quite nice. That seems like to me that’s love.

Saving face itself represents a meaningful act of trust and devotion that signi- fies one of the many ways parents show their feelings for one another. Participants would pick up on subtle but meaningful cues through behaviors and sacrifices, which to them captured their parents’ emotions. This is of course not something children learned over the course of a day but some- thing that second-generation Korean and Chinese Americans begin to recog- nize throughout the course of their lives.

Although they admitted this was certainly not the kind of marriage they wanted for themselves, the participants in the study felt they could learn from the ways their parents provided stability and support for their family by working through difficult times and making practical decisions about the family. When asked if there was anything about his parents’ marriage he would want in his own, Mike, the oldest son of Korean business owners, answered,

Perseverance is probably the strongest attribute of their marriage, or any marriage that lasts a long time, because those people have a good perspec- tive on a long-term goal. [My parents] had really nasty fights when I was a child. Not recently, but there have been times where I was scared as a teenager. They would fight over finances, over our upbringing, but I don’t think it’s important what they fought about, but the fact that they fought, they dealt with it and they moved on and they’re actually happy. They’re

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staying together because they enjoy each other’s company, they still love each other very much, and that’s the key. I wouldn’t encourage people to stay in bad situations because that does happen but it just worked out. They still laugh together, they laugh a lot. They’re good partners and there’s still give and take. It’s not everything my father’s way, it’s not everything my mother’s way, so flexibility to still grow with each other. If someone said to me, you can have the relationship your parents had, I might say I would take that, just because it lasted a long time. They have three kids who are fairly decent people.

At the time of the interview, Mike was still single, managing his father’s liquor store. Although he admitted that he did not follow through with all the responsibilities expected of him as the oldest son, he still expressed much regard for some of the traditional family values his parents have conveyed to him such as respecting his elders and providing direction for his two younger brothers and cousins; at the same time, he believed his family’s comfortable class status also afforded him the privilege to decide for himself how much of his life to devote to the family.

As one can see, the presence or absence of visible affection and romance is not a sufficient measure by which participants gauge the extent of their parents’ love for one another. However, the one major reason why second- generation children may characterize their parents’ marriage as “bad” and look down on them is if a parent reneged on marital obligations or practical responsibilities as a husband or wife. This may occur if a parent verbally or physically abused the other or tricked the other parent out of money through a divorce, because such acts indicated outright betrayal of loyalty and moral values that to them represented love within the cultural context of their parents’ marriage.

Of course, the social contract of marriage as understood within this cul- tural framework often involves traditional gendered expectations and house- hold division of labor, where the mothers are expected to be responsible for household and caregiving matters and fathers act as primary breadwinners in the family. As mentioned, this did not often align with the realities of Asian immigrant parents’ lives. Yet surprisingly, only a few of the participants out- wardly expressed any major disappointment with their parents if they did not fulfill traditional gender roles and responsibilities expected of mothers and fathers. As one example, Lin, who is the middle child of a Taiwanese astro- naut family, informed me that her parents are married on paper but have lived almost their entire lives apart. Because her mother was busy working and taking care of three children on her own, Lynn got involved with a bad crowd and rebelled throughout her teenage years. After she graduated, her

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mother suggested that she go live with her father in Taiwan, who “took a lot of time out to sit and talk to me and try to figure out why I was being the way I was, whereas my mom, she didn’t have the time, so she was just like, don’t do this, don’t do that, without really having conversations.” However, look- ing back, she repeatedly told me that she understands that “as a single parent in that kind of environment, trying to raise three kids, putting one through college, was really difficult [for my mom].” This ability to adapt to new fam- ily arrangements does seem to conflict with what scholars such as Parrenas have found on Asian immigrant families where mothers are often blamed for neglecting their family for work as compared with fathers.17 Given that Parrenas interviewed mostly younger children in a different cultural context, the reason for this difference may be that Asian Americans are able to feel greater empathy toward and understanding of the realities of their parents’ lives as they get older. It is also possible that my participants did not want to come across as adopting a conservative “non-American” stance on gendered family roles.

Instead of preserving gender roles, participants felt it was more important that their parents be fully open and honest with one another and also with their children on all financial matters. For them, full financial disclosure not only signifies equality and trust within the relationship, but also gives every family member the means to empathize with the other and act accordingly. Several interviewees expressed concern for their mothers if their fathers did little to help them learn how to manage money since they felt this would make their mothers helpless and dependent should their fathers pass away first. Tom explained how the one major conflict he witnessed while growing up was in regard to money—not necessarily about how it was spent but the fact that his father never shared this information with his mother.

There were stresses growing up, especially related to money when money was tight and my dad never really consulted with my mom on major busi- ness decisions. I’m gonna open this restaurant, I’m gonna buy this piece of real estate. I think that hurt my mom, right? It put a lot of stress on the relationship where it’s like I’ve gotta live with you through all the finan- cial stresses and you don’t include me in the conversation. I did have this conversation with my mom, she pointed out she was a teacher and she ran a daycare center with a staff and she gave up a career to take care of us. She helped my dad raise the money to open the restaurants. And I think part of me took it as if she was trying to justify her importance or her value and I was like I know what you sacrificed to raise me and my sister, you don’t really need to tell me. But I think it was important to her that I knew.

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This last observation about his mother wanting to prove her worth is a par- ticularly poignant one. It reveals how women’s work—the act of accompany- ing her husband to America, the work of raising children, and the sacrifice of helping run the family business without recognition—is often overlooked and devalued even in the typical immigrant tales of sacrifice and the American Dream. Tom told me that he learned from his father’s mistake and makes every effort to treat his wife and three children with respect and dig- nity, especially when it comes to financial matters. Although he said his wife, who quit her job after the second child, usually deferred to his advice, he is always careful to consult with her on investment matters and has a financial advisor who knows all the details of their holdings so that if anything were to happen to him, she knows whom to go to for assistance.

Suzanne, one of the few whose parents’ marriage was arranged, said that her parents relate to each other in a very traditional Korean way, even addressing each other by formal Korean titles like dangshin and yeobo. Nevertheless, she felt that the way her parents shared financial responsibilities and operated their green grocery businesses together day and night indicated to her the strengths of their marital partnership, as compared with her and her sisters’ more American values.

One thing I see from them is that it was really a partnership and there were no secrets. My sister’s in a relationship now. She’s thinking about these things like when you are married, do you have one bank account, or do you have several bank accounts. You have to think about these things when you are working separate jobs, and you separate incomes, and you have separate interests. For my parents, it was just like they make the money, they managed the money. My father says I need this much money to go buy supplies, my mom gives it to him, and there were nooo secrets. Nothing was separate; everything was together. And that’s something that I really admired about them. I don’t know if that’s feasible, if I married and there’s dual incomes and dual interests and dual retirements and all of that. And I think that they really labored together. Cause I have friends whose moms just ran the whole ship and the fathers wanna play golf or want to go drinking with their friends. My parents really stuck it out together.

Of course, the legal ambiguity that comes with merging spousal belongings can become problematic, especially if one partner, oftentimes the husband, asserts or abuses his control over the family’s holdings. This is probably also why it has become a necessity for modern-day dual-wage-earning couples who are more vulnerable to divorce to legally designate their property and belongings through separate accounts, wills, and other legal mechanisms.

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This is increasingly becoming the case not only in the United States but also in modernizing nations throughout Asia. Yet Suzanne appreciates the fact that her parents’ definition of love and marriage is flexible and adapts to the social and economic realities of their lives.

The Language of Parental Love

Emotional communication can also be complicated between the immigrant parent and American-born child. Regardless of race, ethnicity, or nationality, second-generation children often have difficulties relating to and communicat- ing with their immigrant parents as a result of language barriers, cultural differ- ences between their parents’ ancestral culture and their American upbringing, and conflicting pressures they face from their parents at home and their peers at school. Immigrant parents who share a common language with their children or have had greater premigration exposure to English proficiency and Western cul- ture may have an easier time bridging some of these generational differences over time. This is not to say that cultural differences and intergenerational con- flicts do not occur in many European immigrant families.18 However, the racial marginalization of those cultural differences can magnify the shame and distress that come with family conflict. The cultural clashes that often occur in Asian immigrant families—particularly those that focus around mother-daughter relationships—have been the subject of many popular novels, autobiographies, movies such as The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan) and The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri), and Asian American indie films such as Yellow.

In order to understand how Asian Americans communicate across this language and cultural barrier, we need to think beyond the Western frame of reference and take into account the different ways in which people commu- nicate and express emotion across cultures. What Americans may view as viciously cold and demanding about so-called Chinese parenting reflects not a cultural inability to feel or express emotions, but rather a cultural difference in the way it is communicated. In Western cultures like the United States, communication is understood to be a linear, logical, and verbal dialogue between equally situated individuals, where each party is expected to directly articulate his or her individual feelings and desires to the other. Emotions such as love are separated into clear-cut and binary categories of sameness and difference, all of which should be openly conveyed through words and then expressed through direct individual actions. A healthy relationship between a parent and a child thus involves each party verbally expressing his or her affection for the other and sharing individual grievances in the hopes of resolving any conflicts or differences.

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East Asian cultures however employ a more intuitive, relational, and con- textual approach to communication in which a person’s body language and actions as well as his or her history, background, and status provide impor- tant cues for understanding thoughts and feelings better than any words can articulate.19 In collectivist cultures like Korea and China, the needs of the group supersede individual goals, and the means of communicating vary depending on one’s status within the social order. One’s identity is rooted not in the individual and independent self, but rather in one’s position in rela- tionship to others. From a relational perspective, emotions, just like life itself, cannot be easily dichotomized into oppositional categories of feelings such as love and hate but may encompass a complex wellspring of contradictory feel- ings that do not conflict but rather complement one another. Problem solv- ing is not always the ideal objective, especially if hiding personal feelings and struggles achieves the larger goal of preserving one’s dignity and sparing loved ones unnecessary pain and burden.

In one study on Chinese Americans, Chan and Leong show how parents convey their love for their children not by verbally articulating their feelings but rather tending to their physical and material needs and working hard to improve their children’s future.20 When they do want to convey emotions, they use “gestures, facial expressions, intonations, and the volume of speech” or even meaningful silence, as opposed to direct verbal communication.21

A parent saying the words “I love you” to a child however is less meaningful, and if anything superficial and selfish, than sacrificing wordlessly for the good of the family. In day-to-day conversation, the things parents don’t say are just as important as those they do, especially if they believe that revealing their feelings through the imperfect medium of another language could only aggravate intergenerational tensions. The context of immigration also requires that parents focus even more intensely on the practical matters of survival over issues of social and emotional growth. If anything, they believe that the tactic of tough love best prepares their children for the harsh realities and struggles of day-to-day survival.

Of course, some are aware of these cultural differences in parenting and love, as in the case of Leah, a twenty-nine-year-old Taiwanese American who helped out at her father’s small mechanic shop, attended a Chinese church, and was raised in an Asian American–dominated neighborhood of Orange County, California. She commented, “My dad is not a very affectionate guy, very black-and-white, not very expressive. My mom was the cuddly one, very emotional and expressive verbally and physically and so naturally we were all closer to my mom. But my dad, the way he would express his love for us was

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through providing for us and also engaging us in activities. So it’s very differ- ent ways of expressing their love.”

Similarly, Cecilia, whose Taiwanese stepmother made efforts to teach her about cultural differences, observed that “Chinese people when you grow up, they don’t hug you, they don’t say I love you. My understanding is for the most part, Chinese people tend to show their feelings through action: making you a home-cooked meal or taking you somewhere where you wanna go, what do you need, what do you need to buy, rather than ‘oh I love you,’ ‘have a great day at school,’ hugs, kisses.” But even in Cecilia’s case, she needed the verbal and affec- tionate connection with her stepmother for her to understand all of this, which was not possible when she used to live with her abusive biological mother.

Others, like Stephanie, a Chinese American daughter of a working-class family, learned how to keep the peace in the family by internalizing these cul- tural norms, but also recognized how doing so created conflict in their own lives. Stephanie explained how her father had apparently struggled consider- ably as an undocumented immigrant laborer in Chinatown but did not learn about much of his past until she was older. She believed that it was because unlike other Chinese parents, her parents did not want their children to feel guilty and indebted because of their sacrifices. However, this notion that fam- ily members are to protect each other from emotional stress also created an immense burden on her because as the peacekeeper in the family, she could not come out to her parents and introduce them to her longtime female part- ner. She talks about one past incident with her mother where she learned the hard way that being honest and sharing her problems could lead to headaches for both sides.

I admit that I’m a peacekeeper. Let’s not do anything that rocks the boat too much with my family. I just want to shield them from any crap in my life. I want them to think that everything’s perfectly fine and I don’t want to worry them about anything. I don’t believe there’s such great value to the truth sometimes (ha). One example is I had an injury to my spine and I actually went to my mom. I told her, mom I want to go see your doctor. Once I did that, forget about it. The questions about my injury were non- stop. My mom would call me every day about it, bothered me every day about it, and my sister’s like you never should have told her. You stressed her out. I was like oh, so there’s a little bit of a guilt trip like keep my parents in this cushion. It’s almost like for no good, they can’t really be helpful anyway. If I was unemployed or something like that, of course my parents would open up their wallets and give me money. I wouldn’t really want them to do that, you know what I mean?

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Other participants who wanted to come out to their parents about their sexual orientation delayed telling them not only to protect their feelings and keep the family peace, but also to spare them the shame and isolation they would endure as part of a traditional ethnic community. This was the case for Alice, whose mother enjoys actively volunteering for the Chinatown commu- nity and, Alice fears, could face severe humiliation and ostracism if people were to find out about her gay daughter. No matter how close they were to their parents, the vast majority of Korean and Chinese Americans I inter- viewed reported that they never shared the intimate details of their private lives, especially their romantic relationships and struggles, for some of the same reasons. It was not just because they feared being disowned but also because of what it would do to their family and relationship with the ethnic community.

Unfortunately, those second-generation youth whose parents hide them from their hardships and who communicate less often with their parents have a hard time making sense of this way of communicating and have trouble negotiating two cultures. Although most second-generation Asian Americans sense that their parents’ true intentions are often lost in translation, under- standing and bridging this communication divide is an enormous task, especially when faced with the pressures of generational conflicts, cultural misinterpretation, and adaptation struggles. The process often entails a long, emotionally painful journey that can continue well into adulthood. Because of their renewed interest in cultivating relations with their family as adults, many Asian Americans in the study expressed deep remorse over making little effort to learn their parents’ language as children since it offered one of the few means to better understand their family history and get in touch with their ancestral roots.

The potential emotional ramifications of intergenerational miscommuni- cation and misunderstanding are best captured in the following anecdote by Angela. Angela, the only child born in San Francisco, said that she had heated arguments with her parents when she was younger because they pressured her heavily about her schoolwork and would not allow her to date lest it interfere with her academics. She related to me one incident as an adult in which she tried to reach out emotionally to her parents, which somehow ended in a dis- astrous argument: “At one point I made a big mistake and said you know I’m glad we’re getting closer now. I know we’re not like some other families—I don’t know what it was but it was honest. And that was like too much. How could you dare say that! Even though we all know it was the truth, that we’re not as close as a lot of families are, and I think they see it too but I can’t speak that out loud. There’s just a lot of walls up in my house.” For Angela, what was

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an honest and heartfelt attempt to emphasize how emotionally close they had become as a family was misinterpreted by her parents as an insinuation that they had not been close all along. Angela spoke from the cultural lens of an American who believed that by honestly expressing her feelings and highlight- ing how their relationship had improved, she was making an emotionally dif- ficult step to connect with her parents. Her parents however may have taken this act of airing out their family’s dirty laundry as unnecessarily conjuring up negative feelings, misinterpreting their past act of concern as emotional dis- tance, and overlooking the sacrifices they made to convey their love. Angela said she continues to value her independence from her parents since she left home for college, although she is continually pulled back home to help care for her parents in their old age. However, she believes they are less able to com- municate since she speaks only very basic Mandarin while her parents’ limited English proficiency has gotten steadily worse with retirement.

A Story without a Past

What is often lacking in mainstream portrayals of intergenerational conflicts is a more developed discussion on the way structural contexts that transcend individual family differences—namely, the surrounding ethnic community and the host society—can also affect the lines of intergenerational communi- cation. This is particularly true for racial minority groups whose understand- ing of their own family histories and parents’ ancestral cultures may be circumscribed by limited multicultural education, absence of coethnic role models, and distorted media representations. Zhou and Bankston show that in the absence of parental supervision, the presence of an ethnic community can play an instrumental role in shaping and monitoring the social behavior, internal norms, and academic achievements of the second generation.22 The same can be said about mediating family relationships. Those who live in close proximity to ethnic communities benefit from mentors, pastors, and older peers, who may help intervene and guide second-generation youth where American society cannot. However, this type of institutional support is not available to all Asian Americans who as a result of their socioeconomic diversity live in very diverse neighborhood settings: from low-income ethnic enclaves to inner-city black/Latino ghettoes to white or Asian suburbs.

One major gap among most of the Korean and Chinese Americans I interviewed was a clear understanding of their parents’ past and how this ultimately led to their migration to the United States. Unless they made deliberate and sustained efforts to learn about Asian history and culture through school or nonprofit work, second-generation Asian Americans had

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only a vague picture of their family histories and the homeland within which their parents’ lives took shape. What little they knew was pieced together through things they overheard at home or from friends and relatives who helped convey some parts of their family history. Responses like Kathy’s were common throughout most of the interviews I conducted with Korean and Chinese Americans: “I know bits and pieces, like the major events and the big stories, but I think you learn about your parents through people who knew them at that time. And we’re not very close to extended family and it’s very difficult for me to talk to my aunts and uncles partially because of the language barrier.”

One of the interviewees, Daniel, expressed visible frustration when my research assistant pushed him to give more details about his parents’ lives. Like Kathy, he claimed his parents were very vague about the details of their histories so that the little information he got was just fragments of stories from his relatives or secondhand accounts his mother passed on through his paternal kin. When asked why he thought they did not like to talk about their past, Daniel responded,

A lot of it is maybe sheltering us from something that may have been more tragic. Maybe it’s just the past and you know we’re here in America, you don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to worry about it, you just do your thing and don’t worry about my past. It might distract me from being a doctor or lawyer (ha) or being really successful and opening a business. In a lot of ways it’s like protecting us from something but I always have gotten that feeling that they don’t want us to think about it, because it’s going to distract us from our path here in America. Like we fought to get here to America, fought so you can have a good life, so you have your good life and that’s it. We went through all this stuff [but] you don’t need to worry about it.

What is striking in this passage is the interviewee’s sense that his parents are hiding this information not out of negligence or apathy but a deliberate attempt to help their children live a good life. It is meaningful that despite the difficul- ties and distance that it created, many of the people I interviewed felt this lack of communication signified to them their parents’ love for their children— something that may have been more difficult to understand as children.

Those who were more in touch with these cultural differences such as Mark understood that the type of relationship they had with their parents may not be physically and verbally intimate but nevertheless was strong enough to signify to them how close they are as a family. Unlike his younger sister, Mark witnessed all the trials and tribulations his parents endured when they first immigrated to the United States, which to him was a sign of their

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parental love. These are complex emotions that could not be captured through simple vocabulary.

Angie: How did you hear of these experiences through them? Do they

talk to you about them?

Mark: Well just in passing. They’ve never told me the story straight. I’ve

just kind of put things together. I don’t even know how my parents met

yet. [laughs] Even to this day, I don’t really talk to them much. Our

communication is very silent. I put bits and pieces together to figure out

my parents’ story of coming here. So I was very independent growing

up, because there’s some sort of distance between us. When I say dis-

tance, I don’t mean we weren’t close-knit—we were definitely very

close-knit—but distance in terms of communication. It’s like modem

versus DSL.

Mark struggled to put into words how he knew his family was close-knit but said he was certain it was because of a combination of “innate” feelings and “things my parents have done for me.” Noticeably, even those who appreci- ated the different cultural ways of expressing affection and attachment did not frequently use the word “love” to convey this relationship and instead preferred terms such as “care for,” “bond,” and “close.” They were keenly aware of the narrow way in which the term “love” was defined in the American context, which in many ways failed to capture the complex layers of emotion that their relationship with their parents entailed.

Not surprisingly, children were more likely to express a stronger emo- tional connection with their mothers because of their gendered role as the caregiver and nurturer of the family. Even if their mothers also worked long hours, they were still more likely than their fathers to spend more time with the children, cook and clean for them, drive them to school and to activities, show concern when they were sick, and just generally be more hands-on in their day-to-day lives. Given the emotionally tumultuous nature of the immi- grant family experience, the role of the mother as nurturer and caregiver should not be underplayed, and those second-generation Asian Americans who have at least a minimally stable relationship with their mothers were conscious of this.

Yet interestingly, even in cases where the father was rarely present, the interviewees’ narratives of their family past often highlighted the broader social significance of their father’s migration, which often revolved around their paid work. This greater attention to the father’s history was rooted in the belief that the migration itself was driven and made possible by their father’s money and career ambitions, whereas their mothers were simply viewed as

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accompanying him. The American Dream itself is rooted in the assumption that immigrants (usually the breadwinner, usually male) work hard through paid labor to help their children have a better life. Of course, it was not always the case that fathers were the sole leaders behind migration, especially in cases where families migrated in order to give their children a better education, which would involve both financial and emotional sacrifices on the part of both parents. Some daughters and sons did recognize when mothers gave up their own jobs or career goals to come to the United States. However, there was a greater tendency for people to view women’s role as homemaker as less interesting than men’s work as wage earners unless it involved conflict with other family members. Sometimes, mothers were also complicit in down- playing their personal histories in this manner. I myself recall one time trying to interview my mother about her migration history out of personal interest, to which she responded that her life was not interesting and that I should just go talk to my father. As soon as the tape recorder started rolling, my father of course started lecturing me on what I needed to do to succeed in life. I gave up on that project very quickly.

Despite the general absence of fathers from the day-to-day lives of many second-generation Asian Americans, their presence as the abstract paternal figure was still a key aspect of their parents’ immigration stories, especially for sons who sorely lacked a male role model both within and outside their fam- ilies. Young is a twenty-nine-year-old Korean American investment manager who worked at a hedge firm in New York and had just moved to Chicago at the time of the interview. His father was an engineer and his mother a home- maker. Young informed me that his mother was much more involved in his life than his father, who when not working did not talk much. Yet surpris- ingly, Young still had more to say about his father’s family history and its impact on his worldview and values. When I asked him to tell me about his father, he narrated to me the following historical account:

Young: My grandfather was the police chief in Seoul during the Korean

War and he died when my father was eight years old. And so it was my

father and his three older sisters, a younger brother and my grand-

mother. So really from a very early age, my father had to start earning

money whichever way he can. He started doing that by tutoring and

living a very impoverished lifestyle growing up in the 1950s. Korea as a

country itself was pretty devastated after going through a civil war. So

what he was able to do in terms of just earning money, tutoring, basi-

cally getting full scholarship to go to school, graduating at the top of his

class, I think he very much believed in this notion that your conviction

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and your sheer determination can pretty much allow you to do anything

that you want. So I sort of inherited that philosophy.

Angie: And how did you find out all about this, about your dad, did he

tell you himself?

Young: Nooo, I kind of just learned it empirically from him. He never

really sat down and lectured me on any particular topic. So it was always

through this quiet observation that I came to realize later on in my life.

He would tell me those things, but I don’t think he would tell me those

things in a lecturing form. He just sort of explained the facts and me

kind of observing and then, absorbing certain qualities and certain

traits.

Although he majored in comparative literature, Young decided that the best career path for him lie not in academia but in more moneymaking fields such as management consulting and finance. However, he told me that money was only part of the lure; he also loved the independence and the opportunity to travel around the world—desires that he partly attributes to his father.

Oftentimes, the lines of communication varied for different siblings depending on their role within the family. Because the oldest child was expected to be the authoritarian figure of the family and carrier of the family name, it was not uncommon for parents to divulge more of their family his- tory to them while hiding the details from their younger siblings. This was not the case for every family and sometimes depended on the gender and age of the oldest sibling. But generally, oldest sons who immigrated at a later age were more likely to know the intimate details of their family history through verbal communication with their parents and direct observations as arbiter of their family problems. Winnie, the youngest daughter of four, explained to me how during her childhood, her parents and even their extended kin went out of their way to hide some of the tensions and conflicts they had with their rela- tives in China from her and her brother but revealed more to her oldest sister when the other siblings were not around. Only when she got older and they felt she was old enough to hear these stories did she learn with surprise about their “crappy” family history and feuds that emerged among her relatives.

To be honest, I was pretty resentful when I first found out about it cause I’m like, how come you’re not telling me anything? But then I started to realize, cause I was young and they don’t want me to worry. They don’t want me to deal with any of the hardships that they dealt with, which is why they wanted me to do certain things or not do certain things. And it’s too late for me to take those kind of things back, but I can try now to show them that I understand. It was just hearing about all those things and

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hearing about the hardships they went through in their own lives, especially my mother. She was ten, eleven when her mom died and she never even saw her father so she had to live with relatives. So I’m so lucky cause I had my family from the start. My father had to come here first to get a job and make money and send here for us [so] we never got separated. And then I guess I read more Asian American literature and it kinda made me see like, wow I’m really lucky that nothing happened to my parents during the Cultural Revolution.

In order to fill the gaps, Winnie, like many others, turned to reading about Asian and Asian American history and literature, which she said helped her to appreciate the historical context of her parents’ struggles and how they affected their behavior and thinking today. Indeed, interviewees would often refer to books they had read, such as Yellow (Frank Wu), The Asian Mystique (Sheridan Prasso), The Accidental Asian (Eric Liu), and The Geography of Thought (Richard Nisbett) and usually had a strong opinion about them based on their personal experiences. In some cases, this is what drove them to participate in this research; most of them expressed interest in reading my findings as soon as they got published.

Although most other interviewees had little sense of their parents’ home- land and migration histories, some Asian Americans were able to piece together fragments of their parents’ past with the help of siblings and extended kin. The specific ways in which family history was conveyed and reinforced for Asian Americans through these networks—namely through extended kin—shaped the lens through which knowledge of their family past was produced and understood. Even for those who did not have strong ties with relatives, I would argue that birth order was the one common emotional ground and meaningful language through which second-generation Korean and Chinese Americans related to their parents, because it was often within that context that their own relationships, responsibilities, and expectations were defined for better or for worse.

For example, participants who were the oldest son of a father who was the oldest son in the family were keenly aware of how the expectations and privi- leges that were conferred onto them had to do with not only their own birth order but also the birth order of their father. The same held true for the old- est daughters in the oldest son’s bloodline, such as Katherine, who told me that she received special treatment and attention from her extended kin because she was the first son’s oldest child. Sometimes, a parent’s lower status within the extended family hierarchy could negatively affect that parent’s sons as well. Peter, a twenty-six-year-old Chinese American who has one older sister, related to me how he enjoyed the company of his father’s side of

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the family but did not have a great relationship with his mother’s side because his relationship to them was based on matrilineal descent. The mere imag- ined positioning of their parents within the immigrant narrative according to gender and birth order helped second-generation Asian Americans to make sense of their family histories and experiences today. It also shaped how their parents treated them knowing what position their children occupied within the larger family tree.

It should be noted that I did not find a similar focus on gender and birth order as a basis for cross-generation empathy or understanding among the second-generation Jews I interviewed. Instead, most Jewish Americans emphasized religious diversity within the Jewish community and important historical events such as the Holocaust or religious persecution in Russia in order to contextualize their parents’ migration history, to understand the reasons why their parents thought the way they did about their culture, and to explain their own perspectives on the larger Jewish community. Most Korean and Chinese Americans on the other hand referred only vaguely to events like the Cultural Revolution in China or the Korean War but were quite effusive about how the family roles their parents assumed as the oldest son or youngest daughter, how their parents related to their own parents and siblings, and how their grandparents treated their parents framed their migration history and impacted their own experiences within the family. Instead of focusing on the cultural or historical dimensions of migration like the Jewish participants, second-generation Korean and Chinese Americans were better able to articulate, explain, and empathize with their parents through the vocabulary of birth order and family roles.

Second-generation Korean and Chinese Americans were also conscious of how family history and conflicts that did not directly involve them could nevertheless dramatically impact their lives and their relationship with their parents and other family members. This was the case for Kimberly, whose mother was arranged to marry her father when she was at the tender age of seventeen and became a victim to patriarchal control and physical abuse by her father and his natal family. In the following passage, Kimberly, who is very close to her mother, tried to makes sense of the way her mother physically punished Kimberly as a result of her own experience within her husband’s family hierarchy. “My father’s mother has six kids, so she kinda picks favorites, and my aunt would tell my mother that my grandmother wasn’t treating me very well, because I’m a curious kid, so I jump around, I do this and that. I know my dad’s mother used to say things to my mother about my behavior and because of that, my mom felt that she needs to spank me, just to show them that oh, I’m teaching my daughter. I don’t think I was

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ever a very quiet kid to start with but because of the pressure she got from her mother-in-law, she had to discipline me more. Where like my sister got a little bit luckier, because my grandparents are a little older so my sister didn’t really get any of that.” These emotional narratives represent an effort by second- generation Korean and Chinese Americans to come to terms with their parents’ behaviors toward them and in some cases relate to their struggles by situating themselves in the patrilineal family hierarchy. As a result, the stories are imbued with empathy over how family roles and relationships could complicate their parents’ lives.

In some cases, family conflicts could create contradictions and tensions for second-generation Asian Americans who relied on their extended kin for support they could not get from their parents but were also subject to their misdirected resentment and frustrations. Cora, a thirty-one-year-old Chinese American marketing manager, is an example of one participant who was trapped between her affection for her aunts and uncles who took care of her in her parents’ absence and their resentment toward her parents for choosing to live independently from the rest of the extended household. She explained how this led to small acts of retribution directed at her and her sister, such as having them pick flint off the carpet in exchange for nickels. Although she found this cruel to do to children upon retrospect, she still felt a bond with them because they provided the kind of guidance, care, and nurturing her parents did not have time to give her and her sibling.

The one major exception where participants had more detailed knowledge of their family histories came from Korean and Chinese Americans who had been actively involved with ethnic organizations or took ethnic studies and Asian history courses on their own initiative. In the absence of a comprehen- sive multicultural education, ethnic institutions such as community-based organizations, student associations, and ethnic churches played a key role in helping second-generation Korean and Chinese Americans to make sense of their family’s past and understand it within the broader context of historical and social forces. As a financial consultant/aspiring filmmaker, Elliott spoke to the importance of the work he did for the Museum of Chinese in America and the Organization of Chinese Americans, because “I have a mental image of my family’s history from my parents and my relatives but I would like to understand how that history relates on a larger context. So doing work for [these organizations], I get to hear other people’s stories and it helps fill in the gaps and gives more context to my personal stories.”

Logan, who has a strong background in Asian American education and political activism, explained how this absence of a deep historical perspective, cultural awareness, and community engagement had broader implications on

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the political empowerment of the Asian American community. From his per- spective, it made sense why immigrant parents may be more preoccupied with everyday struggles but found it troubling how these values were decon- textualized and passed down to second-generation Asian Americans, who could have been in a better position to fight for their rights and give back to the community.

What’s really bad is that Asian people do not have the language but it’s not about English comprehension. Within the community, I feel like there’s a big lack of dialogue. People talk about it in their daily lives, but they don’t bring it up to a level where it becomes activism and that’s what I try to do in my life is to advance. I feel like it’s about our time because our parents, they have to worry about making money so they don’t die, because they’re immigrants. The thing is that just because you have money, it doesn’t mean the struggle’s over. Because Asian culture is so family-oriented and elder respectful-oriented, a lot of kids stop thinking, stop evolving, stop taking it to the next level. You’re constantly in a situation where people are trying to take things away from you. If you don’t keep moving forward, you’re totally being led closer and closer to the guillotine, and closer and closer to irrelevance.

In my past research on nonprofit second-generation organizations in Los Angeles, I heard similar feelings of concern among organizational leaders and activists about the reluctance of the second generation to give back to their community because of their parents, who instilled in them this drive to achieve personal financial success over everything else.

Emotional Kinscripting

In the case of most Korean and Chinese Americans, very few reported having role models and mentors while growing up, whether in their schools, the local community, or the mainstream media. In order to adjust to this support gap, second-generation Asian Americans devised new strategies to deal with the emotional turmoil and bicultural world they struggled with in their day-to- day lives. One involved compartmentalizing their emotional and psychologi- cal needs by turning to different support networks other than their parents for different problems. Sunny, a Taiwanese American who took care of her younger sister in her parents’ absence, explained it in this way:

Sunny: It’s not like I don’t think [my parents] don’t love me. We just

communicate in a very particular way. So I feel like my life is definitely

compartmentalized where you have people for this, you have people for

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that, you have people for other things. And our parents are there for a

particular reason and that’s how we function.

Angie: How do they show that they love you?

Sunny: They tell me. They do tell me that they love me, yeah. I can tell

in the way they act about work, about my sister and about my sister’s

relationship with me.

It is not clear in this case whether or not she is referring to verbal communi- cation, but it is apparent that she also understands the other ways her parents express their love for her beyond verbal expression. At the same time, she experiences different struggles in her life that she understands cannot be reconciled by relying solely on her parents.

It is within this context that intergenerational interpreters and mediators made up of older siblings, cousins, or other extended kin whenever they are available can play a vital role in helping second-generation Asian Americans to communicate across language and cultural barriers, gain perspective on their family histories, and navigate the bumpy emotional terrain of parent-child relationships. Studies have noted how in an environment of limited resources, immigrant households will adopt nontraditional familial arrangements that enable them to maximize and diversify their available assets and cope with the pressures of everyday survival.23 For example, poor black families in the ghetto will delegate different parenting responsibilities out to a loose and flexible multigenerational cooperative of extended kin and friends for different caregiving needs—a process Stack and Burton call “kinscripting.”24 They state, “As households shift, rights and responsibili- ties with regard to children are shared. Those women and men who tem- porarily assume the kinship obligation to care for a child, fostering the child indefinitely, acquire the major cluster of rights and duties ideally associated with ‘parenthood.’”25

As with families that are accommodating to limited material resources, many second-generation Asian Americans face an emotionally stunted envi- ronment that prevents them from sharing their joys and grief with family members, from receiving verbally expressive love, concern, and guidance, and from navigating the bicultural worlds they face at home and in school. When available, children establish informal support channels with close rela- tives and friends to meet not only their economic and caregiving needs but also their emotional needs. Moreover, I find that the process of managing and channeling emotions can vary depending on the class resources, social networks, and gendered dynamics within the family. For example, children whose mothers are better able to stretch their work and family caregiving

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responsibilities are more likely to keep their emotional support systems closer to their immediate family members. The same goes for families that can afford to keep at least one parent or at least a member of the extended family at home. Conversely, children whose parents are overcommitted in terms of time and availability and have little access to extended kin or ethnic networks are more likely to cast their emotional nets more widely to peers and signifi- cant others.

Older siblings and cousins—especially those who are familiar with the language and culture and have closer relations with their parents and extended kin—were the most frequent source of emotional support and intergenerational mediation. Here is an excerpt from Kimberly, who played this role for her younger sister and her mother who was struggling to raise her two daughters on her own:

My mom and my sister can’t communicate, cause my sister’s Chinese isn’t really that great. So when I moved up here, they were forced to talk. I think that helped them with their gap. My mom would be like, your sister did this. Talk to your sister. And then I’ll talk to my sister on the phone. So it’s kinda like okay so whose kid is she? Is she yours or is she mine? That’s just silly. But I think my mom just couldn’t tell my sister and my sister wasn’t really listening. My sister’s one of those persons who’s like okay whatever you say is fine, but is she really gonna do it? So I would just yell at her but I’m her sister at the end of the day. It’s easier for her to talk to me but it’s different.

By virtue of her ability to communicate with her sister, Kimberly became the parent figure in her sister’s life yet she understood the limitations of her authority at the same time. This shows us how immigrant parents can rely on other family members for parenting help, but at the end of the day, this does not always compensate for a lack of parental communication and supervi- sion. This is also true for children who lose a major source of support during the emotionally tumultuous years of high school or college as a result of major changes in their siblings’ lives.

Although the majority of those interviewed were raised within the structure of a nuclear family, it was not uncommon to find families who turned to their extended kin to help take care of the children while their par- ents worked long hours. Grandparents especially helped to create a stable emotional environment for children otherwise bereft of social support and preserve the continuity of the family line by conveying cultural values through their storytelling. Kathy, who lived with her maternal grandmother throughout most of her childhood, remembered her fondly, especially since

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her grandmother nurtured and supported her and her siblings while her parents were busy arguing with one other.

She was such an important figure in our lives. She taught us so many things and took care of us, and actually if we got sick, she’d be the first person we’d run to. We wouldn’t go to either one of our parents. We’d be like grandma I’m sick. She was our primary caregiver actually. I think what it did was it allowed my parents to be selfish; they were caught up in their own drama. Because my grandmother was there, we weren’t really drawn into it that much. We were just like kids and then if anything happened, we didn’t have to think about whether or not mom or dad were approachable. We just went to grandma anyway, so for so many reasons, it was a real blessing having her there.

Kathy’s grandmother passed away when she was nineteen, at a time when she had a lot going on in her life and needed someone to turn to. It would have helped her considerably if another relative had been around to help through this phase.

For this reason, emotional kinscripters can have a more profound and long-term impact on the social and psychological development of children when reinforced by a more expansive network of extended kin where they can channel their emotional needs. Sunny had a particularly difficult and emo- tionally volatile family life as a result of a mother who struggled with a severe gambling problem throughout her high school and college years and refused to let her reach out to her biological father whom her mother described as abusive. She had a stepfather whom she intimately referred to as her “father” but who ended up remarrying after the divorce. In the face of such adversity, however, Sunny was one of the more fortunate people I interviewed in terms of having an extensive kinship network to fall back on for different emotional needs. She told me how she turned to her maternal aunts whenever she wanted to talk about boys, marriage, and having children and to her academic uncle when she needed help with school. As the third oldest child in the family, she recognized her stature as a role model for her younger cousins and doled out advice to them whenever needed.

Above all, Sunny saw her maternal grandfather as being the emotional glue that really held them all together. As a child, she lived with her grandparents in Canada for a couple of years while her mother recovered from the first divorce. She continued to maintain a strong relationship with them by calling them every month and visiting them about four times a year in Canada. She related to me how her grandfather in particular acted as her strongest advo- cate in all matters related to her educational and career goals by providing

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advice, attending all of her graduations, and buying her a computer. Beyond reinforcing to her the importance of her extended family, her grandfather offered her the gift of a historical legacy:

I do have a role model. It’s my grandfather. He told me about his life and all the things he’s done. He’s a very smart man. He’s very, very ambitious. I really admire everything he’s done with his life. He talks to me about family, he talks to me about the things I need to worry about, things to look forward to. Recently he showed me our family book and it goes back like twenty-four generations, because my grandfather was the oldest of his own siblings. So I’m looking at the book, and he’s showing where his generation is—all of his brothers and sisters and then the next generation, all of my grandfather’s children. And only the sons of his son are listed in line and I’m not there, my sister’s not there. I got very upset about that and my grandfather had to make me feel better, saying oh it’s not that big a deal, we’ll make our own book. It’s very sweet, you know. But it was his way of trying to get me to understand, we’ve got this background, we’ve got this history and it’s very important that we make sure that it goes on.

This is of course not to argue that extended kin and even grandparents could not also be the source of extreme conflict and tension, as I will discuss. But extended kin have the potential to offer one of the few stable ways of crossing cultural barriers, learning about family history, and carrying on the family legacy when their parents are busy working. Those who did not have the benefit of older siblings or loving grandparents and relatives who lived nearby also turned to friends and significant others as an important source of emotional compan- ionship outside their family. However, because these nonkin relationships tended to be weaker and fluctuate over the life cycle, emotional dependency on nonfamily networks entailed greater risk and instability. In addition, these rela- tionships rarely helped to bridge the generation gap and had the potential to turn into something more problematic if their emotions were entrusted to the wrong person. For example, heavy emotional reliance on romantic partners could lead to psychological codependency or trauma if they fell apart. Some interviewees also found themselves vulnerable to the temptations of drugs, youth gangs, and abuse as a result of their psychological codependency on delinquent peers and romantic partners.

On rare occasions, some Asian Americans considered their former housekeepers/nannies as their main caregivers in their parents’ absence, but the degree of emotional attachment seemed to vary considerably. One inter- viewee whose mother had passed away and whose father had emotionally abandoned her with an abusive stepmother recalled trying to turn to one of

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the many housekeepers and nannies she was left with, but said that they were so financially (and legally) dependent on her parents that they did little to support her or intervene on her behalf. Others said they had fond relation- ships with their paid caregiver who raised them when they were younger but their employment with the family was often too temporary to lead to a lasting relationship. This is not to say that these support systems were not invaluable for second-generation Asian Americans, especially in the complete absence of family support, but it would be problematic to assume that domestic workers, friends, and romantic partners could provide adequate parental support.

At the same time, if ethnic communities or mainstream institutions pro- vide a stable safety net, for example in the form of positive mentors and role models, then the risks of reaching out can be considerably minimized. For those few who were fortunate enough to be connected with their local ethnic communities as youth, the one area in which nonprofit organizations filled a glaring social and emotional need was in providing role models and mentors for young Asian Americans. Suzanne was one of the lucky few to find a Korean American female mentor through an after-school program at the Flushing YWCA in Queens. Her story shows the powerful impact that such figures can have, especially for second-generation Asian Americans who lack support and guidance at home.

Suzanne: The youth counselor who I’m still very good friends with, she

invested a lot in me too. [She starts crying a little so I turn off the

recorder.] It’s because of her that I really got where I am [sobbing near

the end].

Angie: You okay?

Suzanne: I’m fine. [She laughs]. I don’t know why I’m crying.

Angie: Well sometimes you feel emotional when you have a role model or

someone who inspires you when everything else is pretty rough. If I

were to visualize that relationship you had with her, what would she do

for you?

Suzanne: Back then I don’t think I really understood her. I just thought

she was a very demanding person. But later on, I moved on with my life,

I realized she was a feminist and she really wanted to give back to her

community and really invested in youth. I remember how I was visiting

colleges after I had heard from the colleges, I went to this one college in

Washington, D.C., and I went for this special minority student weekend

for prospectives. So students who were accepted who were minorities

were invited to come and there was like seven of us. The whole school

was white and I was so shocked. Coming from New York I had never

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left, I thought the whole country was this immigrant country. And I

called her, because I was so surprised and she really had this talk with

me, saying “You can’t go to these places in this country and expect it to

look like Flushing cause it’s not gonna look like that.” She wanted me to

get out of Flushing and get out of New York and do something else with

my life and I saw her as being very demanding where she would push me

to apply for this scholarship, apply to this school, go to this workshop

on Saturday. But at the same time, she was encouraging me because she

tried to get the Korean out of me. If I were saying something like “I’m

sorry but can you write me a recommendation?” “If you’re going to feel

sorry, then don’t ask me. You should be demanding these things.” With

a lot of Korean girls, there’s a lack of self-confidence, just because you’re

going through adolescence, Korean boys can be very nasty, especially in

their high school years and your family doesn’t really help. So she was a

very big advocate about being a strong Korean woman.

In a similar vein, Mia, a thirty-year-old Chinese American who lived in Chinatown until she was fourteen, related to me her feeling of social isolation all throughout high school until she came across the Committee of 100, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of distinguished Chinese American leaders providing a political perspective on issues in the United States and abroad. She derived great emotional satisfaction from the experience of men- toring and providing academic guidance to children who were going through the same identity crises she did when she was younger, and her activities later inspired her deeper involvement with other nonprofit organizations.

Conclusion

The narratives of second-generation Korean and Chinese American adults challenge the model minority view of Asian immigrant families as models of social order, emotional stability, and internal cohesiveness. In their memo- ries, pressures associated with immigration and adaptation, cultural and linguistic barriers to verbal communication, and shifting power dynamics between spouses and parent and child clearly impacted their childhood experiences, relationships, and support systems. The chapter has revealed how second-generation adults attempted to emotionally navigate and con- nect with their parents lives even without the benefit of historical knowledge or cultural understanding. Participants devised new ways of addressing their emotional and social needs through strategies such as channeling their emo- tions to other support networks and establishing new modes of empathy and

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communication with their parents based on family roles. The chapter has shown that those who are well connected with extended kin, older sibling mediators, and ethnic organizations within the community had an easier time with this transition than others. The outcome of this emotion work depends on the different resources and networks that second-generation Korean and Chinese Americans and their families can mobilize.

This is of course not to claim that the volatile environment did not have painful effects and emotional burdens that carried over into their personal decisions on culture, marriage, and family that I discuss throughout the book. However, the assumption that such disjunctures and constraints automati- cally lead to a social disengagement from their family and culture obfuscates the complex, contradictory, and fluid ways second-generation Asian Americans are able to work out their emotional and social needs especially as adults. By acknowledging the different ways in which emotion work plays out in American and East Asian cultures, the chapter has shown that it is possible to create and sustain emotional parent-child relationships that involve a communal, historical, and sacrificial way of showing love—one that is difficult to articulate in terms of the Western binary approach to love and emotion. The next chapter delves further into the way that differences in household structures and children’s roles within the family can refract the lens through which second-generation Asian Americans ultimately view their ethnic identities.

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