Between Two Generations: Language Maintenance and Acculturation Among Chinese Immigrant Families (The New Americans: Recent Immigration and American Society)

The New Americans Recent Immigration and American Society

Edited by Steven J. Gold and Rubén G. Rumbaut

A Series from LFB Scholarly

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Between Two Generations Language Maintenance and Acculturation among Chinese Immigrant Families

Donghui Zhang

LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC El Paso 2008

Copyright © 2008 by LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zhang, Donghui, 1976Between two generations : language maintenance and acculturation among Chinese immigrant families / Donghui Zhang. p. cm. -- (The new Americans : recent immigration and American society) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59332-271-7 (alk. paper) 1. Chinese Americans--Cultural assimilation. 2. Chinese Americans-Languages. 3. Americanization. I. Title. E184.C5Z43 2008 305.8951073--dc22 2008024655

ISBN 978-1-59332-271-7 Printed on acid-free 250-year-life paper. Manufactured in the United States of America.

In dedication to my dear Chinese friends in Philadelphia, whose love and support had made my journey in the US so enriching and enjoyable, and who had helped me so much in coming to self-realization by sharing their world with me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgements Preface

ix ix xi xii

Introduction

1

Immigration, Language and Acculturation Understanding Language Maintenance within the Context of Acculturation Organization of the Book

3 5

1. Language Maintenance, Language Shift and Acculturation

9

Heritage Language Maintenance and Language Shift Heritage Language Maintenance and Models of Acculturation Heritage Language Maintenance in the Three Domains of Acculturation Chinese as a Heritage Language in the US

2. The Socio-cultural Context: Chinese Immigrants in the US and in Philadelphia

1

9 12 20 28

31

Chinese Immigration in the US The Profile of the Chinese Population in the US The Chinese Communities in Philadelphia

31 36 42

3. Access, Research Relationships and Ethics

49

Access, Power Relations and Subjectivity Research Sites
Two Chinese Communities in Philadelphia Data Collection and Data Analysis Ethical Issues

4. Encountering Two Languages: Varied Bilingualism Parents’ Bilingual Proficiency vii

50 56 60 66

69 70

Table of Contents

viii

Children’s Language Struggles Language Shift and Preference from an Early Age Unbalanced Bilingualism and Biliteracy Summary

78 85 92 98

5. Language Attitudes and Heritage Language Maintenance

103

Parents’ Language Attitudes Parents’ Language Maintenance Efforts Children’s Attitudes towards Learning Chinese Summary

103 116 121 127

6. Language Maintenance and Cultural Participation Home Culture Participation and Transmission Generational Dissonance in Acculturation Children as Language and Cultural Brokers The Mediating Role of Heritage Language Summary

7. Language Maintenance: A Social Network Perspective Passive Ties: Extended Family Parents’ Networks: Co-Ethnic Communities and Cross-Ethnic Ties Children’s Networks: Co-Ethnic and Cross-Ethnic Peers Chinese Language Schools Summary

8. Policy and Beyond

129 130 143 156 164 168

171 172 183 191 198 209

213

The Study Policy Implications Directions for Future Research

213 220 228

Appendix 1: Interview Protocols 2: Consent Form

231 239

References Index

243 255

LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Berry’s Two-Culture Matrix Table 2: LaFromboise et al’s Typology
Socio-Political Structures and Acculturation Outcomes Table 3: Generational Language knowledge and Types of Acculturation Table 4: Language Attitudes Table 5: Asian American Population: 1980, 1990, and 2000 Table 6: Top Ten States with the Largest Chinese Population Table 7: Top Ten Cities with the largest Asian Population Table 8: The Asian and Chinese Population in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia Table 9: Summary of Child Participants Table 10: Summary of Parent Participants

14 14 19 21 37 40 41 42 61 62

LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Asian Groups by Ethnicity 2000 Figure 2: The Growth of the Chinese Population from 1980 to 2000

ix

37 38

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank, first of all, Dr. Diana T. Slaughter-Defoe at Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, who had been my strongest support since the first day I started my journey in the US. I am grateful for the many hours she spent discussing my work, listening to my ideas, reading the drafts and giving me invaluable suggestions. She also taught me so much beyond academics. She made me discover my own strengths, initiated me into the American culture and helped me become a mature scholar and person. I also owe thanks to her for financial support while I was doing this study. Without her continuous support, guidance and encouragement, I would not have completed this. Special thanks also go to Dr. Nancy H. Hornberger and Dr. Grace Kao at University of Pennsylvania who read my work and provided me with valuable feedbacks and comments. Dr. Hornberger
with her own work on linguistically different communities around the world, ignited in me an initial interest in bilingualism and language diversity. I learned immensely from Dr. Kao while working with her on the Asian elderly research project from 2002-2003. I am especially grateful for her thoughtful ideas on the incorporation of a sociological perspective to my research. I am indebted to a community of scholars who had inspired, supported and encouraged me in different ways while I was working on this study, to name only a few, Dr. Margaret Goertz, Dr. John Puckett, Dr. Ritty Lucose, Dr. Ruth Neild, Dr. Stanton Wortham. I sincerely thank them for their wisdom and kindness along my academic journey. I thank, as well, my series editors, Dr. Steven Gold and Dr. Ruben Rumbaut, and managing editor, Leo Balk, who have made the revision process an enjoyable experience. I also would like to thank my colleagues and friends in Philadelphia. Tanja Sargent, my classmate and special friend, encouraged me to pursue my research interest and provided me with valuable references and books. Her love of the Chinese culture motivated me to learn more about my own country and people. My roommate and friend Huafang Cui knew about all of the struggles I had in the process of writing. She was kind enough to listen to my frustrations and offer me her perspective as a Chinese international xi

xii

Acknowledgements

student in the US. Cheng Huang furthered my thoughts on how to lay the background for my study with his expertise in demography. I also want to thank my friends from the Chinese church in Philadelphia, from whom I found spiritual enlightenment, colorful social activities and fellowship that greatly enriched my life in the US. I am especially obliged to the 18 Chinese families in Philadelphia who participated in my study. I am thankful that they allowed me to talk to them and shared with me their lives, struggles and journeys in the US. I truly appreciate their trust and ever-lasting friendship. Last but not least, I want to thank my families in China. My most heartfelt appreciation goes to my parents who have always been there for me. My husband Qingdong Zhang supported me from the beginning to the end while I was doing the research in the US. He spent a lot of time talking to me over the phone from the other side of the ocean, in spite of the time difference. Without their love and support, I would never have completed this work.

PREFACE: A JOURNEY BACK AND FORTH Seven years ago, I started my cross-cultural journey in the US. For five years, I studied and lived in Philadelphia as a member of the Chinese community there. Even though I have relocated myself to my motherland ever since, that journey has influenced me so much that I can still feel it back home. I was born and raised in a small town in Northeastern China where I had never heard anybody speak English except from English teachers in the classroom. I was curious to learn a different language, so I chose to be an English major in college and graduate school, where I got further acquainted with the language and the culture. In spite of all the preparations, I was shocked to find, once I arrived in the US, how huge the tasks were to deal with the language and the culture in a new country. I was at a loss not knowing what to do with my previous self---who I was, what I spoke and how I acted. For a whileI was ashamed of my accent and tried my best to acquire the American way of speaking and acting. Gradually, I started to use English more and more, and came to accept and conform to the rules in the American society and culture. In the process of acculturation, however, I discovered that something inside me could not quite fit in, and something that I had never thought about occurred to me: I am a Chinese
I can speak Chinese! This cultural identity had never struck me in my homeland because I was a mainstreamer in China and I took my Chinese identity for granted. In the midst of all the confusions and joys at the discovery, I was proud of my ability to speak Chinese and act Chinese, although at this time my Chinese was deteriorating. I got involved in the Chinese community in Philadelphia and happily found people who shared the same dilemmas of language shift, language loss and identity confusion with me. My personal experiences with language and identity attracted me to explore how the Chinese newcomers dealt with heritage language maintenance and acculturation issues in the US. I was especially fascinated in how they attempted to preserve the heritage language in xiii

xiv

Preface

their American-raised children during the larger acculturation process. On the one hand, physical relocation has placed them in new surroundings that require them to quickly learn a new language, i.e., the need for language shift. On the other hand, however, they seek to maintain the language of their homeland because this language is one that indicates where they come from and gives them a sense of familiarity and self-worth, so they feel a desire for language maintenance in the course of acculturation. This book is a reflection of what I had learned during that journey in the US. Now having come back to my homeland, things I acquired from the American culture has served to distinguish me from my fellow countrymen and constantly put me to reverse cultural shocks. Even thus, I benefit so much from this cross-cultural journey that I now have a better understanding of who I have come to be.

INTRODUCTION

Humans are a migratory species. ----Massey et al. (1998: 1)

IMMIGRATION, LANGUAGE AND ACCULTURATION In the contemporary globalized world, millions of people change their country of residence and live the life of a stranger in a foreign land. Most notably, the United States is a linguistically and culturally diverse nation that accommodates immigrants, refugees, and temporary workers from different parts of the world who are constantly remaking the fabric of American society. In the process of such geographical relocations, immigrants are faced with two classical problems: first, whether they should maintain their language of origin, the so-called heritage language, or shift to the host language; second, whether they should keep their culture of origin or adopt the host culture. These two questions relate to the language maintenance and acculturation issues involved in the process of immigration. Language is the foremost issue that the linguistically different immigrants have to confront with in coming to terms with their new surroundings (Portes & Rumbaut 2001). Research has documented that language competence and preference constitute the most important element of a minority individual’s acculturation in the host country (LaFromboise, Coleman & Gerton 1993; Phinney 1990; Portes & Rumbaut 2001). While the immigrants themselves face the language choice dilemma, a more critical issue lies with maintaining the heritage language in their second-generation children. Overall, past research has consistently shown that language shift is a much more common phenomenon among immigrant children than language maintenance (Fishman 1966; Portes & Rumbaut 2001). Maintenance of children’s heritage language in an English-dominant environment and development of their bilingual skills has become a more and more salient issue in immigrant families. How do the immigrant parents seek 1

2

Introduction

to transmit the language they brought to the next generation? How do their language maintenance attitudes, efforts and patterns influence their children’s language attitudes and behavior? In what ways do the children respond to such language socializations within the family, given the larger social environment in which the mainstream language is different from their parents’ language? How does heritage language maintenance relate to immigrant families’ acculturation in the new country? In this book, I chose to investigate the intersection of immigration, language and acculturation, based on my fieldwork with 18 Chinese immigrant families in Philadelphia. I was interested to find out how heritage language maintenance is played out between first-generation parents and second-generation children within the larger context of acculturation. First-generation parents in this study refer to adult immigrants who are foreign born and arrive in the new country after they have reached adulthood, while second-generation children refer to their American-born or American-raised children. I chose heritage language maintenance between the two generations in immigrant families as the focus of the study for two reasons. First, having lived in the immigrant community for 5 years, I observed strong generational discrepancy in terms of language and culture between the Chinese parents and children. The first-generation parents remain, in one form or another, tied to the land of their birth and attached to the Confucian culture, whereas the second-generation children are born or raised Americans and have no connection to the distant land except through their parents. Generational conflicts are often exhibited in the form of cultural differences instead of mere age gap, which was especially appealing to me. Secondly, heritage language maintenance is the focal point where generational struggles manifest most strikingly. While the parent generation cherishes the language they brought and endeavors to transmit it to the next generation, the children often resist their efforts after schooling starts. This suggests to educators that there are issues beyond language itself involved in heritage language maintenance. Using heritage language maintenance as a lens, I hoped to capture the complex dynamics in the acculturation process of the immigrant families. In this study, two subgroups of Chinese families are distinguished: Mandarin-speaking families and Fujianese (also spelled as Fukienese) speaking families. These two subgroups are different in terms of immigration background, education and socioeconomic status. By

Introduction

3

including the two types of Chinese families in the study, I sought to emphasize within-group diversity and portray a holistic picture with regards to heritage language maintenance in Chinese immigrant families. Having had direct experiences of living in the Chinese immigrant community, I attempted to provide an insider’s view on their struggles in terms of language and acculturation. However, my interpretation of the lives, attitudes and behaviors of the Chinese parents and children had to be biased by my own background and perspective as an international student from China. Coming to the US at the age of 25, I could identify more with the first-generation parents and less with the second-generation children. Therefore, I saw the Chinese language as an invaluable resource and its maintenance as important to the cohesion of immigrant families as well as to their consonant acculturation in the host country. However, the opportunity to study in an American higher education institution had also enabled me to understand the pressures of assimilation and language hegemony that the second-generation children commonly experience in their schooling. The presentation of data in the following chapters reveals such positionality and subjectivity of mine.

UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE IN THE CONTEXT OF ACCULTURATION Language maintenance is generally defined as “the continuing use of a language in the face of competition from a regionally and socially powerful or numerically stronger language” (Mesthrie 1999: 42). As such, it is usually presented as the reverse side of language shift, i.e., change from habitual use of one’s minority language to that of a more dominant language under pressures of assimilation from the dominant group (Haugen 1956; Weinreich 1968). My study with the Chinese immigrant families is based on a sociolinguistic understanding of language maintenance (Fishman 1966; Hornberger 1988). Language maintenance is neither an isolated process nor exists in absolute terms. Rather it influences and is influenced by the various factors that immigrant families encounter in their acculturation process in the host country. Acculturation is a gradual process that starts the moment an immigrant arrives in a new culture

4

Introduction

and new society. Scholars have used the term “acculturation” differently. While some researchers used acculturation synonymously with assimilation to mean the acquisition of a dominant culture (Gordon 1964; Alba & Nee 1997), other researchers have inclined to distinguish acculturation from assimilation and use it to indicate a process of culture change and adaptation that results when minority individuals of distinct cultural traits come into contact with a different mainstream culture (Gibson 1996; Portes & Rumbaut 2001; Schnittker 2002; Ying 1995). Unlike assimilation, acculturation in the latter sense may be an additive process that need not result in rejection or replacement of old cultural traits or loss of identification with one’s former group. In this study, I adopted the latter usage of “acculturation” to examine how the Chinese parents and children from the Chinese (Confucian) culture of origin form their cultural identities after they come into contact with the American host culture. According to Ying
1995, there are three major domains of acculturation, namely, language competence, cultural participation and social network. These domains are vital to the understanding of language maintenance since language maintenance not only takes place within the larger context of acculturation, but also interact with each of the domains. It is difficult to assume either total loss of one’s heritage language or total retention of one’s heritage language. Instead, varying degrees of language maintenance and language shift exist in different domains (Zeng 1997). For example, many children undergoing language shift to English monolingualism may retain some elements of their heritage language in participating in certain ethnic activities, whereas bilingual children having successfully maintained their heritage language may still have difficulty identifying with their ethnic culture and handling relationships with co-ethnics. In the present study, the issue of heritage language maintenance was examined in relation to each of the three domains of acculturation. Although language maintenance and acculturation are closely related, previous research tended to separate them into two areas of study and there was a lack of communication between them. An important characteristic of this study is to bring the two concepts together to examine the Chinese immigrant families’ adaptation experiences in the US. Through situating heritage language maintenance in each of the three acculturation domains, I make it clear that language maintenance can and should be understood from the various perspectives of acculturation.

5

Introduction

RESEARCH QUESTIONS My main research question for this study was: what issues are involved in heritage language maintenance between two generations in the Chinese immigrant families? More specifically, I sought to answer the following questions: 1. What are the language experiences for Chinese parents and children in the US, respectively? How do they encounter and acquire English? To what degree is the Chinese language, both spoken and written, maintained by the second-generation Chinese children? 2. What are the language attitudes with the Chinese parents? How do they seek to transmit the heritage language to the next generation? How do the children respond to their parents’ language beliefs and language maintenance efforts? 3. What a role does the heritage language play in the acculturation process of the Chinese parents and children? What cultural practices do the Chinese immigrant families participate in? What conflicts emerge between generations in terms of cultural differences? 4. What is the social environment for the children to speak their heritage language in the US? What are the major social networks to the Chinese parents and children in the US? How do these social networks bear upon heritage language maintenance?

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK Chapter 1 lays out the theoretical conceptualizations in literature that address the complex relationships between language maintenance, language shift, and acculturation. Language maintenance and language shift take place in the process of immigrants’ acculturation, influenced by a variety of micro-level and macro-level factors. The contemporary language policy in the US has emphasized language shift and pressured the immigrant children to assimilate into the mainstream language and culture as soon as possible. LaFromboise et al. (1993), Berry (1980), and Portes & Rumbaut (2001) provide models of acculturation different from the “total assimilation” paradigm, upon which this study is built to understand Chinese heritage language maintenance in the US. Phinney

6

Introduction

(1990) and Ying (1995) assert that acculturation is not unidimensional, but exists in varying degrees in three important domains: the language domain, the cultural domain and the social domain, each of which, I argue, interacts with language maintenance. The relationships between language maintenance and language attitudes (the language domain), between language maintenance and cultural identity (the cultural domain), between language maintenance and social network (the social domain), are discussed respectively. In Chapter 2, I described the formation and emergence of the Chinese as an ethnic group in the US. Historically, the Chinese immigrated to the US in three major waves: the first accompanied the 1849-era California gold rush; the second included migration of the anti-communist elites after the 1949 Communist revolution; the third was comprised largely of Chinese students, immigrants, smugglers and their families who entered the US during the last two decades of the 20th century. I also delineated the profile and characteristics of the Chinese population in contemporary US society. Finally, I gave the reader an introduction of two major Chinese communities in Philadelphia, in which two different groups of Chinese families, the Mandarin-speaking academic families and the Fujianese-speaking labor families, will be found. Chapter 3 provides details on the research methodology this study used in collecting data. I relied on ethnographic interviews and participant observations in the fieldwork to learn about the Chinese immigrant families’ lives. The detailed information about the participants and research settings was provided. I also described how I accessed the Chinese families in Philadelphia, the relationships between the researcher and the researched, as well as important ethical issues that were involved. The subjectivity and positionality of the researcher are emphasized in the analysis and interpretation of the data. In Chapter 4, I turned to the discussion of the Chinese immigrant parents’ bilingual status and their second-generation children’s language experience with English acquisition and heritage language maintenance. The bilingual ability with first-generation parents varies greatly from individual to individual, ranging from minimum English ability to a very high level of English proficiency. However, even among the bilingual parents, Chinese is still the preferred, dominant communication language. On the other hand, the second-generation children prefer using English to Chinese and regard English as their dominant language from an early age, although many of them are possessed with a high level of heritage language proficiency. The

Introduction

7

widespread and swift language shift, I argue, has something to do with the pressures for language assimilation and the negative societal attitudes towards the children’s heritage language. In Chapter 5, I discussed the language attitudes and language maintenance efforts of the Chinese parents as well as their second-generation children’s responses to these beliefs and behaviors. I argued that the Chinese parents value their heritage language as a resource, as a symbol of their ethnic identity and as a means to promote family cohesion. However, many Chinese children do not share their parents’ language attitudes and resist to heritage language learning due to the lack of a supportive environment in the school settings. In Chapter 6, I looked at the intersection between language maintenance, cultural participation and acculturation. I described the cultural practices that the Chinese parents and children participated in and their distinctive cultural identities. I found generational conflicts emerging between the two generations due to cultural differences. Two aspects of cultural conflicts are identified and illustrated with concrete cases: authoritarian versus authoritative parenting, and individualist versus collectivist values. I argued that given the different paces of acculturation between the immigrant parents and children, the heritage language enables the children to become language and cultural brokers between their parents’ culture and the mainstream culture. In Chapter 7, I looked at Chinese language maintenance from a social network perspective. Three types of networks were examined: extended family ties, co-ethnic networks and cross-ethnic networks to see how they bear upon children’s heritage language learning. Chinese language schools are given special attention to as a collective community force and social capital that the Chinese families and communities can rely on to promote heritage language learning in their next generation. In Chapter 8, I brought my findings to the policy arena and hoped to provide thoughts for the educators and policymakers in the US to re-consider language policy, heritage language education and parental involvement with regards to students from immigrant families.

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CHAPTER ONE

LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE, LANGUAGE SHIFT AND ACCULTURATION

Immigrants exhibited a dual capacity for repeated self-transformation and reconnection with their unique heritages. -----Ueda (1997: 50)

HERITAGE LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AND LANGUAGE SHIFT Heritage language maintenance, also referred to as community/home language maintenance1, has recently received enthusiastic support from language educators and scholars in the US (Peyton, Ranard, & McGinnis 2001; Wiley 2005; Wiley & Valdes 2000). Broadly speaking, heritage language education refers to “developing heritage language learners’ biliteracy in both the dominant societal language and the heritage language, whether these be indigenous, immigrant, ethnic, second or foreign languages in any particular context” (Hornberger 2005). Based on the US Census 2000, more than 47 million people (18%) speak a language other than English at home, the majority of whom are foreign born immigrants and their descendents. Immigrants from linguistically different background have long faced the task of maintaining the language of origin in their children. Zanden (1990) argued that maintaining one’s heritage language in the host country decreases the feelings of powerlessness and anomie, which often accompany the entry of immigrants and their children into 1 In this book, the terms “heritage language”, “home language”, “first language”, and “language of origin” are used interchangeably.

9

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Between Two Generations

a different mainstream culture. The benefits of heritage language development are further reinforced by the increasing demand for foreign language skills in the labor market. Ruiz (1984)’s “language-as-resource” orientation emphasizes the importance and value of minority languages not only as a personal resource, but also as a societal and national resource. In spite of the acknowledged advantages of heritage language maintenance, past research has indicated that language shift is a much more common phenomenon than language maintenance (Hinton 1999; Portes & Rumbaut 2001). Language maintenance is generally described as a three-generation process (Fishman 1966; Veltman 1983). That is, the first generation learns as much English as it can but speaks the mother tongue at home; the second generation may speak the mother tongue at home but shifts to unaccented English at school and in the workplace; by the third generation, English becomes the home language, and effective knowledge of the heritage language disappears. Historically, language policy in the US has been constantly shifting between tolerance of bilingualism and anti-bilingualism, showing that the mainstream societal attitudes towards immigrant languages are a controversial and ambivalent one. Although Bilingual Education Act following Lau vs. Nichols was passed in 1968 and the civil rights movement era provided a general climate of tolerance towards immigrants’ languages and bilingual education, bilingualism versus English-Only debate never stops, with English-Only movement recently getting an upper hand. Advocates for bilingualism and language maintenance cite positive research results to support their position. But English-Only advocates vehemently attack use and maintenance of immigrants’ mother tongue for symbolic reasons: This (English-Only) is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot Boarding House (cited by Crawford 1992: 59). In addition, public sentiments against bilingualism have been growing in the last two decades. With the new wave of immigration after the 1960s, opponents of bilingualism emphasize the potential dangers of

Language Maintenance, Language Shift and Acculturation

11

linguistic fragmentation and increased ethnic conflicts due to the different languages that the new immigrants bring to the country (Portes & Hao 1998: 269). Many educators and policymakers view loss of the minority language as a positive step towards Americanization. As a result, the English-Only movement challenges the use of languages other than English in schools, as clearly demonstrated in current state and federal initiatives to make English the official language, such as the passage of Propositions 227 and 203 in California and Arizona, the passage of the Massachusetts version of the Unz initiative and the imposition of the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act titled No Child Left Behind, all of which support eliminating minority languages from public schools (Hornberger 2004). Under the contemporary escalating pressures to learn English and English only, a general educational goal of the language policy for second-generation immigrant children in the US has been to acculturate and assimilate them into the mainstream language as soon as possible (Crawford 1992; Portes & Rumbaut 2001). The consequence is that language shift to English among the second-generation children has been almost universal, while their first language development continues to be neglected (McKay & Wong 2000; Portes & Hao 1998). Portes & Hao’s (1998) analysis of longitudinal data on 5,266 second-generation immigrant children in the school systems of Miami-Fort Lauderdale and San Diego in 1992-93 shows that, although the vast majority of the new second generation had some knowledge of their home language, majorities of children from every nationality already preferred English at this early age and they all had a superior command of English relative to their parents’ language. In view of this, Portes and Hao (1998: 269), citing Lieberson, Dalto & Johnston (1975), poignantly pointed out: The United States is a veritable cemetery of foreign languages, in that knowledge of mother tongues of hundreds of immigrant groups has rarely lasted past the third generation. In no other country has the process of language assimilation and the shift to monolingualism been so swift. Ironically, in parallel to the anti-bilingualism language policy in the political arena, heritage language programs have been thriving in

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Between Two Generations

recent years. While in the past the maintenance of heritage languages has mainly been the task of individual families or immigrant communities, there has recently been a growing interest in heritage languages among language educators in the US. Along with the zeal in foreign language learning amidst the globalization trends, the value of immigrants’ heritage languages as national resources are increasingly acknowledged. To promote the preservation of heritage languages in the future generations, educators and policymakers need to understand the factors and conditions that lead to the loss or maintenance of heritage languages. My study attempted to provide such an understanding by looking at Chinese heritage language maintenance in the US.

HERITAGE LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AND MODELS OF ACCULTURATION A socio-cultural approach to language believes that language reflects and reinforces the values and beliefs of a given culture and at the same time is shaped by that culture. Culture is a complex entity, which holds a set of symbolic systems, including knowledge of norms, values, beliefs, language, art, and customs, as well as habits and skills learned by individuals as members of a given society (cited in Blount 1982: 56). After immigrants physically relocate themselves from one country to another, they are inevitably under the influence of two cultural systems whose values may be bipolar. Language maintenance influences and is influenced by the various factors that immigrant families encounter in their acculturation process in the host country. In order to understand the conditions of language maintenance, it is important to understand the cultural adaptation process of the immigrants in which language maintenance occurs. MODELS OF ACCULTURATION A common task lying in front of the immigrants and their children is to reconcile the cultural conflicts between their home culture and host culture. On the one hand, they sense the need to remain loyal and attached to the ethnic culture of their home country; on the other hand, there is the pressure from the mainstream society that requires them to assimilate and adopt the mainstream ways of living. In the course of cultural adjustment, it has traditionally been suggested that immigrants invariably discarded the values of their culture of origin and

Language Maintenance, Language Shift and Acculturation

13

accommodated to the mainstream culture and behaviors. Although this assimilation model may have been appropriate to describe the acculturation experiences of the early European immigrants, recent scholars have postulated that instead of a linear perspective where endorsement of one culture necessitates rejection of the other, a two-culture matrix or even a multidimensional typology of acculturation may be more valid to characterize the experiences of the new immigrants from linguistically and culturally different backgrounds, such as Asian cultures and Latino cultures (LaFromboise, Coleman, & Gerton 1993; Phinney 1990 & 1991; Porter & Washington 1993; Schnittker 2002). LaFromboise et al. (1993) presented five models of acculturation that might occur to immigrants who live within, between, and among cultures: assimilation, acculturation, alternation, multiculturality and fusion. Assimilation indicates that immigrants, their offspring, or their cultural group, will eventually become full members of the majority group and lose identification with their culture of origin as they gradually acquire a new identity in the host culture. The acculturation2 model also points to the acceptance of the majority culture by the minority person, but unlike assimilation, acculturation implies that the minority person, while becoming a competent participant in the majority culture, will always be identified as a member of the minority culture and suffer from a sense of inferiority of his/her own ethnicity. Alternation assumes that there isn’t a hierarchical relationship between two cultures to the effect that one culture is superior to the other. Instead, the culture of origin and the host culture are parallel to each other. Different cultures typically dominate in different life domains and an individual has to alternate his behavior according to the cultural demand of the situations. The fourth model, “multiculturality”, indicates that any person (not just the minority person) in a multicultural society is influenced by multiple cultures of different social groups, and that the various cultures are tied together within a multicultural framework and serve common functions instead of operating separately. Finally, the fusion model suggests that cultures 2

Here the term “acculturation” refers to a particular model of cultural orientation, different from the more general usage of the term throughout the book.

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Between Two Generations

sharing an economic, political, or geographic space will fuse together until the respective sharing of institutional structures will produce a new common culture. This new common culture is different from each single culture of former immigrant groups. The fusion model of acculturation represents the assumptions behind the “melting pot” theory. In a different review of the literature on acculturation, Berry and his colleagues (Berry 1980; Berry, Kim, & Boski 1988) also attacked the “total assimilation” theory, but they developed a different nomenclature for stating possible acculturation outcomes: assimilation, separation, integration/biculturality, and marginalization. These choices represent, respectively, a minority individual’s endorsement and identification with the dominant majority culture, with the ethnic minority culture, with both cultures and with neither culture (Ying 1995), as shown by the following two-culture matrix in Table 1. Table 1: Berry’s Two-Culture Matrix Identification with the Host Culture

Identification with the Home Culture

Yes

Yes Integration/bicutlurality

No Separation

No

Assimilation

Marginalization

Table 2: LaFromboise et al’s Typology
Socio-Political Structures and Acculturation Outcomes Minority Culture in Relation to the Mainstream Culture Out of Existence Inferior Parallel Mosaic Melting Pot

Acculturation Outcome

Assimilation Acculturation Alternation Multiculturality Fusion

Language Maintenance, Language Shift and Acculturation

15

Berry’s two-culture matrix differs from LaFromboise et al. (1993)’s typology in two important ways. First, LaFromboise et al.’s typology takes the socio-political structures in a given society as the determining power in a minority individual’s acculturation outcome. Table 2 shows how the different acculturation outcomes correspond to the socio-cultural patterns in a society. For example, hierarchical structures in which the minority culture is inferior to the mainstream culture lead to acculturation, parallel structures in which the minority culture is parallel to the mainstream culture result in alternation, while a mosaic, multicultural society produces multiculturality. Berry (1980)’s scheme, however, treats the acculturation patterns more as an individual’s choices in dealing with two cultural systems. An individual can choose to identity with both, either or neither of them. Secondly, LaFromboise et al. (1993)’s five models assume that a minority individual will necessarily identify with the mainstream culture one way or another, therefore they only distinguish different patterns of identification with the minority culture, whereas possibilities of separation and marginalization as acculturation outcomes are neglected. This study adopts Berry’s nomenclature in discussing Chinese immigrant families’ acculturation experiences in the US. Researchers and scholars on acculturation are also interested in finding out which acculturation pattern is most effective in facilitating immigrants’ cultural adjustment and identity formation. Early research findings suggested that affinity to one’s ethnic culture of origin placed the immigrants at greater risk for psychological impairment because it conflicted with the dominant American culture (Johnson 1976; Sung 1985). However, Phinney’s (1990) review found a positive relationship or an absence of any relationship between ethnic identity and psychological adjustment. Rogler, Cortes & Malgady (1991) reported mixed findings: on the one hand, separation or minimal assimilation were negatively related to positive mental health and well-being as limited English skills and other resources led to an inability to function effectively in the new environment; on the other hand, high assimilation also predicted poor adjustment as it implicated alienation from the home culture, loss of ethnic support, and potential internationalization of the majority society’s prejudice and deprecation. To solve the apparent paradox, Oetting & Beauvais (1990) identified an orthogonal model of cultural identification that includes four categories: a) high cultural identification with both; b) high identification with one

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Between Two Generations

culture and medium identification with another; c) low identification with either culture; and d) monocultural identification. Based on this model, a series of studies with American Indian youth were done to demonstrate that identification with either the host culture or the culture of origin may serve as an individual’s source of personal and social strength, but medium or low cultural orientation is undesirable and harmful to one’s general well-being and positive personal adjustment. Therefore, Oetting & Beauvais (1990) concluded that it is not mixed but weak cultural identification that causes problems. Portes & Rumbaut (2001) further argued that there is no single effective acculturation pattern that fits all immigrant groups or individuals. Instead, the success of adaptation depends largely on how the immigrant’s characteristics interact with the circumstances he or she finds in the host country. For example, Schnittker (2002)’s study on Chinese adult immigrants’ self-esteem shows that English language use is most beneficial to the immigrants’ self-esteem in neighborhoods with primarily non-Chinese residents. On the other hand, Chinese cultural participation is beneficial in all or most Chinese neighborhoods, but detrimental in neighborhoods with few or no Chinese. These findings refute the prevalent belief that assimilation is necessarily the most desirable acculturation outcome under all circumstances and support Portes & Rumbaut’s context-specific adaptation theory. Similarly, Bankston & Zhou’s (1995) study on the academic achievement of Vietnamese children in New Orleans shows how this group of Vietnamese immigrants in a relatively disadvantaged minority environment rely on one another and develop their own institutions to resist the negative forces from the outside world. To the Vietnamese children in this community, separation and not getting involved in their white and black peers, rather than assimilation into it, seems to be the best acculturation outcome. While acknowledging the contextual importance in developing desirable acculturation patterns among immigrants, scholars nonetheless tend to agree that a bicultural orientation is generally more conducive to one’s identity development if the person is placed in a pluralistic setting (Berry, Kim & Boski 1988; Ekstrand 1978; Lang, Munoz, Bernal, & Sorensen 1982). LaFromboise et al. (1993) claim that ethnic minorities who develop bicultural competence will have higher self-concept, self-esteem, and confidence as well as better physical and psychological health than those who do not. Researchers advocating bicultural orientation put forward the notion of “segmented

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assimilation” to describe the optimal acculturation pattern in which host culture accommodation is combined with ethnic retention in a flexible and situationally dictated manner to produce the optimal benefits for the individual immigrant (Gans 1997; Portes & Zhou 1993; Rumbaut 1997; Schnittker 2002). With “segmented assimilation”, immigrants can retain traits and practices associated with their native culture that benefit their sense of identity, while simultaneously adopting selective host-culture practices that lead to more effective adaptation. Lee’s (1994) study on Asian American students’ identity development showed that the high-achieving Korean children were encouraged by their parents to develop a dual identity, that is, to maintain their Korean identities at home and in the Korean community but to emulate their white middle-class peers at school. This strategy of maintaining a dual identity is similar to the strategy of “accommodation without assimilation” that Gibson (1988) described the Punjabis children of poor farmers adopting. Both of these acculturation strategies are examples of “segmented assimilation” that lead to biculturality. This study builds upon the above conceptualizations on acculturation as a theoretical framework to discuss the heritage language maintenance among Chinese immigrant parents and their children in the US. THE ROLE OF HERITAGE LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE IN ACCULTURATION Immigrants and their children caught in the middle of different cultural messages are often confounded and undergo tremendous stress. Zanden (1990) theorized that maintaining one’s ethnic language in the host country could have several psychological advantages in the acculturation process. The first major advantage is that maintenance of the mother tongue helps children to retain some of their distinctive culture and to be better able to control the rate at which he or she adapts to the ways of majority Americans than would be the case if they lost their mother tongue immediately. The second advantage of heritage language maintenance is the promotion of ethnic consciousness. Many Asian-American and Hispanic children have experienced being treated as “outsiders” due to the visible differences in their physical features, even if they could speak English. One way of coping psychologically with the experience of marginality is the assertion of ethnic identity.

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Between Two Generations

With the maintenance of heritage language, the child has the opportunity to gain standing and recognition within the ethnic group even though both may be denied outside. A feeling of “wantedness” within the ethnic group can help lessen the emotional damage of the experience of not being wanted in the majority culture. Thirdly, as many first-generation parents or grandparents are limited English speakers, failure to maintain the heritage language is detrimental to the second-generation children in the sense of losing family affection and support. Actually, heritage language loss among second-generation children has often been cited as a major root for intergenerational conflicts and family tie disconnection in immigrant families (Hones & Cha 1999; McKay & Wong 2000; Portes & Rumbaut 2001). The role of heritage language maintenance in alleviating acculturation stress and helping the immigrant children achieve positive acculturation outcomes has also been proved by many empirical studies (Hulsen, De Bot & Weltens 2002; Maloof 1999; Portes & Hao 2002; Sakamoto 2001; Wright 1997; Zhou & Cai 2002). Garcia (1981)’s study on Spanish immigrants, for example, found that when Spanish dominant homes enhanced the Spanish fluency in the children, the children developed higher levels of self-esteem, more ambitious economic plans, greater assuredness of achieving such plans, and greater locus of control, in spite of the low expectations the teachers had for them. Parallel to such positive effects of home-based language maintenance efforts, Cummins (1983)’s study on French immersion programs in Canada found that when school programs tried to cultivate bilingualism and promote heritage language maintenance in the minority children, the children’s self-esteem would be enhanced. The children in French immersion programs perceived that their home language, the home and community culture, their parents and relatives were accepted by the school and therefore were likely to develop a positive attitude towards their home culture and the school culture. In comparison, language minority children who were mainstreamed tended to be vulnerable to a loss of self-esteem and status because the school system and teachers may seem latently or manifestly to be rejecting their home languages and values. Such children would not only internalize the stigma attached to their ethnic culture by the mainstream society, but also develop a hostile counterculture against the school. Portes & Hao (2002: 907) pointed out: “It is fluent bilingualism rather than English monolingualism that is associated with the more desirable results in terms of family relations and

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psycho-social adjustment”. Immigrant children’s heritage language abilities not only influence their own cultural adjustment and bring them psycho-social benefits in the course of acculturation, they also affect the well-beings of the whole immigrant families. Most notably, parent-child relations and parental authority are put to jeopardy when the children experience loss of heritage language and exhibit faster acculturation into the mainstream culture. Reversely, children who are bilingual and bicultural may be able to support their parents’ confrontation with the mainstream culture. Portes & Rumbaut (2001) put forward a holistic, dynamic, household model of acculturation that includes both immigrant parents and children’s language knowledge in the scheme. Thus, the relationship between heritage language maintenance and acculturation patterns is situated within the intergenerational context of the immigrant family, as shown in the following table. Table 3: Generational Language knowledge and Types of Acculturation Children’s Knowledge of Mother Tongue None Parents’ Knowledge Of English

None

Dissonant acculturation

Limited

Partial dissonant acculturation Consonant acculturation

Fluent

Limited Partial dissonant acculturation Partial consonant acculturation Consonant acculturation

Fluent Selective acculturation Selective acculturation Selective acculturation

Source: Portes & Rumbaut (2001: 145) When children move decisively in language shift to English while parents remain attached to their own language and culture (the first column-first row cell), dissonant acculturation will occur within the family, with the children being assimilated to the mainstream culture and the parents’ staying separated from it. When children preserve some of their heritage language and parents learn at least some words

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Between Two Generations

of English (the first two cells in the second column and the first two cells in the second row), partial consonant or partial dissonant acculturation will occur, signifying different degrees of acculturation between parents and children, but they are not totally deprived of communication with each other. When the parents are fully bilingual and can communicate with the children in English (the first two cells in the third row), regardless of the children’s heritage language status, the children will experience consonant acculturation with little or no intergenerational conflicts. But consonant acculturation is unlikely to occur within immigrant families since the first-generation parents are often limited English speakers. Lastly, when the children are fully bilingual and can communicate with their parents in the heritage language (all the cells in the third column), selective acculturation will be their expected outcome, regardless of their parents’ English abilities. Selective acculturation is similar to “segmented assimilation” (Gans 1997; Portes & Zhou 1993; Rumbaut 1997; Schnittker 2002), signifying one’s ability to move between the home culture and the school culture freely and to select elements that are most beneficial to them. Obviously, selective acculturation based on heritage language maintenance and bilingualism is most desirable because it not only facilitates the children’s own cultural adjustment, but also helps the immigrant family to develop positive acculturation patterns as a whole. My study will take such an intergenerational approach to examine the language status of both the parents and the children and see what a role heritage language plays in the parent-child relations and in achieving selective acculturation for the immigrant families.

HERITAGE LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE IN THE THREE DOMAINS OF ACCULTURAITON Phinney argued that the construct and assessment of acculturation is not unidimensional, but consist of multifaceted elements (domains), including preference in language, interpersonal relationships, cultural activities, as well as cultural values and ethnic identity. Ying (1995) suggested that there are three important acculturation domains: the language domain (language orientation), the cultural domain (cultural participation and cultural identity) and the social domain (social network). The three acculturation domains are interrelated with one another: language orientation serves as the prerequisite and tool for participation in cultural activities and social relationships. In turn,

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active participation in the latter two domains can promote one’s advancement in language proficiency and preference, which helps one get further involved in the cultural activities and social networks pertaining to one culture. The concept of acculturation domains is central to the present study: the discussion on heritage language maintenance among the Chinese immigrant families will be situated in the three domains. In each of the domains, there are forces that work to promote or hinder heritage language maintenance among the second-generation Chinese children. Specifically, I will look at the relationships between language attitudes and language maintenance (language domain), between cultural identity and language maintenance (cultural domain), and between social network and language maintenance (social domain). LANGUAGE ATTITUDES AND LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE The factors affecting language maintenance and language shift are manifold, among which language attitudes and ideologies have been identified as important. Language ideology is defined as “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (Silverstein 1979: 193). Ruiz (1984) provides a typology for understanding language attitudes in any given society: language as a problem, language as a right, and language as a resource. The different language attitudes are rooted in different underlying language ideologies, cultural goals and social goals (Hornberger 1991). Table 4: Language Attitudes Language Attitudes Language Goals Cultural Goals Social Goals

Language as a Problem Language shift Cultural assimilation Social incorporation

Language as a Right Language maintenance Strengthened cultural identity Civil rights affirmation

Language as a Resource Language development Cultural pluralism Social authonomy

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Between Two Generations

Source: Adapted from Hornberger (1991)’s bilingual education model types, slightly revised by the author. As shown in Table 4, the language-as-a-problem orientation regards children’s minority language as a problem to be overcome during the course of learning English. Aiming at language shift, cultural assimilation and mainstreaming, the immigrants’ children are expected to give up their parents’ language in order to assimilate into the English-dominant mainstream society as quickly as possible. The language-as-a-right orientation, on the other hand, sees immigrant students as having the right to maintain their mother tongue. As such, this language orientation intends to develop and maintain the minority children’s cultural heritage as he or she is introduced to the majority culture and help the child become functionally bilingual in the two languages. The language-as-a--resource orientation goes even further than language-as-a-right to believe that the immigrant languages are not only a resource for the immigrant students themselves, but also to the society as a whole. As a result, this perspective advocates for the development of two languages among both immigrant students and mainstream students so they can all understand and identify with two or more languages in a multilingual and multicultural society. Cultural pluralism and social autonomy are the goals underlying this language orientation. In spite of the recent interest in heritage languages as a national resource, the dominant language ideology in the contemporary US mainstream society is still language-as-a-problem, especially with the renewed, escalating English-Only movement in the political field since the 1980s. Pressure groups such as English First and US English have been pushing forward English monolingualism and cultural assimilation. More recently, the passage of Proposition 227 in California and Proposition 203 in Arizona, along with the passage of Massachusetts version of the Unz initiative, has largely eliminated bilingual education and minority language instruction from the states’ public schools (Crawford 2000). Furthermore, Bush’s controversial No Child Left Behind put the emphasis on learning English among English language learners through accountability. All these showed hostility towards immigrants’ languages and a strong desire for the immigrant children to assimilate into English in the political field. Given the adverse societal attitudes towards minority languages, immigrants themselves also express diverse language attitudes towards their own languages. Some parents adopt the language-as-a-problem

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orientation. As a result, they urge their children to shift to English as quickly as possible in order to assimilate and succeed in the mainstream society. Other parents see the heritage language positively and seek to maintain it in the next generation. These different language ideologies directly impact on the second-generation children’s language maintenance. Fishman (1991), for example, emphasized the connection between language ideologies and language maintenance/shift. He argued that reversing language shift requires reversing the resistant attitudes towards the threatened languages among both dominant language speakers and minority language speakers. In a study on Chinese Canadians, Young & Gardner (1990) also highlighted the role of language attitudes in the development of minority language skills. The Chinese in the study who identified with Canadian culture thought that their Chinese language skills were weak so their desire to improve these skills was weak, too. However, participants who had a positive attitude toward their home culture and language were proficient in both Chinese and English or were eager to improve their skills in the Chinese language. These results suggest that language attitudes and beliefs affect the actual status of language maintenance. Language ideologies and language attitudes are important constructs in the present study. What attitudes the Chinese immigrant parents hold towards their heritage language and how their language attitudes and beliefs influence the second-generation children’s heritage language learning in the English dominant US society will be the focus of the study. CULTURAL IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE Cultural identity is formed by the complex configuration of one’s awareness of one’s own culture and a recognition of the cultural group in which one belongs in practice (Lee 2002). “Every culture provides the individual some sense of identity, some regulation or belonging and some sense of personal place in the school of things.” (Adler 1975: 20) In the course of acculturation, the immigrants are often confronted with the task of forming a new cultural identity that is based on the individual’s choices between the home culture and host culture. Immigrant families bring to the second-generation children the cultural practices inherited from their home country, which are often different from the schooling practices in the dominant culture. There is great

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Between Two Generations

discontinuity in the lives of the immigrants and their children between the family and the larger society. After reviewing more than 70 studies of ethnic identity, Phinney (1990) argued that identity development is particularly difficult for those belonging to ethnic and racial minority groups whose lives are complicated by the need to be loyal to their home culture and the need to belong to the host culture. Berry (1980) presented a typology of four possible acculturation outcomes: assimilation, separation, integration/biculturality, and marginalization. Ideally, the immigrants will integrate the two cultures to form one unique bicultural identity (Hamers & Blanc 1993). Biculturalism assumes that it is possible for an individual to know and understand two different cultures. Ogbu & Matute-Bianchi (1986: 89) said: “It is possible and acceptable to participate in two different cultures or to use two different languages, perhaps for different purposes, by alternating one’s behavior according to the situation.” Language has been noted by some researchers as one of the most prominent factors in the formation of one’s cultural identity since it acts as a salient indicator of a group’s identity and serves as the main tool to internalize culture (Fishman 1977; Giles & Coupland 1991). Pandharipande (1992) defined “cultural identity” as an umbrella term that is comprised of several factors, which can be broadly characterized as (1) linguistic (2) regional/geographic (3) religious and (4) racial/ethnic. These identity markers together, of which language is an important element, constitute the “culture” or “cultural identity” of a particular group. Northover (1988: 207) asserted: “Each of a bilingual’s languages is the mediator between differing cultural identities within one and the same person.” In a study on Korean second-generation college students, Lee (2002) concluded that cultural identity and heritage language proficiency were strongly interrelated; the higher the heritage language proficiency, the stronger the Korean students identified with both the Korean culture and the American culture. That is, those who were proficient in the heritage language tended to be more bicultural. In a different study on Vietnamese youths in New Orleans, Bankston & Zhou (1995) found that the familiarity with the heritage language gave the Vietnamese children access to the cultural capital and social capital of a distinctive ethnic identity. Therefore, the Vietnamese children who maintained their home language and achieved bilingual skills have better school performances than their monolingual peers.

Language Maintenance, Language Shift and Acculturation

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In the Vietnamese community, values and traditions constitute a source of motivation and direction as the children deal with adjustment problems in the new country and cope with the disruptive environment of urban schools. These cultural values and traditions were transmitted through the family with the help of the Vietnamese language (Bankston & Zhou 1995: 17) However, not all scholars acknowledge the close relationship between cultural identity and heritage language. For example, Hoffman (1991) argued that proficiency in a language does not necessarily imply knowledge of the culture of the language and vice versa. She saw bilingualism and biculturalism to exist in varying degrees along the continuum. Furthermore, Bhabha (1990) and Chow (1992) argued for the “third” or “new” space for the identity formation process of the diasporic, hyphenated people who struggle between different codes of languages. The “third” space is characterized by hybridity, displacement, rupture, as well as creation. Lowe (1991) adopts the notion of cultural hybridity over the notion of ethnic identity formation since the latter implies a separatist idea about one’s cultural identity as either assimilating to the host society or retaining the ethnic traits. Similarly, in a study on Korean American students’ heritage language learning, Jo (2001) further advanced the notion of “cultural hybridity” by exploring the diverse ways of language expressions and language speeches that the Korean American students exhibited in both English and Korean. In doing so, she critiqued the research on heritage language learning that assumes a simple correlation between ethnicity and heritage language learning and proficiency. Jo (2001: 27) argued: Korean-American students’ process of struggle in acquiring a ‘standard’ Koran language proficiency produces itself as a kind of language performance, which signifies Korean-American lived experiences and identities, not dissolved into the Korean native nor assimilated into the American identity. It is yet unclear what the defining relationship is between cultural identity and heritage language maintenance as the Chinese immigrant parents seek to transmit their Confucian cultural patterns and beliefs to

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Between Two Generations

the second-generation children. Li (2002)’s study on four Chinese immigrant families in Canada suggests that the first language was of paramount significance in their immigrant lives. “To keep their first language alive at home is their connection to their home culture and the assertion of their personal and cultural identity in the Canadian society.” (Li 2002: 186) Given the fact that the second-generation children often acculturate into the host language and culture at a faster pace than their parents, it is also interesting to find out how children’s maintenance of the heritage language helps the two generations to achieve mutual understandings of the different cultural identities they have developed in the host country. This study intends to provide the answer. SOCIAL NETWORK ANDLANGUAGE MAINTENANCE Patterns of language maintenance and language shift have been explained on the basis of a variety of factors by sociolinguists. Yagmur (1997), referring to Kipp et al. (1995), elaborated on factors possibly involved in language maintenance or shift, such as birthplace, age, period of residence, gender, education, marriage patterns, prior knowledge of English, reason for migration, and language variety (dialect or standard) etc. Since the 1980s, the concept of social network has emerged in a number of research studies as a prominent factor in deciding a minority individual’s first language maintenance in multilingual contexts (Li 1994; Stoessel 2002; Govindasamy & Nambiar 2003). Social networks were chosen as possibly influential in language maintenance and shift because of the power of social networks in linguistic and cultural socialization. A social network is defined quite generally as “informal social relationships contracted by an individual” (Milroy 1987: 78). A network is thus a group of people who know each other in some capacity and with differing degrees of intensity. The social network approach to language maintenance assumes that there is a dialectic relationship between speakers’ linguistic behaviors and interpersonal relations; that is, speakers’ language use is influenced and shaped by the types of social contacts they have, and in the meantime it actively contributes to the social relations which speakers maintain (Li 1994). It is particularly interesting to see the relationship between social network and language behavior in the case of immigrants who enter a new country and have to adapt their linguistic behavior to the new environment and have to establish new memberships in the new social

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27

networks. Faced with the challenge of having to use a new, second language in many of their daily interactions, they are forced to go through a second process of socialization in the new linguistic environment. The success of their linguistic adaptation and the validation of it by the new social network members can be seen as a crucial element in the individual’s decision on language maintenance or shift. Immigrants who feel inadequate in their use of the language in the host society often long for their “own” group, such as the old home-country network or the ethnolinguistic community in which they can continue to speak the mother tongue and function appropriately both culturally and linguistically (Winning 1991). As Peirce (1993:14) insightfully pointed out, It is through language that a person negotiates a sense of self within and across different sites at different points in time, and it is through language that a person gains access to --- or is denied access to --- powerful social networks that give learners the opportunity to speak. Thus language is not conceived of as a neutral medium of communication, but is understood with reference to its social meaning. The most famous theory of social networks in relation to language maintenance is put forward by Milroy (1982). Milroy (1982:212) argued: “a close knit network has the capacity to function as a norm enforcement mechanism and insulate its members from the pressures of mainstream value—including linguistic values”. In a close knit network, people nearly all know each other and they largely interact among themselves with little contact beyond the defined network. Therefore, a close knit network structure is an important mechanism of language maintenance, in that speakers are able to form a cohesive speech community capable of resisting pressure, linguistic and social, from outside the group. A number of studies conducted in different parts of the world have supported the correlation between language maintenance and social network (Giles, Bourhis & Taylor 1977; Hill & Hill 1980; Prabhakaran 1998). For example, Hill & Hill (1980)’s study showed that the Indians with the strongest commitments to the Nahuatl community values were the ones who switched to Spanish the least. Prabhakaran (1998) in her study of the Andhra community of South Africa found that the well-settled Indian immigrant community, based on their linguistic

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Between Two Generations

groupings, had promoted the use of their mother tongues. However, legal acts passed by the government uprooted and dismantled the community, therefore splitting the previously close-knit sociocultural units and causing the shift to English. More recently, studies on language maintenance have started to challenge the theory of closeknit social networks. Stoessel (2002)’s study on immigrant women in the US found that the impact of social networks on one’s bilingual development varies from individual to individual. Govindasamy & Nambiar (2003) in their study of the Malayalees in the context of multilingual Malaysia, echoing David (1998)’s study of the Sindhi community in Malaysia, found that although there was a dense social network system functioning in the community, it had not facilitated language maintenance. Malayalees were still interacting socially with more of their own kind than with members of other ethnic groups but the language of interaction was increasingly shifting to English. Therefore, Govindasamy & Nambiar (2003) argued that the immigrant community responds more to the opportunities and pressures of its external environment which provides better chances of social mobility to English-speaking individuals, instead of adhering to the old patterns of social interaction in the network. Language is always used within a social environment. Linguistic rules are formative for group behavior and make members part of the group. The maintenance of one’s heritage language is fostered when speakers can find social occasions to use it. The interplay of social network and language maintenance/shift contributes to the formation of one’s group identity and therefore is part of the immigrants’ acculturation in the host country. In the present study on Chinese language maintenance, the social network perspective is drawn upon to describe the Chinese immigrant families’ possibilities of interacting with the surrounding communities, their opportunities for speaking the heritage language, and how all of these experiences change their cultural and social identities across time and space.

CHINESE AS A HERITAGE LANGUAGE IN THE US Chinese as a heritage language has received increasing attention in recent years in the US and around the world (Chang 1998; Chao, T.H. 1997; Li, G. 2002, 2006; Li, W. 2000; McGinnis 2005, 2007; Wang 2006). On the one hand, the Chinese immigrant population within the last two decades has been growing rapidly. The number of Chinese

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immigrants reached over 2.8 million in the US in 2000, making it the largest Asian group and second-largest immigrant group only next to Mexicans (US Census 2000). With the increase of the population, Chinese becomes a noticeable language that is frequently used by the new immigrants. In 2000, the Chinese language had speakers of more than 2.0 million, jumping from the fifth to the second most-widely spoken non-English language in the US. On the other hand, globalization trends and international cooperation with China has promoted learning Chinese as a foreign language among the English-speaking Americans (McGinnis 2005). In some cases Chinese has entered the high schools and colleges as a strategic foreign language course. In view of the fact that many non-Chinese speakers are learning their heritage language, the loss of Chinese among the heritage language speakers has become a deplorable issue. The Chinese parents and communities are working hard towards the maintenance of the heritage language among their American-born descendents. However, research directly dealing with the maintenance of the Chinese languages in different Chinese communities has been little. Although literature on language maintenance and language shift in the US has been extensive, many of these studies focus on the Spanish-speaking immigrants and their children’s language maintenance and bilingual development. The paucity of research on Chinese as a heritage language in the US has to do with the status of Chinese as a new immigrant group. Although the first appearance of Chinese in the US dates back to the early 1840s, Chinese immigrants have only recently (after 1965) emerged as a substantial minority group in terms of population size and political and economic status (Zhou 1992). Another factor might be attributed to the “model minority” label that has generally been used to characterize Asian American children, Chinese children included. A consequence of this popular image is that most of the existing research on Chinese children falls under the “model minority” literature. That is, researchers and scholars are more interested in explaining Chinese children’s academic success through exploring the cultural, familial and communal factors (Chun 1980; Kao 1995, 2003; Ogbu 1974, 1987; Siu 1992; Sue & Okazaki 1990), while the issue of Chinese language maintenance has been largely neglected. A third factor could be attributed to the linguistic diversity among Chinese speakers in the US (Wiley et al. in press). Immigrants of Chinese ethnicity come from different places in Mainland China, Hong

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Between Two Generations

Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. They bring with them different Chinese varieties (or called Fangyan), such as Mandarin (the official spoken language in Mainland China), Cantonese (the local language of Guangdong Province), Fujianese (the local language of Fujian Province or Taiwan), and Shanghainese (the language of Shanghai City), etc. Although these languages are all put under the umbrella term “Chinese”, they are usually mutually unintelligible. Such vast linguistic diversity within the Chinese immigrants make research on Chinese language maintenance a complicated task and prevent many researchers who are unfamiliar with the Chinese languages from undertaking such a venture. As a result, despite the increasing influx of Chinese immigrants and the appearance of Chinese languages in various social settings, the linguistic status of the Chinese speakers is little known to the mainstreamers. The lack of research on Chinese heritage language maintenance is made especially striking in light of Portes & Rumbaut (2001: 281-282)’s disturbing findings on children’s home language proficiency comparison across different immigrant groups: “Mexicans are most prone to retain their parents’ language as primary, second-generation Cubans and other Latinos are most prone to become fully bilingual, and second-generation Asians are most prone to shift to English monolingualism and lose their parents’ language.” The present study attempts to close the research gap by making second-generation Chinese children’s heritage language learning experiences my research focus. By situating Chinese language maintenance in the complex and dynamic process of acculturation that the Chinese immigrant families undergo in the host country, I am able to study the factors and conditions behind Chinese language maintenance in relation to language attitudes, cultural participation and social network. In this study, I adopted a qualitative and ethnographic research approach to obtain an in-depth understanding of Chinese heritage language maintenance in the US. Qualitative interviews and participant observations with 18 Chinese parents and children in Great Philadelphia area where I had lived for five years were the major research methods used. In the next chapter, I turn to a historical examination of the emergence of Chinese immigrants as a distinct ethnic group in the US and in Philadelphia to provide a socio-cultural context for understanding the Chinese participants in this qualitative study.

CHAPTER TWO

THE SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT: CHINESE IMMIGRANTS IN THE US AND IN PHILADELPHIA

Chinatown has traditionally occupied a chimerical position in the American popular imagination. -----Lin (1998: 1) This chapter examines the emergence and formation of Chinese immigrants as a noticeable and distinct ethnic group in the US throughout the immigrant history from mid-19th century until now. Such an attempt is intended to provide a socio-cultural context for understanding the Chinese participants in the study. I will start with a depiction of the historical development of Chinese immigration in the US. The general demographics and the profile of the Chinese population in the US and in Philadelphia will be presented the next. Since the study was conducted within the Chinese families and communities, prominent characteristics of the Chinese communities formed by the early immigrants as well as the new immigrants in Philadelphia will be explored to further illustrate the research settings the present study takes place in.

CHINESE IMMIGRATION IN THE US With the post-1965 immigration policy, an increasing influx of new immigrants arrived in the US. These groups of people are called new immigrants because, unlike the large waves of immigrants in the early 1900s who came to the US primarily from Eastern and Southern parts of Europe, the bulk of the current immigrants come from Asia and Latin America whose languages and cultures are hitherto unknown to the 31

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Between Two Generations

European Americans (McKay & Wong 2000; Portes & Rumbaut 2001). While an increasing amount of research has begun to address the adaptation experiences of the new immigrant populations in the US, Chinese immigrants have continued to be neglected due to complex historical, social and cultural reasons (McKay & Wong 2000). First, the immigration of a large number of Chinese to this country is a relatively recent phenomenon. Previously, although a group of immigrants from South China came to California to work on railways and other hard labors around mid-19th century, the number of such immigrants was small and they did not form a prominent group. Only after the 1965 immigration law did large numbers of Chinese immigrants from various pre-immigration backgrounds come to US and become a noticeable minority group. Therefore, unlike some well-established ethnic groups that have a long history of immigrating into the US, such as the Mexicans and Cubans, the Chinese are among the least known minority groups in the US. Secondly, the Chinese immigrants, along with other Asian ethnic groups, have typically been characterized as the “model minority”. They are often portrayed as having relatively high levels of educational attainment and high levels of income (Barringer, Takeuchi & Xenos 1990). This broad generalization leads to the neglect of the heterogeneity and diversity within the Chinese ethnic group and to the neglect of their individual needs. In fact, the Chinese population in the US is not a monolithic group. It is the most diverse of all Asian ethnic groups in terms of nativity, occupation, educational attainment, language and so forth (McKay & Wong 2000). Although some Chinese children fare well in the US and seem to have been successfully assimilated into American mainstream society, others fail to live up to the “model minority” expectation and face serious problems in their acculturation process. However, the umbrella term “Asian Americans” has been commonly used to represent all Chinese as well as other Asian groups. All these factors contribute to the relatively few research efforts directed at the Chinese population and their adaptation experiences in the US, as compared with research on other minority groups (such as Black and Latinos). In order to understand the complexity and diversity of the Chinese ethnic group, it is necessary to sketch the history of Chinese immigration into the US. According to Chang (2003), Chinese immigrated to the US in three major waves: the first accompanied the 1849-era California gold rush; the second included migration of the anti-communist elites after

The Chinese Immigrants in the US and in Philadelphia

33

the 1949 Communist revolution; the third was comprised largely of Chinese students, immigrants, smugglers and their families who entered the US during the last two decades of the 20th century. The first wave of Chinese arrived in the western coast back in the late 1840s when the California gold rush provided an impetus for Chinese hard labors from South China, Guangdong (Canton) Provinces, to come and work in mining and railroads. By 1851, there were already 25,000 Chinese in California. These early immigrants were predominantly adult males, speaking Cantonese and virtually no English. They left their wives, children and parents behind to work in the US as a means to support their families back in China. As a result, there were very few Chinese families in the early Chinese community, which made some scholars term it a “bachelor society” (Heyer 1953). Due to lack of family life and severe racial discrimination prevalent at the time, the early Chinese immigrants had no intention to stay in the US, but thought to earn enough money and return to rejoin their families in China. The majority of the early immigrants did go back eventually when they turned old and weak. However, new laborers kept coming from China every year to supply the badly needed cheap labor. By 1875, Chinese laborers in the West had increased to 105,000 (Wong 1998). This situation lasted until the 1880s, when economic recession in the country caused white workers to compete with the Chinese for jobs in California. Employers hired Chinese workers for lower wages, pitting them against white workers, which inevitably triggered a chain of reactions from the latter. Anti-Chinese sentiments and complaints grew fast and spread to the whole western coast. Public hysteria at this period were best illustrated by the outrageous signs “Chinamen must go”, and “Yellow Peril” that could be found everywhere on the streets in major cities (Kwong 1996; Lin 1998). The anti-Chinese resentment eventually led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Law through Congress in 1882, which blocked all immigration of Chinese laborers. It was the first and, as it turned out, the only federal law ever to exclude a group of people by nationality. For the next several decades, Chinese immigration to the US virtually stopped. Those who were already in the US were driven out of the small towns and villages and forced to form Chinatowns in big cities where they were to stay segregated among themselves. The first Chinatowns were formed in the 1880s in the major metropolitan areas, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, in the western coast. Not surprisingly, the harsh conditions of their working

34

Between Two Generations

life and the intensity of discrimination during this period caused many Chinese to view their residence in America as temporary. They planned to stay only as long as it took to save enough to retire in China. The second wave of immigration began during the mid-20th century and decreased in the 1970s. In China, the war with Japanese (1937-1945) was followed by the civil war (1945-1919), which resulted in the Communist Party establishing the People’s Republic China. As a result of the civil war, many bureaucrats, businessmen, and intellectuals fled the country. Some went first to Hong Kong, others to Taiwan, but for most of them, America was their final destination (Chang 2003). At this time, World War II brought changes in the status of the Chinese in the United States. In 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. After more than sixty years, Chinese were for the first time allowed to enter the US, although under a yearly quota of a mere 105. The second wave of Chinese immigrants brought in more highly educated and wealthy Chinese immigrants than the first wave of laborers, however limited they were in number. The elite refugees tended to settle down around universities or research centers rather than Chinatowns. Most could speak English; however, some who came as political refugees didn’t speak English and many among this group ended up in Chinatowns doing the manual labor work (Chang 2003). The more decisive change in American immigration law did not come until the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which stipulated a flat quota of 20,000 immigrants for every country, without regard to race and nationality. The new immigration act came about as the result of the civil rights movements and changing race relations in the 1960s, “representing a liberal and enlightened vision to make America a color-blind society”. (Kwong 1996: 22) Obviously, the new law had important consequences for the Chinese communities as well as the American society at large. An increasing influx of Chinese from Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia flowed to the US. The Chinese population grew dramatically from 236,000 in 1960 to 1,079,000 in 1985, almost five times in the 25 years after the new law took effect (Kwong 1996). Not only did the number of Chinese immigrants dramatically increase, the 1965 Immigration Law also profoundly changed the composition of the Chinese communities in the US. According to the

The Chinese Immigrants in the US and in Philadelphia

35

1965 Act3, preference for admission emphasizes two principles (Kwong 1996): first, to unite the families of American citizens; second, to admit persons with professional skills needed in the US economy or students who come to earn advanced degrees in the US universities. These categories bring in two very different types of Chinese immigrants. After the normalization of Sino-American diplomatic relationships in 1979, increasing numbers of Chinese students and scholars were allowed into the US. This was the largest immigrant wave of Chinese scholars in American history (Chang 2003). Most were from professional backgrounds, particularly science and engineering, and they spoke English and Mandarin, the standard Chinese language, as well as other Chinese dialects. By 2006, 62,582 students from Mainland China were enrolled in the US higher education institutions: 27,876 from Taiwan; and 7,849 from Hong Kong (Institute of International Edcuation 2006). Chinese students constituted the largest group of foreign students in the US. This group of Chinese who either arrive with professional skills or come to study for advanced degrees are better able to find employment in the mainstream industries and do not settle in Chinatowns. Some could even enter elite professions, such as computer and engineering technology, and become the middle class. They are called the Uptown Chinese (Kwong 1996). At the same time, another group of Chinese came to the US after the 1970s from the rural areas of southern China, Guangdong (Canton) and Fujian (Fukien) provinces. They came under the sponsorship or with the help of early immigrants who have become naturalized American citizens as their families or relatives. Some entered the US as permanent residents, but a considerable number of them did not have a legal status but smuggled to the US undocumented. The Chinese of this category, either legal or illegal, speak Southern Chinese dialects, such as Cantonese or Fujianese (Fukienese), are only distantly familiar with Mandarin and know no English. Coming from a humble origin and having little education, they tend to settle in Chinatowns and continue to take up the manual labor jobs as their predecessors. They comprise the Downtown Chinese. Clearly, at this time, the Chinese population is no longer a monolithic whole, but consists of two distinct groups, (a) the well-to-do 3 For the specific texts of the 1965 Immigration Law, please refer to Peter Kwong (1996: 21).

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Between Two Generations

scholars and professionals; and (b) the Chinatown manual workers. Furthermore, in the post-1965 period, with the new law’s emphasis on family reunification, most Chinese immigrants arrive with their family and children, regardless of which group they belong to. The Chinese communities are no longer a “bachelor society” and the immigrants have no intention of returning to China: they are to stay in the new country. This brief historical overview of Chinese immigration in the US demonstrates that although the Chinese were among the first Asian ethnic groups to arrive in the US, the majority of the Chinese in the contemporary US are foreign-born, first-generation immigrants, most arriving after the 1960s. With the 1965 Immigration Law that abolished immigration restrictions based on people’s nationality, the Chinese population had increased dramatically and emerged as a conspicuous ethnic group in the American society comprising of two subgroups: the Uptown Chinese and the Downtown Chinese. In this study, I call them the academic Chinese and the labor Chinese.

THE PROFILE OF THE CHINESE POPULATION IN THE US POPULATION The Chinese in the US have gained considerable visibility in recent years. According to the 2000 Census, the Chinese population in the US had reached 2.8 million, or almost 1 percent of the total US population. About 71 percent of the Chinese population comes from recent immigration, most arriving after 1980 (US Census Bureau 2004). Table 5 shows that in 1980, the number of Asian Americans in total was only a little over 3 million, composing 1.5% of the US total population, among which the number of Chinese was less than 1 million. However, within two decades, Asian Americans had reached up to 11 million by 2000, constituting almost 4% of the total US population, with Chinese being the largest ethnic group among all the Asians (23%). (See Figure 1) With the continued influx of new immigrants coming from countries like P. R. China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore every year, the Chinese has become the second-largest immigrant group after the Mexicans in the contemporary US demographic landscape. In addition, the increase rate of the Chinese immigrants after the 1980s is dramatic: from 1980 to 2000, the Chinese population had more than tripled, as compared to 24% in growth of the total US population in the same period. Today, the Chinese population is among the fastest-growing minority groups in the country (See Figure 2).

The Chinese Immigrants in the US and in Philadelphia

37

Table 5: Asian American Population: 1980, 1990, and 2000 1980 Census 1990 Census Race/Ethnicity # % # Asian Americans 3,259,519 1.44 6,908,638 Chinese 806,040 0.36 1,645,472 Japanese 700,974 0.31 847,562 Filipino 774,652 0.34 1,406,770 Korean 354,593 0.16 798,849 Asian Indian 361,531 0.16 815,447 Vietnamese 261,729 0.12 614,547 Other US total 226,545,805 248,709,873

%

2000 Census4 # %

2.78 11,898,828 0.66 2,858,291 0.34 1,152,324 0.57 2,385,216 0.32 1,226,825 0.33 1,885,590 0.25 1,212465

4.23 1.05 0.41 0.85 0.44 0.67 0.43

281,421,906

Data Source: US Census 1980, 1990, 2000. Figure 1: Asian Groups by Ethnicity 2000

Data Source: US Census, 2000. 4

In this book, the data of Asian (Chinese) populations in 2000 Census include those who report Asian alone and those who report Asian in combination with other races.

38

Between Two Generations Figure 2: The Growth of the Chinese Population From 1980 to 2000

Data Source: US Census, 1980, 1990, 2000. EDUCATION, OCCUPATION AND LANGUAGE However, the Chinese immigration history has clearly shown that of the increasing Chinese population, there is huge within-group diversity in terms of places of origin, language, education and occupation (McKay & Wong 2000). According to the 2000 Census, 48% of the Chinese have a bachelor’s degree or more, compared to the 24% of the total US population; whereas 23% of the Chinese have less than a high school education, compared to the 20% of the total US population. In terms of occupation, a higher percentage of Chinese than of the total US population (52% vs. 33%) are in the management, professional and related field, while lower percentages are in service (13.9), sales and office (20.8), production, transportation and material moving (10.4) (US Bureau 2002a & 2004). Given the fact that the Chinese immigration typically brings in the academic families and the labor families in the two ends of the socioeconomic status, such results might not be surprising.

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39

The 2000 Census also shows that 71% of the Chinese are foreign-born, among whom 38% are naturalized citizens and 33% are not citizens). Of the foreign born Chinese population, 75% entered the US in the past two decades after 1980. 85% of the Chinese speak a language that is different from English, of whom 35% are bilingual and speak English “very well”, while the rest 50% speak English less than “very well” and has to use Chinese as their dominant language. With the rapid growth of the Chinese immigrant population in the last two decades, the Chinese language has become the most commonly spoken language at home in addition to English and Spanish. Sociolinguists identified seven major varieties of Chinese that exist in different geographical regions in China, Beifang, Wu, Xiang, Yue, Min, Hakka (Kejia) and Gan (Ramsey 1987). The Beifang dialect (Northern dialect) refers to the language spoken in the North China. It is also prescribed as Mandarin, the standard Chinese language. The Yue dialect, which includes Cantonese, is found mostly in Guangdong Province, the southernmost province of China. Kejia (Hakka) has many users in small agricultural areas and are now scattered throughout southeastern China and Taiwan. Varieties of Min are spoken in Fujian as well as in Taiwan and Hainan Islands. Wu varieties are spoken in the lower Changjiang (the Yangtze River) region, which includes the heavily populated metropolitan area of Shanghai. Xiang varieties are mainly spoken in south central region. Gan varities are spoken chiefly in the southeastern inland provinces. (Ramsey 1987; See also Li 1994). Wiley et al. (in press)’s language survey among Chinese immigrants and students found that all of these language varieties have speakers in the US, with Mandarin, Wu (eg. Shanghainese), Min (eg. Fujianese and Taiwanese) and Yue (eg. Cantonese) speakers constituting more than 90% of the total respondents in the survey. Moreover, Wiley et al. found that none of the Chinese speakers are monolingual, instead they exhibit a high level of multilingualism, with a large number of the respondents speaking English, Mandarin and a Chinese dialect. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION The Chinese constitutes the largest share of Asian population and roughly has the same geographical distribution as the Asians in total. According to Census 2000, of all respondents who reported Asian, 49 percent lived in the West, 20 percent lived in the Northeast, 19 percent lived in the South, and 12 percent lived in the Midwest (US Census

40

Between Two Generations

Bureau 2002a & 2002b). The top ten states with the largest Chinese population in 2000 were California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, and Maryland (See Table 7). These top ten states together have 70% of the total Chinese population in the US, with half of the Chinese living in just two states: California and New York. Therefore, the Chinese population is most concentrated in the eastern and western coastal areas, with smaller concentrations scattered throughout the US. Table 6: Top Ten States with the Largest Chinese Population State California New York Texas New Jersey Massachusetts Illinois Washington Hawaii Pennsylvania Maryland

Population 33,871,648 18,976,457 20,852,820 8,414,350 6,349,097 12,419,293 5,894,121 1,211,537 12,281,054 5,296,486

Chinese 980,642 424,774 105,829 100,355 84,392 76,725 59,914 56,600 50,650 49,400

Data Source: The Asian Population: 2000, Census 2000 Brief, US Census Bureau, 2002a A further analysis of the geographical distribution of the Chinese population shows that the majority of Chinese tend to concentrate in urban counties where large Chinese communities formed, such as Seattle, Washington; Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area of California; New York City, New York; Newark, New Jersey; Washington, DC; Chicago, Illinois; Houston, Texas; and the Minneapolis-St.Paul, Minnesota, metropolitan area. In these urban counties, the Chinese are typically located in the suburbs of large metropolitan areas or near colleges or universities. Table 8 shows the top ten big cities with the largest Asian population (due to the lack of specific information on Chinese).

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Table 7: Top Ten Cities with the largest Asian Population City New York, NY Los Angeles, CA San Jose, CA San Francisco, CA Honolulu, HI San Diego, CA Chicago, IL Houston, TX Seattle, WA Fremont, CA

Population 8,008,278 3,694,820 894,943

Asians 872,777 407,444 257,571

776,733 371,657 1,223,400 2,896,016 1,953,631 563,374 203,413

253,477 251,686 189,413 140,517 114,140 84,649 80,979

Data source: The Asian Population: 2000, Census 2000 Brief, US Census Bureau, 2002a These demographic data indicate three distinct characteristics of the Chinese population. First, it is one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the US. Recently-arrived immigrants of foreign born constitute a majority of this group. Secondly, a high degree of linguistic diversity is conspicuous among the Chinese immigrants as well as diversity in educational attainment and occupation. The Chinese tend to be found either in the uppermost or lowermost end of the social strata. Thirdly, a large proportion of the Chinese concentrates in coastal areas and urban counties. Given the profile of the Chinese population in the US, my study intended to take a micro-level approach to investigate 18 Chinese families in the Great Philadelphia Metropolitan area. Although they cannot be a representative sample of the Chinese across the nation, it is hoped that the results from this study could help the mainstream US society achieve a better understanding of the lives of Chinese immigrants as well as their second-generation children in this particular location at a particular time.

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THE CHINESE COMMUNITIES IN PHILADELPHIA The populations of Asians and Chinese in the state of Pennsylvania and in Philadelphia have grown rapidly in recent years, following the same pattern of growth nationwide. In Pennsylvania, the number of Chinese in 1990 was a little short of 30,000, but reached 56,831 by 2000, increasing by 92 percent; in Philadelphia, the number in 1990 was 11,691, but reached 19,672 by 2000, increasing by 68 percent. Table 8: The Asian and Chinese Population in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia

Pennsylvania 1990 2000

Asian Chines e


135,78 4 29,562

% Grow th

Philadelphia 1990 2000 % Growt h

248,601

83%

43,096

74,435

73%

56,831

92%

11,691

19,672

68%


The count of Chinese includes Taiwanese. Data source: Data derived from analysis by the Asian American Federation Census Information Center: Detailed Asian Groups in Pennsylvania, 2004. The national distribution of the Chinese population has shown that Pennsylvania is among the top ten states with the largest Chinese population. While increasing dramatically, the size of the Chinese population in Pennsylvania is small when compared with the total Chinese population (2.8 million) in the country, only about 2 percent in 2000. The largest concentration of the Chinese population in the US is in the western and eastern coast. In 2000, the New York metropolitan area had the largest Chinese population of 524,507, followed by San Francisco metropolitan area 506,068 and Los Angeles metropolitan area of 425,928 (Data derived from analysis by the Asian American Federation Census Information Center 2004). Thus, the Chinese

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population in Pennsylvania and in Philadelphia can be seen as part of the eastern coast concentration and as a satellite spreading from the New York metropolitan area. Although Philadelphia is not one of the ten big cities with the largest Chinese population, it is nonetheless a metropolis and situated along the eastern coast. As such, the Chinese communities in Philadelphia resemble those of the other metropolitan areas in the US, especially those in the eastern coast, such as the New York City5. My field work showed that the Chinese immigrants in Philadelphia have close relationships with the Chinese immigrants in the New York City. New York City is the first stop where many Chinese immigrants in the eastern coast landed from the airplane from China. For the Fujianese-speaking labor families in Philadelphia who came to the US under the sponsorship or help of old-timer immigrants, many of them have relatives or friends in New York and they themselves had been living in New York for a while before they moved to Philadelphia. The distinction of two subgroups of Chinese immigrants nationwide, i.e., the academic Chinese (uptown Chinese) and the labor Chinese (downtown Chinese), is also apparent in Philadelphia. These two groups form two very different Chinese communities in Philadelphia: the Chinatown community and the university community. THE CHINATOWN COMMUNITY A typical characteristic of an urban city with a large Chinese population is that the Chinese will gradually form their own ethnic enclave called “Chinatown”. The metropolitan cities listed in Table 9 all have old established Chinatowns that earlier immigrants built and are inherited by the new immigrants of the same ethnicity. Philadelphia Chinatown was built by the earlier immigrants and was a home to them and their descendants. As one Chinese church leader in Philadelphia informed me, the Chinatown area in Philadelphia used to be bar streets and illegal businesses, an area nobody but Chinese would venture to come.

5 For characteristics of the Chinese communities in New York, please see Zhou (1992).

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Between Two Generations John Tan6:

Okay, this area actually was…Chinese area, and you see this area used to be a…or many Chinatowns in the east coast, the Chinese ended up going into the area that no one would like to go into. And this particular area was a bar of every corner. DZ: A bar? John Tan: Bar, drinking, wine…At 10th and Vine, at 10th and Race, the four restaurants there are right now, they were all bars. In every corner in Chinatown, there were many many bars in Chinatown, I could…when I was a kid, I could probably remember seven or eight bars, it’s just around this area, and just bars, and many from the…many …yeah, so this area was really burned down, very dilapidated, and the Chinese began investing in this area. (Interview Community Leader, 12/11/03)

As Kwong (1996: 11) said, “In the United States, there are dozens of Chinatowns, but they did not develop voluntarily.” Although the Chinese is a cohesive ethnic group and would like to stick together in the host country, the concentration of Chinese into these urban ghettos, the so-called Chinatowns, was not voluntary or purposeful, but forced by severe racial discrimination they experienced in the mainstream society. Based on what John Tan said, Philadelphia Chinatown most probably came into being due to a similar cause in the pre-1965 era. After 1965, however, more and more new immigrants from Fujian province in southern China, the so-called Fujianese, joined Philadelphia Chinatown under the sponsorship of old Chinatown residents, claiming to be their family members or relatives. They quickly replace the Cantonese (Chinese from Guangdong Province, traditionally the largest Chinese group in the US) as the largest group of Chinese in contemporary Philadelphia Chinatown. Moreover, according to the Fujianese participants in my study, many of the Fujianese immigrants in Philadelphia are from the same village or county in Fujian province, China, since they usually have closely knit kinship or clanship in the village or county. At the same time, reflecting the situation nationwide, a 6

All the names that are involved in the study are pseudonyms.

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large number of the Fujianese in Philadelphia came to the US under undocumented status. That is, they attempt to smuggle into the US with the help of the local “snakeheads 7 ” in China. Legal or illegal, the Fujianese immigrants share similar characteristics in their pre-immigration background: rural, semi-skilled with little education and minimum income. Unfamiliar with the English language and lacking necessary workforce skills, they have to live in Chinatown for survival and work in the ethnic businesses or restaurant kitchens in Chinatown as “invisible people”. Nowadays, Philadelphia Chinatown has become a neighborhood of largely documented and undocumented Fujianese immigrants. Fujianese, the Chinese dialect spoken in Fujian province, is the everyday language used by the majority of the Philadelphia Chinatown residents among themselves. Due to the influx of a large number of Fujianese immigrants in recent years, Philadelphia Chinatown is not like the immigrant ghettos of Italians, Jews, or Poles, which tended to disappear as each group integrated into the American society, nor does it resemble black and Latino ghettos, which lack jobs and capital (Zhou 1992). Rather, the arrival of new immigrants every year makes Philadelphia Chinatown’s ethnic businesses prosper and at the same time provides cheap labor to them. As a result, Chinatown self-perpetuates and remains the largest Chinese community in today’s Philadelphia. THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY With the 1965 Immigration Law and especially with the opening-up policy of People’s Republic of China, another group of Chinese arrived in Philadelphia since the 1980s --- the scholars and professionals. This forms a Chinese academic community around three major universities and their research centers in Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and Temple University. Although the September 11 event in 2001 heightened American suspicion towards any “foreign”

7 Snakehead is a nickname given to the Chinese gang in Fujian and Guangdong provinces who are engaged in the business of smuggling people abroad. Those who intend to smuggle pay the snakeheads a sum of money and the snakeheads will provide them with fake documents and help them smuggle. The information here is based on Fujianese immigrants’ narrative of their own smuggling experience.

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person and somewhat slowed down the growth of Chinese students in the US, the overall trend is still on the rise. Different from the Chinatown laborers who predominantly come from poor rural areas in southern China, this group of Chinese largely comes from well-educated and higher socioeconomic background in Mainland China or Taiwan to pursue advanced degrees in American universities. When they graduate, they tend to work at professional positions in well-respected companies or institutions. In terms of residential patterns, this group of Chinese tends to live around University City area in west Philadelphia (the city) when they are students, and move to suburbs of the Philadelphia metropolitan area after they graduate and work. Although they may work in different careers and live in scattered locations of the region, the academic Chinese can identify with one another through their common experience and involvement in the American academic institutions. Unlike the Chinatown residents who largely come from the same province in South China, Fujian, the academic Chinese in the university community come from diverse provinces and cities in Mainland China/Taiwan and speak different accents. Yet due to their advanced educational background, Mandarin, the official language of China/Taiwan and the only variety of Chinese that has a corresponding written form, has replaced their local dialects and becomes their primary language. Obviously, the Mandarin scholars and the Fujianese labors represent opposite poles of the class structure within the same ethnicity in Philadelphia. The emergence of the latter group has led some commentators to say that the Chinese are being overrepresented in Ivy League universities. Some of them even earn distinction in elite professions and pass for the middle class. The commonly used “model minority” label signifies the larger society’s recognition of the success of the top tier of Chinese immigrants and their children. In my study, I included 12 Mandarin families from the university community and 6 Fujianese families from the Chinatown community, all of whom are from Mainland China. By including the two different groups of Chinese immigrants in my study, I hoped to obtain a holistic picture of the lives and struggles of the Chinese in the US and to reveal the complexity involved in the maintenance of the Chinese heritage language to the second-generation in different Chinese families. Given the different pre-immigration backgrounds and post-immigration circumstances, the two groups of Chinese seem to live in totally different

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worlds and to have little to do with one another. An important reason for the rare contact between the two groups is the lack of a common language among them. Most of the Fujianese Chinatown workers speak their hometown dialect, Fujianese, as their dominant language and do not speak fluent Mandarin. In contrast, the scholars are from all parts of China and regardless of what dialects they come from, have adopted Mandarin as their primary language. Some have even lost their original local dialect after years of education. This language difference further weakens the already thin connections between the two groups and drives them further apart. This chapter delineated the history of the Chinese immigration to the US and described the current profile of the Chinese population in the US and in Philadelphia, in an attempt to provide a socio-cultural context for the study. The next chapter will turn to the Chinese participants actually involved in the study. Access to the participants and data collection methods used with them will be discussed.

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CHAPTER THREE

ACCESS, RESEARCH RELATIONSHIPS AND ETHICS

Methodology helps to frame a research topic and to guide researchers in concrete terms during the whole process of producing knowledge, especially when they are in trouble. ---- Seale et al. (2004:7) This chapter is devoted to a detailed discussion of the research methods used in the study. The purpose of my study is to explore Chinese immigrant families’ experiences with heritage language maintenance in the course of their acculturation in the US. I did not assume objectivity and neutrality in my investigation. Instead, I chose ethnography as my guiding methodology and relied on ethnographic techniques, mainly qualitative interviews and participant observations, as my tools to collect the data from which I hoped to gain understanding and knowledge of the issues involved in Chinese heritage language maintenance. Ethnography, “the art and science of discovering and describing a group or culture” (Fetterman 1989; Spradley 1980), is appropriate for my research topic. The intent of my research is to discover how the Chinese immigrant families strive to deal with two languages and two cultures in the host country and what identities they have come to form in the acculturation process. Ethnography, characterized by prolonged engagement with the culture of a particular group in natural settings, has enabled me to enter the world of the Chinese immigrants and their children to learn about the languages they use in daily lives, their language attitudes, and how language plays out in their cultural practices and social relationships. Quantitative research methodology cannot adequately capture these issues. Moreover, ethnography allows the researcher to have firsthand experiences with the researched 49

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through the fieldwork. By being with the families and participating in various activities within the Chinese communities, observing the lives of the Chinese families and listening to the parents and children talk about themselves, I was able to obtain both an etic (outsider) and an emic (insider) point of view on the Chinese immigrants’ visions of the world, their beliefs and values about the Chinese language and why its maintenance is important to them.

ACCESS, POWER RELATIONS AND SUBJECTIVITY Ethnography is not only an art of discovering and describing a culture, but also a personal meaning-making process for the ethnographer (Li 2002). To understand another’s culture, it is crucial for an ethnographer to understand her/himself first because the principal tool for ethnographic research is the ethnographer (Hornberger 1988). Therefore, in ethnography, the researcher’s own standing in the research settings is as equally important as the participants she/he studies. BACKGROUND OF THE RESEARCHER I grew up in a small town in Northeast China, Jilin Province, raised by my very traditional grandparents who embraced Confucian ideas of the world. I was educated in the Communist-ideology schools after the Cultural Revolution, where I learned both the traditional Chinese virtues and the modern Chinese aspirations after Deng Xiaoping’s opening-up and reform policies. I speak Mandarin (standard Chinese) with Northeastern accent since childhood. I started to learn English as a foreign language in middle school in my hometown, taught by Chinese teachers. I obtained Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English Department, Peking University, in Beijing. I came to the US in 2000 to study for a Ph.D. degree at Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. Having lived for over twenty years in North China among predominantly people of Han ethnicity and nationality, and having few prior travel experiences, the arrival in the multilingual, multicultural, and multi-ethnic US society had confronted me for the first time with language pressures and cultural shocks. Although I had learned English for over 10 years in China and am able to read and write English proficiently, I nonetheless speak English with Chinese

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accent when I arrive. In the Chinese context (including in China and in Chinese diaspora), I am a well-educated female Han person, speaking perfect Mandarin and good English. In the American context, I am a bilingual academic person of Chinese ethnicity, with Mandarin being my first, dominant language and English second language. ACCESS AND POWER RELATIONS I was attending University of Pennsylvania as a doctoral student of education while the study was being conducted. As a member of the Chinese academic community in Philadelphia myself, I was able to maintain meaningful relationships with the Mandarin parents on a long-term basis through regular community activities, such as monthly movie shows, special theme seminars, site tours, cultural activities and gatherings on important Chinese holidays etc. Many of these activities are organized by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at Penn (CSSAP), an important university-based organization for the Chinese in the academic community. Participation in these events provided me with opportunities to get to know the Chinese families personally and enabled me to develop an insider’s perspective on their lives in the US. During the gatherings, I usually exchanged greetings with the Chinese parents in Mandarin, which enhanced our identification with one another and gave us a sense of cultural affinity. At the same time, I participated in the Chinatown community in Philadelphia as a regular church member. Hosting pre-school and kindergarten classes, after-school programs and other educational and cultural programs, the Chinese church served as a community center for all the residents in Chinatown, not just the converted ones. All of the Fujianese parents in my study had attended some activities, religious or non-religious, in the Chinese church. Therefore, I often had chances to meet the Fujanese parents in the church and attend their weekly gatherings on weekends. In addition, I also participated in a Chinese weekend school in suburban Philadelphia as a Chinese teacher to the second-generation heritage language learners from 2003-2004. The direct involvement in the Chinese language school connected me to a group of Chinese parents, community leaders and teachers who were interested in Chinese language maintenance. I talked to them and exchanged thoughts with them at teachers’ and parents’ meetings.

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My status as a member of the local Chinese communities was a possible asset in approaching the Chinese families and learning about their lives, yet issues of power relations also emerged when I asked to interview the Chinese parents and their children. I sensed a dramatic change in our relationships: while the Chinese families in general treated me warmly as an active member of them before the interview, they started to view me with curiosity, caution and in some cases distance after I put the interview request. Even though I tried my best to explain to the parents that the interview was purely for research purpose and I assured them of confidentiality, some parents, especially those undocumented Fujianese parents, still eyed me with suspicion and were unwilling to accept my interview. In addition, with the Fujianese families, there was a language barrier between us. I did not speak Fujianese dialect and they did not speak English. The only language we could use to communicate was Mandarin, but some Fujianese parents had difficulty in expressing themselves freely in Mandarin. Due to these factors, initial interviews with the Chinese families were limited to the better-educated Mandarin families in the university community who were also my personal acquaintances. Fortunately, the first participants were able to introduce their friends to me or help me connect with other Chinese families in the city. As it turned out, the Chinese families in Philadelphia have established close networks among themselves, especially if they are from the same place of origin in China (Lao Xiang, or “fellow villagers”), or if they belong to the same community organizations in Philadelphia, such as the Chinese church or Peking Opera Association. When I approached these parents, I was usually introduced by a friend of theirs whom I had interviewed. After that, I explained my research intention to these parents, and most often they were kind enough to cooperate. As I reflect back upon this, these parents’ cooperative behavior might be partly due to the mutual trust that had historically been built between community members in the same ethnic institution. On the other hand, it was important for the informants to know that their friends trusted me and had accepted my interview. This can be an additional incentive for them to agree to my interview. In fact, I met one Fujianese mother in the church who offered to be interviewed by me after she knew that I had been doing interviews with her friends. In general, I found the snowball sampling method worked especially well with the Chinese families.

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Another major challenge I faced in the study was to establish a good relationship with the Chinese children. Since my study was concerned about heritage language maintenance among the second-generation children, interview with the children constituted an important part of my study. In each family, at least one parent and one child were interviewed to get both the parent and the child’s perspectives. However, being a non-parent young adult in my late 20s, my past experiences with children had been little. First of all, there was the age gap. Most of the Chinese children I interviewed called me Aunt Zhang since I was regarded as their parents’ friend and had always showed up in their presence along with their parents. I had never had the chance to stay alone with the Chinese children before the study. This made some usually eloquent children intimidated and reticent when I talked to them. Secondly, with the second-generation US-born children, there were additional difficulties. Most of the children I interviewed were having the American school life that I was not too familiar with, whereas I was from the Chinese educational background that the children were not familiar with. Most of the children preferred to use English in the interview, but my Chinese-accented English was different in style from the American English spoken by the children. As a result, I initially felt a sense of distance from the children. The situation might have been different for a US-born native-English-speaking researcher of Chinese descent who shares similar background with these second-generation children. However, one advantage I had was my Chinese language skills, skills that were essential to my study on Chinese heritage language maintenance. My mother tongue Chinese and my China background also made possible a warm co-ethnic relationship with the first-generation parents, who greatly helped me in building trust with their child. As I went along in the interviews, I became more and more experienced in understanding and using children’s language, and was able to handle pretty well with the child interviews. All in all, it can be said that my Chinese background, my participation in the Chinese communities and my bilingual status facilitated my approach to both the Chinese parents and the children. SUBJECTIVITY The nature of ethnographic research is subjective. “The investigator and the objects of investigation are interactively linked so that the

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‘findings’ are ‘literally created’ as the investigation proceeds” (italics in original, Guba & Lincoln 1994: 11). The ethnographer as a research instrument is never neutral. Rather, subjectivity and bias are inevitable. Jansen & Peshkin (1992:717) regard subjectivity as “unavoidably present in social research.” A researcher’s subjectivity operates during the entire research process. It influences the researcher-researched relationship, the researcher’s awareness of her/his subjectivity, and the researcher’s description, interpretation, and presentation of data (Li 2002). In my study, I researched two groups of Chinese families in Philadelphia: the Mandarin-speaking academic families and the Fujianese-speaking labor families, all of whom are from Mainland China. The purpose of the study is to explore these Chinese families’ experiences with heritage language maintenance and acculturation in the US. As such, this study is not seeking to achieve “scientific truth” or “objectivity”. Rather, it aims to provide a “situated understanding” of the Chinese immigrant families’ struggles and dilemmas concerning heritage language transmission between the two generations from my standpoint both as an insider and as a researcher. It is hoped that the results of the study can help promote better understanding of the particular language and cultural issues facing these immigrant children and families in the US. Given my personal status, I share similarities with many of the first-generation Mandarin parents I studied. I was admitted to the US on an F-1/student visa to pursue a higher degree. The majority of the Mandarin parents in my study (11 out of 12) are on a similar excuse to enter the US. While the study was conducted, they were either studying as graduate students in universities like me, or had graduated and begun their careers in Philadelphia. Having been educated in Mainland China until the graduate school, the Mandarin parents are culturally identifiable by the Confucian beliefs and the post-Mao Communist ideology. With similar educational and cultural background, I also share the same language with the academic parents, Mandarin, although spoken with different accents. With the Fujianese parents, I was not a complete “insider” since I was not a townsman to the Fujianese and did not speak their hometown language. However, I could identity with them as a fellow countryman from Mainland China and as a newcomer in the US. My understanding of the Fujianese families was strengthened by my direct involvements

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and participant observations in the Chinatown activities, though at the same time colored by my own visions of the world as an academic Chinese. The common bond that I had with the Chinese immigrant parents, either the Mandarin or the Fujianese, allowed me to study them. Yet on the other hand, my understanding of the Chinese families in general and of the heritage language maintenance from the parent generation to the child generation in particular was influenced by my strong identification with the first-generation parents. In other words, I empathized with the Chinese parents in that Chinese as a heritage language is important to our lives, our identities and our sense of beings. Thus my subjectivity could introduce a potential bias in that I may be especially sympathetic to the parents’ beliefs about how children should be educated and put more emphasis on the parents’ perspective in my discussion of heritage language maintenance. Moreover, my own experience in language shift and acculturation also affected my interpretation of what I saw in the fieldwork and led to a researcher’s bias in presenting the findings. The subjectivity of the Chinese parents and children is also an inevitable factor in my study. One measure of the degree of language maintenance is proficiency in the heritage language. For this purpose, the parents and children were both asked to give self-reports of their proficiency in English and Chinese. However, parents’ and children’s self-reported language proficiency and behavior in different situations might not be consistent with their actual language proficiency and behavior. Although I used the observational data as a triangulation, reliability cannot be guaranteed. The investigation of parents’ language attitudes and language maintenance efforts was also largely based on their reports of what they thought and what they had done concerning heritage language maintenance. In general, it is tempting for the immigrant parents to emphasize orally their heritage language and culture. Given my co-ethnicity, the Chinese parents might feel compelled to report to me their attachment to the heritage language and ethnic identity. However, in face of the acculturation pressures in real life, the parents might not be able to carry out what they said in their actual behavior.

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RESEARCH SITES: TWO CHINESE COMMUNITIES IN PHILADELPHIA In my study, I participated in two important Chinese communities in Philadelphia, the academic community in the University City and the surrounding suburban areas and the church community in Chinatown. These two communities are vastly different, but representative of two significant subgroups of the Chinese first-generation immigrant population in the US. To reiterate, University City residents are mostly well-educated university students or professionals working in high-tech companies (the so-called “Uptown Chinese”), while Chinatown residents are typically manual laborers with little formal education who work either in restaurants or garment factories (“Downtown Chinese”). My interview participants are from these two communities. PHILADELPHIA CHINATOWN Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love”, is the fifth largest city in the US with the total population of 1,448,394 (US Census 2000). It is nationally recognized as the birthplace of the United States. The Declaration of Independence was signed and created in Philadelphia and this is reflected in many of the city's attractions and buildings. Almost stretching from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill River, downtown Philadelphia has several notable and interesting districts that harbor some of the country's most treasured historical sights, such as Independence Hall, Liberty Bell, Christ Church, Carpenters’ Hall and Powel House, the Museum of American Art and the ancient Reading Terminal Market. Philadelphia’s Chinatown, which is a home for many Fujianese immigrants, is conveniently located at downtown Philadelphia and borders the Center City in the south where a swathe of restaurants and shops are found. Philadelphia Chinatown has existed for several generations. On the wall of one of the most famous Chinese restaurants in Philadelphia Chinatown is inscribed a little history of the Chinatown: “Since the first Chinese laundry shop opened on Arch Street in 1929, the nowadays Chinatown area attracted more and more Chinese to settle in and start their businesses. Gradually it developed into Chinatown 8.” 8 The original words were written in Chinese. The translation was done by the author.

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Philadelphia Chinatown today covers a 5-block area between Arch Street and Vine Street in the north-south direction, and a 3-block area between 11th and 8th in the west-east direction, with a huge Friendship Gate (with “Philadelphia Chinatown” written in Chinese on it) standing on Arch Street marking the start of its boundary. The buildings in Chinatown typically host small businesses on the first floor, the most common of which are restaurants and food shops serving Chinese food. Residents, usually owners of the businesses and their tenants, occupy the second floor and up. Therefore, Chinatown is very crowded with the commercial space and residential space combined together. It can be argued that Philadelphia Chinatown in general bears the same physical characteristics of most other Chinatowns around the country, especially New York Chinatown. Inside Philadelphia Chinatown, there is a grayish, modest-looking, three-story building --- the Chinese Christian Church and Center. The church congregation typically gathers every Sunday morning, followed by an open lunch. The Sunday services are provided in three different languages: English, Mandarin and Cantonese, and each has its own time schedule. Although the original purpose of the church is to preach religious beliefs to the Chinese immigrants, they also serve important social functions. For example, it hosts a variety of community events and activities in it on important holidays. Moreover, the church opens one Pre-K class and one Kindergarten class and other after-school programs for the neighborhood children and youth all the year around. In my interview with one of the church leaders in Philadelphia Chinese Christian Church and Center, John Tan, he observed: Our church started as a Chinese social center. It was set up by Christian missionaries. It started first as a center in 1943. And we formed the church from the center a couple of years afterwards. So the church was established, … the church here didn’t get built until 1953, I believe. The importance of the center is from the history, and is still at the commitment of our church leaders. The center offers… a lot of social activities, social advance, social programs as an outreaching in the community. Again, it’s a church, but it gets out of the church, developing from the center. So the center still makes itself an important part of our church. Well, a lot of the works of the center are meeting people’s needs, but you

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Between Two Generations have to meet people’s spiritual needs when their physical needs are being met first. So that is the goal of the center. (Interview Community Leader, 12/11/03)

Because of the outreaching efforts of the center, the church in recent years has established a branch in the University City to gather the academic Chinese under its roof. The church is therefore more inclusive in its composition. It not only involves the converted Christian Chinese, but also attracts many non-Christian immigrants to its activities. The religious ties and cultural activities in the church also transcend socioeconomic and educational lines to bring the Fujianese workers and Mandarin-speaking intellectuals together. More than half of the 18 participants in my study were actively involved in the Chinese church, either as a church member or as a secular participant. I typically attended the church activities twice a week, once on Friday night and once on Sunday morning from 2003-2004. UNIVERSITY CITY Located on the west side of downtown Philadelphia, the University City District (UCD) is one of Philadelphia’s most vibrant and diverse neighborhoods. The University City boundaries are, on the east, 29th Street and the Schuylkill River; on the west, 50th Street; on the north, Spring Garden Street (to 40th Street), Powelton Avenue (to 44th Street), and Market Street; and on the south, Civic Center Boulevard, University Avenue and Woodland Avenue. The five colleges and universities located here earned the area the "University City" name. They are University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College, and Lincoln University Urban Center. These colleges and universities lend University City its intellectual and international flavor. The area becomes a hotbed of education, science, medicine and research. University City was Philadelphia's first suburb, yet today the dynamic community is home to college students, artists, and families who coexist amid world class universities, dining, nightlife and cultural offerings. The residents of University City can be described as young, highly educated, and diverse. The student-aged population represents nearly half of the neighborhood’s total population. About 40,714 students (US Census 2000) live in this area and 90% of them go to University of

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Pennsylvania and Drexel University. In addition, the area is becoming more ethnically diverse, with an estimated 7% increase in the minority population since 2000. Among the 46,490 residents in the University City, 39% are African Americans, 14% are Asian Americans and 42% Caucasions (US Census 2000). Home to five universities and colleges, the share of University City residents who have a bachelor's degree or higher in the University City is almost 40%, which is 20% higher than the city. With the influx of Chinese graduate students from Mainland China to world-renowned American universities after the 1990s, the Chinese academic community in Philadelphia has been formed surrounding the University City from 30th Street to 50th Street and extending to nearby suburbs around the city. Various associations and organizations were formed by the Chinese scholars and professionals, such as the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations at Penn (CSSAP), the Peking University Philadelphia Alumni (PUPA), the Chinese Organization of Economics and Business, and the Chinese Pharmaceutical Associations (CPA) etc. They organize interesting activities and events that appeal to the taste of the academic Chinese, such as immigration seminars, movie shows, barbecues, site visits and academic forums. While the study was conducted, I lived on 42nd Street at University City and was a graduate student attending University of Pennsylvania. I participated actively and extensively in the events and activities that were available. 12 families in my study were from this academic community. The Chinese academics do not confine their activities to the University City Districts though. Typically the Chinese students and scholars go across the Schuylkill River to Chinatown at downtown Philadelphia on weekends. They rely on the Chinatown shops for ethnic food and are important customers to the Chinatown restaurants. Many of the academics also attend the Chinese church activities and the Chinatown parades on important traditional holidays. So the two Chinese communities are linked in a sense, although each remains distinct with its own particular characteristics.

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DATA COLLECTION AND DATA ANALYSIS PARTICIPANTS 18 Chinese immigrant families in Greater Philadelphia area participated in the study from July to December 2003. They were largely selected from two important Chinese communities in Philadelphia, University City (including suburbs), and Chinatown. Regardless of their educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, the Chinese parents are invariably first-generation immigrants; in other words, they all grew up in China and came to the US after they entered adulthood. The children were either born in the US or came to the US at an early age to attend US primary schools. I define them as “second-generation Chinese children.” More information about the children and parents participating in the study is included in Table 9 and Table 10. In addition to the Chinese parents and children, several community teachers and leaders were also interviewed as opportunity showed. Although the study focused on the family as the immediate environment where heritage language maintenance occurs, my field work in the local Chinese communities showed that the immigrant community plays an important role in transmitting the heritage language to the next generation. As a result, I expressed the intention to interview people in the community who might be informative to my study. Some of the parents helped me to connect with the community leaders, while my personal network at the Chinese school and the Chinese church also enabled me to have fruitful talk with the community teachers. In the end, after obtaining their consent, I interviewed one Chinese church leader, two church teachers and one Chinese school teacher who also worked as a bilingual teacher in a public School in Philadelphia.

Table 9: Summary of Child Participants

1

Lulu

F

10 (5th)

Length of Stay (Years) Native

2 3

Tracy Naning

F F

7 (1st) 7 (1st)

2 Native

Nancy

F

8 (3rd)

Native

John

M

7 (2nd)

Native

Mandarin Mandarin Mandarin/Engli sh Mandarin

F

th

7

Fujianese

th

No.

4 5 6

Child9

Min

Gen der

Age (grade)

13 (7 )

Dominant Home Language Mandarin

7 8

Long Nina

M F

14 (8 ) 11 (6th)

4 Native

Fujianese Mandarin

9 10

Leizhao Donna

M F

8(3rd) 8 (2nd)

Native 2

Mandarin Mandarin

11 12 13

William Maya

M F

10 (5th) 13 (8th)

Native 4

Fujianese Fujianese

Alice

F

6 (1st)

3

Mandarin

rd

14

Mary

F

8 (3 )

6

Mandarin

15 16 17

Caifeng Yigang

F M

7 (2nd) 10 (5th)

Native 3

Fujianese Fujianese

Xiaoyan

F

14 (7th)

4

Mandarin

Native

Mandarin

18

Vicky

F

st

6 (1 )

9

The children’s names are all pseudonyms. Some children have both a Chinese name and an English name. The creation of the pseudonyms is based on their more commonly used real names, either in Chinese or in English.

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Table 10: Summary of Parent Participants Education

Area

Language

UC UC

Mandarin Mandarin

7

Master Doctor Master Master

Suburb

Mandarin

Nancy’s Mother

14

Master

UC

Mandarin

5 6

John’s Mother Min’s Mother

12 7

Suburb Chinatown

Mandarin Fujianese

7

Long’s Father

12

Chinatown

Fujianese

8

Nina’s Mother

13

Master Primary School Middle School Doctor

Suburb

Mandarin

9

Leizhao’s Father

13

Master

UC

Mandarin

10

Donna’s Mother

2

UC

Mandarin

11

14

Chinatown

Fujianese

12

William’s Mother Maya’s Father

15

Chinatown

Fujianese

13

Alice’s Mother

3

Vocational School Middle School Middle School Associate

UC

Mandarin

14

Mary’s Mother

5

Master

Suburb

Mandarin

15

Caifeng’s Mother Yigang’s Mother

11

Chinatown

Fujianese

Chinatown

Fujianese

Xiaoyan’s Mother/Father Vicky’s Mother

2

Middle School Primary School Doctor

UC

Mandarin

5

Master

Suburb

Mandarin

No

Parent

1 2 3

Lulu’s Mother Tracy’s Father/Mother Naning’s Mother

4

16 17 18

Years of Stay 13 5

3

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METHODS PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION Ethnographic interviews and participant observations are the major data collection methods used. Participant observation largely took place in the two Chinese communities where I was an active member. In fact, participant observation was an ongoing activity throughout the five years of my living among the Chinese immigrant communities in Philadelphia. However, after my research goals were clarified and my fieldwork officially started in July 2003, I focused my observations on heritage language transmission and language use within the Chinese communities. To achieve that purpose, I made use of various opportunities for observations. For example, I observed children’s heritage language learning when I taught Chinese in the Chinese school on Saturday mornings. Since I volunteered to help in children’s Sunday School in the Chinese church at Chinatown, I also observed children’s language use among co-ethnic peers. In addition, with the help from my colleagues at Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, I had opportunities to sit in classrooms at two public schools for two months in Fall 2003, one in the University City and one close to Chinatown. More than half of the children participants in my study attended these two schools. So I was able to observe their interactions and language use with children from other backgrounds in public schools. During the observations, my role was the active-member-researcher (Adler & Adler 1994). That is, I participated in the activities and committed to the members’ values and goals, but at the same time I assumed the responsibilities of being a researcher. I usually jogged down notes on my notebook on the spot and then input the observation field notes into the computer after I went home. Sometimes I wrote reflective and thoughtful questions and memos for future observation and interview guides. The field notes and memos not only recorded things and ideas that emerged from my observations, but also oriented me towards questions/observations in the follow-up activities. Participant observations in the different community settings provided me with an in-depth knowledge of the Chinese families participating in my study.

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INTERVIEW An important method to obtain data in my study is through ethnographic interviews. Interviewing is a subtle art. If used effectively, it can help the researcher obtain the insiders’ point of view from the researched and build rapport and trust with them. However, interviewing often creates asymmetrical power relations between the researcher and the researched. That is, the researcher asks questions and the researched answers them. The former is the authority who is studying the latter, while the latter is open to the scrutiny and questioning of the former. The relationship between the researched and the researcher is seldom equal. How the researched sees the researcher influences the access to the researched, the answers they provide and the manners in which they provide the answers. Since I often met the participant families in various community activities, informal or conversational interviewing was ongoing throughout the data collection process. Through informal talks and continuous dialogues in the natural settings, I had obtained important information on the participant families about their daily routines and life histories before the formal interview began. The variety of kinds of talk with the participants also facilitated our research relationships in the formal interview. In the formal interviews, I talked about my research purpose in the beginning and asked for the parents’ and children’s voluntary agreement in the research. By doing so, the participants gained more power in the interview, understood more about what I was doing and became more active in my research. To reach out to the participants and to ease the unequal power, I took advantage of my bilingual skills and conducted the interviews either in Chinese (Mandarin) or English, depending on the participants’ preferences. Most of the parents reported that they were more comfortable speaking Mandarin than speaking English. According to some participants, speaking Mandarin gave them a sense of familiarity and closeness, and allowed them a wider space to express themselves freely. So the parent interviews were conducted primarily in Mandarin, although some bilingual parents used mixed English and Chinese. It is to be noted that the Fujianese parents speak Mandarin as a second language and not without difficulty. While their proficiency in spoken Mandarin was enough for me to understand, their vocabulary was usually limited. Interviews with the children were more often in English because most of the second-generation children

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selected English as their interview language. Only two China-born newcomer children used Chinese during the interview. In general, I found the Fujianese parents were quite reserved in the formal interview. Since they were not proficient in Mandarin, they generally appeared apologetic and shy. They also viewed me as a teacher figure in the interview and scolded their children for not being able to answer my questions well. On the other hand, interviews with the Mandarin families went quite smoothly after I explained my research purpose. Most of the academic parents showed understanding and some even strong interest in my research. So they were rather talkative and were able to provide me with their thoughts and ideas openly during the interviews. I conducted interviews with the Chinese parents and children in a variety of settings, such as participants’ homes, children’s schools, Chinese schools, my home, and other public places, such as restaurants, churches, and bookstores. Most of the participants selected the interview site that was convenient for them. Some of them wanted me to go to their homes, which allowed me to have a glimpse of their home environment and what language was being used in their home setting. In most cases, the mother of the family was interviewed since they were generally available and more responsive to my interview request. A few of the younger children (Tracy, Vicky) were interviewed with the parents staying at hand, while most others were interviewed separately without the presence of their parents. Depending on the informants’ schedule, parent and child interviews took place either immediately one after the other on the same day or with a few days elapsed. The interview process was semi-structured. An interview protocol was prepared, but during the interview I tried as much as possible to follow up on the participants’ thoughts and make the interview flow naturally. Generally, the parent interview lasted from 1 hour to 2 hours, whereas the child interview was typically shorter, from 20 minutes to 40 minutes. After the interview, I presented the child (sometimes the parent) with a small gift (a checkered chess) to show my appreciation for the cooperation of their family. The interviews were all audio-taped, and later transcribed and translated by myself. The translation was done with the aim to be as accurate and faithful as possible to the original discourse. In presenting the interview data in the following chapters, speech translated from Chinese appears in italics, while any words originally said in English appear in regular typeface.

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DATA ANALYSIS Data management and analysis are an art as well as a science. Huberman & Miles (1992, 1994) advise that to ensure high-quality and accessible data, it is important to process the data at an early stage. In my ethnography, data analysis was a continuous and developmental process that was parallel with data collection. I used coding and thematic analysis as my major analysis methods. I first coded the interview and fieldwork entries paragraph by paragraph broadly and descriptively across the whole data. In some cases, I attached more than one code to a single paragraph. After the primary coding, I continued to read through the data to refine and standardize the codes in order to find possible themes. Similar events, activities, beliefs and experiences were grouped together under one theme. In doing so, the whole range of data was reduced to a smaller number of codes that represent larger themes. I then examined the themes and further clustered them into different domains. Three domains emerged in the process: language preference, cultural identity, and social network. Finally, the themes in each domain were organized and interpreted in analytical and logical ways to permit the drawing of possible conclusions and hypothesis. As the primitive conclusions unfolded themselves, I brought them back to the field and asked for the participants’ opinions. Through member check with the participants, mostly with the Chinese parents, I sought to verify the conclusions by collecting more evidence or refute them by finding alternative explanations.

ETHICAL ISSUES Prior to the interview, an IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval for the study was granted by the Office of Regulatory Affairs, University of Pennsylvania. When the interview was conducted, I provided a written copy of the consent form (see Appendix 2) in both Chinese and English to each participant family. Before the interview, I asked each parent participant and child participant to read the consent form and sign it. I also informed the participants orally of the purpose of my study, tasks to be performed, possible inconveniences, and their participant rights to withdraw from the study at any time. In the case of the younger children, I explained my purpose in simple words, sometimes with the help of their parents, to help them understand what an interview was like and why I wanted to do it.

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Ethically, while I was able to obtain informed, voluntary consent from the participants, my greatest concern was to protect the confidentiality of the parents, children, as well as the community teachers and leaders involved. Since I worked with a small sample of 18 Chinese families, pseudonyms were used throughout the study to ensure the anonymity of the participants. I chose names to reflect the authenticity of the original names. Some parents keep using typical Chinese names for themselves and their children in the US, others have adopted English names, whereas still others have two names, one in Chinese and in English. To avoid confusion in name referral, I created names to imitate their most commonly used names. I also tried to obscure identifiable features of parents, children, and community members to the best of my ability so that experiences, reports or opinions could not be attributed to specific individuals or organizations. This is a particularly important issue to the disadvantaged first-generation Chinese immigrants, such as the undocumented Fujianese. Generally the first-generation Chinese are cautious in their daily behavior in the new country. Many of them have not obtained permanent residency in the US. Several families refused my interview invitation simply by saying that they would rather not get involved in anything “potentially” harmful to them. Therefore, I paid special attention to protect my participants from possible identification. After the research methods for the study have been presented, the following chapters will turn to discussions of the major findings from my ethnographic fieldwork, including both interviews and observations. In the next chapter, I will examine the Chinese parents’ bilingual status and their second-generation children’s experiences with English acquisition and heritage language learning.

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CHAPTER FOUR

ENCOUNTERING TWO LANGUAGES: VARIED BILINGUALISM

Bilingualism is a valuable gift: all children should be given the opportunity to develop competence in bilingualism to the fullest extent possible, and as a group, language minority students have special access to this gift. -----Hakuta (1992: 2) Immigrant families from linguistically different backgrounds usually develop bilingualism after they arrive in the host country. But the extent of bilingual abilities can vary greatly from one ethnic group to another and from one generation to the next. This has to do with the complicated historical, social and cultural circumstances the immigrant families are placed in. In this chapter, the linguistic status among the Chinese families in my study will be discussed. What language issues are being faced by the Chinese parents and their children? What is the home language in the Chinese families? The discussion in this chapter will start with an examination of Chinese immigrant parents’ bilingual proficiency. To what extent are the Chinese parents bilingual? Which language is the primary communication language to the parents? After this, I turn to the second-generation Chinese children and explore how they acquire English, what happens to their mother tongue in the English acquisition process, what is the language of preference to the children and to what extent the heritage language is maintained in them. It is to be noted that in examining bilingualism and heritage language maintenance within Chinese families, this chapter, like the following ones, will investigate the Chinese parents as well as their second-generation children. Such a comprehensive intergenerational 69

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approach is illuminating because there often exists a large discrepancy between parents’ linguistic status and children’s language preference. Different degrees of language shift and language maintenance between parents and children are generally considered as the root for generational conflicts in immigrant families. Moreover, parents’ language status usually has important influence on their children, both in terms of their language ideology and language behavior. Given these considerations, the Chinese parents’ and children’s bilingual skills are discussed side by side in this chapter to provide a holistic picture of the language issues faced by the Chinese families.

PARENTS’ BILINGUAL PROFICIENCY As Table 10 shows, all of the parent participants in this study are first-generation immigrants from Mainland China with Chinese (Mandarin and Fujianese) being their mother tongue. Given such a background, most of the parents regard Chinese (either Mandarin or Fujianese) as the language that they feel most comfortable with and that comes most naturally to them. But their English proficiency varies greatly. A couple of the Mandarin-speaking parents claim that they are fluent in English and that they feel almost equally comfortable speaking English as speaking Chinese. At the other extreme, nearly all of the Fujianese parents are at a minimum to zero level of English ability and can barely conduct a conversation in English. However, most of the Mandarin-speaking parents fall into the middle category, that is, they have reached a certain level of English proficiency that allows them to handle everyday affairs without external help; yet they still regard English as their second language and are not able to speak it fluently or without difficulty. The different levels of English proficiency among the Mandarin parents and the Fujianese parents are closely related to the huge differences in their educational background and socioeconomic status. Therefore, the examination of the two groups’ language status as well as the factors behind it will be dealt with separately. MANDARIN PARENTS: RELEARNING ENGLISH AS A COMUNICATION LANGUAGE Most Mandarin-speaking parents came to the US with a higher educational background, usually with a bachelor’s degree or at least an

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associate degree obtained in China. Some of them came to the US to study for higher degrees; others came as spouses of higher-degree-seeking husbands or wives. Given the education-motivated immigration background, the majority of these parents have received systematic English learning as a foreign language in China. However, due to the absence of an English-speaking environment in the home country, they still expressed powerlessness and inadequacy with the new language in their initial days in the US. Most noticeably, they reported that learning English in China focused only on the reading, writing and grammar parts, while their spoken English severely lagged behind. For example, John’s mother said: We started learning English in middle school and continued through the first two years of college. When we came to graduate school, we even had American teachers to teach us English in China. That is to say, my English reading and writing was good. But in listening and speaking, … after I first came here, I couldn’t communicate with them. I often said: “Oh, what I learned was not like this, why do they speak like this? This is not correct!10” (Interview 5, 10/25/03) John’s mother described the unbalanced development in her oral and written English abilities before immigration. To a certain extent, this imbalance represents many first-generation Chinese parents’ bilingual status at their initial entry into the US. On the one hand, such a situation poses a serious challenge to the English teaching practices in China and other non-English-speaking countries, that is, how they should teach spoken English in a foreign language environment. On the other hand, more relevant to our understanding of the Chinese immigrants in question, we learn that the Chinese parents, although highly educated, were nonetheless put at a linguistic disadvantage by the lack of oral English ability in the host country. Although they could read and write English up to an advanced level, their English communication skills were so limited in the beginning that it exposed 10 This quote is in italics to indicate that the original interview was conducted in Chinese and translated by the author. Interview quotes originally in English appear in regular fonts. This distinction applies to all the interview quotes throughout the book.

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their newcomer and “foreigner” status immediately. Many parents reported that they tended to use the written form of the English language as they spoke, the way they were taught in China. Often times, what they said did not make sense to the native speakers because they either used a wrong word or a formal word rarely used in colloquial English. In receiving messages from the English-speaking natives, the Chinese parents were also not accustomed to the American style of expression. John’s mother, for example, complained that the Americans do not speak the correct language and what they speak is different from what she learned from books. Xiaoyan’s mother also distinguished between formal English and colloquial English: Like the formal language, it seems I have no problem with understanding that, but when the young people or students speak, they speak very fast. I just do not know what they are talking about. Especially in slangs or dialects they use, we couldn’t understand (Interview 17, 12/20/03). Since it is the communication function of the English language rather than the reading and writing proficiency that matters most in immigrants’ initial adjustment, almost all the first-generation Chinese parents, regardless of their educational background, acknowledged language barriers in the beginning. The limitation in spoken English often frustrated them and aggravated their sense of inadequacy in the new environment. Naning’s mother said: I didn’t realize that the language gap could be so huge all at once. When we first came to the US, it was really difficult. Although I learned English in college in China, it was different from using it every day. English had no stimuli to me in the beginning. When others called me, I would have no response. When they spoke something to me, it wouldn’t get into my mind and I had no reaction. At the time maybe only “yes” and “no” had stimuli to me. So even the very simple things I couldn’t understand, I really couldn’t understand. They had no stimuli to me. Just that kind of feeling. (laughing) You see, my life was terrible. I had been working for a couple of years in China before I came to the US. It had been all very comfortable. You see, everything

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was good, everything was under control. But all of a sudden, I felt I could do nothing myself. Because of the language barrier, you simply couldn’t do anything in the new country. (Interview 3, 09/28/03) Due to their insufficient oral English skills, many Chinese immigrants felt that they were suddenly deprived of the most important and most fundamental ability in surviving in a society---communication. This formed a sharp contrast with their pre-immigration middle class status in the home country and contributed to their uneasiness as a new immigrant in the US. However, having had good educational background and systematic language training in the home country, most Mandarin-speaking parents in my study could overcome the initial language barriers and gradually come to use the host language more fluently and skillfully: “Little by little, I started to accept their usage. It has been more than 10 years, and my listening and speaking have improved” (Interview 5, 10/25/03). With good foundations in English reading and writing, some Chinese parents improved their oral English simply by interacting with the Americans and using English on a daily basis. Once they picked up idiomatic phrases and got used to the slang, they became more confident in communication. Other parents whose English background was not as good attempted to learn English from books, TV and in many other different ways. Naning’s mother talked about her language improvement efforts: Since we will stay in the US, I knew I couldn’t be mute for ever. So I started to practice listening myself. I listened to the tape recorder. After I listened a lot, I gradually got accustomed to the language. And then I went out to take some English lessons. After about two years’ preparation, I went to graduate school to study computer. By then, I had no problem listening to the teacher. After I attended graduate school, I improved a lot in speaking and listening. I got in touch with more native speakers. Since the teachers were all Americans, I couldn’t use Chinese. So quickly I could catch up, and I feel okay now. (Interview 3, 09/28/03)

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This narrative provides us with a picture of the English-learning or re-learning process that many Chinese immigrants commonly experienced in the US. As we can see, the Chinese parents consciously seek to brush up their English after they arrive in the new land and they learn English through a variety of channels, such as going to English classes, watching TV, listening to tapes at home, and attending graduate programs etc. Still other parents learned to change their communication style to adjust to the new linguistic and cultural environment. As Nancy’s mother talked about herself, In the past, I had to think and speak several times in my mind before I could speak out. Now I can speak out directly because I have learned the American way of expressing myself. Previously, I would think it was very impolite to be straightforward, I thought it was not good. But now I think being straightforward is sometimes very good, if you can be politely straightforward. (Interview 4, 10/10/03) Communication is sometimes more than the language itself. Many parents come to realize the different cultural behaviors behind using English and adjust their communication styles accordingly to achieve better results. Nancy’s mother deliberately changed her Chinese way of implicit expression and came to adopt the American way of straightforward communication. Other parents reported that they were able to learn certain non-verbal communication cues from the native speakers, the most common ones among which are shrugging shoulders and using language fillers such as “Uh-huh” and “Uh-Uh” to assist in self-expression. “I USE ENGLISH ONLY WHEN I HAVE TO”. As a result of their deliberate efforts to improve English skills, most of the Mandarin-speaking parents acquired a high level of proficiency in English, both oral and written, after several years’ stay in the US. The achievement of bilingualism allows them to live and work in the US with much more ease than when they first arrived. Indeed, as many Chinese parents are graduate degree holders, a good number of them have made it to the “white-collar” professional class in American mainstream companies or institutions where English is the only work

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language. “After I started this job, I use English more than Chinese because five days at work from 9 to 5 I have to speak English” (Interview 3, 09/28/03). Apparently, this might seem to imply fast pace of language assimilation and language shift on the part of the middle-class Chinese immigrants, a case similar to other high-status immigrant groups such as Indians and Japanese. Their language of origin could also be predicted to lose its importance in the immigrants’ life as they participate more and more in the mainstream society. Nonetheless, the first-generation Chinese parents in my study pointed out that although their English skills have improved dramatically, English remains a second language to them and they are not able to achieve native fluency and proficiency. For example, they are concerned that they have strong Chinese accents and others might not be able to understand them very well; they have to think when they speak English and their English is not fluent enough to allow them to communicate freely; they can’t express themselves as accurately in English as in Chinese, etc. As Mary’s mother said, “I can use English in everyday conversation, but when we get to talk more deeply, I will feel restricted by my English vocabulary and expression” (Interview 14, 12/07/03). Given the limitations in using English, many Chinese parents still consider language ability as an important factor in their life and work in the US. A typical manifestation of this is that they have a tendency to avoid situations where a high command of the English language is required. A great portion of the well-educated parents in my study are engaged in science or engineering jobs that do not require strong communication skills. Nina’s mother gave an example that further illustrates how language could interfere with the Chinese parents’ decision-making in everyday life. We once held a block party within our block of seven or eight families. At the time we just moved to that place. I was very willing to contribute something. I would like to get involved. So I asked them what I could do. They gave me a list of choices, bringing food, doing cleaning, communication and outreaching, etc… I said I could bring food or do cleaning, but as to communication and outreaching, that was not my job. So whenever language is involved, I will refuse. You see? (Interview 11/16/03)

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From this instance, we can see that even after the Chinese parents have achieved a functional command of English, they inwardly feel a strong sense of inadequacy and diffidence in using it. The restriction of English makes them turn back to their first language in many situations. “When I use English, I usually say what I have to say, either at work or in social time. But when I use Chinese, I can say anything I want to say” (Interview 3, 09/28/03). So a majority of the Chinese parents still regard the mother tongue Chinese as their dominant language, the language they feel most comfortable with. Among the participants in the study, all the first-generation Chinese parents, except Nancy’s mother who speaks English to her Jewish fiancé at home, asserted that their home language is Chinese. They invariably use Chinese (different varieties though) with their family and children. Outside home, the bilingual parents also prefer using Chinese as their daily communication language when the situation allows. Naning’s mother said: “I use English only when I have to, for example, with non-Chinese.” (Interview 3, 09/28/03) From their language preference and language use pattern, it can be seen that most first-generation Mandarin-speaking Chinese immigrants have not experienced language shift in its truest sense. Although they no longer think English constitutes a barrier to their life and work in the US and some may even use English more than Chinese in their daily life, they nonetheless prefer using Chinese to English. The heritage language still occupies a vital and important role in the Mandarin-speaking Chinese parents’ life. FUJIANESE PARENTS: “WE CHINESE DO NOT KNOW ENGLISH”. If the Mandarin-speaking Chinese parents haven’t acquired full bilingualism, the situation of the group of Fujianese parents is even worse. My interviews with the Fujianese parents indicate that they largely remain monolingual in their original language (Fujianese) even after they have been in the US for a lengthy period of time. Being placed in the English-dominant language society does not automatically generate language learning. Sociolinguists have long demonstrated that second language acquisition is a complex issue, often conditioned by the specific socioeconomic, cultural and structural factors that the language minority individuals are situated in. Unlike their Mandarin-speaking counterparts who possess a large amount of human capital that helps them change from monolinguals to functional

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bilinguals in the host country, the Fujianese come from a different background that is not conducive to such a transformation. Maya’s father voiced out his dilemma in learning English: My English is no good. I only studied up to sixth grade in China. I can only speak one or two sentences in English. I am too old to learn now. Although I sometimes listen to the tapes and learn a little bit, how can you expect me to remember the difficult and complicated words all at once? Moreover, I work 6 days a week from morning till midnight in the Chinese restaurants. I use all my time working in the kitchen, with other Fujianese workers. We speak Fujianese among ourselves. We do not even see our boss. We do not go out to see the guests either. (Interview 12, 11/25/03) Maya’s father had been in the US for 12 years, but his English remains at “one or two sentences”, as he himself said. Although he complained that he was too old to learn, he was actually not older than other Mandarin-speaking parents I mentioned above in biological age (most of the Chinese parents in my study range from 30 to 40 years old. Please refer to Table 10 in Chapter 3, p.61). The true difficulty that prevented him from learning English, I argue, lies in his pre-immigration educational background and post-immigration occupational status. Like most other Fujianese immigrants, Maya’s father came from a rural village in Fujian Province, China and only completed primary school education before he came to the US. Having no foundation of English at all, as the well-educated Mandarin-speaking parents usually do, he found it hard to learn the language by himself as an adult. More importantly, survival pressures and economic constraints in the host country forced him to work for extremely long hours in the kitchen where no interaction with English-speaking people is available. “We Chinese do not know English. In the US, we can only live among Chinese. It’s no good if we go out to the American world.” (Interview 12, 11/25/03) Having no language skills or other human capital, the Fujianese parents confined themselves to Chinatown, living and working in the ethnic enclave, and having very little contact with the mainstream world. This in turn leads to increasing dependence on the home language and perpetual isolation. Such a settlement pattern, plus the lack of educational preparation,

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makes learning English an almost impossible task for the Fujianese immigrants. Structural barriers form a vicious cycle with the consequence that the Fujianese continue to have minimum English proficiency in spite of their extended length of stay in the US. All in all, it can be said that the first-generation Chinese parents’ bilingual status is not uniform or static. For some people, bilingual proficiency improves with increasing time spent in the US, whereas for others it stays the same. Bilingual ability also varies greatly from individual to individual, ranging on a spectrum from minimum English ability to a very high level of bilingualism. The Fujianese parents are not privileged to have the necessary resources, time and educational background to develop bilingualism. They largely remain monolingual in their home dialect. On the other hand, the Mandarin-speaking Chinese parents strived to acquire a high level of English proficiency, especially in their spoken abilities, after they arrived in the new land. To a certain extent, they have succeeded in doing so by taking advantage of the human capital resources they brought over to the US, i.e., their previous education and language learning in China. While they make great headway in English in the new land, it is to be noted that their language shift is not complete. There exist limitations in their using English to express themselves, which reflects their first-generation immigrant status and the fact that they learn English as a second language as adults. In a word, although some Chinese parents have achieved functional bilingualism, their bilingualism is strongly tilted to the heritage language: Chinese remains their preferred communication language.

CHILDREN’S LANGUAGE STRUGGLES The analysis of the parents’ language status above shows that the Chinese parents have a clear preference for Chinese (either Mandarin or Fujianese) and they use it as their home language. My interview with the Chinese children confirms that they use Chinese at home, either Mandarin or Fujianese, with their parents. This has an important implication for the second-generation children’s language socialization. That is, having a home language different from English results in many children’s language minority status or being termed “English language learners” when they go to school. All of the children in my study started with Chinese as their first language and had very little contact

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with English in the home environment before they go to school. The learning of English to most Chinese children occurred outside home. Some children were exposed to English at an early age by attending mainstream daycare centers or pre-schools. Presumably, they might have picked up English when they reached public school age. Other children who were foreign born or did not have these experiences had to deal with the language problem in the beginning of their formal schooling. INITIAL ENCOUNTER WITH ENGLISH: A PAINFUL EXPERIENCE Generally speaking, the younger the children are, the more receptive they are to a second language. However, regardless of the age at which the Chinese children in my study came into contact with English and regardless of what home language background they came from, either Mandarin or Fujianese, they all experienced a transitional period in the beginning of their confrontation with the new language. The following is a conversation I had with an eight-year-old girl Nancy, in which she talked about her English-learning experience. DZ 11 : Nancy:

When did you start learning English? Do you remember? Yes. When I was in pre-school, I was like crying and shouting because I do not know what…what they are doing, because my mother just dumped me and left me there (unintelligible), and I am crying, and I am like saying in Chinese: Why are you dropping me down because they always teased me? They did not understand, but they keep talking in the strange language which is English. And I am like, Ahhh…keep on talking in Chinese, then I was like there…(Interview 4b12, 10/10/03)

11 In presenting the interviewer and interviewees, abbreviation of names are used when necessary. DZ refers to Donghui Zhang, the author. 12 Interview 4b refers to the No. 4 child being interviewed. The letter “b” indicates that the interviewee is a child participant.

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By the time Nancy did the interview, she was already a third-grade girl and spoke fluent English. She chose English as her interview language, which further revealed that she regarded English as her primary language. Yet the memory of being placed in an all-English environment when she knew nothing of the language at age three was still keen in her mind. Nancy’s experience is commonly shared by other Chinese second-generation children. Coming from a linguistically different family background, they all experienced difficulty learning English at the beginning. They struggled with the sudden downpour of the new language in the school setting and did not know what was happening. To make the situation worse, some second-generation children were foreign born and therefore were confronted with the challenging tasks of physical relocation, language learning and cultural adjustment all at once. The following conversation with a new immigrant couple revealed the painful experience of their 7-year-old girl---Tracy’s English learning process in her first year in the US. DZ: TF13:

So she has never been to a language class? Right. At the time when she came here, they (the school) said, kindergarteners do not go to ESL14. They just play with the children. It will be okay. DZ: But at first, did she have any language problems? TF: In fact, she did. Only she did not tell us. She also did not know how to tell us. You see, when she first came, just imagine, she did not know a word and was placed in that…that totally American environment. I think, I think she should have met with a lot of frustrations. Only she… one thing is because she had been separate from us for so long, she was not close to us and did not tell us. Second, she did not know how to express herself, I think the child she…did not quite know the words with which to express her own emotions. TM15: The child was too young. Still she was limited in expressing herself. 13 14 15

TF refers to Tracy’s father. ESL refers to English as a second language program. TM refers to Tracy’s mother.

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TF: Right. So… DZ: So she did not tell you in Chinese either? TF: Not in Chinese either. TM: But sometimes she would cry. TF: Sometimes she would cry. TM: Occasionally, that is, if one thing after another led to a series of discomforts in her, she would cry and say: ‘I do not know English. Nobody plays with me. I do not want to go to school.’ (Interview 2, 08/31/03) Tracy was raised in China by her grandparents and came to the US only two years ago to join her parents. From Tracy’s parents’ description, we notice that the school’s suggestion for the newcomer Chinese child was: “Kindergarteners do not go to ESL. Just play with the children. It will be okay.” The theoretical rationale behind this statement might be: since the children are very young, they are not suitable to learn a second language in classrooms; they can learn more quickly in interactions with other children. But based on the parents’ observation, we find that although the school expected the new children to learn English in the course of socializing with native children, what actually took place on the playground was more complex. The children who did not know the language and were strangers to the surroundings were often alienated and isolated by other children. My observation on peer interactions at the two neighborhood schools confirmed this. During recess time and lunch time, the Chinese children tended to stay alone, playing with themselves or watching other children play. Although Tracy was too young to fully understand what was happening to her, by saying “I don’t know English. Nobody plays with me. I don’t want to go to school”, she nonetheless voiced out the frustrations she went through at the beginning of her schooling in the US. While language prevents peer interactions on the playground, the linguistically different children also experience alienation in class. Without basic language skills, they do not understand the teachers’ instructions and are not familiar with the class routines. At this time, the most common thing they do is to copy others blindly. Xiaoyan’s mother recalled what her daughter experienced in the first days in an American classroom: “In the beginning she didn’t know one word. She shed tears every day when she came back home. In class, she just relied on watching, watching others what they did and then following them”

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(Interview 17, 12/20/03). Xiaoyan was already in the fourth grade when she came to the US and therefore experienced a particularly struggling time with language in the beginning. As can be imagined, the language barrier prevented her from moving ahead in all academic subjects. At the time, she was like listening to God’s words for all the classes. She couldn’t understand at all. But the good thing is that her school had ESL (English as Second Language) class. Every day, they had one hour for the foreign students to learn English. At the time she liked that class the most, because she could at least learn something in that class. For the first half of the year, she did not do other homework because she did not know how to do them. She only did ESL.” (Interview 17, 12/20/03) From these instances, we realize that language minority children’s English learning process is not as easy as we tended to think. It takes even the young children a fairly difficult time to get used to the second language in the beginning. In those bleak days, the Chinese parents make great efforts to help their children overcome the language barrier as fast as possible. Some bilingual parents in my study (such as Lulu’s parents, Mary’s parents, Xiaoyan’s parents etc) reported that although they had been used to speaking Chinese at home, they started to speak English when their children went to school. Other parents (such as William’s mother etc.) who didn’t possess adequate English skills themselves hired tutors for their children. In spite of these efforts, however, the parents of my study in general found that they eventually had to rely on the school to help their children learn English. For one thing, the children spend most of the weekday at school, while the tutoring time is rather limited, usually a couple of hours per week. For another, even the bilingual parents are not confident of their own language abilities since English is a second language to them. “We prefer her studying English at school because we believe what she could learn at school can be better than what we could teach her. Like in pronunciation, we do not speak standard English. We do not want to influence her” (Interview 2, 08/31/03). As to some Fujianese parents who do not have bilingual abilities nor the resources and money to get outside help, schools are the only channel they can resort to in helping their children learn the new language.

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LANGUAGE HELP: PAINS RELIEVED How American schools could best facilitate the language minority children’s learning process and language adjustment doesn’t have a definite answer. Depending on the school resources and language philosophy, different schools adopt different programs to help the language minority children deal with the language issue. Of the two children mentioned above, Tracy was mainstreamed in a regular class with no extra language help, while Xiaoyan underwent ESL (English as a Second Language) program that pulled her out from the regular class to learn English for one hour every day. It remains controversial as to which language program is most beneficial to the language minority children’s development, both cognitively and socioemotionally. But from the interview excerpts quoted above, we can learn that while Tracy and Xiaoyan both had a hard time with the new language, Xiaoyan did benefit a lot from the ESL class she went to at the time. “At the time she liked that class the most, because she could at least learn something in that class” (Interview 17, 12/20/03). The following talk by Alice, a 7-year-old China-born girl similar to Tracy, further proves that ESL programs or other language programs could be greatly appreciated by the English language learning children. Well, when I was in pre-K, there was a special teacher. When I cried, she helped me. Sometimes she always sat next to me, even on a trip, sat next to me, wherever I go. So the teacher, she was called Ms. Draught. And she was very nice to me. And I told my mother that she is nice to me. So then she …I keep on saying the small words of English, and then I got some big words, and then bigger words, and I got to learn English. (Interview 13b, 12/05/03) Clearly, the English learning process is such a hard-to-forget one that the first-grader Alice still remembered what happened in her pre-K. She remembered the “special teacher” and how she had helped her, although she did not even know that the teacher was her ESL help. When I compared the different situations that Alice and Tracy were placed in during the process of learning English, I noticed the huge difference that language help at school could make to their growth. Too often educators and policymakers pay more attention to whether the language minority children can succeed in learning English rather than

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how they learn it and what they experience in the course of learning it. Mainstreaming and ESL are common practices for language learners to learn English at school. Although different, they are derived from the same English-Only language policy that aims for English proficiency as soon as possible, whereas children’s home language has no place in the classroom in these two programs. When I observed in the kindergarten class sponsored by the Chinese church, however, I found the homeroom teacher Jennifer Lo used English as the primary instruction language, but spoke children’s heritage languages as aids to engage in the non-English speaking children’s attention. She said: Because if I am telling a story in English, Lisa is going to sit there with a blank stare, because she has no idea what’s going on. I feel that when I…at least in the first three months, I use a little bit of Chinese, you know, Cantonese, Mandarin and English, so Lisa knows what I am talking about. But once we get to the next year, you know, at least they have some idea of what some of the usage means in English. So then I speak more English, but I want them to know, I explain everything in English, and then I use Chinese so they know what I am saying, then I use English again. So you notice when I say something, I always say in English, Cantonese, English, Mandarin, English, English, so everybody can catch up. (Interview Community Teacher 2, 11/12/03) Speaking of her pedagogical practice, Teacher Lo mentioned that her use of children’s heritage languages in class instruction had to do with her own growing-up experiences as a language minority child. Teacher Lo grew up in an immigrant family that spoke Cantonese. Like the Chinese children she was teaching, she understood what it felt like sitting in a classroom without knowing what was going on in class. “It’s quite lonely if you are not knowing. When I came to Boston, dadadada…they were talking so fast, I had no idea what they were talking about. I can imagine what these kids are going to feel…you know it’s very difficult. So I want them to at least…even if I do not use…I do not explain everything in Mandarin or Cantonese, at least they can understand part of it.” (Interview Community Teacher 2, 11/12/03) Teacher Lo doesn’t see herself as an ESL teacher or a

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bilingual teacher. But as a homeroom teacher who teaches academic subjects, she regards the use of children’s first/heritage languages in the classroom as a legitimate assistance in their learning process rather than a hinderance. Therefore, she takes advantage of her own language skills to help the children learn in class. I believe that Teacher Lo’s bilingual or even trilingual teaching not only facilitates the linguistically different children’s initial confrontation with English, but also helps them develop a positive attitude towards their home language. In a sense, she is providing a language environment that fosters the bilingual development of the Chinese children, an issue we are going to examine in the next section. As the US public schools grow more and more diverse with an increasing number of language minority children coming in, language education is being put onto the national educational agenda. Educators and policymakers have to face the challenge of linguistic diversity and take appropriate measures to respond to it. While the “sink or swim” mainstreaming seems a shortcut way for language minority children to acquire English, my study with the Chinese children in Philadelphia shows that linguistically different children are threatened with isolation and marginalization in mainstream classrooms with no language help. Tracy’s pains and struggles in learning English call for additional language programs in public schools to serve the language minority children’s needs.

LANGUAGE SHIFT AND PREFERENCE FROM AN EARLY AGE After the initial painful period of learning English, however, most of the Chinese children in my study (from both language groups) have been able to acquire basic English listening and speaking skills by the end of one year or two. According to the teachers I talked with in the two neighborhood schools where some of my child participants went to and where I had opportunities to observe, the Chinese children in their classes did not seem to have any language problem in following class rules and in interactions with others in English. They could also catch up in learning reading, writing and literacy in English. Seeing this, the Chinese parents were relieved of their initial worries. Moreover, they were often joyfully amazed with the children’s capability to adjust to the new language in a short period of time. As Donna’s mother

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described her daughter’s progress in learning English: At first I was worried for June’s language. She did not know any word and I was afraid she couldn’t catch up. About a year later, the school held a parent-teacher conference. Her Dad went and asked the teacher: “June came to the US only a year ago. Does she have problems in class? Does she have problem communicating with you?” The teacher said: “Not at all!”Maybe the American teachers are always praising the students, always saying “good”. Anyway, the teacher said: “She has made great progress in the past year. She is fine in reading, writing, speaking, listening or whatsoever now.” I heard that children could learn a language really fast. Now I believe it. (Interview 10, 11/20/03) At the time of my interview, Donna was a 7-year-old girl in the second grade. She came to the US with her mother to join the father two years ago. Since her parents knew only little English, they had no idea of how their daughter was doing at school. When they learned from the teacher that Donna had been able to acquire English within one year, they were so surprised with joy that they even suspected the teacher was exaggerating and being over-positive. Many Chinese parents in my study expressed similar feelings about their children’s fast pace in English acquisition. However, their joy did not last long before they began a new worry, i.e., they found their children quickly shifted to English and no longer wanted to speak Chinese. A preference for English among the children was reported by parents from both home language groups, Mandarin and Fujianese. It seems that once the children have mastered English, they want to stick to it, regardless of what language and family background they come from. It is true that all the children in my study started with one variety of Chinese as their first language, but most of them came to adopt English as their dominant language by the time they stayed at school for a couple of years, with the exception of the two Fujianese children, Maya and Long, who attended bilingual programs at school. The acquisition of English can be said to be a tremendous achievement by the second-generation children. However, what is disturbing is that the English proficiency is often achieved at the expense of heritage language loss. Most noticeably, the Chinese children expressed a

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reluctance to speak Chinese, regardless of their actual speaking abilities. In my conversation with Tracy’s parents, Tracy was also present, sitting beside her parents and listening to us most of the time. However, when she heard her mother talk about which language she liked to use, Tracy jumped in: TM16: We speak Chinese all the time at home. But when speaking with her (Tracy), we sometimes use English, because she likes using English now that she has learned it. Tracy: I like speaking English. I do not like speaking Chinese. I speak English most of the time. (Interview 2, 08/31/03) A preference for English is already evident in children like Tracy who had only been immersed in the English environment for a short period of time. And the preference is concomitant with a distaste for using the heritage language. English gradually replaces Chinese as their primary language of communication in key social contexts after they go to school. This is vividly shown by the fact that the majority of Chinese children chose English as the interview language, in contrast to their parents’ language choice of Chinese. To most second-generation children, Chinese has become a language to speak only at home or on special occasions. DZ: Which language do you like to use? Lulu: English. DZ: When do you speak Chinese then? Lulu: My Dad makes me speak Chinese at home. DZ: To whom do you speak Chinese outside home? Lulu: That’s like…nobody. (Interview 1b, 07/19/03) Nancy: I speak English more because I speak English almost every day, mostly at school and every day, so that’s mostly. But every weekday when I come to my grandma, I speak Chinese. (Interview 4b, 10/10/03) The second-generation children’s language shift and preference, according to many Chinese parents, occurs swiftly and catches them at 16

TM refers to Tracy’s mother.

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a surprise, especially when it is contrasted with their language behavior before going to school. Lulu’s Mother: When she was in kindergarten, her English was pretty limited. Our family had to speak English to help her learn. We sometimes had to force her to speak English. But now we have to force her to speak Chinese. (Interview 1, 07/19/03) Xiaoyan’s Mother: When she did not know English, she was reading the Chinese novels every day. But now she no longer reads Chinese novels, she reads English novels every day. (Interview 17, 12/20/03) As I mentioned in the previous section, the Chinese children have been exposed to little English before they go to school. Foreign-born children’s contact with English is even less before they came to the US. However, after one or two years at American schools, they not only overcome the language barrier, though not without difficulty, but also show a clear inclination to treat English as their dominant language. BEHIND LANGUAGE SHIFT: “BECAUSE I DON’T WANT OTHER PEOPLE TO LAUGH AT ME”. When I pursued reasons for such widespread language preference and shift, many children pointed to the lack of corresponding development in their heritage language skills. Some children said that they were no longer comfortable with speaking Chinese because they had been used to speaking English at school. Other children argued that while their English vocabulary was increasing every day, their Chinese lagged behind and they did not know how to say many things in Chinese. Still other children complained (and some parents concurred) that the Chinese language was more difficult to learn than English. Xiaoyan’s mother thus commented on the Chinese language when comparing it with English: “Chinese as a language of characters is inherently more difficult than English, a language of letters. In Chinese, the words are difficult to write and their pronunciations are totally separate from the writing system. But in English, the writing is closely associated with the pronunciation” (Interview 17, 12/20/03).

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All these answers may contain elements of truth, yet among the various answers, Alice’s case deserves further attention. When asked why she liked speaking English, Alice said: “Because I did not want other people to laugh at me, when I was in school. When I was in kindergarten, I only knew how to speak Chinese, and other people laughed at me” (Interview 13b, 12/05/03). Once again, we are reminded of the Chinese children’s painful experience of learning English in a home-language-unfriendly environment where having a home language different from English placed them at a disadvantage in the classroom. The initial pain and isolation caused by the inability to speak English left deep impressions on some Chinese children and caused them to feel inwardly ashamed of their home language. The adaptive coping strategy many language minority children adopt as a way out is to give up the home language and switch to English as quickly as possible to avoid being a laughing stock among their English-speaking peers. Similar to Alice, Xiaoyan was also ostracized by her peers due to the language difference in the beginning. However, the discrimination incurred by language lasted even after she had been able to speak English. Xiaoyan’s mother described Xiaoyan’s dilemma: In a period after she had started to speak English, nobody treated her as somebody who was able to talk. Even if she had improved, others still regarded her as …as not good. “You are a foreigner and your language is no good.” Afterwards, there was a one-month free camp in the summer. The camp was composed of all kinds of students from different schools. My daughter said nobody knew her there nor did they know what her English was like. So she tried to talk with them and they did not find her different. Later on, we moved to Philadelphia and she transferred to this school. To a certain extent, this transfer did her a lot of good. And she made many friends in this school. (Interview 17, 12/20/03) Xiaoyan’s experience reveals that language minority children’s English deficiency in the beginning could become stigmatized and follow them through the whole period of schooling. The Chinese background won Xiaoyan the label of a “foreigner” in the first school she went to, which perpetuated itself well after she had mastered

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English and prevented her from participating as an in-group member among her classmates. Xiaoyan herself mentioned that she only started to feel at ease in the summer camp where nobody knew her background. The transfer of school eventually allowed her to make friends in the new environment. Given the out-group estrangement and sense of inferiority that a foreign home language background could bring to the language minority children, it is understandable that they are eager to hide their home language and assimilate to English as soon as possible. Based on these instances, I argue that although language shift might be a natural process in the English-dominant environment with children’s English proficiency gradually getting an upper hand of their home language skills, the language ideology of English hegemony over children’s home language, implicit at school and in mainstream American society, could accelerate their pace of shift and lead to a strong disinclination to speak the home language. Another interesting observation related to language attitudes among the second-generation children was made by Nina’s mother with regard to her two daughters. Nina and her younger sister Tina were both born in the US, but Nina grew up in the US and her younger sister Tina was raised in China by her grandparents before age 4. The common expectation would be that Tina should maintain the Chinese skills better than her sister Nina. Research has also shown that length of stay in the US negatively affects the children’s home language skills, with foreign-born or raised children having a higher level of home language skills. Contrary to these logical expectations, however, Nina’s mother found that her China-raised daughter Tina resisted Chinese more strongly than the US-raised Nina.Tina did not like to speak Chinese, even more than her sister. She speaks English most of the time and seldom uses Chinese.” The mother’s explanation for this anomaly was: Maybe Tina came from China and could only speak Chinese at first. She had a painful experience of learning English at school. She treated Chinese as something that others would laugh at. So she refused to speak Chinese even if she could in order to be like everybody else. But her elder sister grew up in a bilingual environment: Chinese at home and English at school. She picked up English easily through watching TV and going to school. She did not have a hard time socializing with other kids at school. So she was kind of used to

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speaking Chinese at home and did not feel there was anything wrong about it. (Interview 8, 11/16/03) The comparison between the two sisters who underwent different language experiences further implies that social attitudes towards the minority language in children’s surroundings, as represented by teachers’ attitudes and peer attitudes, etc, can greatly influence children’s language attitudes and language behavior. When the home-language speaking children are made conspicuous by their lack of English proficiency at the entry into American schools, a clear message of language assimilation is conveyed to them by the surroundings. As a result, the English language learners often demonstrate a stronger desire to get rid of the home language than their English-speaking counterparts. This helps account for Tina’s more complete language shift than her sister, as well as the prevalent pattern of language preference for and shift to English among other foreign-born/raised Chinese children, such as Tracy, Xiaoyan, Lulu and Alice etc. FUJIANESE CHILDREN IN BILINGUAL PROGRAMS: REVERSING LANGUAGE SHIFT An exception to this pattern of language shift and preference can be found among the Fujianese children who attend bilingual programs at school. Long and Maya are representative of this group of children. As Table 4-1 shows, Long and Maya bear many similarities with other second-generation children in the study. For example, they are foreign-born and came to the US along with their parents at a young age; before coming to the US, they had minimum exposure to English. However, they are different from the other Chinese children in language development in two different ways. First, although they had been in an American school for more than three years, they hadn’t realized complete language shift to English by the time I interviewed them. In other words, they were still learning English with Chinese their home language as help. Second, they didn’t exhibit a strong preference for English over Chinese. This can be exemplified by their choice of Chinese when talking to me in the interview. My observations in the bilingual classes also showed that they, like their classmates, used both Chinese and English every day because both languages were legitimate in class. Although they spent a large portion of school day learning English, they did have a one-hour Chinese class in the

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morning. Chinese was also a viable language in doing class discussions and home assignments in other subjects, even though the textbooks used were in English. It is arguable that the continued use of children’s ethnic language in the bilingual programs contributes to their bilingual development and slows down the pace of language shift. Although other Chinese children, especially the Fujianese children who live in Chinatown, might have opportunities to use and learn Chinese from the ethnic community or ethnic schools, their home language learning is more sporadic and unsystematic. Long and Maya are the only children in my study whose home language is developed formally at school and therefore they are the only children who haven’t demonstrated a clear preference and shift to English. From this discussion, it seems valid to conclude that although the Chinese children, regardless of foreign-born or native, start with Chinese as their first language, most of them quickly shift to English by the end of the second or even the first school year. The pattern of language shift is most obviously manifested in their clear preference for using English in most social settings. English becomes the primary, more frequently used language to most second-generation children, and Chinese is reduced to the status of “home language” or even a language seldom used. The only exception lies with the Fujianese children in the bilingual classes who use English and Chinese every day at school and outside. The reason for widespread language shift among the majority of the Chinese children who are not in bilingual classes is partly due to the lack of home language development opportunities in American schools. However, in-depth interviews with the Chinese children on their English learning experience in US schools reveals that a language hegemony favoring English over other minority languages in the larger society could play a critical role in advancing the pace of shift to English among language minority children, an issue that deserves further discussion and will be the focus of next chapter.

UNBALANCED BILINGUALISM AND BILITERACY If the children’s home language development lags behind after they go to school, to what extent do the children maintain Chinese as they acquire English? This section is an attempt to examine home language

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proficiency among the second-generation Chinese children. It is to be noted in the first place that information in this regard is obtained from various sources. Parents were asked in the interview to comment on their children’s home language skills, including understanding, speaking, reading and writing Chinese. The children were also asked to self-report their Chinese skills in the above four aspects. Participant observation in the Chinese community from July to December 2003 provided further triangulation for the reported linguistic skills with the second-generation children. In addition to these efforts, a language test carefully designed was included in the interview to the children. The test was based on a Chinese story “A Raven Looking for Water”, taken out of a second-grade Chinese textbook, to measure children’s listening, speaking and reading skills. Two pictures accompanied the story to facilitate the children’s understanding and memory of the story. During the interview, the story was first told in Chinese to the child. Then the child was asked to re-tell the story to the interviewer in Chinese to show how well he/she was able to understand and speak Chinese. After the oral test, the story written in Chinese was presented to the child for him or her to read and identify words he/she knew. Although the children were given freedom to use English in the interview, they were required to use Chinese in this part of the interview. Consistent with the qualitative nature of the study, the test was not a quantitative measure, but rather a qualitative, informative one. The purpose of the test design in addition to parents’ and children’s self-reports is to avoid possible subject bias and assure validity of the results. In general, findings indicate that all the Chinese children in my study are bilingual to a certain extent, however with a huge variation of bilingual skills among them. The majority of the children understand when they are spoken to in Chinese and some of them are fluent Chinese speakers, but most of them have low reading and writing skills, i.e., a low level of Chinese literacy. Almost all of the children, including the kindergarteners and first-graders, could understand the story told in Chinese. However, when being asked to re-tell the story in Chinese, five children were hesitant and seemed not able to do it. In the end, I allowed them to re-tell the story in English and their English version showed a good understanding of the story and a great command of English. More than half of the children mixed Chinese and English in the re-telling, showing their limited Chinese vocabulary, but a

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skillful use of Chinese mixed with English. Still a few children were able to re-tell the story fluently and accurately in Chinese without the assistance of English. However, when it comes to the reading (literacy) part of the test, the results were less encouraging. Most children could only recognize less than half of the words in the 78-word text. And it should be noticed that the story was equivalent to the second-grade reading level in China, but all the children interviewed aged above 5, with seven children in the fifth grade or higher. Therefore, the literacy level among the second-generation Chinese children does not match their listening and speaking skills. Only one child, Xiaoyan, who had received formal schooling in China up to the fourth grade, and the two children in the bilingual classes, Maya and Long, fared well in the reading test. Such unbalanced proficiency in the home language should not come as a surprise to many Chinese parents. The interview with the parents shows that they were clearly aware of their children’s unbalanced bilingual status. Their reports of the children’s mastery of Chinese and the children’s self-reports all confirm the results from the test. The following interview excerpts demonstrate the awareness on the part of Chinese parents and children. Nancy:

Well, I speak Chinese really well, know how to read it, because I…I how to write, I do not know how to words, but I know how to speak (Interview 4b, 10/10/03)

but I do not do not know write a lot of really good.

JM17: He speaks well. He speaks standard Chinese with no accent. Only he may use some individual words not properly, but in terms of communication, he is mostly no problem. In reading he is not good and in writing he is even worse. So in reading one sentence, for example, 10 words he may only know 3 or 5 words, so he still couldn’t figure out what the sentence means. DZ: Ah. Which grade is he in at the Chinese school? JM: The highest grade. He is taught by my mother. But my mother told me: ‘If you compare the highest-grade 17

JM refers to John’s mother.

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students with the students in China, they are not as good as the third graders.’ (laughing) So that is to say…in reading and writing they are no good. But they speak all right. (Interview 5, 10/25/03) From a practical point of view, it is not anomalous that the second-generation children should develop such unbalanced oral and written skills. As I mentioned before, the home language of most children in the study is Chinese. Although they favor using English over Chinese in social settings, they still communicate with their parents at home in Chinese. Thus through using the language at home, most children have been able to acquire and maintain Chinese in terms of listening and speaking. On the contrary, the reading and writing skills have to be acquired through persistent efforts and systematic learning. Moreover, the written forms of the Chinese language have no association with its pronunciation. Even though the children have a high level of oral language skills, this cannot help them in learning Chinese reading and writing. Therefore, when the children were given the text of the story that they had been told, they still did not have any clue as to what the words represented unless they had memorized the written words accurately. LIMITED BILINGUALISM WITHOUT BILITERACY The Chinese parents in my study expressed strong regret that their children couldn’t master the written form of the home language. Given the difficulties in developing biliteracy in language minority children, many parents have to accept, although reluctantly, the fact that their children’s home language becomes an oral language. In fact, with English being the official language in US society, literacy in children’s home language does not seem to have significant value from a practical lens. Instead the communication function of the home language is much more important to immigrant families than reading, writing and literacy. Following this line of argument, past research on language maintenance and bilingualism has largely focused on the speaking and listening skills of the bilingual children, much to the neglect of development in their home language literacy. However, based on a closer examination of the Chinese children’s unbalanced proficiency in oral and written home language, I argue that if the children’s good speaking and listening skills do not help them

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develop strong biliteracy, weak written skills in turn hurt their speaking fluency and vocabulary. For example, when I asked the Chinese children to comment on their oral Chinese proficiency level, younger children tended to rate themselves higher. It seems that the older the children are, the less confident they are about their Chinese. It is true that there may exist an age difference for the bilingual children in maintaining the home language as the older children usually get more involved in school and peer culture and less attached to home and parents. But the oral skills of the older children in my interviews are not necessarily more limited than those of the younger children. Still they are shy to speak their home language and are more uncertain about their bilingual abilities. DZ: How well do you speak Chinese? Lulu: Don’t know. (Interview 1b,07/19/03) DZ: How well do you speak Chinese? Nina: When I talk with my grandma who is in China over the phone, I will have to ask my mother together with me, in case when I do not know how to say it in Chinese, I can use mixed and let my mother help with the translation. (Interview 8b, 11/16/03) The above two children are in fifth and seventh grades respectively. It seemed to me that they spoke perfect Chinese, but later they explained to me that they felt more comfortable speaking English because they knew more vocabulary in English and they had age-appropriate reading and written skills in English. As they acquired more vocabulary and syntax in English, they felt their Chinese remained at a child’s level without advancing to the appropriate age-equivalent level of sophistication in reading and writing. For example, although they can handle everyday routines very well in Chinese, they can’t express their thoughts with as much depth or detail, which often requires the help of more complicated words and syntax that could only be acquired through literacy development. This makes the Chinese children reluctant to speak the home language and sometimes even feel embarrassed with the primitive “baby talk” that their home language appears to them.

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As the children get older without proper literacy development in the home language, their parents also start to realize that their communication with the children in the home language only remains at the superficial level, which hurts family cohesion and the close ties between generations. DZ: Do you think he should maintain his Chinese? LF18: Sure we think so. If he spends more time at home, his Chinese will be better. We hope his Chinese can be Ok. His speaking Chinese is good, but bad in writing. His logic of thoughts is different from mine. DZ: Do you think you have trouble to talk with him in Chinese? LF: Yes, we can’t talk deeply19. DZ: With his mother? LF: The same, not deeply. (Interview 9, 11/06/03) Leizhao’s father worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia. Therefore, it could be said that he possessed a fairly high level of bilingual skills. Nonetheless, he found it hard to reach out to his American-raised and educated child in his truest thoughts. “We can’t talk deeply. His logic of thoughts is different from mine.” The reason for this might be due to his unfamiliarity with the American way of thinking. But the language difference between the father and son prevents them from communicating with one another thoroughly and understanding each other’s thinking. The exchange of people’s inner thinking usually requires the speaking partners to have sophisticated vocabulary in a common language to talk confidentially. However, the father was limited in expressing himself in English, English being his second language, and the son had limited vocabulary and literacy skills in Chinese. Although they could communicate in daily routines in both languages, they did not share a primary language with which they can both express themselves adequately. Therefore, misunderstandings and communication barriers occur between generations in the family. 18

LF refers to Leizhao’s father. “Talk deeply” is a Chinese idiom, “Shen Ru Jiao Liu”, meaning “to communicate confidentially”. 19

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The finding about the necessity of developing children’s literacy skills in the heritage language is powerful because it points to the importance of biliteracy in achieving true bilingualism. Ms. Sun, a Chinese language school teacher who also works as a bilingual teacher in a public school, emphasizes teaching Chinese writing as a way to help the children become more proficient with speaking. She said: Speaking or writing, which aspect should be emphasized more? This varies depending on each individual. Some people say it’s good enough for the children to be able to speak, but I think they should be able to write. Writing does no harm. It makes the language more tangible and down-to-earth. Moreover, writing can help them memorize and accumulate vocabulary. Listening, speaking, reading and writing, four aspects, right? They should be a complete whole. (Interview Community Teacher 3, 11/10/03) The unbalanced development in Chinese children’s home language skills demonstrate that in the efforts to promote home language maintenance and bilingualism among second-generation children, parents, educators and researchers should bear in mind the interrelated relationships between oral and written skills of the minority language. Indeed, many Chinese parents in my study seem to highly regard the reading and writing skills in the home language. As we can see from the above interview excerpts, some parents devoted great efforts to developing children’s ability to read and write Chinese. They either taught the children reading and writing by themselves or sent them to a Chinese school to receive formal training in the home language. Parental home language maintenance efforts will be discussed further in the next chapter.

SUMMARY This chapter examines the Chinese immigrant parents’ bilingual status and their second-generation children’s language experience with English acquisition and heritage language maintenance. Overall, it can be said that the bilingual ability with first-generation parents varies greatly from individual to individual, ranging on a spectrum from minimum English ability to a very high level of English proficiency.

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Some well-educated Chinese parents have achieved functional bilingualism and a certain level of English proficiency, while the Fujianese parents with disadvantageous educational and socioeconomic backgrounds largely remain monolingual in their home dialect. However, even among the bilingual parents, Chinese is still the preferred, dominant communication language. There exist limitations in their using English to express themselves, which reflects the fact that they learn English as adult immigrants and English is a foreign/second language to them. In any case, language shift is not prominent with the Chinese parents in spite of their length of stay in the US. On the other hand, the second-generation children’s bilingual status is quite different from that of their parents. Most Chinese children start with a home language of Chinese and in the first days of being in the US schooling system, they encounter difficulties in learning English unassisted. Being too young and growing up in immigrant families, the language obstacle frequently places them in isolation and marginalization in mainstream classrooms with no additional language help. However, once they master English, they prefer using English to Chinese and regard English as their dominant language from an early age. The widespread and swift language shift, I argue, has something to do with the pressures for language assimilation and the negative societal attitudes towards the children’s heritage/home language, which the minority children have internalized in the painful process of learning the mainstream language---English. As a way out, many language minority children decide to give up the heritage language and switch to English as quickly as possible to avoid being a laughing stock among their English-speaking peers. Amidst the trend of language preference for and shift to English, however, most of the Chinese children I interviewed do maintain their heritage language to a certain extent, especially the children in the bilingual classes. A majority of the second-generation children have a high level of understanding in Chinese and some of them are fluent Chinese speakers, but their reading and writing skills severely lag behind for lack of efforts to develop literacy in their heritage language. The unbalanced development in the heritage language affects children’s speaking fluency and vocabulary, which in turn leads to their increasing disinclination to speak the home language and accelerates language shift to English.

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Based on his observation in the Tyneside Chinese community in Britain, Li Wei (1994) constructed a typology of bilingualism that covers a range of language patterns from monolingual home language speaker on one extreme to monolingual host language speaker on the other. Consistent with the traditional perspective in bilingualism studies, the typology focuses on oral use of the two languages and does not measure reading and writing skills. The following is a revised version of the bilingual categories by Li (1994) and I apply it to the participants in my study. Type 1: The monolingual home language speaker People who are monolingual in their home language no matter how many years they spend in the host country. Most Fujianese parents belong to this category, although they often have acquired a certain level of Mandarin. Type 2: The functionally bilingual home language speaker The first language of such persons is the ethnic language of the community, which they use in many key social contexts, but they also use the host language in some other contexts on a regular basis. For example, they may use the community language at home and with members of their own ethnic group, but use the host language at work. The term “functional” is used here to imply that people of this category are competent in the host language only to the extent that they can use it to fulfill specific tasks in specific contexts, whereas the home language is still their dominant language. Many Mandarin-speaking Chinese parents fit into this category. Type 3: The “mixed” bilingual speaker Such persons are typically fluent in both languages. They code-switch frequently between the ethnic language and host language, depending on the talking partners. The code-switching pattern constitutes a distinctive linguistic mode. A few of the Mandarin-speaking parents who have high level of English familiarity can pass for “mixed” bilingual speakers. Among the second-generation children I interviewed, those who are more actively involved in the ethnic community, such as the Chinatown Fujianese children, the children in the bilingual classes (Maya and Long), and the new coming children from China (Tracy, Xiaoyan and Donna), can fall into this category.

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Type 4: The functionally bilingual host language speaker Such persons grew up learning the ethnic language which they still use regularly in the family and the community. But over the years, they have developed a high level of competence in the host language through education and their fluency in the host language surpasses that of the home language. As a result, they prefer to use the host language as their primary language for communication. As can be seen, those second-generation children who have realized language shift belong to this category. Type 5: The monolingual host language speaker Although the mother tongue of such persons is the ethnic language, they maintain only a minimum and often passive knowledge of it. They no longer understand the language nor speak it. To a certain extent, home language has become a relic to them. No participants in the current study fit into this category. It is worth noting that this typology is merely intended as a conceptual tool for categorizing and comparing different types of bilingualism among the Chinese parents and children in the study. It is by no means final or absolute. There may be other types of bilingualism that are not included in this typology. Moreover, each individual’s bilingual status is tentative and can change with time. For example, some Chinese parents have moved from “monolingual home language speaker” to “functional bilingual home language speaker” as they acquired English speaking skills over the years in the US. Likewise, while some second-generation children may currently fit into “mixed bilingual speaker” status because they have a good command of both languages, their home language ability may gradually decrease as they grow older and assimilate more into English. At that time, it is likely that the children may switch to “functionally bilingual host language speaker” or even “monolingual host language speaker”.

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CHAPTER FIVE

LANGUAGE ATTITUDES AND HERITAGE LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE

Having two languages is more like having two children than like having two wives. ---- Hakuta & Garcia (1989: 375) Although the second-generation children in my study have largely undergone partial or complete language shift to English from an early age, they do maintain a certain degree of Chinese proficiency, however unbalanced their bilingual/biteracy levels are. The maintenance of Chinese as a home/heritage language in the second-generation children does not happen automatically in an English-dominant environment. What factors promote or hinder language maintenance with the Chinese children? In this chapter, I will present the stories behind Chinese children’s home/heritage language maintenance and explore language socialization within the Chinese families, with the focus on the roles the Chinese parents play in the process.

PARENTS’ LANGUAGE ATTITUDES In simple terms, language attitudes refer to the feelings people have about their own language or the languages of others. Generally, most of the Chinese parents I interviewed value their heritage language very much, which lead them to make great efforts to maintain the heritage language in their children. The positive attitudes towards the heritage language come from different sources though. Some parents regard their home/heritage language as an important resource that the children could take advantage of in their academic advancement and future career. Other parents see the heritage language as closely related to their ethnic identity, an important link that connects the 103

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second-generation children to their home country and culture. Still other parents see the heritage language as a necessary family link that reinforces family ties and contributes to family cohesion. It is to be noted that certain parents may value their heritage language out of a combination of the different motives. In the following discussion, I will look at each particular heritage language attitude in detail. HERITAGE LANGUAGE AS A RESOURCE Interestingly, some Mandarin parents in my study believe in the positive effects of learning the heritage language in itself. For example, Vicky’s mother said: “Learning Chinese as another language is like learning math. It can be an exercise to the children’s brain. Learning more things is always good.” (Interview 17, 12/21/03) This belief is consistent with past research findings on the beneficial effects of bilingualism on children’s cognitive development (Cummins 1976; Diaz 1985; Hakuta & Garcia 1989; Peal & Lambert 1962). However, more importantly, the majority of Mandarin parents view the heritage language from a more practical orientation. They see the heritage language indeed as a “heritage” and as an important resource from which the children can benefit in their school achievement and future career. This attitude, I argue, has something to do with the Mandarin parents’ own bilingual skills and their educational background. As I mentioned before, the Mandarin-speaking Chinese parents come from the upper-middle class segment of the Chinese society and are highly educated. They have had experiences of using Chinese (Mandarin) as the language of power in China, a nation with the largest population in the world. Even though they come to the US and have to accept English as the dominant language in American mainstream society, they do not necessarily disparage their language of origin. Instead they understand that Chinese is a viable language spoken by millions of people in China and in many parts of Asia. They even recognize the status of Chinese in the international society: Chinese is one of the five official languages used by the United Nations and has recently become a widely accepted foreign language in the US. As a result, most Mandarin-speaking parents believe that learning Chinese is practical and important for their children to survive in the contemporary globalized society. In the following interview excerpt, Lulu’s mother mentioned that the possession of Chinese skills in addition to English could promote her children’s academic pursuit in

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the US. Lulu’s mother said, As far as we are concerned, we are mainly concerned, that the children shouldn’t forget this language. We try hard to instill in them, that is to say, if you, if you go to college, or Ph.D., you are required to have two to three… foreign languages, you can use your Chinese, when the time comes, you can very easily take a test. You don’t need to spend time learning it, right? Just like this. Moreover, we also tell them that there is a large percentage of Chinese population all over the world. (Interview 1,07/19/03) It seems that heritage language maintenance efforts within this immigrant family are closely related to the parent’s high expectations towards her children’s education. Lulu’s mother expected her children to get as high as to the doctoral level of study where “two to three foreign languages” are needed and Chinese can serve as one foreign language. The Asian parents’ expectations of their children’s academic success in the host country have been well documented by past research (Barringer, Takeuchi & Xenos 1990; Chao 1994; Sue & Okazaki 1990). Following this line of logic, minority language educators often argue that the success-oriented Asian parents would like their children to shift to English as soon as possible and would not actively engage in maintaining their ethnic language to the children. However, the interview with Lulu’s mother and many other Chinese parents clearly indicates the opposite. The idea of looking at heritage language maintenance as a way for advancing children’s education might be new to the American mainstream educators, but it comes naturally to the immigrant parents, as the following two parents said, Nina’s Mother: China is developing very fast now in economy and in other aspects, there are more and more trades between the US and China. It is said that Chinese has become a second foreign language and it is being considered to be added to the High School AP courses. And also some even learn Chinese as a second language in college, right? So I think you are a Chinese in the first place, you have such good background, when the US declines in economy some day in the future, China may probably become a possible

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work place. Learning Chinese may be helpful in the job market. Who knows what the future is going to be? (Interview 8, 11/16/03) Nancy’s Mother: My relatives in New York, they are my mother’s group, of their generation. They have a …a kid in twenties. She graduated from Yale, but she is concentrated in East Asia Studies. Now she is working at Lincolnbirm Financial Firm, doing businesses with people of Asian background. She is…she is American-born Chinese. But she goes all the way to…the home ground. So she went to college, she went to Yale, but she studied Chinese. It’s like we come here to study English. So she came back to China to learn Chinese as part of her training. She got a job and instead of using her English background, she is using her Chinese. (Interview 4, 10/10/03)

The Mandarin parents are clearly aware of the globalization trends from their own immigration experiences. Being immigrants themselves, they are keeping a constant eye to both sides of the globe, their country of origin and the host country. In terms of career development, they are not confined to the American domestic job market. Rather, they seem more international in the scope of vision. Both mothers above recognized the increasing importance of China in the world economy and the opportunities of transnational business and international cooperation between the US and China. With this prospect in view, the Mandarin parents are convinced that their children growing up in a Chinese-speaking family are advantaged in terms of language skills, compared with their English-speaking, monolingual peers. The awareness of globalization leads them to firmly desire their children to maintain the heritage language and become bilingual/biliterate so that they can successfully compete in future job markets. The Mandarin-speaking parents’ view on the practical value of Chinese (Mandarin) as a heritage language was shared by the Fujianese parents. Although most of the Fujianese parents spoke Fujianese, a Chinese dialect (Fangyan) with significant variation from Mandarin, as their first language, they nonetheless emphasized the maintenance of Mandarin in their children. The emphasis is partly due to the superiority of Mandarin over Fujianese as the national, standard

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language of power in China that has more speakers. In contrast, Fujianese is a local language spoken only by people who come from Fujian province. It could also be attributed to the fact that Fujianese exists only in the spoken form, like the other Chinese dialects, while Mandarin is the only variety of Chinese that has a corresponding written form, shared by all literate Chinese whatever dialects (Fangyan) they speak (Li 1994). As Ramsey (1987: 18) notes, “From a Chinese perspective, the written standard overrides the different oral varieties as a standard”. Moreover, most of the Fujianese parents themselves are functionally proficient at Mandarin and accept it as their language of origin, especially when compared with English in the US. Even though Fujianese is the language they are born with and most familiar with, they nonetheless look to Mandarin and the Chinese script as the heritage language. As a result, none of the Fujianese parents in my study expressed the wish to maintain Fujianese to their children, yet most realized the importance of Mandarin and hoped their children could master it. For example, William’s mother and Min’s mother thus commented on the necessity of their children’s heritage language learning. William’s Mother: We want to brush up his Mandarin. If he knew Mandarin, he could feel more convenient and comfortable in the church. His Dad said: If he couldn’t find other jobs in the future, at least he can work as an interpreter. (Interview 11, 11/23/03) Min’s Mother: I hope they can be bilingual. That will be very good. When they look for jobs in the future, Chinese and English will both be required. It should be encouraged in the US to have these two languages taught. (Interview 6, 11/09/03) Similar to the Mandarin parents, the two Fujianese parents above also mentioned the usefulness of Chinese (Mandarin) in the job market and in the overseas Chinese community, such as “the church”, an important motivation for them to have their children learn the language. This reinforces the “resource” view of Chinese (Mandarin) as a widely accepted heritage language in the US society. William’s mother clearly specified “Mandarin” as the language her son should master instead of

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using the umbrella term “Chinese”. This further reveals the perceived importance of Mandarin over other Chinese varieties. In contrast, the Fujianese language has rather narrow applicability, and is not mentioned by either parent. HERITAGE LANGUAGE AND ETHNIC IDENTITY Another commonly declared reason for the Chinese parents to attach great importance to their heritage language is the perceived connection between the heritage language and ethnic identity. My interviews with the Chinese parents generally indicate that the sense of ethnic identity is very strong among the Chinese immigrants. Although they have passed from sojourners to American citizens and decided to settle down in the US permanently, they are nonetheless clearly aware, sometimes even reminiscent, of their cultural roots. This in part has to do with the Confucian culture the first-generation parents grew up with, which emphasizes respect for one’s origin and ancestry. Redding (1990) suggests that the majority of the Chinese people living overseas have not psychologically left China, or at least not left some ideal and perhaps romanticized notion of Chinese civilization. A reminiscent mind of the Chinese people kept alive by the rich legacy of Chinese history and Chinese culture is one of the most distinct features of their ethnic identity. Actually, the name given to the overseas Chinese by the Chinese themselves, Huaqiao, signifies the status of a Chinese sojourner living outside China temporarily. Those living in the US are commonly called American Chinese instead of Chinese Americans, with the emphasis on their ethnicity instead of nationality. My study confirmed this viewpoint. Many parents in my study mentioned the importance of “homeland” or “where they come from”, which they sought to instill in their children, as the following interview excerpts demonstrate. If you grow up here, it’s a homeland for you. But you start wondering where you come from: Okay, my mother comes from there, and if I go back, it will be very warm, you know, I will feel very warm there. So it’s that identity, and she…that’s why we want her to learn the language, like, in the future, definitely I am living as a Chinese immigrant, I am just expecting her to learn Chinese. (Interview 4, 10/10/04)

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Especially my mother, she really wants to…never forget where you come from, who you are and stuff like that. It depends, you know. You could blame them, you know, what you have to do to survive in America, do whatever you need to do, but you shouldn’t forget, you know, your past, or your…what your parent teach you, or who you are, you know, as a Chinese. So I try to instill in my kids, you know, who they are and stuff. (Interview 9, 11/16/03) In the hearts of the immigrants is preserved a place for the warmth of the homeland. The strong identification with their ethnic origin keeps reminding the Chinese immigrants of how different they are from the mainstream Americans, even after they have entered into American citizenship. With such a strong ethnic identity in themselves, the Chinese parents and grandparents try to transmit their ethnicity to the second-generation children. “What you have to do to survive in America, do whatever you need to do, but you shouldn’t forget, you know, your past” (Interview 9, 11/16/03). Clear ethnic distinction, “different from the mainstream”, often places the immigrants at a disadvantage in the host country. However, the Chinese parents seem to take pride in their ethnicity, culture and language in spite of the marginal status they are reduced to in the host society. Mary’s mother said, So I tell my daughter that since you are a Chinese, it’s very important to learn Chinese. If you can’t speak it, that’s very…very… it’s a shame, you know? So we speak Chinese to her at home. Actually it’s a very…very good thing. Some kids are like…they feel speaking Chinese is a shame, you know? That would be very troublesome. (Interview 14, 12/07/03) Therefore, the Chinese parents not only try to transmit ethnic identity to their children, but they also strive to cultivate ethnic pride in them. Here Mary’s mother seems to be countering the dominant current of English hegemony over their heritage language. “If you can’t speak it (Chinese), it’s a shame.” This is clearly contradictory to the assimilationist view that immigrants have a sense of inferiority with their language of origin and will abandon it in due time. Undoubtedly,

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Chinese parents’ strong positive attitudes towards their heritage language will influence the second-generation children’s language attitudes. It is interesting to note that when the parents in the above interview excerpts are concerned with developing ethnic identity and pride in the second-generation, they seek to transmit the ethnic identity by means of the ethnic language. Their logic seems to say: without the Chinese language, you are no longer a Chinese. Although there are many other aspects of the Chinese culture, such as the distinct cultural traditions and holidays that the parents can pass on to their children, they somehow turn to the Chinese language as the key distinguishing characteristic of their ethnicity. This may have to do with the detraditionalization and modernization of the Chinese cultural activities that these parents experienced during the communist China period (before the opening-up policy), while the language has been left intact from history. As the next chapter further shows, the Chinese parents do not strongly emphasize the traditional Chinese cultural activities to their children. Instead, their focus is on the Chinese language. Donna’s Mother: I absolutely…I absolutely don’t like her to forget Chinese. Chinese people can’t forget Chinese, right? Because of this, she will learn Chinese. (Interview 10, 11/20/03) Nancy’s Mother: You are belonging to Chinese Americans, .so you have to learn Chinese. You must, you must learn. If you can’t speak Chinese, you couldn’t…you have no way to communicate in the Chinese community. (Interview 4, 10/10/03) It had been mentioned previously that there exist different varieties of the Chinese language---“dialects”, as opposed to Mandarin. However, regardless of what specific dialect background they come from, the Chinese parents in my study all use the umbrella word “Chinese” to refer to the heritage language in both oral and written forms. I argue that the Chinese parents were using the general language term “Chinese” in order to emphasize the commonness between them rather than their differences. Indeed, Chinese can refer

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to ethnicity, language and nationality at the same time. “Chinese people can’t forget Chinese” (Interview 10, 11/20/03) .It has been an acknowledged fact that the Chinese immigrants overseas are a diverse group with huge within-group differences along many lines, such as places of origin, socioeconomic status, specific customs they adopt etc. However, a common language called “Chinese” that is shared by all immigrants of Chinese origin could represent a national, unified identity, ethnicity as well as a common culture. Ethnic group members can have obvious and immediate identification with those who share the same heritage language. The heritage language connects the Chinese immigrants together and links them to a common past, no matter what differences there might be between them. The connection between language and identity has also been documented by research on other minority groups. Previous studies on ethnic identity indicate that language is perhaps the most frequently cited contributor to ethnic identity (Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey 1990; Hurtado & Gurin 1995; Giles & Coupland 1991). Giles & Robinson (1990: 307) stated: “Ingroup speech can serve as a symbol of ethnic identity and cultural solidarity. It is used for reminding the group about its cultural heritage, for transmitting group feelings, and for excluding members of the outgroup from its internal transactions”. From this perspective, it seems natural that the Chinese parents should emphasize heritage language maintenance in their second-generation children as a way to reinforce ethnic identity. It is rhetorical and persuasive to express one’s ethnicity through the ethnic language. At the same time, it also points to the reality that the Chinese parents keenly realize the power of language in negotiating social relationships in a multicultural society, which we will discuss further in the next section. HERITAGE LANGUAGE AND FAMILY COHESION In addition to viewing the heritage language as a resource and/or an epitome of ethnic identity, some Chinese parents in my study regard their heritage language as important out of a concern for family cohesion. In an informal talk with an immigrant father who was not very comfortable with speaking English, he said: “Our English learning can’t keep up with our daughter’s. If she speaks a little faster in English, we can’t understand. So she has to keep Chinese. Otherwise, we won’t be like one family.” (Personal Communication,

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10/23/03) As the previous chapter shows, the second-generation children’s language preference for and shift to English from an early age forms a sharp contrast with their parents’ limited English skills, in some cases even minimum English proficiency. Moreover, as the children stay longer in American schools, they tend to adopt English as their primary language and get further and further away from the home language. Heritage language loss among the second-generation children hinders communication between parents and children in immigrant families and threatens family cohesion, especially when the first-generation parents are not able to use English fluently. Tracy’s mother said, We have a very big concern. That is, later on, since our English…our English has not been up to a very high level, if in the future we want to talk deeply with her as she grows up, we are concerned whether we can handle this very well. So…I don’t know either…probably we should try to learn English well. But we should also urge her to learn Chinese well. That way, we won’t be falling apart. (Interview 2, 08/31/03) Tracy’s mother expressed a latent concern for the relationship with her daughter in the future. At age 5, Tracy had a good command of both English and Chinese for the time being, but given the quick language shift pattern, it is foreseeable that her English will get an upper hand as she acquires literacy at school, whereas her home language might deteriorate for lack of equivalent development in Chinese reading and writing20. “To talk deeply” would become a problem between the English-dominant child and the Chinese-dominant parents. The phrase “to talk deeply” Tracy’s mother mentioned here reminds us of the communication problem in Leizhao’s family. “To talk deeply” is a Chinese usage that means “to communicate confidentially”. As such, it is different from “talking” in the usual sense of the word, but rather indicates an exchange of one’s inner feelings and emotions and therefore implies a sense of confidentiality and closeness between the talking partners. Since the Confucian-rooted Chinese culture emphasizes strong family ties, it is not surprising that the Chinese parents should value the capability to 20

Please refer to “Unbalanced Bilingualism and Biliteracy” in Chapter 4.

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“talk deeply” in the relationship with their children. However, being able to “talk deeply” requires a high level of proficiency and comfortableness in the language used. It is necessary to reiterate the language status of the Chinese immigrant parents here. Tracy’s mother, like many other Mandarin-speaking parents, received a master’s degree in an American university and therefore had a functional command of English. However, according to her, “Our English has not been up to a very high level.”(Interview 2,08/31/03) As I reported in the last chapter, the Chinese parents are usually more familiar and comfortable with their heritage language, regardless of how good their English proficiency is. Although some parents have mastered a high level of written or even oral English skills, they express a particular identification with Chinese. To a certain extent, Chinese means “home” to them. Being able to communicate in Chinese itself is an important part of “talk deeply”. On the other hand, the second-generation children are adopting English much faster than their parents. After one or two years at US schools, they have been able to use English as their primary language. At the same time, they become more and more reluctant to speak Chinese. Some even feel embarrassed to speak it since without age-appropriate development in Chinese literacy, the Chinese children usually lack a sophisticated level of Chinese vocabulary to express themselves in depth 21 . Thus, with children’s language shift, the communication between parents and children in the heritage language is in danger of being reduced to a surface level and “talking deeply” becomes more and more difficult. Different degrees of language assimilation across generations have been reported to be a major root for family disconnection and conflicts in immigrant families. As a result, some Chinese parents emphasize the importance of heritage language maintenance in the second-generation children as a way to maintain family solidarity. “Probably we should try to learn English well. But we should also urge her to learn Chinese well. That way, we won’t be falling apart.” Admitting the limitation of her English skills, Tracy’s mother nonetheless sees the heritage language as a bridge that enables her to reach out to her child and strengthen family ties. If heritage language maintenance in the second-generation children can greatly enhance family cohesion in the 21

Please refer to “Unbalanced Bilingualism and Biliteracy” in Chapter 4.

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Mandarin-speaking families, it becomes even more crucial in cases of Fujianese families with parents speaking virtually no English. Min’s mother said, I can’t understand the homework. But they just ask me to sign, sign. I don’t know what it is, how could I sign?(sighs) Last night, she did something in her room. She worked on the materials and didn’t go to sleep until 11. I don’t know what she is doing. I asked her to explain to me, she said she didn’t know how to say it in Chinese. (Interview 6, 11/09/03) Like many other Fujianese families, Min’s family smuggled in the US from a poor Chinese village in Fuzhou and had lived in Chinatown ever since under undocumented status. Min’s mother only completed primary school education in China and had been working in a garment factory in Chinatown after coming to the US, a typical job for unskilled Fuzhounese-Chinese women. Having no language skills and being confined to Chinatown, the “ethnic enclave”, Min’s mother found herself unable to have access to her daughter’s school life, nor to understand the American educational system. Although her daughter spoke some Fujianese and a little Mandarin and was able to talk to her about everyday routines, her Fujianese or Mandarin had not reached a level that allowed her to explain schoolwork and school-related activities to her mother. Therefore, the mother was frustrated with having to sign the homework as required by the school. Indeed, while I was interviewing Min’s mother, she took the opportunity to ask me to translate the school calendar for her. To my great surprise, she did not even know when her daughter’s school would have after-school activities and other basic school routines, even though her daughter had already reached the seventh grade. Her behavior of asking me for translation nonetheless showed that she was eager to get involved in her daughter’s school life, but only felt powerless to do so. If the deplorable situation with Min’s family doesn’t improve, it is imaginable that as Min grows up and as school replaces family as the most important social site in her life, the first-generation parents could only watch her move farther and farther away from them.

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When I observed in the Chinese church kindergarten class taught by the Chinese teacher Jennifer Lo, I found she used three different languages in instruction, English, Mandarin and Cantonese, especially in teaching the key words of the text. Since most of the children in her class were from Mandarin or Cantonese background, Jennifer deliberately included children’s home languages in her instruction. In addition to facilitating the non-English-speaking children to understand the class content, the use of home language in class, according to Jennifer, is to “connect with the non-English-speaking parents”. For example, we learn the unit on Spider this week. I make sure they know the word spider in Chinese, Zhizhu, Mandarin is Zhizhu. So I just translate a little bit. I do it frequently. I want them to know the Chinese key words so that they can at least go home and talk to the parents: This is what I learn. If they go home and say: Wo xue le (I have learned) Spider. ‘What is Spider?’ I don’t know. I don’t want them to do that. (Interview Community Teacher 2, 11/12/03) It is sad that the Chinese parents are eager to know what the children learn at school, but the children cannot explain. Jennifer was trying to avoid this problem by using children’s home languages in key words and important classroom occasions. To a certain extent, Jennifer was deliberately adding the Chinese language in instruction to help the children maintain strong ties with their non-English-speaking parents, who otherwise would have been disconnected with the children, as is the case of Min’s family. The working-class Chinese parents send their children to public schools learning English, in the hope that when the children grow up, they don’t have to be as restricted in language as they themselves are. But an important problem emerged, that is, as the children learn English and use English all the time at school, their Chinese deteriorates with time and the result is they are no longer able to speak Chinese. Even though some of them still speak Chinese, their Chinese is reduced to everyday routines, such as “How

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are you?”, “I am hungry” etc. They would have no way to learn the more complex Chinese words and translate the schoolwork into Chinese for their parents. (Interview Community Teacher 2, 11/12/03)

Coming from a background that is similar to the children she taught, Jennifer keenly realized the role of home language as a bridge that connects parents to their children. Possessed with the necessary language skills, she was also able to incorporate home language learning in her instruction of content areas. However, the mainstream educators in American public schools are generally not in a position to help the second-generation children learn their home language. As a way out, most Chinese parents send their children to weekend Chinese schools to learn Chinese, as will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters. In summary, I found that all the Chinese parents in my study value their heritage language very much. Some parents regard Chinese as a resource that can add to the children’s marketable skills, others view learning Chinese as a way to reinforce children’s ethnic identity, and still others see the home language as a bridge that can enhance family cohesion. Regardless of what language orientation they hold, the first-generation parents invariably hold positive attitudes towards the heritage language and desire to transmit it to their American-born children.

PARENTS’ LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE EFFORTS USING CHINESE AS THE HOME LANGUAGE As a result of the strong parental emphasis on the heritage language, most of the Chinese families make great efforts to resist the language shift pressures from the outside and the school. They take specific measures to help their children maintain the heritage language. For example, many Mandarin parents specify Chinese as the sole home language, though everybody in the household possesses some knowledge of both English and Chinese. Lulu’s mother described an incident in her family between the daughter and the father in language use at home.

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With her dad, she speaks Chinese because her dad definitely asks her to speak Chinese. You see, there is a very interesting incident in this regard. Her dad once squeezed the toothpaste and paying no attention, he just took it up and gave it a squeeze. And sometimes he even forgot to put back the lid. Lulu then wrote a note in English to her dad and told him to “squeeze from the bottom, please pay attention”. Thus she wrote this to her dad. But her dad wrote back in Chinese: If you write a note in Chinese, I will follow your advice. If you don’t, I won’t follow…(Interview 1, 07/19/03) Lulu’s father is a Ph.D. degree holder and works at a respectable position for the Philadelphia municipal government. Therefore, he had a perfect understanding of what his daughter wrote, but he deliberately asked her to communicate with him in Chinese and only in Chinese, as if he did not understand English. Through his action, he seemed to convey the message to his daughter that Chinese was the home language in the family and she had to speak Chinese at home. Lulu herself realized this: “He asks me to speak Chinese because he doesn't want me to forget it” (Interview 1b, 07/19/03). In general, my interview shows that many immigrant parents believe that speaking Chinese at home consistently, especially after the children go to school, is an effective way of instilling the heritage language in the children. Vicky’s mother said, We speak Chinese to her at home, but many times, especially when she begins to understand English more and more, it’s inevitable that we speak English. Like sometimes she will speak to us in English first. When we reply, we often forget to use Chinese, so we reply in English too. After a while, we have to remind her to speak Chinese. We do this purposefully now. (Interview 18, 12/21/03) After the children go to school and get more and more skillful with English, it is often hard to make them keep using Chinese at home. The bilingual parents have to consciously remind their children to speak Chinese with them. When the children have made a complete shift to English, the task of making them speak Chinese may get even more difficult than it seems to be at first sight. Nina’s mother said,

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We remind them to speak Chinese, but sometimes they can’t express themselves, they will have to turn to English. We just let it go. We can’t force them to say Chinese for every word. It seems that so long as we can understand, we will just let it go. (Interview 8, 11/16/03)

TEACHING CHINESE AT HOME Not only through such conscious daily interactions and communications do the Chinese parents transmit the heritage language, some of the parents or grandparents also teach Chinese to their children and actually become Chinese teachers. Tracy’s Mother: This summer, I taught her some Pinyin. I teach her Pinyin so that she can look up in the dictionary. It will be more convenient for her to learn Chinese later by herself. Previously I also taught her writing some words. But I found it very difficult since after she learned the 24 letters in English, she found that much easier to write than Chinese characters. (Interview 2, 08/31/03) Donna’s Mother: Depending on her schedule, I sometimes ask her to write a little journal in Chinese. We brought the Chinese textbooks from China with us, see, just this textbook. Sometimes I ask her to copy one text, copy, well, copy the new words. If we have time, I will ask her to read the storybook, A Journey to the West, we brought from China too. She will read for me, and the words she doesn’t know I will tell her. There are many words she doesn’t know though. (Interview 10, 11/20/03) For textbooks and teaching materials in the heritage language, the parents often rely on community resources and libraries. Many parents, such as Donna’s mother, Nancy’s mother and Xiaoyan’s mother, bought Chinese textbooks from China or other Chinese-speaking parts of Asia, such as Taiwan and Singapore during their visits there. With the heritage language textbooks, the parents can assign Chinese homework to the child every day. Most second-generation children in my study reported that they had to do Chinese homework along with the homework from school as a

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study habit. Lulu distinguished the two types of assignment as “school homework” and “home homework.22” Lulu: For my home homework, math will take me about one hour, and Chinese about 15 minutes. But the school homework I can be done in …10 minutes. (Interview 1b, 07/19/03) LM: I teach her Chinese and math. I brought some storybooks from China for her to read. She could read, for example, Princess Huanzhu. When she couldn’t understand, I will have to explain to her in a simple way. I used to teach her some Chinese poems too. I also teach her math using a Chinese math book, which is more challenging than what she learns at school. The math in her school is too easy. So she learns math with me in Chinese too. (Interview 1, 07/19/03) Like many Chinese parents, Lulu’s mother paid great attention to her daughter’s academic development. Since the school couldn’t provide instruction in Chinese, she took over the task by herself, although she was not a trained educator. In addition, she felt that the school didn’t assign enough homework and the math curriculum was less challenging, she had to assist in her daughter’s math education by making use of home language resources --- Chinese math book. While learning math in Chinese, it is expected that Lulu’s Chinese literacy will improve too. LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL IMMERSIONS In addition to teaching the heritage language by themselves, many parents also make conscious attempts to immerse their children in Chinese-speaking environments or deliberately put them with Chinese-speaking contacts. For example, some parents take their children to various ethnic activities in the Chinese community, register 22

“Home homework” is not a set phrase in Chinese, but it is a term created by Lulu herself to refer to the homework assigned by her parents, which is usually academic learning in Chinese.

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them in extracurricular ethnic educational programs, or send them to weekend Chinese schools in order for them to have more opportunities of using and learning the home language. The following two parents reported: So there has always been the mechanism to ask her to go to a Chinese environment to learn. The church is also a Chinese church. The opera Gongfu lesson is also Chinese. Her piano teacher is ….is a Vietnamese Chinese. They speak English between the two of them. But when my mother is present, she speaks Chinese as much as possible. (Interview 4, 10/10/03) The good thing is that my wife’s parents, my in-laws, speak Mandarin, and they are more educated. They watch my kids. Every day I pick up my kids after school and drop them off at my in-laws. They have the satellite TV and Chinese programs. So Victoria is exposed to Chinese a lot more. In addition, she has been going to the Chinese school a couple of years now. Like every week, every Saturday, they have four hours. So it’s good exposure. (Interview 9, 11/16/03) With busy schedules, the working parents usually do not have time to teach the children themselves. But they take advantage of the extended family ties, such as grandparents, co-ethnic community resources, and other means available to them to get their children learn Chinese one way or the other. Chinese schools are especially popular in this regard. Over two-thirds of the children in my study attend Chinese schools on weekends. Although many people doubt the cost-effectiveness of such heritage language schools in the English-as-the-first-language environment, Chinese parents are persistent in sending the children there. As one parent said, “If we teach them, it’s not systematic. If they go to Chinese school, they can learn the language more formally and consistently” (Interview 10, 11/20/03). The Chinese parents seem to prefer a school education in the heritage language for their children instead of a sporadic learning at home. This may help account for the rapid increase of the Chinese weekend schools in the US in the past decade. However, even with the existence of Chinese schools and other heritage language promoting

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programs, the Chinese parents don’t want to relent their grasp on children’s heritage language maintenance at home. Tracy’s mother said: “We parents have to assist with Chinese school teaching by speaking Chinese to the children at home. They only attend Chinese school for three hours a week. If we don’t reinforce it at home, they will quickly forget what they learn at the end of a week”. (Interview 2, 08/31/03) Being major caregivers who interact with the children on a daily basis, parents’ influence on children’s bilingual development cannot be overestimated. In a word, with strong positive attitudes towards the home language, the Chinese parents are willing to spend considerable time, money, and energy to help the children maintain Chinese. They do so through making the children speak Chinese at home, teaching the home language to the children, and/or sending the children to Chinese schools or other ethnic educational programs. However, how these home language maintenance efforts on the parents’ side impact on the second-generation children remains a question. In the next section, I will turn to the Chinese children themselves and examine their attitudes towards learning the heritage language.

CHILDREN’S ATTITUDES TOWARDS LEARNING CHINESE In spite of parents’ strong emphasis on heritage language learning, few of the Chinese children in my study see the heritage language as important, to the great disappointment of their parents. Most Chinese children, especially older children, feel Chinese is something they have to learn to obey their parents, yet they themselves do not feel necessary or important. The question remains why the Chinese children should form such language attitudes and why the Chinese parents fail to transmit the positive attitudes they hold towards their heritage language to the next generation. In this section, I will examine the Chinese children’s heritage language learning experiences as well as the dynamics behind it. RESISTANCE WITH AGE It is important to note in the first place that most Chinese children are initially happy with learning the heritage language. However, their enthusiasm follows a descending pattern with age. Since the current

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study includes children ranging from 7-13 in age, I could see the children’s language attitudes changed as they matured and as they moved up the educational ladder in American schools. Generally speaking, the younger children in my study, such as kindergarteners and first graders, do not mind learning Chinese. Instead, they regard Chinese as fun and are eager to learn it because what they learn about Chinese at this time period are usually games and activities that are appealing and interesting. Moreover, their academic tasks in the public school at this stage are not challenging yet and they have enough free time to enjoy going to a Chinese school on weekend and socializing. As young children, they may also stay closer to their parents and participate in more community activities along with parents, all of which provide them more opportunities to use Chinese. However, by the time when they reach the third grade and beyond, the children begin to change their attitudes towards learning Chinese. At this time, they are confronted with a heavier load of book learning in the public school. They spend all the weekdays at school and learn different subject matters in English, compared with the one weekend morning or afternoon allocated specially to learning Chinese. In terms of the learning materials, they also start to learn Chinese reading and writing, a far more complex task than before. The complicated Chinese written system that is totally different from the English letters requires tremendous efforts and inputs in learning. Mutually unintelligible dialects in the Chinese language system also add to the complication and confusion. All of these facts may have challenged the children’s learning interest. A majority of the older Chinese children in my study claimed that Chinese is a difficult language. On the other hand, as children grow older, they gradually participate more in school-related activities and begin to move away from the parent-centered ethnic activities. They form their own peer groups at school and use more and more English. With the language shift complete, the Chinese children eventually come to a point where they feel learning Chinese is neither necessary nor enjoyable, but rather a tedious and unprofitable task. To a certain extent, this depiction represents most second-generation children’s experience with regards to learning the heritage language. Although they start with a good command of Chinese, more often than not they end up with having no interest in keeping it up.

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A USELESS LANGUAGE IN THE US? While acknowledging some of the practical obstacles mentioned above, such as the difficulty of the Chinese language and the time constraints for learning Chinese etc, my interview with the Chinese children nonetheless indicates that the main reason that causes the abandonment of heritage language learning lies in children’s own negative attitudes towards maintaining Chinese. DZ: How important do you think Chinese is? Lulu: Not really. Since we live in the US, it’s not that important, but…but Mom and Dad keep talking about college, you need more languages… (Interview 1b, 07/19/03) Nina: I guess….everyone, like other friends saying that: you are lucky, you understand Chinese…you know it. But I don’t know because…I …I don’t think it’s really that…big. I just…I just don’t think it’s that a big deal. …See, I spend most of my day in school, in school, we don’t really speak Chinese. So I don’t feel like it’s necessary… (Interview 8b, 11/14/03) From Lulu’s and Nina’s narratives, we find that they both question the “necessity” of learning Chinese, based on the non-applicability of Chinese in the larger US society, especially in their school environment where English is the dominant language. “I spend most of my day in school, we don’t really speak Chinese.” It hardly needs to be said that the social environment that an individual is placed in plays a decisive role in shaping their language attitudes. When the minority children use English at school every day and do not see much use of the home language outside family, they seem to lack the motivation to learn it. In other words, they do not see the point of maintaining the home language in the US, which leads them to resist putting efforts into learning it. Children’s perception of the heritage language being “useless” reveals a lack of support for heritage language learning in an English-dominant US society. Generally, in the United States, acquisition of English has been assumed to be essential for the integration of immigrants and their children into American society. In contrast, immigrants who seek to retain their language of origin have

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often met with negative attitudes in the dominant culture (Crawford 1992 & 2000; Fishman 1991; Gerber 1991). Ruiz (1984) provides a typology for understanding minority language attitudes in any given society: language as a problem, language as a right, and language as a resource. It is arguable from the previous discussion that the Chinese parents largely hold the language-as-a-right or language-as-a-resource attitudes in the sense that they treat their heritage language as a useful resource and a powerful symbol of their ethnic identity. However, the dominant language ideology in the US mainstream society is still language-as-a-problem, especially with the renewed, escalating English-Only movement in the political field since the 1980s. Given the adverse societal attitudes towards children’s home language, most US public schools mainstream minority children in the regular classrooms for them to become proficient in English as soon as possible. There is no attempt to maintain their first language (L1) or enhance their ethnic culture as they learn English (L2). Moreover, English language learners are sometimes labeled “Limited English Proficiency” students. Such a term emphasizes the perceived deficiency of language minority children in L2 and doesn’t recognize their accomplishments in L1. As my interview with the second-generation Chinese children shows, minority children whose first/home language is different from English commonly experienced being a laughing stock among the peers in the initial period when they were unable to speak English, which further conveys the message to the children that their home language is a problem or hinderance to be removed rather than a resource to be made use of or be proud of. In face of the language-as-a-problem orientation and the strong assimilation pressures from the larger society, Chinese parents’ efforts to transmit positive language attitudes to the next generation are being undermined. Although the parents may themselves value the heritage language and exhort their children to do the same, the latter receive a conflicting, undercurrent message from their school and the outside environment that reduces the heritage language to a marginal, even “useless”, status. As a result, the children find it hard to agree with their parents on the importance of the heritage language. For one thing, they do not seem to have their parents’ transnational scope of vision to foresee the potential usefulness of the Chinese language in their academic advancement as well as in the globalized job market. For another, they do not feel the same connection and attachment to China,

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their parents’ homeland, and are unable to identify with the Chinese language. Indeed, because the American-raised children couldn’t understand their parents’ language orientation, heritage language maintenance has become an issue of heated argument between parents and children in some Chinese immigrant families. Nina said: “Like my mother always tells me when you grow up, you will regret, like if you don’t learn when you are young. She has been telling me this since I was a first grader. But even now I probably, I probably still don’t understand.” (Interview 8b, 11/14/03) The following interview excerpt also shows the struggle between the two generations in terms of whether to learn the heritage language or not. John’s mother said, Like my first child, he didn’t like it. He came here at 5 years old, he protested and said: On Saturday, other kids stay at home and watch cartoons. None of my friends go. Why should I go to Chinese school? Then I said to him: But you are different from them. They are Americans, you are Chinese. Since you are my child and I am a Chinese, you have to come with me to the Chinese school. But he was very unwilling, resisted strongly. (Interview 5, 10/28/03) MAKING THE HERITAGE LANGUAGE RELEVANT Can the Chinese parents ever succeed in transmitting positive language attitudes to their children in an English-dominant society? Many parents feel powerless to fight against the mainstream social and linguistic environments that do not foster heritage language learning. It is hard to bring it home to the children that their heritage language can be a resource when the mainstream society treats it lightly and exhibits a problem-oriented attitude towards it. However, my study shows that despite the prevalent pattern of language shift among most second-generation Chinese children, a few of them do enjoy learning the heritage language. Although they agree that heritage language learning takes time and effort, they regard it as worthwhile and rewarding. Nancy’s case is illuminating here. From my interview with Nancy, I found she was a balanced Chinese and English speaker. She didn’t exhibit resistance in using or learning the heritage language. Every day after school, she would go to her grandparents’ house to learn Chinese and math with them, with Chinese being the only

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instruction language. She liked to stay in her grandparents’ house and watched Chinese videos there. According to her mother, Nancy was even reluctant to go back to their own house since she felt it was more fun with her grandparents. Nancy’s persistence in Chinese language learning might in part result from her special affection for her grandparents. However, there was something else. Once when I observed in Nancy’s class at the neighborhood school that I had access to, I found she was playing the multiplication table game with her classmates, four other non-Chinese children. Since Nancy could answer the multiplications fast and accurately, she always won the game. I asked her what her tricks were for her to beat others, she answered to my surprise: “Grandpa taught me the multiplication in Chinese. And it rhymes in Chinese, so I can memorize them.” As it is, what Nancy did in the game was that she first changed the problem into Chinese and then she sang the Chinese multiplication song in one second to get the answer. After that, she translated the answer back into English and spoke it out. I was amazed at how quick Nancy could be in the whole process of translation back and forth. Yet she always got the answer faster than other children. It seemed that Nancy had been able to exploit the advantages of the Chinese education her grandfather gave her at home in the American classroom. To Nancy, her home language had become a useful resource that helped her succeed in school performance, which have further motivated her to learn the home language. Many Chinese parents who are eager to transmit the home language to their children often push them to learn Chinese the language itself while neglecting the transmission of Chinese academic heritage, be it math, social studies or cultural values. When the children fail to see the usefulness of the heritage language in an English-dominant environment, the Chinese parents could only promise them a future-oriented resource picture, which doesn’t sound convincing to the children. Nina said: “My mother told me that as I grow older, the USA is going to, the America is going to have like business with China, so it’s probably easier if you know Chinese, so you can understand when they talk. But it’s not it now. Now I probably, I probably still don’t understand. (Interview 8b, 11/14/03) A bit of advice that can be learned from Nancy’s case is that learning different subject matters in the heritage language, such as a dual-language program, might be able to enhance children’s heritage

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language development by making them aware that their heritage language is not just an alternative way to speak, but also allows them to learn about the world in different perspectives. Thus, it is a resource available for use in their present school life rather than in the distant future.

SUMMARY My interview data shows that the Chinese parents generally value the heritage language very much and wish to maintain it in their second-generation children. Some parents regard Chinese as a resource that can add to the children’s marketable skills, others view learning Chinese as a way to reinforce children’s ethnic identity, and still others see the heritage language as a bridge that can enhance family cohesion. Consistent with such positive attitudes towards their ethnic language, Chinese parents take various measures to pass on the home language to the second-generation children. For example, they deliberately make the children speak Chinese at home, teach the home language to them and send them to Chinese schools or other educational and cultural programs to receive systematic training. On the other hand, my study also shows that to the disappointment of the Chinese parents, the children themselves seem less motivated, or even resistant, to learning the heritage language. This unfortunate situation, based on my interview with the Chinese children’s language learning experience, is arguably a result from the lack of a supportive language environment and the lack of positive language attitudes in the mainstream society. Generally, the immigrant children see no point in learning their heritage language in the English-dominant US environment, which reduces children’s heritage language to a marginal status and conveys the feelings of shame and inferiority to children who are not able to speak English. I would argue that only when the parents, teachers, and society at large value minority languages other than English and see them as a social resource rather than a disadvantage can the children start to enjoy and take pride in being bilingual. Minority parents alone cannot succeed in maintaining the heritage language in their children.

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CHAPTER SIX

LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AND CULTURAL PARTICIPATION

Family structures and functions are molded within each culture by the prevailing belief systems, ideals and ethical tenets. What is transmitted to children by their families includes not only the personalities of the actual parents, but also the family, racial and national traditions handed on through them, as well as the immediate social milieu which they represent. -----Elovitz & Kahn (1997: 71) The purpose of my study is to examine heritage language maintenance within the larger context of immigrant families’ acculturation in the host country. Heritage language maintenance is not inseparable from participation in the heritage culture. Cultural identity formation is an important aspect of acculturation. In this chapter, I will look at the interplay of heritage language maintenance and cultural identity to see how the Chinese immigrant families participate in the two cultures of the home and the host countries and what roles heritage language maintenance plays in their acculturation process. The concept of culture is defined broadly here. Cultural participation not only includes participation in the distinctive activities, customs and rituals followed by a particular ethnic group, but also involves the endorsement and identification with the hidden, implicit values and beliefs embraced by the ethnic group members and guiding their daily decisions. In the discussion that follows, I will examine the Chinese parents’ and children’s participation in cultural activities such as holiday celebrations, food styles, popular cultures such as TV, movie, newspapers and other mass media etc, as well as in the traditional 129

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Confucian values and beliefs. Their cultural identity is measured by their practice in the customs, traditions and activities that reflects affinity to a culture (Ying 1995). The major research questions this chapter seeks to answer are: To what extent do the Chinese parents and children retain the home cultural traits? To what extent do they participate in the American mainstream cultural activities and how do they feel towards participating in them? Is there a generational dissonance in terms of cultural participation and cultural identity between the immigrant parents and the second-generation children? What a role does the heritage language play in their acculturation process?

HOME CULTURE PARTICIPATION AND TRANSMISSION As first-generation immigrants who spent formative years in China and came to the US after adulthood, the Chinese parents retain important ethnic and cultural practices to a certain degree. FOOD STYLES Most of the Chinese parents manifest a strong and clear preference for ethnic food. They buy Chinese vegetables in the Chinese grocery stores and cook traditional Chinese dishes. Chinese food occupies a prominent place in their life even if they have been in the US for a lengthy period of time. They try the American food, but they find it hard to adopt the Western food culture. “Although I can try it occasionally or once in a while, we can’t stay with it.”(Interview 5, 10/25/03) This explains why the Chinatown food supermarkets and restaurants are so popular and can prosper in spite of intense competition from outside (Zhou 1992). Because of the ethnic food style they stick to, some Chinese parents laugh at themselves: “We are still living a Chinese life in the US.” (Personal Communication) MEDIA AND POPULAR CULTURE In terms of participation in the popular media culture, such as books, movies and TV programs, most Chinese parents report a lack of involvement with the mainstream media. Instead, they like to stick to the media in their heritage language. They report an uneasiness with the American entertainment styles. As Xiaoyan’s father said,

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I like watching Chinese because the cultural background with American movies is different. Moreover, the American movies are not attractive. They are all creepy, you know. Like the Lord of the Ring, we went to the theatre to watch it, but we don’t understand it very well. Not that we don’t understand it, but I think the Chinese movies are more profound and thought-provoking. The American movies don’t have a clear theme, you know. (Interview 12/20/03) Similarly, John’s mother distinguished the English-medium books and the heritage language newspapers and books. She said, Like us, if we read…things related to our study and work, we read the English books. But occasionally if we subscribe magazines for leisure, if say, I want to relax, we are tired after work, most probably, we will take up a Chinese book, Chinese magazines, Chinese newspapers. … We have Chinese TV channels at home; another is Chinese videos, TV series that we exchange with friends. Like this. (laughing) Now whenever we go back to China, we will bring lots of them, everybody goes back and …I think all my friends do this, everybody buys a lot when they go back. And then we exchange. So it’s all right. Like my family subscribe Overseas Chinese, People’s Daily (overseas), so the newspapers are all right, and we also get some free newspapers every day, Chinese newspapers, so we read all of them. So when we read the Chinese newspapers, we feel we are relaxing, it’s a relaxation. (Interview 5, 10/25/03) In the same case as the ethnic food resources, the heritage language media are usually found in Chinatown. The parents also rely on resources from their home country. They bring tapes of Chinese popular movies and TV plays from China and entertain themselves with them. Sometimes they go to rent Chinese movies from public libraries or video stores whenever they are available. Due to the persistence of the Chinese parents’ love for the heritage culture, the second-generation children report they have been frequently immersed in the Chinese cultural activities. For example,

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Nancy reported that she likes Chinese food, watches the Chinese TV series Princess Huanzhu, and goes to Kung Fu lessons on weekends. DZ:

Have you ever watched any like the Chinese programs on TV? Nancy: No. Tapes. DZ: Tapes. Nancy: Yeah. Tapes. DZ: Your grandma’… Nancy: Yeah. My favorite… DZ: Your grandma… Nancy: My favorite one is Princess Huanzhu. DZ: Oh, Huanzhu. I love that too. Nancy: Yeah. I love it. I like the little Yanzi. I love…I like DZ: Little Yanzi, yeah. Nancy: I like her and her fighting, I like her because she fights really good, she flies. (Interview 4b, 10/10/03) Nancy: On Saturdays, I go to the Kung Fu every other week in Chinatown. But this Saturday, I am not sure if I have. But next Saturday, if this Saturday I have, then next Saturday I don’t. And next next Saturday I don’t. (Interview 4b, 10/10/03) DZ: Yeah. Great. Ah…Do you like Chinese food? Nancy: Eh, I like them. DZ: Who cooks Chinese food for you? Nancy: My grandma. Sometimes they don’t eat Chinese food because my grandma goes out to buy some, food and vegetables, and I eat chicken and stuff. My grandma sometimes forces me to eat the green …vegetables, so I went like: wooo! DZ: Yeah. But they will say: it’s healthy, right? Nancy: Yeah. Once I asked my grandma: is…does she like vegetable? She said: no. But I have to eat them. Keep healthy. (Interview 4b, 10/10/03) From Nancy’s interview, we can see that the Chinese second-generation children are socialized in the Chinese way in terms

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of eating habits. They are also exposed to extensive Chinese cultural activities, such as Kung Fu, TV programs and Chinese movies etc. Most Chinese children in my interview also have Chinese names along with English names, although the latter are more commonly used to identify them, especially in public. The Chinese names are more often used when the parents or grandparents address them in a homely and intimate way. HOLIDAYS Compared with the emphasis placed on the heritage language, many parents do not see traditional cultural activities essential to their life. For example, many Chinese parents declare that they do not celebrate the traditional holidays as a big thing, far less formal than when they were in China. When they do celebrate somewhat, the most frequently celebrated Chinese holidays are Chinese New Year, Moon Festival and National Day. Naning’s mother thus commented on her feelings towards the Chinese holidays: We will remember the holidays, but not many of them, not many of them. Like the Moon Festival, we will buy moon cakes, but it’s not like in China … The atmosphere is different. And like Chinese New Year, we sometimes forgot. (laughing) We don’t have the (lunar) calendar, and we don’t know which day is the Chinese New Year. So only after the day has passed do we remember the Chinese New Year. So we called back home and they said the day has passed. On Chinese New Year, what we did most is to call China, call back… … You see, here those who are working are working and those who are in school go to school, so maybe sometimes they are even taking exams. So we simply forget it. So Chinese New Year is not that big…we don’t have the atmosphere here. (Interview 3, 09/28/03) Naning’s mother repeatedly emphasized: “We don’t have the atmosphere for the holidays.” In face of the acculturation and survival pressures in the new environment, due to the busy schedule in their immediate life, the Chinese families tend to neglect the traditional

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holidays. It seems that these cultural practices are no longer important or relevant to them once they become part of the American society. “We simply forget it” is a common attitude among the immigrants, especially after they have been in the US for a long while. “We don’t have the atmosphere” shows that cultural practices and activities don’t stand alone in a social environment. They do not make much sense in a culturally different society. As a result, minority individuals tend to lose their distinctive traits in a culturally unresponsive host country. Such an attitude towards the ethnic holidays is echoed by other Chinese parents in the study. Nancy’s mother expresses similar attitudes towards Chinese holidays: “We seem not sensitive to holidays.” (Interview 4, 10/10/03) But at the same time, she noticed the difference between herself and her boyfriend who is a Jew. “Like my boyfriend, he may have those Jewish holidays. He will keep them” (Interview 4, 10/10/03). The contrast between Chinese and Jews in terms of observing traditional holidays has also been mentioned by two other parents: Nina’s mother and John’s mother. This is particularly interesting in view of the fact that Jewish holidays are given due attention to in the US mainstream society. Schools will have a day off for important Jewish holidays, and the Jewish community will make itself conspicuous on the streets to remind people of its tradition and culture. In contrast, Chinese holidays and traditions are less known to the American mainstream society, and therefore are not widely acknowledged by the public23. Some working parents have to work during the Chinese holidays. “It seems we don’t care about it so much. Like this year, it was a Friday, the restaurant was busy, how could I come back home to celebrate the festival?”(Interview 7, 10/29/03) This further illustrates that a minority group’s culture is hard to preserve in a culturally different mainstream society that doesn’t encourage minority cultural activities. Given this larger social environment, some Chinese parents do not think it important to transmit the traditional holidays and activities to 23

School rules regarding ethnic holidays may be different depending on the composition of the school’s or state’s population. In San Francisco where there is a large Chinese/Asian population, for example, Chinese New Year is a school holiday while Jewish holidays are not. Since the study was conducted in Philadelphia where the Chinese is not a prominent ethnic group in number, the informants generally complained that Chinese holidays were not acknowledged in public schools and outside.

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the second-generation children. Alice’s mother said, I think I am not asking her very much to remember the lunar calendar or the Chinese New Year, I think she may not be able to understand them, the lunar calendar or Chinese New Year. She might forget gradually. Because we haven’t taught her which day is Chinese New Year on purpose, because I think she is in the US, she will learn which day is New Year, which day is Christmas in the US, she will get to know these days little by little. As to China, because we won’t go back to live in China after all, that is, the Chinese New Year or the holidays, it seems we don’t want to require her to understand and know these on purpose. Anyway, we haven’t told her about these, I don’t know other families, if the parents of other families are like this or not, telling children the lunar New Year or not. At least I haven’t, but I don’t expect her to remember these Chinese holidays either. That is, I try as much as possible to create the conditions for her to learn Chinese, after all we are Chinese. But my other thought is that she couldn’t understand the holidays, because after all she is going to face the American way of life. Just like this. Because she is in the US, she will come to accept the American culture, the Chinese culture, she seems not able to understand deeply. (Interview 13, 12/04/03) With the acculturation pressures, Alice’s mother de-emphasizes their traditional holidays and activities. For one thing, her family has relocated to the host country and will stay on in the host country. So she regards the ethnic traditions as superfluous and contrived. She thinks her children will not understand them without the larger environment reinforcing the home culture. However, this is not to say that Alice’s mother does not value their roots. Rather, speaking of the home culture, her attention is on the heritage language. “I try as much as possible to create the conditions for her to learn Chinese, after all we are Chinese.” (Interview 13, 12/04/03) Alice’s mother seems to believe that the heritage language has to be transmitted to the children. In contrast to the cultural activities on holidays, language is singled out by her as the most important link to the home culture.

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However, some Chinese parents do emphasize the cultural practices such as Chinese holidays. For example, John’s mother and Nina’s mother thus talked about what they would do on Chinese holidays: DZ: Will you celebrate those Chinese holidays? JM24: We do. Like the Moon Festival, the Spring Festival, we all celebrate them. DZ: What do you do? JM: We buy moon cakes on the Moon Festival, and let the kids know why we eat moon cakes today. As to spring festival, that is, usually we don’t go to work ourselves. We will take a leave for ourselves, that is, using our own vacation, because we have vacation, we say: why do we have to go to work? We are Chinese. Our Chinese New Year is finally coming. So we don’t go to work on that day. (laughing) (Interview 5, 10/25/03) Nina’s Mother: We surely celebrate the Chinese holidays! Like Spring Festival, about…the big holidays, we will celebrate. For example, the Moon Festival we will buy moon cakes, and also on Spring Festival, I usually will take a day off, and then I will do things at home…… Because I am thinking that…others…like the Jews don’t come to work on their holidays, so I…the Spring Festival is such a big holiday, why don’t I take a day’s leave and let them know today is Chinese Spring Festival? So I will stay at home and ask for leave. I ask for leave and stay at home. And then I cook some simple dishes. (Interview 8, 11/16/03) Although the public calendar doesn’t recognize the traditional holidays, John’s mother and Nina’s mother will take a day off for themselves and enjoy ethnic food at home. They also express the wish to transmit the culturally relevant knowledge to their second-generation children. “We let the kids know why we eat moon cakes today.” It is to 24

JM refers to John’s mother.

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be noted, however, that when they do celebrate the traditional holidays, it seems that their cultural activities during the Chinese holidays in the US are simplified to having a bountiful dinner of ethnic food with none of the big celebrations they would have done in the home country. Therefore, some Chinese parents regard holidays as the days when they are most reminiscent of their home country. They reconnect with relatives and friends in their home country. Some well-to-do Mandarin families even go back to China together to celebrate the Chinese New Year in China, to catch the “atmosphere”. TRANSMISSION OF CULTURAL TRADITIONS AND ETHNIC IDENTITY AWARENESS On the other hand, even if some Chinese parents intend to maintain the ethnic cultural activities at home, they sometimes find they are not capable of transmitting the home culture to the next generation. They don’t know how to do it, or they feel powerless in handling this task. For example, speaking of whether she thinks Chinese culture is important to her American-born daughter, Naning’s mother said: I think the customs are relevant. As to importance, I think they are actually important, only that we can’t make it, that is, to make her have a good understanding of…actually to ourselves, we can’t…that is, only because we grew up in that environment, but if you ask me to talk about…how important Chinese culture is to her, I can’t…because we were not in the arts major, we were both from the sciences major. So we can only say that we have the wish that she could know, it’s good if she could know more of…we do our best to make her understand, to explain to her, we wish she could understand, know more, I feel it’s very good, but we can’t do as we imagined to do that well, that is, to make her understand well…actually to us, only because we grew up there, we lived there, we experienced it, not to say that we have a full understanding of it. Actually I myself don’t know much about it. (Interview 3, 09/28/03) According to Naning’s mother, a culture is not to be articulated or taught, but rather to be experienced and to be immersed in. “Actually to us, only because we grew up there, we lived there, we experienced it”.

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However, in the US, there is not such an environment or atmosphere to reinforce the cultural activities. This is one more reason that the Chinese parents often cite why they don’t emphasize too much their own culture/cultural activities. It seems that the Chinese parents are actually ambivalent in defining their own culture. They find it hard to articulate what the Chinese holidays represent. Comparing the American holidays with the Chinese holidays, Mary’s mother commented: Actually the Chinese holidays we don’t even know much ourselves, what are the hidden meanings behind them? You see the Chinese New Year, everybody celebrated it…So we just celebrated it for nothing. But you see how they celebrate their holidays. They teach the holidays at school, like Thanksgiving, what does it mean, and how to celebrate it. But our Chinese just don’t have this education when we were young, we don’t know it, because we haven’t learned this. Like when the holidays come, we will steam some moon cakes. Otherwise, you just say Chinese culture, you don’t know the holidays, they Americans all know their holidays. Our Chinese New Year, the Big New Year, they (my daughter) learn the Chinese New Year at second grade, their teacher taught them its origin, what it means, they asked me to tell them, I couldn’t say anything. (Interview 14, 12/07/03) Mary’s mother thinks that her knowledge of home culture is not systematic, but merely experiential. So she feels she does not have much to say. She is not in the position to teach. In fact, most of the Chinese holidays are more secular than religious, which makes it hard to interpret their meanings and associations. The origins often come out of some ancient legends or folklore that have been largely forgotten, especially after the detraditionalization and modernization efforts by the Communist leaders. In contrast, major American holidays have clear historic or religious meanings. All these factors presented the first generation parents with a challenging task of transmitting Chinese cultural traditions to their American-born children. Further, some Chinese parents devalue cultural activities because they see cultural activities as superficial and unimportant. They asserted that they do not celebrate the holidays very much even in

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China. The cultural and traditional atmosphere has been downplayed in the communist China since the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. Therefore, some of the Chinese parents who are influenced by the new concept of “Chinese” start to see the traditions and customs as superficial. According to them, the deeper Chinese culture lies in Confucianism which emphasizes harmony in interpersonal relationships, things that cannot be adequately represented by the holiday customs and practices. In other words, although some parents don’t celebrate Chinese holidays, it is not justifiable to say that they are not Chinese-oriented. They simply don’t regard cultural participation as one of the important elements that constitute the “Chineseness”. For example, Xiaoyan’s father said: I don’t pay too much attention to the holidays. I didn’t care about the holidays even in China. I don’t care. Chinese culture is not shown in these formalities. I think they are only one part of it. Something on the surface. But the inner meaning of the Chinese culture lies in Confucianism. But Spring Festival is only a reflection, a symbol. It’s just like when we think of the US, we will think of the Statue of Liberty. (Interview 17, 12/20/03) Due to the diverse attitudes and practical difficulties to observe traditional Chinese customs on the part of the Chinese parents, the second-generation children growing up in recent Chinese immigrant families do not have many opportunities to participate in home cultural activities. Overall, the Chinese children in my study reported that they are much more familiar with the American cultural activities which they learn at school than with the home culture. Even in families where parents pay attention to ethnic cultural activities and holidays, the second-generation children only have a vague idea of the Chinese customs and traditions. As a result, most of the children in my study reported that their favorite holidays are the American ones, such as Christmas, Halloween and Thanksgiving. However, as a minority group in the American society, ethnic cultural participation is important to the second-generation children. Although cultural activities and behavior at home without external reinforcement might not leave a lasting memory, what impresses the Chinese children most is the fact that their parents, either mother or

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father, would be invited to school to talk about Chinese customs to the whole class on the Chinese New Year. DZ: Do you do anything special on Chinese New Year? Naning: My Mom will go to my school. DZ: Why? Why? Naning: Because I am the only …Chinese person, and my Mom is a Chinese too and she can tell us all about Chinese New Year. (Interview 3b, 10/05/03) Thus the Chinese children’s ethnic identity can be reinforced through home cultural participation when the school environment acknowledges what the parents do at home. In fact, several of children in my interview mentioned that their parents have been invited to school to talk about Chinese New Year. However, in situations like this, some children are self-conscious of their inadequate cultural knowledge, which makes them uneasy. Nina said, I was embarrassed when my Dad came to my school to talk about Chinese New Year. I felt awkward. Well, they are…I was really surprised on a couple of the things. I don’t really know some of them, my Dad didn’t tell me a lot about it to learn. (Interview 8b, 11/14/03) Nina felt that she did not know more about the Chinese culture than her classmates. Given the fact that Chinese parents tend to de-emphasize the cultural activities and the children have little exposure to them, it was a reasonable concern. However, the reinforcement of ethnic identity in class singled her out as a Chinese person who should have known more, which clearly caused her embarrassment. This in turn leads to pressures on the ethnic parents to transmit and on their children to acquire culturally relevant knowledge. Therefore, when the surrounding environment and society is friendly to the minority groups and recognizes cultural diversity, home culture maintenance will become a necessity and obligation to minority parents and children instead of an impossible task and an unnecessary burden. Many Chinese parents are actually aware of the dual expectations and demands from the mainstream towards the minority group. John’s mother noted:

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You see, you are staying in the US, you have to know their culture, so their customs and stuff you have to get involved in. Especially for them, they are born here and will grow up here. In the future, they will live here…But after all you are a Chinese, you know that…if you know a lot of Chinese things, it is not a question of hurting or not, they will only feel that you are a really knowledgeable person. You are indeed born here, but then when you grow up and work with the American colleagues, you…after all, they will see you as a Chinese, but when they ask you something about Chinese things, you will know nothing. They will feel, instead…very…it’s not a good thing. If you know it, you can introduce something of yours to them and when they hear these, they will feel …pretty envious, ah! It’s always good to know more than to know little. (Interview 5, 10/25/03) Thus, John’s mother realized that familiarity with one’s own cultural traditions is actually a demand to the minority children in a multicultural society. On one hand, the acculturation pressures to the immigrants require them to participate in the mainstream cultural activities and become part of the American society, but on the other hand, the “hyphenated” Americans, due to their skin color and minority status, are necessarily taken as representative of their culture of origin. This challenges the dominant “melting pot” theory according to which assimilation is the necessary acculturation outcome for minority children. It calls for the importance of transmitting the cultural traditions and customs to the second-generation children. THE ROLE OF CHINATOWN INHOME CULTURAL TRANSMISSION Compared with the Mandarin children living away from Chinatown, the Fujianese children who have ready access with and participate in the Chinatown community seem to have more opportunities and exposure to the home cultural practices. DZ: Have you done anything on Chinese New Year? Nancy: Eh…not really. But this is…this is special. My grandma sometimes takes me…anybody can take me out in the street and in Chinatown, we can see

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the dragon dance in the street. (Interview 4b, 10/10/03)

Nancy lives in the University City area, but since her parents and grandparents are active members of the community, she frequently participates in ethnic cultural activities. On the other hand, the Chinatown children can be more directly involved in the community celebrations of the Chinese traditional holidays. Min reported she has observed and got involved in these activities. Min said, I like Chinese New Year, like when I …when I get money and stuff.And the Moon Festival, it’s like fun. We all…all those Asian people celebrate together, and we have fun with our friends. Every…umm…we always celebrate the Moon Festival out there (in Chinatown). Just out there (on the street). And everybody comes and stuff. All the different Asian people. (Interview 6b, 10/26/03) In addition to the supportive community she lives in, Min goes to a neighborhood school that serves Chinatown community, which also reinforces home culture. She said, At school, everybody likes…celebrating it, because like there are this African American and white people, and like …they like the food, the Chinese food, everybody brings the food. We have a like…we have an assembly in the auditorium, and they have lion dance and those Chinese dancing. (Interview 6b, 10/26/03) From Min’s description, it can be seen that the Chinatown community as well as the neighborhood public school plays a crucially important role in promoting the second-generation children’s identification with the home culture. Actually, my interview with Min’s mother indicates that due to her long working hours in the garment factory, they are not able to celebrate the Chinese holidays at home, but involvement in the Chinatown community and in a school where Chinese students constitute one-third of the school population enables Min to acquire cultural knowledge and reinforce her cultural identity. Chinatown is the community center where the Chinese come together

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from different places in the proximity. The function of Chinatown has been documented by many scholars and researchers (Lin 1998; Kwong 1996; Zhou 1992). I will discuss the impact of the Chinese communities at length in the next chapter, but it suffices to say here that Chinatown sets the physical community boundary within which ethnic restaurants, shops, and traditional herbal medicines can be found. It also hosts parades, cultural celebrations, and various kinds of clubs and associations, such as Peking Opera Club, Chinese churches and temples etc. Most of the provincial associations have their offices in Chinatown too. In a word, Chinatown plays an important role in the Chinese diaspora’s daily life. Although it is hard for a minority individual to retain cultural traits in a culturally unresponsive host country, the community can be a site of education for the Chinese children with its rich cultural heritage and long-established ethnic institutions. In this sense, the ethnic community powerfully assists the parents in transmitting the culture to the next generation. Many Chinese parents, such as Min’s mother, choose to live in Chinatown out of this consideration.

GENERATIONAL DISSONANCE IN ACCULTURATION According to Edmonston & Passel (1994), some members within an immigrant family may acquire attitudes and behaviors of the host culture before other members do, which becomes the seed of conflict for immigrant families. In the acculturation literature, it has been commonly recognized that minority parents typically lag behind their children in the acculturation pace. Portes & Rumbaut (2001)’s study on the second-generation children argued that children’s acculturation should be placed in the context of the acculturation of the family as a whole. If the parents and children are at different levels of acculturation, dissonant acculturation will be the consequence, which inevitably leads to generational conflicts between the parents and children. The conflicts can be shown in almost every aspect of daily life, from participation in overt cultural activities to endorsement of deeply-rooted cultural beliefs and values. In this section, I will examine the major areas of generational dissonance in acculturation within the Chinese immigrant families.

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Almost all the families in my study report generational dissonance to an extent. The parents, as we have discussed in the previous section, stick to the traditional culture to a large extent. However, they find it difficult or useless to transmit the home culture to the second-generation children in face of the acculturation pressures from the outside. As a result, the children participate more in American cultural norms, especially after they grow older. The distance between Chinese children and their parents becomes wider and wider with age. DISSONANCE IN OVERT CULTURAL PRACTICES The following interview excerpt is an example of the generational dissonance between the Chinese parents and children in terms of eating habits. John’s mother said, We cook, we cook two kinds of dinner. The Chinese food we cook is for my Mom, my husband and me. For us, the three meals every day can be said to be all Chinese food. But my son, especially the second son, we have to cook separately for him. You see he was good previously, before he was two years old, we all had Chinese food at home, he was happy to eat those too. But after he went to school, he started to have lunch at school and he loves the American food. (Interview 5, 10/25/03) Although food is a minor issue at first sight, it can be disturbing sometimes since it is a daily necessity. It is hard to imagine that this family has to cook two kinds of dinner every night. When they go out to eat, there is again the issue of where to go. Sometimes we argue about where to eat out, my husband would say: let’s go find a restaurant in Chinatown. At this time, my eldest son would say: Uh? Why don’t we go to the American restaurants to eat? We always go to Chinatown. So this has happened to us several times…that is, we go to the American shops to buy something for them, we take out and then we go to a Chinese restaurant, open their take-out packages, and they eat theirs and we eat ours. (Interview 5, 10/25/03)

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While the parents prefer to go to Chinese restaurants to enjoy ethnic food, the children want to have American food instead. It sounds unbelievable that the living habits of the parents and children could be so different. Although they live under one roof, they have formed different eating habits due to the outside larger cultural environment. But John’s strong preference for American food may not represent that of all the second-generation children. Some Chinese American children stick to Chinese food out of habit even after they go to school. It might have seemed to be a personal and idiosyncratic issue what style of food one enjoys. However, in the face of daily clash between home culture and the dominant culture, nothing seems completely personal to the minority children because the pressure for uniformity among the peers is prevalent and strong. As Nina’s mother described her daughter’s school lunch experience, They don’t want to be different from the Americans. And then the Chinese food they don’t want to take to school, like we bought some from Chinatown, the package, at the time they were only in primary school, second grade, she didn’t want to take it since so young. Since she doesn’t want to take, I don’t prepare them for her later. Afterwards I asked her: Why don’t you want to take it? Especially like dumplings etc, the Chinese styled food, she said: other people will ask her, since the package has Chinese words. They will ask her: what does this mean? She said I couldn’t explain and it was embarrassing, you know? Another thing is the pancakes she brought, those Americans don't have these, they will ask her: What is it you bring? They look delicious. So she just doesn’t want to become the attention spot. So she would refuse to bring these. Therefore, she is very Americanized in terms of dress and food at school. But in fact, she likes Chinese food very much. (Interview 8, 11/16/03) In my interview with Nina, I found that lunch time is the most important social time for Nina at school. Children chat with one another and make friends over lunch: “Finally you get lunch time, that’s probably my favorite time, because I can laugh and talk to my friends and stuff.” (Interview 8b, 11/14/03) It is easily imaginable that Nina would refuse to draw particular attention to her simply because of

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the food she brings as if she were different from everybody else. It has to be mentioned that Nina lives in a suburban area and she goes to a school where she is the only Chinese student in her class. Her classmates are predominantly white Americans. In such a mainstream environment, Nina has to efface whatever aspects of the home culture she has acquired to fit into her peers’ customs and habits. However, what is most striking about Nina’s case is that her mother reported that Nina likes Chinese food better, which Nina herself also concurred. “I like Chinese food better. I got used to them because we have always been eating Chinese food at home. If you ask me the English food, which is my favorite food, I probably don’t know, because I didn’t try many of them. Probably my favorite restaurant is down in Chinatown, Little Cold Palace.”(Interview 8b, 11/14/03) In spite of her personal preference, the in-group identification at school obliges Nina to hide her true feelings. Nina’s experience of struggling with the two cultures best represents what could happen to the children from different family and cultural background. The cultural dilemma is a common headache in the everyday life of the second-generation children whose home culture is different from the school culture. DISSONANCE IN CULTURAL VALUES AND BELIEFS The differences between the home culture and the host culture in terms of overt cultural practices can be magnified by the external assimilation pressures that impose on the second-generation children, as the above examples show. However, the conflicts in deeply-rooted cultural values and beliefs are even more disturbing. Such conflicts are most strongly manifested in the parent-child relationship within immigrant famililes. All the Chinese parents in my interview demonstrate typical Chinese parenting beliefs that are largely dictated by the Confucian theory of parent-child relationship. These are in discordance with what the children are taught at school in terms of interpersonal relationships, especially the parent-child relationship. Generational dissonance emerges in the relationship between the Chinese parents and children due to the dichotomy in the dominant cultural values between the home culture and the host culture. I will illustrate the dichotomous cultural values with the following two cases. AUTHORITARIAN VERSUS AUTHORITATIVE: NINA’S CASE Authoritarian and authoritativeness are two opposing parenting styles. Most research comparing Asian American and European American

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parents has been conducted within this dichotomous parenting framework to find that differences in parenting styles exist across ethnic groups (Chao 1994 & 1996; Steinberg, Dornbusch & Brown 1992). Characteristics of authoritarian parenting include valuing obedience to and respect for authority, having high expectations for the child’s behaviors, making decisions without considering the child’s perspective, and not being warm and nurturing. On the other hand, authoritative parents are responsive and nurturing while at the same time setting clear expectations, explaining the reasons behind their expectations, and considering the child’s perspective in decision-making. European American parents have generally been reported to be more authoritative, whereas Asian American parents have been found to be more authoritarian (Chao 1994 & 1996). The different parenting styles in the home culture and the host culture often find the immigrant children caught between two different messages, one from their parents, and the other from their peers. Take Nina’s case as an example. Nina often compared her own parents with those of her European American friends. She found that her parents decided many things for her, especially in learning, whereas her American friends are allowed a large degree of autonomy to decide for themselves. Like the differences in choosing our teacher for the piano. We had quite a big argument about that. Sometimes I don’t really like the idea of learning the piano, so I try to tell them, I don’t want to visit a new teacher, because I am really scared and stuff. But they just asked me to learn it. When I talked with my American friends, they said: ‘You should talk to your Mom if you are not happy with it’. Afterwards, when I talked to my parents, they got mad immediately. (Interview 8b, 11/14/03) Nina’s mother registered her to learn piano once a week. She has to go to a teacher’s house after school and learn piano for one hour every Wednesday. Nina was against this idea, but her mother insisted that she should learn it. Nina was quite brief about the argument with her parents, probably out of embarrassment and discomfort, but her mother gave a more detailed description of what happened between the mother and daughter. Based on the mother’s narrative, the argument

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148 over piano lessons was an intense one.

I said I am just creating the opportunities for you to …to learn. But she is still… no matter how I explained to her, she still doesn’t understand sometimes. So sometimes it’s very annoying. Sometimes she seems to get it, but the next day she would come to me and ask the same questions, so I would get annoyed. I get annoyed and go mad immediately. So I would yell at her. As I yell, she would cry bitterly. She said: Mom, the American parents never yell at children. They always treat the kids as their friends and talk to them and like this. Because in terms of playing piano, she indeed doesn’t like it very much. But now I feel, I feel: You got to keep learning it for one more year, at least one more year. After she goes through this, anyway we don’t want her to become famous or what, anyway, she can quit after that. But she was like… she got it the other day, but later she was hesitant again, and she said: I will learn one more month. She again argued with me. As we argued, I became very angry: ‘I spend so much time explaining this to you every day. The next day, you still ask me one more time.’ She then said: ‘I will not talk to you later! I will not talk to you on whatever happens to me! (Interview 8, 11/16/03) The tension between the mother and daughter was huge. It seemed that Nina’s mother pushed her to learn piano against her will. Such a parenting behavior is typically authoritarian and apparently not desirable within the Western psychological constructs of parenting. However, according to Bukowski & Sippola (1998)’s local-knowledge model, what Asian parents do to their children shouldn’t simply be labeled as bad parenting. In fact, it should be viewed in light of the parents’ ideas about what it means to be a good parent and what constitutes a good or virtuous child. One interpretation of the research on Asian American parenting is that the emphasis on parental control and the high expectations emerges from the belief that good parents will be responsible for their children’s future and therefore, they should help them decide what is best for them when they don’t know better. When we listen to the mother’s voice, we find she considers herself justified in what she did to her daughter.

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It seemed I just forced her to attend without her own choice. Because the children don’t know many things before they grow up, how could they know what is good for them and what is not good for them? If you let her…if you allow her to choose, she will miss many opportunities in the future. I said to her: ‘If you want to choose, you have to guarantee me that you wouldn’t come back and complain to me when you grow up. Do you know?’ I said: ‘I know many people who learned piano, but quitted, when they grew up, they would come back to ask Mom: Why did you allow me to quit when I was young? So there are some things you don’t know now. But she feels she has no freedom. (Interview 8, 11/16/03) Nina’s mother explains away her authoritarian parenting behavior by introducing the “future-oriented” philosophy, which her daughter fails to see for the time being due to her young age and lack of life experience. According to the mother, she is acting for her daughter’s good. She is trying to present the best things, “create the best learning opportunities”, for her daughter, based on the knowledge and experience she has acquired in life, which qualifies her as a good and responsible parent. Although this contradicts her daughter’s freedom, she feels obedience to the authority, in this case the parents who know better, is more important than children’s autonomy. In fact, too much autonomy to the children when they can’t make the right decision for themselves is often viewed as irresponsibility on the parents’ part. This can be best exemplified by what Nina’s angry father did. Deciding to give up arguing with Nina and leave her alone, he said: “You go out to play! You go out to find those of your friends and play with them. Even if you play the whole day, I won’t restrict you! It’s fine you don’t learn anything. Just forget it. You just play every day!” (quoted by Nina’s mother, Interview 8, 11/16/03) Not only in learning piano, but also in other key academic issues does Nina find that her parents often decides for her and does not give her any freedom to choose. This lack of autonomy became more conspicuous when Nina compared herself with her American friends. Once Nina had the optional opportunity to attend the John Hopkins Research team, a program her school provided for high-achieving students to attend national competition.

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My best friend also had the right to attend it or not. But her parents asked her to choose it for herself. She can attend it or not attend it. She then chose not to attend it. But my parents asked me to do it. They said it’s going to be good to me. If I don’t attend it, I will regret in the future. (Interview 8b, 11/14/03)

Past research has repeatedly demonstrated that Asian parents, Chinese parents in particular, emphasize academic excellence and hold high academic expectations towards their children. This mentality in part originates from the Confucian belief that academic achievement was the only way to social mobility in old China. “Nothing is as noble as learning.”25 In a homogeneous culture where academic achievement is given high status by the society at large, as is the case in China, the children usually develop a tendency to internalize the values and beliefs held by the parents. However, under the influence of the mainstream American culture where diversity is valued and heterogeneity is taken for granted, the children find they are stranded in the middle. On one hand, they have come to accept the mainstream values and envy their peers’ autonomy in being able to decide their own life trajectory; on the other hand, they are being constantly instilled with their parents’ home culture-oriented belief that academic achievement should be the top life goal. In accordance with the high degree of parental monitoring that is characteristic of authoritarian parenting, the Chinese parents also exhibit a tendency to downplay parental responsiveness in the relationship with their children. As mentioned before, parental responsiveness is represented by the degree that the parents are encouraging, nurturing or sensitive to the children’s cues. Even though the Chinese parents are no less loving than European parents, the Chinese culture advocates implicitness in terms of emotion expression in relationships. As a result, the Chinese parents believe that the closeness and attachment in parent-child relationship should be manifested in what they do to their children, rather than verbally. This forms a sharp contrast to the European American parents’ open expression of love and affection towards their children. When the second-generation children are used to the warm nurturing and 25

This is a Chinese proverb, translated by the author.

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encouraging of the European American adults outside home, they go home and expect their parents to relate to them in the same way, only to find that their Chinese parents are reticent and sometimes even harsh. The Chinese children often complain that their parents are not encouraging enough. For example, although Nina does very well at school, Nina’s mother fails to praise her openly. Nina’s mother said, Each time when I go to their(my friends’) houses, they often say encouraging words to me: ‘Nina, you are a good girl. Your behavior etc, etc…very encouraging, like “I am proud of you”. She said: ‘I feel my friends’ parents are very proud of me. But you are not very proud of me.’ Like she said to me the other day, which made me very sad. She said: ‘Mom, I feel very happy at school, when I am at school, whatever I do my teacher praises me. Good job! Excellent!’ Stuff like this. And if she does well in the exam, she will get positive comments: Excellent! Awesome! etc. So…so she said the other day, she brought back a performance card with straight As, and because it requires parents’ signatures, each time she came back with a 100 grade, she usually got all 100, after she came back, we would sign our names, with no comment. My family is always…giving no comment, at most a “good”. So she said: Other families, when my classmates got a B, they would rejoice, cheer up, very much like that. I got As, but I don’t feel happy at all. She said: ‘Because after I took it back, you didn’t give me any applause. You simply signed your name.’ (Interview 8, 11/16/03) Nina’s mother described what her daughter was expecting her to do: the warm and nurturing feedback from the parents. However, her reaction was simply signing her name with no comment. Such a parental behavior might seem odd to the mainstream Americans, or tend to be regarded as bad parenting. However, Nina’s mother explained her behavior by contrasting what her culture orients her to do with what the American parents would do on such occasions. One of my friends told me a story. She went to the parents’ meeting. Beside her was a parent whose son took out a report card. His Mom opened it up: ‘Oh, wonderful!

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Excellent!’ At the time when she saw the Mom was so happy, my friend wondered: How wonderful is it? How excellent is this? So she glanced at it, because she just sat next to her. She found there were As, Bs, and Cs, (laughing). And still this Mom said ‘excellent’ etc. If it were our Chinese parents, Bs at first sight might have passed, but seeing Cs, we would say: ‘What is going on? How many Cs do you have? What problem do you have at school? I got to talk to your teacher!’ And stuff like this. But it turned out this parent said: ‘Oh! Wonderful…’It seems whatever the child does, she can acknowledge and accept. (Interview 8, 11/16/03)

From the comparison with European American parents’ behavior, it seems that Nina’s mother realized the cultural difference in parenting. Indeed, many Chinese parents in my interview agree on the importance of giving positive feedback to the children to build children’s confidence. They also rightly observe that due to the lack of positive reinforcement from the parents, many Chinese children are not able to develop high self-esteem. Nina described herself as a “shy person”. Her mother observed she was not as confident as other European American children in her class. “We just always feel scared, and feel ashamed of ourselves. It seems if we speak out, what if our opinion is not correct? What if they don’t agree with us? Even if my children growing up in the US, they are very shy, they don’t venture to speak out in class.” (Interview 8, 11/16/03) Therefore, Nina’s mother realized that it is important to encourage, reinforce and affirm what the children do since they are young. However, due to her different cultural orientation, she often finds it hard to do so verbally. Sometimes I will reflect upon them, like the things the child said last night. I feel, right, it’s very important to build up the kids’ confidence. Because last night the kid told me she had no confidence. You know? Afterwards I feel there does exist such a problem. So I am trying to imitate the Americans, but I feel it’s really hard to speak it out. For example, “Ahhh…you are so great, so great…”I always feel, it sounds awkward, too sugarly. It seems we don’t have this kind of thing. But when I listen to the Americans say these, I don’t feel awkward, it seems this is their culture. Just like this. But

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to us, it seems, if we hear some Chinese say things like these as the Americans do, I will feel weird. (Interview 8, 11/16/03) When Nina’s mother was consciously changing her parenting style, the Chinese cultural tradition made her uneasy. Although she tried to imitate the American parents who could offer strong verbal encouragement to the children, she found it “embarrassing” to do so herself. This demonstrates a big challenge facing the Chinese American parents in learning the mainstream parenting behavior in their acculturation process. They have to overcome considerable cultural shock to be able to feel easy with the host culture. On the other hand, the American-born children want their parents to be the same as those of their peers as soon as possible. As they get acculturated, they find it hard to appreciate their parents’ Chinese parenting style, which fails to provide them enough autonomy and nurturing. Such generational dissonance might hurt family solidarity on one hand and prove an obstacle in the children’s acculturation process on the other. COLLECTIVISM VERSUS INDIVIDUALISM:ALICE’S CASE An important aspect of the Chinese culture is collectivism that emphasizes group identification, especially family bond. Confucianism dictates that one’s self can only be reflected in relationships with people. In the Chinese tradition, the ideal society is people living and working together in harmony. In contrast, American individualism is based on the concept of “independence”. The American idea of individualism is derived from the fundamental belief that people are different. Therefore, the notion of “self” is critical in the American tradition. Stewart & Bennet (1991) explain that Americans’ perceived subjectivity of the self endows individuals with a uniqueness of perception, placing priority on personal preferences, opinions, choices and creativity. This is in contradiction of the Confucian tradition of sacrificing oneself for the sake of group interest. Although few Chinese immigrant parents in my study openly expressed wholehearted embrace of the Confucian tradition, the collectivistic philosophy is still a guiding principle to them in managing relationships with people. Its influence is an implicit but deep-rooted one. In the context of the Chinese family, first-generation parents are not in congruity with their children in attitudes towards relating self and

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other family members. Often the parents find the children they have raised adopt a totally different system of relating to people in the acculturation process, characterized by individualism and independence, core values in the American society. Alice’s mother said, It seems their values are different. Now what she received was totally the American way of education. Her mind was all her teacher taught her, that is to say, she sometimes, how to say, her stuff is even like that. Because in China, we were like the older children got to give way to the younger ones. But in the US, there is nothing like this, nothing like yielding to each other. What is mine is mine. If I allow you to use it, you can use it. If I don’t, you can ‘t use it. So I feel…I sometimes tell her some things like this. But some of the things, since she came at a very young age, some of these, like respect the elders, care for the younger brother, yield to each other, etc, seem not much effective to her. I think so, but we also told her, but I feel the result was not satisfactory. For example, yielding to each other. Because after all I have a son. She seems to…sometimes after all she is a kid, she is like a different person, not normal, sometimes she will yield, sometimes she won’t. But at school, it seems they don’t teach the virtue of yielding to others. The American kids seem not to have this, the kids in China will have parents who teach them this, the teacher will teach them this too. In the US, what the teachers taught seems to be more independent. That is, what is yours is yours, what is mine is mine. (Interview 13, 12/14/03) Due to school socialization, younger Chinese children are adopting the practices and norms of their mainstream American peers. From their parents’ perspectives, the “Americanization” of their children results in a lack of respect for elders and more “selfish” attitudes. According to Ho (1994), one way to understand the Chinese parenting is to consider the beliefs and values that shape Chinese American family life. Confucian ethics have provided a foundation for parent-child relationships in China, Japan and Korea. This is a perspective that emphasizes obligation to others rather than individual rights and in parent-child relationships is epitomized by filial piety. So

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Alice’s parent expects her to take care of the younger brother and to place other family members’ needs before her own. This expectation is further justified by what the immigrant parents have done for their children. Many Chinese parents report that they sacrifice many of their own conveniences for the sake of the children. For example, Naning’s mother thus talks about her investment on her daughter’s education. I feel I should be satisfied, because at least I don’t feel guilty, I feel I have done the best I can do, I have provided the opportunities as much as we can. That is, not only the environment, but also our time we put on her. That is, our energies, our heart is on her, so we don’t feel guilty. That is, we are pretty satisfied. (Interview 3, 09/28/03) Many parents in my study selected their housing location, either purchasing a house or renting an apartment, out of the consideration that the children can get into a good school. “When we first moved here, we just considered that my child could go to this school…because this school is a newly built one. We didn’t live here before.” (Interview 13, 12/14/03) Although the Chinese parents realize that the good school district or good school is usually situated in a more expensive neighborhood, they would rather face the financial constraint, which is usually not a minor problem to the immigrant parents, by living a modest life themselves and giving up conveniences so that their children could receive better education. Some of the immigrant parents stay on in the US in order that their children can receive the best education, even though they personally would rather go back to the home country. Given the fact that the Chinese parents are willing to sacrifice so much for the children, they expect strong family ties and obligations from the children in return. To the children, however, adopting the moral values of one’s social group requires them not only to possess the knowledge of those values but also to identify with that group and desire to embrace those values. In a relatively homogeneous social environment, those values are reinforced by the child’s family and by members of the greater community in a multitude of ways. The US is pluralistic society. Therefore, children are exposed to many different values, some of which may be antithetical to the values parents wish to develop in their children. As the children gradually acculturate and approximate the norms of the mainstream, they exhibit

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more and more individualistic propensities, to the parents’ disappointment. Family bonds could be loosened due to the confrontation of different cultural orientations across generations.

CHILDREN AS LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL BROKERS The above cases have illustrated that different degrees of acculturation into the host culture across generations is often the origin of conflicts within the Chinese immigrant families. However, according to Portes & Rumbaut (2001), dissonant acculturation can transform to selective acculturation when the second-generation children are fully bilingual and bicultural, which enables the children to benefit from two cultures and at the same time allows the parents to acculturate with the help of their children. In that case, children’s faster acculturation into the mainstream culture can have a positive effect on the adjustment of the Chinese families in the new country. With their skills in and familiarity with both languages and cultures, the second-generation children can act as a language and cultural broker between the parents and the larger society. PARENTS’ PARTICIPATION IN THE HOST CULTURE After the immigrants leave their homeland to begin a new life in the US, they are full of hope and excitement towards settlement in the new country. They are eager to participate in all levels of social life in the new culture. My interview with the Chinese parents suggests that although they retain certain cultural traditions, values and beliefs and seek to transmit them to their second-generation children one way or the other, they are also open-minded towards the mainstream host culture. The majority of the first-generation Chinese parents in my study express the desire to get acculturated and become “American-like”. Since they are voluntary immigrants, they immigrate out of their own will to seek a better life in the US. It’s not surprising that they hold open attitudes towards the American culture rather than resisting it. Although they value their home culture and language, they are not resistant to learn the new culture and language. This can be shown in their persistent efforts to learn English after they arrive, as I described in Chapter 4. It is also reflected in their attempt to learn the new culture actively. The following is an example of how the Chinese parents try to get involved in the American holiday culture.

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John’s Mother: It can be said we follow the local customs since we are here. In fact, we don’t have this religion or faith or what. My family only believes in Buddhism a little bit, so we don’t believe in Christianity. But that’s okay. We don’t reject it. No matter Christmas or what…as you said, Halloween, or Valentine’s Day, so long as it is a holiday, we will celebrate it with others. But that is not in that sense…it’s just…okay, it’s Halloween today, we need to buy candies and wait for others to knock at the door, and decorate the outside. When it’s Christmas, although we don’t believe in Christianity, we will also decorate the house with lights, buy Christmas tree, we buy it every year. Like Thanksgiving, that…that’s American, that is to say, occasionally, that is to say, we try as much as possible to get close to theirs. We don’t know what they eat on Christmas. For Thanksgiving, we know they eat turkey, oh, okay, we will join in. So we do it purely as a family activity, we celebrate the holidays for the sake of the children, and make them know that…you see, the children are going to live in America, if you don’t even celebrate Christmas, they will have no sense when they grow up. That’s not good. So we follow their customs since we are here. We celebrate all the holidays along with them. We don’t attach too many meanings to them, but just join them blindly and celebrate. (Interview 5, 10/25/03) There are several interesting things here that are worth attention. First, the Chinese immigrant parents are consciously trying to follow the customs of the host country. Contrary to the forgetfulness of their own ethnic holidays, most of the Chinese families celebrate the important American holidays, among which are Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Halloween. This is surely a sign of acculturation, but when we come closer to examine what the Chinese families actually do on these holidays, we find that they are a little ambivalent towards the culturally relevant activities in the host country. John’s mother said: “We will also decorate the house with lights, buy Christmas tree, we buy it every year…but we don’t know what they eat on Christmas.” (Interview 5, 10/25/03) Other parents express the same willingness to celebrate the American holidays, but at the same time the same hesitancy as to how to celebrate them.

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Naning’s Mother: Having dinner is for sure…but sometimes there is something special, for example, what day is today? Or what are we expected to do? We will do the things expected to do. For example, like others would say: like on Halloween we go to buy candies, and prepare the small pumpkins and etc. We actually do not know, but we will do it anyway. Like on Thanksgiving or what, we prepare a Turkey etc, That is, we also adopt a little bit. But what we did is certainly not like the way they did it. But we will do it too. (Interview 3, 09/28/03)

Naning’s mother was frank enough to admit her lack of cultural knowledge about the mainstream activities: “We actually do not know, but we will do it anyway.” In the process of acculturating themselves to the host culture, the Chinese parents deliberately observe the host cultural practices and try to make sense of the new cultural rituals. “We will do the things expected to do”. This indicates that the immigrant parents, coming from a different culture of origin, are still not used to the new culture to the extent that they can do it spontaneously. Rather they are at the stage of learning, not without efforts, to celebrate the American holidays in the American way. What is more ironic is that some Chinese families even do traditional Chinese activities on the American holidays. It seems that they do not attach too much significance to the mainstream holidays. Rather they take the holidays simply as a day for relaxation, and the form of entertainment and relaxation they resort to could be things they are most familiar with, such as the Chinese style of enjoyment. Vicky’s Mother: I think these holidays, no matter how long you have been here, you will join them. And we…moreover, it’s inevitable. We will have these and celebrate these. But like on Thanksgiving Day, we didn’t eat turkey because we didn’t like turkey. We have had turkey, when we first came, we went to friends’, as many people would do, they roasted the turkey, and we didn’t like it. We didn’t eat turkey even though it was Thanksgiving. When my colleagues asked me if I had turkey, I said no, I had ducks. (Interview 18, 12/21/03)

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In my interview with the Fujianese parents, the group of Chinese immigrants who are reportedly most unfamiliar with the mainstream culture, the phenomenon of doing ethnic activities on American holidays is even more prominent. For example, Maya’s father mentioned that the family would have a hotpot dinner and play Mah-jong (Majiang), a traditional Chinese gambling game, on Thanksgiving when relatives and friends get together. It seems that the idea of participating in the American cultural activities rarely occurred to them due to the lack of cultural knowledge. On the other hand, some of the particular traits of immigrant families, whose important ties are usually in the home country and who don’t have extended families in the US, also affect the way they spend the American holidays. Nina’s mother reported that they always come to the Chinese church to celebrate Thanksgiving together with other co-ethnics, as if in a big family, which made her daughter wonder why they could not do it as a family activity in the way that the European American families would do. From these diverse ways of reaction to American holidays, it seems proper to say that the Chinese parents are trying to learn the cultural cues in the US. However, a lack of culturally relevant knowledge often makes them unable to get acculturated successfully. As a result, they either try to imitate the mainstream Americans through doing what are “expected”, or they stick with the traditional Chinese cultural activities they are most familiar with. Either way, they are not able to identify with the host culture because they feel they are not adequately familiar with the culture. LEARNING CULTURAL CUES FROM CHILDREN When the parents feel inadequate with the relevant knowledge of the host culture, ironically, they often turn to their children for their “expertise”. Schwartz (1948) argued that urban American culture relied heavily upon two institutions: the public school systems and the neighborhood settlement houses, as acculturation agents. The children have been immersed in the mainstream cultural practices, beliefs and values at school. Public school education and network accelerates minority children’s acculturation and adoption of the host culture. Although the Chinese parents haven’t spent their formative years in American public school, they can re-learn the host culture through their children. Xiaoyan’s mother said,

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I still feel there is a distance with the Americans. But like my daughter, she and her friends are close with one another, but if I contact with her friends’ parents, sometimes I don’t know the American families’ customs, I feel a little embarrassed. Like her daughter’s birthday party, I learned that we don’t attend as parents. Only the children go. So sometimes I think when it’s my daughter’s birthday, I will also invite them to come over, such as watching movie together or eating cake together. But this is what we have learned or experienced. If there are other occasions, we don’t know what we should do. Sometimes I will ask her (my daughter): ‘Can you tell me what they do on this occasion? We can do the same thing.’ (laughing).(Interview 17, 12/20/03)

Therefore, the faster-acculturated second-generation children act as an important bridge between their first-generation parents and the outside society. They motivate the immigrant families as a whole to participate in the host culture and assimilate. Many parents declare that they participate in the neighborhood community activities mainly for the sake of the children, such as block party, basketball and football games. In addition to participation in cultural activities, Xiaoyan’s mother mentioned that because her daughter has many non-Chinese friends at school, she has opportunities to get to know their parents and establish cross-ethnic friendships. The immigrant families’ social network will be discussed in detail in next chapter. But it suffices to say here that the Chinese parents’ social network, especially cross-ethnic network, is often broadened because of the children. Vicky’s Mother: Most of my friends are Chinese, from the church. It seems I have no other way to know more friends. You don’t have opportunities to know others. But I go to girls’ scout. That is, my daughter attends girls’ scout, so in the Girls Scouts, you will have some involvement and get to know more people, and make friends with them. (Interview 18, 12/21/03) In negotiating the parent-child relationship on a daily basis, the Chinese parents also find that they can be influenced by their children’s acculturation and become more and more accustomed to the

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mainstream cultural beliefs themselves. The second-generation children sometimes bring a different set of values and beliefs they have learned at school into the family. Although these often clash with the home culture beliefs and become the cause of family dissonance, they also force the Chinese parents to come face to face with the host culture. For example, John’s mother talked about the change in her parenting behavior on children’s responsibility as family members. John’s Mother: At first, I said: ‘You go out to throw away the garbage.’ They would say: ‘Can you give me two quarters?’ ‘Why should I give you two quarters? Don't you use the garbage can? You also use it. No way!’ But now, it seems, that is, I have a change. I am not strict with them now, not in the way of our Chinese tradition with which we were raised up back then. (Interview 5, 10/25/03). As we all know, the Chinese culture emphasizes strong family bond and each family member’s responsibility in the family. It would be considered highly inappropriate and bad-mannered in China that the children ask for payment in return for what they do for the family. Likewise, since the Chinese parents see the family as a whole as an economic unit, they are willing to take it as their responsibility to shoulder children’s college tuition when the time comes. In a word, in traditional Chinese families, family members have reciprocal interests and duties, especially in the family’s finance. However, the American-born children have been used to the concept of financial independence after they enter school. From their peers, they also learn that material reward from parents to the children is customary and habitual. Confronted with the children’s new concept of independence rather than collectivism between family members, the Chinese parents often experience a shock at first, but they gradually come to accept such practices and values, as John’s mother did. CHILDREN AS TRANSLATORS AND LANGUAGE TEACHERS In addition to learning cultural cues from their children, many Chinese parents also get language help from the next generation. As we mentioned before, the second-generation children experience language shift within one or two years after they start school. Once they are proficient in English, they quickly adopt it as their primary language.

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Even the foreign-born Chinese children can adjust to the host language with high levels of proficiency in a relatively short period of time. However, the Chinese parents cannot keep pace with their children in learning the host language. Although some parents are able to achieve high level of written and oral English proficiency after staying in the US for a lengthy period of time, their English is still far from native. Most of the bilingual Chinese parents in my study report that their language skills enable them to handle everyday life with no problem, but when it comes to highly loaded cultural terms or usages, they would feel at a loss. At this time, children are often convenient help they can turn to for explanation. Xiaoyan’s mother said, Her English is no problem now, having classes and talking with classmates are all all right. Sometimes when she went shopping with us, you know, we adults came here and it took a long time before we could get used to the language, especially their slangs, those short, fast, abbreviated language. Sometimes we couldn't understand, she can understand and we ask her. (Interview 17, 12/20/03) In cases like this, the children’s English ability becomes a resource to the immigrant family. Xiaoyan’s family has only been in the US for two years. The family immigrated when Xiaoyan was in 4th grade. Xiaoyan virtually knew no English when she came, while her parents could be said to be functionally bilingual since the beginning, having obtained doctoral degrees in Japan before they immigrated. In the two years that followed, Xiaoyan’s English has quickly outpaced that of her parents, who have not had as many opportunities to develop their English skills while working in a research lab. Even though well-educated, Xiaoyan’s parents often felt restricted due to unfamiliarity with the language and the US society. Moreover, they found there were not many resources available that could help them get through the initial stages of adjustment. After Xiaoyan acquired English skills, she becomes an important means through whom the parents can rely on to get necessary information and knowledge about the host country. To the parents whose English level is extremely limited, such as the Fujianese parents in my study who do not even have a basic knowledge of English, children’s role as language and cultural broker is

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even more important. For lack of English skills, the Fujianese parents are confined to Chinatown, working in self-employed restaurants or Chinese-run garment factories where minimum English is used. The Chinese community allows them an enclosed space to conduct basic life without language skills. However, living in the US, the Chinese families as any other minority groups cannot but interact with the mainstream society on a daily basis. In such cases, the parents have to depend on their children for everyday translations. Maya’s father said, We Chinese don’t know English. In the US, we can only live among Chinese. It’s no good if we go out to the Americans. Sometimes I think since I can’t learn myself, I place my hope on the kid. I want my kid to learn as much as possible. Our language is not good, so we are often bullied by others. I am already 40 years old. Even if I learn now, how can you expect me to remember the difficult and complicated words? Sometimes the simple things Maya can translate a little bit. Like when we called the police because our restaurant was attacked. She talked over the phone with the policeman on the other side. Some other things like electricity or agencies for utilities and paying bills, she could help. (Interview 12, 11/25/03) In the host country, the children’s role to the immigrant families is crucial. Although there are other kinds of help that the Fujianese parents can turn to for interpretation, such as social workers, informal networks, co-ethnic friends, etc, children as family members are indispensable links between the parents and the “outside”. As Caifeng’s mother said: “When I want to do something outside, I can ask others to help me. But if my own children could speak English, it will be more convenient. After all, they are my children. I can ask them to do it whenever I have the need.” (Interview 16, 12/18/03) Besides acting as a language medium, the second-generation children can also become language teachers to the immigrant parents. Lulu’s mother reported that for lack of English-speaking friends, she often practices English with her daughter to improve her language skill. “I began to speak English with Lulu, because her pronunciation is very standard. So when she speaks English, I also speak English with her. So I can practice.”(Interview 1, 07/19/03) In my visits to Nancy’s

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grandmother’s house, I found a couple of tapes recorded by Nancy for her grandma to learn English with. The tapes were recorded using both English and Chinese. Nancy offered elaborate Chinese explanation for each English word to help her grandparents learn. Some parents and grandparents who are not confident with their English ability frankly admit that their second-generation children can be better language teachers to them than others. Nancy’s grandmother said: “I can talk with the kids in English because they won’t laugh at me. I dare not talk to the adults in English. It will be embarrassing if I say something wrong.” (Personal Communication) The role of language and cultural broker presents a peculiar task to the second-generation children, a task they wouldn’t have faced if they stayed in the home country. The parents would have assumed more power and authority in family affairs in the native country. In the new country, however, the children find themselves being placed in the center of the family, given their knowledge of the mainstream language and culture. The church teacher Jennifer Lo thus recollected her growing-up experience as a second-generation child. “I wanted to be able to help these children. My background was very similar to their background. You know, my parents didn’t speak English, so I had to do the translation. When I went to Japan, I was only…you know very young, but I used to translate from Japanese into Chinese for them. When I was here in the United States, I had been doing the translation work all the time. I grew up translating back and forth.” (Interview Community Teacher 2, 11/12/03)

THE MEDIATING ROLE OF THE HERITAGE LANGUAGE However, not all the second-generation children are able to accomplish the translation task successfully. In order for the children to play the role of language and cultural broker, they have to be familiar with both languages and both cultures. Most of the second-generation children in my study have maintained a high level of heritage language fluency, which enables them to communicate with their parents in the heritage language. However, I have also shown that the Chinese children demonstrate a clear preference for English since an early age due to the assimilation pressures. When the children’s language shift is complete and their home language lost, the advanced acculturation on their part

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will form a sharp contrast with the non-acculturation of their parents. Rather than becoming a bridge for the parents to get to know the mainstream culture, they will have no means to reach out to the parents. There will be a lack of communication across the generations. This is especially so in families where the parents don’t have a functional command of English, such as the Fujianese families. The following interview excerpts with Min and her mother show the struggles between parents and children with the children’s loss of heritage language. DZ: When do you speak Fujianese? How do you think of your Fujianese? Min: I speak Fujianese with my Mom, but when I speak with my sister, we use English. Sometimes I don’t know like…I don’t know like…Some words I don’t know, and I don’t really know how to pronounce them. When they…like the teacher tells us something, I don’t know like how to explain it to my Mom. (Interview 6b, 10/26/03) Min’s Mother: After they come home, they often ask me to sign, to sign their homework, I don’t understand what it is, how could I sign? (laughing) They just ask me to sign, sign, sign. (Interview 6, 11/09/03) Min immigrated with her mother at the age of 5 when she started kindergarten in the US. She hadn’t had any schooling in China before immigration. Without proper bilingual development, Min’s heritage language gradually deteriorates in a mainstream language environment. She reported that her Fujianese remains at the level of basic daily exchange and she doesn’t speak Mandarin at all, even though her mother speaks both. For the schoolwork and more complicated thoughts, Min did not have a viable common language to communicate with her mother. The result is that she did not speak to her parents on many things, leaving her mother in the dark as to what happened to her at school. While I was visiting Min’s house, Min’s mother took out a school calendar for the parents and asked me what “after-school programs” meant. Apparently, the days marked with “after-school programs” will have school days one hour longer than usual. She also asked for my opinion about what her daughter could be possibly doing

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with all the wooden models on the floor of her own room. “She worked on it last night for the whole night. She also called several of her friends in. I don’t know what they were doing.” (Interview 6, 11/09/03) It turned out that the daughter was doing a science project for school assignment. These things should have been simple enough to a parent who knows about the American school routines; however, they are inexplicable to Min’s mother who only finished primary education in a village school in China. Min’s inability to be a language help or cultural broker in the family only made the distance between her and her mother wider and wider as she gets acculturated. Min’s mother said, Sometimes when I have time, but they don’t stay at home with me. Sometimes, for example, I go to the foreigner’s garment factory to work, I will come back home at 4, I like them to be with me at home together, or go out shopping together, they wouldn’t go with me. So sometimes if I come back early and they are not at home, it’s useless. If there is work, I will go out again, doing more work, to earn more bucks. Actually it’s very tiring to go out again and do it. If I come back in the evening, the kids are there, I will feel warm. But they …sometimes if I ask them, they don’t obey me, they like going out with friends. This way, I feel very sad. It is really hard in the US. Recently, I don’t know why…suddenly I often feel sad. (Interview 6, 11/09/03) From this sad narrative, we can see that the loss of heritage language not only affects the communication between parents and children, but also threatens the family bond and drives the children to go out of the family. Being undereducated and semi-skilled, Min’s mother felt powerless and unable to get into her daughter’s world. The daughter was becoming more and more involved with her peers and lost the anchor in the family. Without the children being a language and cultural bridge, Min’s mother knew little about the host culture and had no way to know it. As a result, she would rather that her children stay at home with her. She didn’t trust the social environment her daughter moved about in. “I seem to have little faith. I am afraid she will go out and get cold on the way, she can do well staying at home, there are books to read at home, you can never finish reading them. But she just

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wouldn’t read it, she would rather go to the South Philly library to borrow books.” (Interview 6, 11/09/03) It is imaginable that if Min could help her mother acquire some knowledge of the American society, her mother would have been very happy to see her go to the library. Faced with potential family disconnection, Min’s mother spoke of the necessity of Min learning Chinese. Some people would like their children to go to the Americans, the foreigners, after they came to the US. They want them to join them on purpose so that they can learn English faster. But if their Chinese lags behind, they couldn’t catch up. It becomes more and more…Chinese and English both useful. Chinese communicate not only in English, but also in Chinese, in the US. (Interview 6, 11/09/03) Many Fujianese immigrant parents in Philadelphia Chinatown share the same opinion as Min’s mother: they desire their children to keep Chinese while they pick up English. However, the parents’ wish for bilingualism proves futile when the children defies their authority in the host country and refuses to follow their advice. Min’s mother once did enroll Min to learn Chinese in a Saturday Chinese school, but she dropped it shortly. “This year, it happened that her friends went to the Chinese school, she also went. Previously when I asked her to go there, she refused. Now she goes with her friends. If the friends study well, she will follow them. But sometimes I am not clear what her friends do, she even didn’t go to school. If friends are good, she will be good” (Interview 6, 11/09/03). Without the parents’ guidance, the second-generation children are at the mercy of the street culture and the peer culture. In contrast to Min’s case, Maya’s parents felt lucky to be able to have their daughter attend a bilingual program in the public school where she learns both English and Chinese. Maya’s father thus commented on the bilingual program and its positive effect on the family: The bilingual program she is in is very helpful to the parents. She (Maya) can explain things to me and let me know what she is doing at school. If she only studies English, she will forget Chinese and she can’t talk with the family. Moreover,

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she can translate for me now when I need to talk with the teacher or other Americans who only speak English. (Interview 15, 12/18/03) To the Fujianese parents, maintaining the heritage language in the second-generation children is not so much a luxury of learning an additional language, but indeed a necessity for the family to survive in the host country as a whole. Because the bilingual programs Maya attended reinforced heritage language learning, Maya had been able to keep up her Chinese and undertake the task of being a language and cultural broker for her parents.

SUMMARY This chapter examines the intersection of language maintenance, cultural participation and acculturation. By doing so, I made it clear that language maintenance is not solely a linguistic phenomenon, but rather an important aspect in the immigrant families’ acculturation in the host country. Such a perspective is new to research on language maintenance. Few past studies have examined the issue of language maintenance within the larger framework of acculturation. My study illustrates the interrelatedness of the two and points to the crucial role of children’s heritage language skills to immigrant families’ adaptation in the new country. Although most of the Chinese parents in my study hold positive attitudes towards the American customs and beliefs, they are ambivalent about the culturally relevant knowledge and often hesitant to participate in them due to structural barriers and language barriers. To a large extent, they remain home culture oriented and maintain the traditional Chinese lifestyles. On the other hand, the second-generation children are acculturated faster to the American values and customs given their daily immersion in US public schools. The different degrees of acculturation into the American society between the Chinese parents and children often result in serious generational dissonance and conflicts, loss of parental authority and “role reversal”, especially when the children grow older and face more assimilation pressures at school. It is against this background of acculturation imbalance between generations in immigrant families that my study demonstrates the importance of heritage language maintenance. I argue that if the

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second-generation children maintain adequate home language skills, they could become the bridge between the immigrant parents and the mainstream society. When the second-generation children help the parents get to know the “outside” world, their faster acculturation to the host culture can become a family resource and help rather than a root for generational dissonance. Such a role of language and cultural broker is a crucial one to immigrant Chinese families’ collective survival in the host country, especial to those families where parents have very limited knowledge of the dominant language and culture. It is also helpful to the second-generation children themselves since when they keep strong ties with their parents, they will enjoy parental guidance, support, affection and help of all kinds. However, heritage language maintenance is often a prerequisite for the children to benefit from the two cultures and play the role of a broker successfully.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE: A SOCIAL NETWORK PERSPECTIVE

Social networks are deliberately created by people for special purposes…Members of particular social networks are seen as actively contributing to the constitution of social relations and social structure through their interactive behavior. ---Li (1994: 32) In the previous chapters, I described the language attitudes and language maintenance efforts by the Chinese immigrant parents, focusing on the family as the major context for language socialization. However, language use and maintenance are influenced by many factors outside the family as well. The social contacts and social environment surrounding the Chinese families are crucial to the maintenance of the heritage language in the second-generation children. In this chapter, I will discuss the social relationships that the Chinese families have formed in the US and how these social relationships affect children’s heritage language maintenance. Special attention will be paid to the co-ethnic networks, i.e., relationships between Chinese and Chinese, and the co-ethnic communities that are formed among the Chinese immigrants. The range of one’s social networks is hard to investigate empirically since anybody an individual has some relationship with or get in touch with could pass for a contact person. Based on my fieldwork with the Chinese immigrant families, three network types emerge: exchange ties, interactive ties, and passive ties. According to Li (1994), exchange ties are collectives of people with whom the probability of rewarding exchanges is high. In other words, these are people with whom the person not only interacts routinely, but also exchanges direct 171

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aid, advice, criticism, support and interference. Traditionally, kin and close friends form an essential part of an individual’s exchange ties. Interactive ties, on the other hand, consist of people with whom the person interacts frequently and perhaps over prolonged periods of time, but crucially, the probability of rewarding exchange is low, that is, the person does not rely on these contacts for personal favors and other material or symbolic resources. The exchange ties and interactive ties are similar to Milroy’s (1987) terms: closeknit network and open network. In addition to these two types of networks, a third network that was not mentioned by Milroy (1987) is found important to the Chinese immigrants’ life: “passive ties”. “Passive ties” fall somewhere between exchange networks and interactive networks. Unlike the former, they do not involve regular interaction with the individual, yet their affective impact on the individual is strong in contrast with interactive networks. “Passive ties” are marked by an absence of regular contact, but are considered equally important by the person who depends on such relationships for sentimental and moral support or influence. Many people, for example, would have relatives and friends who for various reasons are physically distant from them, but who are still regarded as important relations. Such relations are particularly relevant to the Chinese immigrants who tend to cling psychologically to their extended families left behind in the home country, despite the passing of time. In the following discussion, each of these network categories is examined to illustrate what roles they play in the lives of the Chinese parents and children, how important they are to them, and in what ways they impact on the heritage language development of the second-generation children.

PASSIVE TIES: EXTENDED FAMILY The family as the focus of Chinese way of life has been recognized and stressed by the Chinese people from earliest times. Confucian philosophers throughout history, who dominate Chinese ideology, have refined and emphasized family consciousness through a carefully worked out hierarchy of extended family relationships which informs the individual’s daily behavior. Compared with the nuclear family, the

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extended family has been traditionally accepted as the ideal family type in Chinese society. To the Chinese immigrants in the US, extended family is still regarded as one of their most important social networks. However, unlike their domestic counterparts, the Chinese immigrants could no longer keep close touch with their extended family. For example, many Chinese parents in my study reported that the majority of their extended family members or relatives live in China. This is not surprising given the fact that most of the Chinese immigrants are recent immigrants after 1960s. The act of immigration has placed many Chinese families in the conditions where they have to say goodbye to their past life. Whatever have been their major social networks in China has to be left behind after they decided to come to the new country. Although some families arrange to have extended family members immigrate after them, the US immigration law restricts them to be close family and limited in number. Therefore, the extended family network of most Chinese immigrants remains in the home country and becomes their “passive ties”. EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT Although the extended family has become passive ties, it still occupies an important place in the new life of many Chinese parents, especially those who recently came to the US. In the initial days when they have not started new friendships on the new land, they tend to stick to the family and friends in the home country. Donna’s mother said, At first, we felt very lonely, because when we came to the US, we had no friends,. …I spent a lot of time on making calls to family and friends in China. When I call them, I will speak more than one hour. Without my knowledge, we talked and talked…last time I bought a phone card which is supposed to last 8 hours, but actually I only used it for one week. My husband said: How come you used it up so quickly? Maybe because I am here only one year, I feel very lonely…It seems I am always calling people, I almost feel embarrassed to tell my husband. I felt I didn’t talk that long, maybe I forgot. Sometimes I tell them what’s happening to me, and they sometimes tell me what was going on in China and in my old company… (Interview 10, 11/20/03)

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In a sense, Donna’s mother’s behavior represents what most Chinese immigrants would do during the initial transition period to the new country. Although she was physically living in the US, her major life activities and networks were still in China. Psychologically, she was still attached to the life of her home country. In today’s world, with the advanced telecommunication and internet technology, people are much more able to maintain strong ties through email and phone calls, even when they are physically removed from one another. This provides the conditions for the migrants in today’s world to rely on their passive ties in the distant countries to get emotional and moral support. TRANSNATIONAL BEHAVIOR As the immigrants stay in the host country longer and as they start to set up new relationships and have new connections, the old ties in the home country are gradually replaced by new friends. In fact, with the elapse of time, the immigrants start to pay more and more attention to their current affairs and current life in the host country, which they are not able share with the old ties. Some Chinese immigrants in my study complain that they no longer have things in common with the relatives and friends left behind in China as they stay in the US longer and longer. Most people reported that they only maintain regular contact with their immediate relatives, such as parents or siblings. Distant relatives and old friends are easy to lose in touch with due to the physical environment change. In spite of this, the existence of extended family in the home country is still meaningful to the majority of Chinese immigrants. It maintains their connection with China and reminds them of their homeland. Even after they have got familiar with the new environment and established new connections, most first-generation Chinese parents mentioned that they engage in transnational behavior on a regular basis. The most common demonstration of transnationalism is making frequent international calls to the home country. “We call home once a week.” “On Chinese holidays, we will call home to say we miss them very much.” It is interesting to see that the Chinese parents still regard China as their “home” even if they have obtained citizenship in the US and the whole family has settled down in the new country with their own house. Transnational travel is also common with the Mandarin families who can afford it.

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John’s Mother: John has been back twice, once in 1997, and once in 1999. Our plan is basically going back every two years. Each time, we took the kids back with us. (Interview 5, 10/25/03) Nina’s Mother: Since 1998, …I went back in 1998, 2000, and 2002. I went back every two years. We will go back next year. We plan to go back during Spring Festival. It’s not that I have a special, special …affection for China. But I feel we should …often go back to visit when my parents and parents-in-law are alive. Once our parents pass away, I think we won’t go back as frequently as now. (Interview 8, 11/16/03) It is to be noted that all these transnational actions the Chinese parents engage themselves in to reconnect with their extended family in the home country have influence on their second-generation children, especially in terms of their heritage language maintenance and identity formation. The children’s heritage language ability is put to a critical test when they communicate with the family ties in China. Nina’s mother said, When we call our family in China, we say one sentence, they (children) learn one sentence from us, they couldn’t communicate with them alone. When they speak Chinese with us at home, they can use English to replace the words they don’t know in Chinese. But if you ask them to talk with people in China, they have to use Chinese in every single word. In the situation that they can’t use any English, they will feel very difficult”. (Interview 8, 11/16/03). This reflects the true status of many second-generation Chinese children’s home language proficiency level. Though they are able to use Chinese as an alternative language in the host country, they find it difficult to handle a conversation with a Chinese-only speaker. On one hand, being educated in English and learning the home language only in informal contexts, the children’s Chinese repertoire is rather limited. On the other hand, they have been used to code switching between Chinese and English when they use their home language. The removal of English as a backup language catches them at a surprise and makes them unable

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to use the home language fluently. However, this does not necessarily mean that the American-born children’s Chinese is not viable, compared with that of the “authentic” Chinese native speaker. Instead, as Jo (2001) argued in her study of Korean American students, heritage language students’ heritage language speaking reflects their diasporic lived histories and experiences which cannot be easily translated into the “standard” home language, be it Chinese or Korean or any other language. While such transnationalism challenges the heritage language ability of the second-generation children on one hand, it also tends to change their language attitudes. Many Chinese children who previously did not take their heritage language seriously start to value it after they visit their parents’ home country. Since they have been personally involved in a Chinese-speaking social environment that fosters the development of their heritage language, they come to realize the importance of being bilingual. Some of the Chinese children might be too young to reach this level of awareness. Yet once they have been placed in a social environment that speaks the language, they can easily acquire the habit of speaking it on their own. For example, a Sunday school teacher in the Chinese church, Meimei, observed, The Mandarin-speaking kids, if they are born here, they will speak English naturally once they go to kindergarten. They no longer speak Mandarin. But I found this interesting. Steve, Wang Wensheng’s son, he has been speaking English all along in my class. Whenever he speaks, he uses English. Then his Dad took him back to China for one month, in the first one or two weeks after he came back, he kept speaking Chinese, but as time goes by, he quits speaking Chinese and changes back to English again. (Interview Community Teacher 1, 09/28/03) Therefore, the extended family visits and network maintenance in the home country can greatly enhance the Chinese children’s home language maintenance. Moreover, in my interview with the Chinese children, I found the children whose parents repeatedly mention their extended family tend to associate China with a mood of attachment and closeness.

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DZ: What do you know about China? Naning: I …I guess…I think of my aunts and uncles. (Interview 3b, 10/05/03) Although some children may have never seen their relatives in China, a longing for more family members makes them view China in a homesick way. Given the fact that the Chinese children do not have many relatives in the US, they have no way to compete with their American peers in terms of kinship playmates and maternal/paternal figures. As a result, they could claim to strongly identify with their extended family in China despite the spatial distance. The identification can grow tremendously after their parents actually take them back to the home country to visit. John’s mother thus described her children’s trip to China: When we went back, it was like a big event. The whole family welcome us, dinner and stuff. It was extremely good. Once the grandma saw them, she gave each of them 100 yuan26, though they didn’t know that 100 yuan is only worth 3 dollars. Anyway, they were all excited. When they had to come back to the US, they cried big and loud. (Interview 5, 10/25/03) It is arguable that although far away, the extended family ties in the home country could promote the immigrant children’s sense of belonging and facilitate their acculturation in the host country as a minority group. THE ROLE OF GRANDPARENTS Although most of their extended family networks remain in the home country, some Chinese families (both Mandarin and Fujianese) do arrange to have certain immediate relatives immigrate after them, among whom are often grandparents. Grandparents play an essential role in traditional Chinese families. My interviews show that grandparents still occupy meaningful positions in Chinese American families. In the US as in China, the Chinese grandparents tend to co-reside with their adult children. Out of the 18 interviewed families, 10 families have grandparents either presently living with them or having lived with them 26

The exchange rate of yuan (Chinese dollar) to US dollar is 8: 1.

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for a while. For those who move out, they live in close proximity to the adult children so that the two households, though separate, have intimate relationships. This family pattern in part has to do with the grandparents’ immigration status: most of the grandparents came to the US as their adult children’s dependent and had no financial resources, language ability, or working skills to be able to live by themselves. But co-residence also has a cultural foundation. As I mentioned before, extended family co-residing together has traditionally been the ideal family pattern in the Chinese culture. Under the Confucian beliefs, the adult children are expected to fulfill “filial piety” and take care of the elderly parents in their golden age. On the other hand, from the grandparents’ own perspective, they feel obliged to provide whatever support and help they can give to the adult children’s household. Such support and help are often much needed to the younger couples in the home country, and even more so to the immigrant Chinese parents who have challenging financial, social and cultural tasks to handle in the new country, but have only too few social networks to rely on. My study indicates that grandparents indeed play an essential logistic role in Chinese immigrant families. They take over major housework chores, such as cooking, cleaning and childcare, etc, for the adult children. For example, in Naning’s family, the grandmother plays the important role of a housekeeper: Previously when I didn’t work, I did the housework. Afterwards, my Mom came over, she did more. After my Mom came, I wanted to have more time to read books, that is, if you read more books and improve yourself, you will find a better job, so…after my Mom came, actually I also stayed at home for a while, but I still read more books and did not that much housework. Now since I started working, I have even less time to do housework, basically my Mom did the housework. (Interview 3, 09/28/03) In fact, the presence of grandparents at home makes possible two working parents, which are often a must for immigrant families given their restricted financial situation. As Naning’s mother asserted, the arrival of her mother in the family freed her from the housework routines so that she could have time to receive further training and

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re-enter the job market. More importantly, and more relevant to the focus of the study, the grandparents are also major caregivers to the second-generation children in the two-working-parent families. It has been a common practice that the Chinese grandparents take on child raising and childcare tasks for the younger parents in China. Having experience with young children and having flexible time, they take care of the children’s domestic needs when the working parents are not available. The Chinese immigrant parents apparently keep up this practice in the US. Naning’s mother said, My Mom will give a lot of help, she is there and I won’t worry about anything, since she is always at home. That is, the kid is at home with my Mom. I don’t worry a thing. If my Mom were not with us, maybe I couldn’t work like this. I couldn’t attend many of the social activities either. Most probably, I either take a part-time job or don’t go to work, because the kid is still most important. Her school ends at 3pm, how could I deal with this? What could I do without my Mom? (Interview 3, 09/28/03) Naning reported that her grandmother would take her to school in the morning and pick her up after school every day. After she gets home, her grandmother cooks something for her to eat and helps her take a shower. In a word, she would spend the whole after-school time from 3pm to 6pm with her grandmother. Such a close relationship with grandparents undoubtedly has significant impact on the second-generation children’s development. Most importantly, the grandparents are important home language and home culture transmitters to the American-born and American-raised children. Knowing no English, they have to be addressed in Chinese. My interview shows that the second-generation children have since an early age realized the monolingual status of their grandparents and have been used to speaking Chinese to them. Naning said: “When my grandma is at home, I use Chinese” (Interview 3, 09/28//03). Although Naning’s mother emphasizes using Chinese as the children’s home language, she admits that they often end up speaking English with the children.

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We speak Chinese to her, but many times she speaks English to us, and when we reply, we often forget to use Chinese, so we reply in English. But when my Mom is with us, we have to speak Chinese” (Interview 3, 09/28/03).

So the presence of grandparents in the family forces the whole household to use the heritage language. In fact, having grandparents co-residing in the family has often been cited as one of the most important reasons why the children are able to keep up heritage language proficiency, especially oral proficiency. Vicky’s Mother: My child was born here, but since my parents and my parents-in-law had been living with us, she had been speaking Chinese up to 4 years old. So although she was raised in the US, she …because of our daycare, she didn’t go outside for daycare, she hadn’t spoken any English up to then. She spoke Chinese all along at home. Otherwise, her Chinese wouldn’t have been very good. Her Chinese is fine now. (Interview 18, 12/21/03) Nancy’s Mother: She grew up with my parents. She stayed with my parents from 1 year old to 3. Starting from 3, she went to day care. But she has been always with my parents for after-school, even now. She and my parents, I think, it is a very very special relationship. So Nancy has the need to speak Chinese, because she is close to my Mom, she can’t use English. So she naturally learns it. I have never thought her Chinese would be a problem. (Interview 4, 10/10/03) In Nancy’s case, her grandparents came to the US and stayed on solely for her sake. Though they live about half an hour’s ride away from her own home, the grandparents have become major caregiving persons for her, due to the busy schedule of the mother. Therefore Nancy is very close to her grandparents. “She and my parents, I think, it is a very very special relationship.” The intergenerational attachment enhances the necessity of speaking Chinese on the part of the second-generation children. Nancy said: “I have to tell my grandma, I have to tell her what’s going on with my school, but the only way to talk to her is speaking Chinese. Otherwise, she couldn’t understand”

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(Interview 4b, 10/10/03). The necessity, according to Nancy’s mother, also explains why Nancy doesn’t have resistance towards learning Chinese, as most other Chinese children do. Nancy’s mother said, Other children resist perhaps because they ask themselves: ‘why do I have to take extra time to learn Chinese? Why?’ But for Nancy, it’s like, well…because my Mom is here, Chinese is an important part of her life. The necessity becomes a motivation for her to learn Chinese because she feels the need. For other children, if they are told to learn Chinese while they see no point in doing that, it’s not surprising that they will resist. (Interview 4, 10/10/03) In some families, the grandparents not only speak Chinese to the American-born grandchildren, but they also teach them Chinese reading, writing, and literacy. When I was observing in Nancy’s grandmother’s house on an afternoon, I found Nancy and two other Chinese girls (Donna was one of them) were learning math from a Chinese math textbook with the help of Nancy’s grandfather. As it turned out, Nancy’s grandfather was their after-school teacher and summer-time teacher. Nancy told me, “I come here mostly every day. After my school, I have to come here and learn my piano lessons and do math and Chinese and other stuff. And my grandpa teaches me Chinese and math” (Interview 4b, 10/10/03). All these activities with grandparents have to be conducted totally in Chinese. In the process of learning academic subjects in the heritage language with the grandparents, children’s biliteracy is developed along with their oral proficiency. In addition to being heritage language transmitters to the next generation, the grandparents as important co-residing family members also bring traditional home culture to the second-generation children. Many of the adult parents, due to the acculturation forces and survival pressures in the US, often find no time or interest to attend the ethnic cultural activities in the community. Their elderly parents, on the other hand, are active participants and supporters for these activities. For one thing, they have more leisure time; for another, they embrace the traditional home culture more wholeheartedly than their adult children. As a result, with the grandparents, the second-generation children have more opportunities to be immersed in the ethnic culture, which in its turn helps to promote their biculturality. Naning reported that she often

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played Chinese games with her grandma during after-school time. “Sometimes we play Pai (cards) with grandma.” (Pai is a popular Chinese game for both children and adults.) Nancy goes to various cultural programs in Chinatown with her grandma, such as Kung Fu lessons, Peking Opera Club and Chinese Church. Victoria stays at her grandmother’s house watching Chinese cartoons and TV programs for after-school entertainment. Since the Chinese children’s daily interaction with grandparents is plenty, such cultural involvement could be extensive and direct, influencing their ethnic identity formation. Nancy’s mother commented on her parents’ influence on Nancy: Because my parents have a very strong sense of being Chinese, the Chineseness. I think my Mom, my parents always think if they are of any good to Nancy, it’s they are giving her the root of Chinese. I also tell Nancy: You are lucky your grandparents are here. So she is much into …Chinese. (Interview 4b, 10/10/03) The above discussion focused on one important social network of the Chinese families in the US, i.e., extended family ties, to examine their possible impact on the second-generation children’s heritage language maintenance. Most of the extended family ties of the Chinese children are back in China, but they exert meaningful and positive influence on the children’s ethnic identity and help them establish connection with their parents’ homeland. Through participating in regular transnational activities, the children’s heritage language proficiency can be greatly enhanced. Grandparents are singled out among the extended family ties as those who often co-reside and provide important help to the nuclear family. Such a co-residing pattern between generations is significant to the Chinese children’s heritage language development as well as cultural identity formation. It necessitates frequent heritage language use by the Chinese children and enables them to participate more in ethnic cultural activities. To a certain extent, the Chinese grandparents play a crucial role in transmitting the home language and home culture to the second-generation children in the US. Amidst the strong influence of the mainstream American culture that quickly acculturates the Chinese children, the involvement in the extended family networks provides a channel for the second-generation children to develop bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturality.

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PARENTS’ NETWORKS: CO-ETHNIC COMMUNITIES AND CROSS-ETHNIC TIES CO-ETHNIC COMMUNITIES AS CLOSE-KNIT NETWORKS Almost all of the Chinese parents in my study claimed that they have more Chinese friends than non-Chinese friends and that their social activities largely remain within the co-ethnic communities. Sociologists define “community” as “a cohesive and self-conscious social group” (Watson, 1977: 195). However, the concept of “community” is a relative new thing to the Chinese tradition. The general pattern of social life of the Chinese people, under the influence of Confucianism, seems to be family-oriented to the neglect of the development of “community” in the Western sense. In a Confucian society, people are linked by blood and the extended family acts as a social unit that unites people together. Each societal member is expected to rely on the mechanism of a complicated hierarchy of his/her kinship and clan for social support. Yet in the case of the Chinese immigrants, immigration has made it impossible for family members to live close enough to offer support when needed. The new situation calls for the formation of a “community” based not on kinship, but on social traits that members share in common. Older Chinese immigrants (before 1965) are homogenous in the sense that they largely come from Guangdong (Canton) Province in China to work as hard labor in the US, speak Cantonese and concentrate in Chinatown, the “ethnic enclave”. However, more recent Chinese immigrants exhibit huge variations in many aspects, such as place of origin, immigration background, language, education and occupation. Their residences also tend to scatter in different geographical areas. These differences set boundaries for community development and make it difficult to form a single Chinese community that unites the immigrants solely on the basis of their ethnicity. Heterogeneity and within-group diversity, coupled with the traditionally weak sense of “community” in the Chinese culture, have contributed to the complex nature of the Chinese communities in the US. Ling (2004) termed the new Chinese community a “cultural community” in the sense that it is a virtual (not real), symbolic community encompassing and bonding all the Chinese immigrants and their descendents based on their common cultural heritage.

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My study with the Chinese immigrants in Philadelphia confirms the vitality of the “cultural community” among the Chinese. Although the Chinese may not know one another and they have important social relations beyond the co-ethnic networks in different life domains, the “cultural community” provides a sense of belonging to all the Chinese who can find cultural identification and seek emotional solace in the same cultural heritage while living in the culturally different host society. As such, the cultural community is not a closeknit and highly interactive community, but rather quite open and loosely connected. On the other hand, my fieldwork in the Chinese communities in Philadelphia suggests that within the larger cultural community, different local Chinese communities have been formed, based on more specific characteristics their members share. In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, I have depicted the major characteristics of two important Chinese communities and how they came into being, the labor community in Chinatown and the academic community in University City. Within these two communities, there are further split small groups, associations or organizations, for example, the townsmen associations, the alumni associations, and the church groups, etc. The Chinese in these small social circles have more things in common, such as linguistic background and places of origin, educational background, occupation and religious beliefs etc. They also establish multiplex, dense relationships and frequently engage in behaviors of “exchange” and “obligations” within each of these small-scale social networks. For example, the townsmen associations are prevalent among the Fujianese immigrants who are more aware of the regional differences according to their place of origin, a pattern representative of the older Chinese immigrants’ way of community organization, such as Cantonese immigrants, Hong Kong immigrants. Within the townsmen associations, the Fujianese families largely know one another and interact with one another on a daily basis. For example, they could be neighbors, fellow workers in the same factory or restaurant, distant relatives, former fellow villagers from the same hometown, customers and providers all at the same time. Their interaction is also characterized by “exchange” and “reciprocity”. It is typical for one Fujianese to introduce a job to his/her townsmen and it is not infrequent for the Fujianese to marry within the Chinatown neighborhoods with the help of a match-maker who is another Fujianese. Chinatown, the enclosed ethnic ghetto, closely unites the Fujianese immigrants and help them form close-knit social networks

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within it that are indispensable to their life. Li (1994) proposed that since the Chinese kinships are traditionally tied to land and specific territories, the townsmen associations are established as substitutes of kinship ties which the immigrants can no longer maintain. Therefore, to a certain extent, the townsmen networks are replacing the family ties to become important resources from which the Fujianese seek material, social and emotional support. For the Mandarin families, they participate in organizations like Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), PUPA (Peking University Penn Alumni), Chinese Professional Association (CPA) etc, within the academic community. These organizations frequently organize cultural activities, such as National Day Parade, movie shows, and barbeques etc, for the Mandarin group to gather together. Although the networks for the Mandarin families are not as dense, close-knit as the townsmen associations among the Fujianese, the Mandarin parents nonetheless emphasize the closeness and warmth between members of their co-ethnic networks. John’s Mother: With the Americans, we meet each other in smile, say hello as a greeting. And that’s it. But with the Chinese, mostly we keep in touch in order to help each other. Last night, our family went swimming for the first time. We got to know a Chinese family there. We exchanged telephone numbers because they wanted to know where my son learned tennis playing. They wanted to send their son there too. I said: “After I go back home, I will call you about the tennis club information.” (Interview 5, 10/25/03) Donna’s Mother: My English was very limited in the beginning. A friend from my husband’s alma mater in China introduced me to a free adult English class. The teacher is an Indian. He uses English all the time, but there are other Chinese in this class. Sometimes when I don’t understand, I will ask them. (Interview 10, 11/20/03) To some immigrant parents, the co-ethnic community and co-ethnic networks provide useful information to them through the medium of their common language. Having minimum English skills, Donna’s mother has to depend on her Chinese-speaking friends in the beginning

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for information about where to learn English as well as for necessary assistance in learning it. Although John’s mother doesn’t need to rely on the heritage language for help, she nonetheless regards “exchange” between co-ethnic networks as important to the stability of their relationships. As a result, the co-ethnic communities are expanding with more and more Chinese coming in. On the other hand, more and more Chinese immigrants, newly arrived or old-timers, come to rely on the co-ethnic networks for social support and helpful information. Eventually, the co-ethnic communities become a closely-knit system that helps Chinese immigrants reorient themselves in the new land. IMPACT OF CO-ETHNIC COMMUNITIES ON HERITAGE LANGUAGE TRANSMISSION The co-ethnic communities as exchange networks have important significance for the Chinese parents in transmitting their heritage language and culture to the second-generation children. While individual Chinese parents, especially those who are well educated and have held high socioeconomic status in the Chinese society before immigration, may value their heritage language and culture, they encounter serious disruption in value judgment and worldview after immigration. Falling into the status of minority individuals whose cultural heritage is not recognized and widely accepted by the mainstream host society, Chinese immigrant parents are confronted with the threat of having to give up the old paradigm and adopt the mainstream Anglo-centered ideology under the assimilation pressures. In face of discrimination and exclusion, a majority of the Chinese parents in my interview mentioned that they have been frustrated in their efforts to maintain the heritage language in the children. Alice’s Mother: We did try our best to keep some Chinese in her, but because Chinese characters are difficult to write, there are many lines, she is not able to read and write well. She has nobody else to teach her, because outside the family, there is no such an environment. So sometimes probably she learned two words today, maybe next day she only remembered one, and the following day she knew neither of them. We sometimes tend to think: after all, she is going to live her life in the US in the future, that is to say, even if she learn the words, she will forget them very soon. Therefore, we can’t expect too much of her. (Interview 13, 12/04/03)

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Nina’s Mother: She went to Chinese school in the first grade, but she didn’t like learning Chinese. She resisted. She didn’t want to learn it. So I thought: I put so much time and energy to send her to Chinese school. I have to drive them there every weekend. It’s kind of hard to me, but when she took the test, I found she learned so little. So I stopped it for her. (Interview 8, 11/16/03) Although these Chinese parents have the intention to transmit the heritage language to the next generation, they express great disappointment and lack of motivation in doing so. Heritage language development for language minority children in an English-dominant environment requires tremendous effort and perseverance. Individual parents often find themselves overpowered by the challenging task or succumb to the English-Only language ideology prevalent in the host country. The consequence is that although they might still hold values to their heritage language, they cannot keep up the maintenance efforts when fighting against the countercurrent by themselves. At this time, the co-ethnic communities as a collective force and external support system contribute to confirming and advancing their pride in their heritage language and culture and strengthening their desire to transmit them to their American-born children. In my interviews, the Chinese parents reported that their enthusiasm in heritage language maintenance is supported and cheered up by other Chinese families surrounding them. Mary’s Mother: It is very difficult, but I am sure Mary will go through it. I think she can learn Chinese well, because I have seen other kids who were born here, and they now…at least the parents’ background is no better than ours, but they can read the Bible in Chinese. Anyway, I have seen it. (Interview 14, 12/07/03) Vicky’s Mother: I hope my daughter can master both languages, although I don’t know if I can do as I said. But I have seen many successes, like Cheng Fei’s children, they speak very good Chinese. (Interview 18, 12/21/03) Like the frustrated parents above, these Chinese parents also perceive difficulties in heritage language maintenance. Nonetheless, they

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have been inspired by the successful examples in the co-ethnic communities and come to develop a firm belief in being able to maintain the heritage language in the next generation in spite of the difficulties. It is arguable that once the positive beliefs, interpretations, and coping strategies that an ethnic group adopts in response to their minority status are formed and kept alive by the members in the community, they can inform each individual community member of the possibility and empower them to take actions and strive to succeed. My study shows that the Chinese parents draw new power, strength and encouragement from their compatriots in transmitting the heritage language to their children. To the parents who live in the Chinatown community, the co-ethnic community offers an additional incentive to maintain the heritage language in the next generation. Historically, proficiency in the Chinese language had been practical for the Chinatown children because their future prospects were limited to either returning to China or finding jobs in Chinatowns. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was terminated, ethnic minority children could enter the mainstream job market through the ladder of higher education. However, not all the second-generation children could make it to college or beyond, especially the Fujianese children from hard labor families with parents of minimum education. To them, employment barriers are still huge and Chinatown remains a major arena for future career development. As Zhou (1992) argued, when the mainstream society closes its door to the Chinese children, Chinatown could provide them many job opportunities with its increasing ethnic businesses, from restaurants to garment factories to laundry stores, all of which requires bilingual skills, sometimes even trilingual skills. As William’s mother said, Now we want to brush up his Mandarin. If he knew Mandarin, he could feel more comfortable and convenient in Chinatown. His Dad said: ‘If he couldn’t find other jobs in the future, at least he can work as an interpreter.” (Interview 11, 11/23/03) So far I have portrayed how the Chinese communities evolved in the US to become major social networks that the immigrant Chinese can rely on. No matter what type of community it is, either the townsmen associations, the church community, the academic community or the “cultural community” in general, the co-ethnic networks play a crucial

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role in the Chinese immigrants’ settlement and adaptation in the new country. With the common cultural heritage and common language of origin, it provides a social space for the new immigrants to seek emotional and physical support in. At the same time, it also fosters positive attitudes towards the heritage language and culture in the first-generation Chinese parents and strengthens their determination in maintaining the heritage language in the children. It remains to be seen, however, what cross-ethnic networks the Chinese parents and children form as well as how they are influenced by them. I will examine these issues in the next section.

INTERACTIVE TIES: CROSS-ETHNIC NETWORKS The Fujianese parents in my study largely work and live their lives in Chinatown. They reported to have very few non-Chinese contacts, especially for those working in kitchens or garment factories where they only see fellow workers who are Chinese too. In contrast, most of the Mandarin parents are working in academic institutions or professional companies. They largely interact with non-Chinese colleagues in the workplace and they reported to have good relationships with them. They also live in the suburban or University City neighborhoods with people from different racial and ethnic background. However, they generally don’t see their cross-ethnic networks as close relationships. Alice’s Mother: Americans, we won’t be very close…that is, I don’t know how to communicate with them. We simply know one another as ordinary acquaintances, not very close. Chinese will be closer with one another.” (Interview 13, 12//04/03) While some Mandarin parents in my study said that they make deliberate attempts to socialize with non-Chinese Americans, language limitations, cultural differences and structural barriers stand in the way of developing successful cross-ethnic friendships. Nina’s Mother: When I use English, I say what I have to say. But when I talk in Chinese, I can say what I want to say. So it is hard for me to socialize with the Americans. (Interview 8, 11/16/03)

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Naning’s Mother: I think there is still cultural difference between us. It seems as if we don’t know how to approach them. Not that we are not friendly with one another, or we don’t trust each other, no, but it seems, that is, most of the time either I have to make a compromise for them or they have to compromise for me. I feel when things are like this, it’s very hard to become friends. (Interview 3, 09/28/03)

In these narratives, the Mandarin parents clearly distinguish “friends” from “non-friend acquaintances”. John’s mother makes the point even more striking: “My American acquaintances mainly come from my colleagues. But colleagues are colleagues, not necessarily friends.” (Interview 5, 10/25/03) In the Chinese tradition, although friends are not as close as the kinship, they are among the five societal relationships (Wu Lun), with the other four being ruler and minister, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, husband and wife. Mutual help and support are expected between friends, but not between ordinary acquaintances. Such a distinction is similar to that between “exchange ties” and “interactive ties” mentioned before. However, the definition of friends in the American culture, as perceived from the Mandarin parents, is more related to socializing and having fun together instead of strong mutual obligations between one another. In other words, the individualist orientation of the American culture inclines people to take care of their own affairs and not interfering with others, even with friends or family or relatives, whereas the Chinese may regard a certain degree of “interference” or “exchange” between friends as appropriate and desirable. John’s Mother: With the Chinese, once we are friends, we will be very close and informal, even careless. With the Americans, you have to be careful. First of all, you shouldn’t ask for their help. Because when you ask for their help, it may cause their inconvenience. Sometimes it’s a matter of appropriateness. Some words, some things are appropriate to talk to Chinese, but not to Americans. (Interview 5, 10/25/03) Chen (1998) argues that different definitions of “friendship” imbedded in the cultural differences of the Chinese and Americans lead to difficulty in intercultural communication and cross-ethnic network

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establishment. Therefore, from the Mandarin parents’ perspectives, their cross-ethnic relations, although extensive, are largely interactive ties since they don’t exchange support or help.

CHILDREN’S NETWORKS: CO-ETHNIC AND CROSS-ETHNIC PEERS A MIX OF CO-ETHNIC AND CROSS-ETHNIC FRIENDS The Chinese communities comprise the immediate social environments the second-generation Chinese children grow up in. Their parents’ deep involvement in the co-ethnic networks undoubtedly has important impact on their second-generation children. Because the parents usually bring children to the social activities they participate in, it enables the second-generation children to have more opportunities to develop friendships with other co-ethnic children. DZ: Where do you get to know your Chinese friends? Donna: Tracy, that is…my Mom…as we first came to Philadelphia, somebody told her there is a place she can have class. So we went. Susan and her Mom were in that class too. Afterwards, Tracy’s Mom invited my Mom to attend the Chinese church. So I can see Susan in the church every Friday evening and Sunday morning. She is one of my best friends now. (Interview 10b, 11/20/03) Most of the second-generation children in my study reported that they have at least a couple of co-ethnic friends. Sometimes parents’ co-ethnic ties could directly promote their children’s network establishment. For example, Mary reported that her best friend is Yuci, a Chinese girl living in the same apartment building whose parents are close friends of Mary’s parents. Meimei, the church teacher also observed: I notice the children in the church develop small circles among them. The small circle seems to come from their parents’ relationship, close or not. If the families are close with one another, you will find the kids. They often hang out together and are close too”. (Interview Community Teacher 1, 09/28/03)

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However, unlike their first-generation parents who take co-ethnic networks as strong, exchange ties, the Chinese children vary in their attitudes towards their co-ethnic friends. For some children, the co-ethnic ties have developed into stable and meaningful friendships, as in Donna’s case. This usually happens in families where the parents have established long-term relationships and tend to engage in co-ethnic gatherings more frequently. For others, co-ethnic friends remain at the peripheral place of their social life due to the practical reason that they don’t live in the same neighborhood and could only see one another during the once-in-a-while co-ethnic activities within the “cultural community”. Generally speaking, school-age children’s major peer network comes from classmates and schoolmates since they spend most of the weekday time at school. Neighborhood children can be their regular playmates after school, although this depends on the socializing environment in the particular neighborhood. Either case, When the Chinese children live in ethnoburbs of diverse ethnic groups or in typical suburbs with more white European children around, they would predictably have fewer opportunities to socialize with co-ethnic children. Most of the Mandarin children in my study report that they go to a school with a predominant proportion of non-Chinese children. In some cases, such as in white-dominant suburbs, the Mandarin children even represent the extreme minority, being the only Chinese/non-white person in the whole class or school. Growing up in a suburban school and neighborhood, the Mandarin children in my interview tend to identify a non-Chinese classmate at school as their best friend. Such a strong cross-ethnic network pattern forms a sharp contrast with the co-ethnic-dominated social networks of their parents. CO-ETHNIC NETWORKS FOR THE MANDARIN CHILDREN: EXTERNAL SUPPORT AND SENSE OF BEING GROUNDED The extensive contact of the Mandarin children with cross-ethnic peers contributes to the quick assimilation of the Mandarin children and allows them to establish significant cross-ethnic peer relations. To my question “Do you think you are in any way different from your classmates”, most second-generation Mandarin children gave a negative answer like “no”, “not much”, or “not really”. Even though some children are able to detect conspicuous differences in physical

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appearance between them and their non-Chinese classmates, they don’t see them as a barrier in negotiating cross-ethnic friendships. Rather, having the same schooling experience, the Chinese children could identify with their non-Chinese classmates to a certain extent. On the other hand, however, the ethnic awareness of the Chinese children could be weakened with an exclusive cross-ethnic network and because of the mainstreaming experience. Nina’s mother reported an interesting incident in this regard. At that time, she (Nina) was at 4th grade in an urban school and she was the only Chinese kid in the class. There were about 28 people in her class with probably 20 blacks and 7 whites. She usually hung out with the white children. Afterwards, I asked Nina: ‘How many white children are there in your class?’ She said 8 because she counted herself in. (Interview 8, 11/16/03) Nina’s confusion of her own ethnicity is disturbing to her mother and is taken by her mother as the origin of conflicts between them. Her friends are all from the Americans, so she always compares us with the American families. When I ask her to learn Chinese or to learn piano, she just has the resistance. She very rarely knows any Chinese children of her age at school. She doesn’t know that the Chinese children are all learning these different kinds of things. We Chinese parents believe learning these is important. (Interview 8, 11/16/03) Children growing up in a minority family often face conflicting expectations from their parents and peers. As children grow in age, the influence of peers becomes increasingly important. In order to fit in with the mainstream peer, the minority children are in danger of breaking away from their family tradition. Cultural discontinuity from home to school and from parents to peers often causes psychological stress to the minority children. However, some form of stable social networks in both cultures could facilitate the positive resolution of stress engendered by bicultural living and make the minority children successful at managing a bicultural existence. “The bicultural struggles can’t be coped with on

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one’s own. One must have the skill to recruit and use external support systems.” (Elovitz & Kahn 1997: 78) Lewis & Ford (1991) labeled the experience of having a well-developed social support system “a sense of being grounded”. It is the sense of being grounded in an extensive social network in both cultures that enhances an individual’s ability to cope with the pressures of living in a bicultural environment. In a study of the impact of the Chinese church on the identity and mental health of Chinese immigrants, Palinkas (1982) supported this position by arguing that a solid social network, one that simultaneously grounds an individual in parts of his or her home culture while facilitating the acquisition of a new culture, sharply reduces the negative impact of acculturation. Against this background, I argue that strong co-ethnic networks that the Chinese children develop through attending the co-ethnic community activities could help balance out the lack of co-ethnics in the school environment and contribute to their ethnic identification. Some Chinese children have achieved some sense of “Chineseness” since an early age. Nancy thus spoke of her difference from other American children: “I don’t feel like much of a difference. The only difference is I know how to speak Chinese” (Interview 8b, 11/14/03). It is in their ethnic traits that the Chinese children could identify with their co-ethnic peers. Although they go to different schools, the identification with co-ethnic peers comes from the common experience of growing up in a Chinese immigrant family. For example, as second-generation children, they are usually pushed by their parents to learn the heritage language and enroll in various extracurricular programs. They also experience similar bicultural struggles between their parents, peers and teachers in the course of the acculturation process. All of these things they don’t share with the mainstream children can be easily understood by their co-ethnic friends. Their parents’ efforts in transmitting the home culture and home language are also backed up by the fact that the co-ethnic peers are engaging in the same endeavors. Donna is a case in point. Donna has a solid co-ethnic social network in the University City neighborhood she lives in. Her parents often bring her to co-ethnic gatherings where she makes quite a few Chinese friends. Moreover, because of her parents’ work schedule, Donna goes to Nancy’s grandmother’s house to spend after-school time with Nancy and another girl, three days a week.

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Donna’s Mother: The church people told me that Aunt Wang did childcare. She had been a nurse before in China. So she is pretty good with the kids. Moreover, Uncle Wang (Aunt Fang’s husband) taught them Chinese math. Since Nancy and Donna goes to the same school, Uncle Wang picks up both of them after school when I am busy. And they ask for very little.(Interview 10, 11/20/03) Due to language limitations, Donna’s parents often rely on the co-ethnic community for social support, including childcare. What benefits Donna herself particularly, however, is her friendship with the two other Chinese girls who also stay at Aunt Wang’s for after-school time. More prominently, the other two girls’ efforts in learning Chinese during after-school time influenced her and motivated her to learn the heritage language actively. In my interview with Donna, she said, Nancy goes to a Chinese school. The other girl (Catherine) goes there too. They have a Chinese book, and their teacher asked them to read the texts on them. I learn to memorize the texts too. I want to go to a Chinese school. My Mom said I can go to a Chinese school next year. I want to go to a more difficult one because my Chinese is a little better. (Interview 10b, 11/20/03) Donna’s eager attitude towards learning the heritage language forms a sharp contrast with Nina’s resistance. Having the co-ethnic social network support, Donna sees the value of maintaining the heritage language and is motivated to do so. A similar case happened to Min. Min was sent to a Chinese school by her mother at the second grade, but she soon dropped out of it. Afterwards, when her Chinese friends went to the Chinese school, she re-started it at 7th grade. It can be seen from these instances that being grounded in a co-ethnic social network could provide the Chinese children more incentive towards learning the heritage language and make them identify more with their ethnic background. Given the generational dissonance common in the immigrant families, a co-ethnic network could serve as a buffer between the second-generation children and their parents. Many Chinese parents seem to have realized the importance of co-ethnic networks for their family cohesion and for their children’s bilingual and bicultural

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development. Nina’s mother, for example, asserted that if her daughter could know more Chinese children of her age, she would have been less resistant to learning the heritage language. CO-ETHNIC NETWORKS FOR THE FUJIANESE CHILDREN: COLLECTIVE SURVIVAL Compared with the Chinese children living in ethnoburbs and suburbs, the Fujianese children can be said to have more extensive, sometimes even exclusive, co-ethnic networks. For one thing, they live in Chinatown and the community is composed of almost all Chinese co-ethnic residents. For another, most of the Chinatown children go to the same neighborhood school that serves the Chinatown area. In one of the neighborhood schools I observed, the Chinese (Fujianese mostly) children constitute almost one-third of the school population. Thus the Fujianese children have more opportunities to socialize with one another and develop co-ethnic networks. Some researchers have argued that too much dependence on the ethnic community may hinder minority children’s social mobility and perpetuate them in the ethnic “ghetto”. Indeed, my observations in Chinatown as well as in the neighborhood school that most Chinatown children go to reveal that the Chinatown children lack cross-ethnic friends. Their social network tends to show a separatist pattern that is composed of co-ethnic children exclusively. My interviews with Min, Long, Maya, and Yigang further reveal that their major activities largely take place within Chinatown. Lacking of meaningful ties outside, they rarely go out of Chinatown. When asked why socializing only with the Chinese friends, Min responded that she doesn’t like to make friends with her non-Chinese classmates because they “say stuff about the Chinese” (Interview 6, 10/26/03). According to the traditional assimilation theory, the separatist social network pattern will act as roadblocks inhibiting the minority children’s assimilation process into the mainstream society. However, Portes & Rumbaut (2001) argued that the assimilation perspective should be viewed in light of the modes of incorporation that each particular minority group is received by the mainstream society, including the policies of the host government (governmental), the attitudes of the native population (societal), and the presence and size of a co-ethnic community (communal). According to Zhou & Li (2003), because different immigrant groups vary in their initial modes of entry and subsequent societal reception, maintaining a distinctive attachment to an

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ethnic community can facilitate adaptation of some ethnic group members while for others it inhibits it. I have described the characteristics of the Fujianese Chinese immigrants as drastically different from their Mandarin-speaking well-educated compatriots. While the latter came to the US initially as graduate students pursuing higher education and had been more or less accepted by the mainstream society, most Fujianese parents came to the US without legal status and were threatened with expatriation. Even after they have obtained legal status due to long-term stay in the US, they often experience severe discrimination due to the lack of essential human capital, among which are English ability, good education and employment skills. Therefore, the Fujianese second-generation children grow up in a social environment that is not friendly to their assimilation. Given the background of different societal treatment, it is reasonable to assume that the Fujianese children can best enlist support and help from their co-ethnic networks than elsewhere. By drawing on the collective power from the co-ethnic community, the Fujianese children as a minority group are better able to fight against a hostile society. It is true that with the co-ethnic network alone they can’t achieve full assimilation, but assimilation might not be the best, or even possible, acculturation outcome to them due to structural barriers. Rodriguez (1975), in a study on the subjective factors affecting assimilation among Puerto Ricans in New York City, argued similarly that Puerto Ricans living in the ghetto had more positive attitudes about succeeding in the mainstream economic system than did Puerto Ricans living in Anglo-dominated suburbs. Those living in the ghetto also claimed to experience less discrimination. “The ghetto provides a psychologically more supportive environment than does the middle class area.” (Rodriguez 1975: 77) In summary, the analysis of Chinese children’s co-ethnic and cross-ethnic networks indicates that regardless of the socioeconomic status of the Chinese families, the second-generation children can benefit from a co-ethnic social network of appropriate density. For the Mandarin children who are quickly advancing to language shift and cultural assimilation, the co-ethnic network can slow down their acculturation pace and motivate them to learn the heritage language along with other co-ethnic peers. As such, it reinforces the parents’ heritage language maintenance efforts and lessens generational conflicts in the Chinese immigrant families. For the Fujianese children, the co-ethnic networks can help them fight against the sense of inferiority

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coming from overt discrimination and develop high self-esteem as well as ethnic pride, which are essential for them to survive collectively in the US society.

CHINESE LANGUAGE SCHOOLS So far I have focused on the types of social networks that are available to the Chinese parents and children and examined how these networks are important to their lives in the host country. I have argued that the co-ethnic networks of the Chinese parents and children, along with the extended families, are especially conducive to heritage language maintenance among the second-generation children. In this section, I am going to turn to Chinese language schools, the community institutions where heritage language learning mostly takes place, to further investigate the social mechanisms behind heritage language maintenance in the Chinese communities. Two theoretical conceptions are of vital relevance in the discussion here: community forces and social capital. Ogbu (1974) conceptualizes community forces as specific beliefs, interpretations, and coping strategies that an ethnic group adopts in response to its societal treatment. Coleman (1990) defines social capital as a closed system of social networks inherent within a community that promotes cooperative behavior and serves specific needs of its members. Based on my observations in the Chinese community and interviews with the Chinese families, I argue that the Chinese immigrants in the US have managed to turn their distinctive cultural heritage into a kind of social capital that they can use as powerful tools and resources in raising the second-generation children. This is achieved mainly through setting up education-oriented ethnic institutions within the Chinese community, most noticeably Chinese language schools. Since social capital is lodged not in the individual, but in the structure of social organizations, in patterns of social relations, or in processes of interactions between individuals and organizations, Chinese language schools are set up by the community forces to shape a particular ethnic environment for mediating the process of social capital formation. The following discussion will investigate in depth how Chinese language schools as an institutional epitome of community forces and social capital promote

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second-generation Chinese children’s heritage language development and ethnic identity formation. HISTORY OF CHINESE LANGUAGE SCHOOLS First of all, a brief historical review of the Chinese language schools is helpful for us to understand their current status and influence in the Chinese communities in Philadelphia. Chinese language schools date as far back as the late 1880s in the United States, with the first Chinese language school appearing in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1884 (Zhou & Li 2003). Just like other ethnic language schools in the immigrant German, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Japanese communities, early Chinese language schools aimed to provide the children with a basic education and with cultural and language proficiency. This function was a practical and crucial one given the severe racial and ethnic segregation at the time. Like other minority children, the children of Chinese immigrants were not permitted to attend public schools with white children nor were they allowed to enter the mainstream job market. There were minimum chances for the Chinese children to get assimilated or acculturated. Their future options were limited to either returning to China or finding jobs in Chinatowns. Under this situation, the Chinese parents believed that proficiency in the Chinese language and a strong Chinese identity were necessary to prepare their children to come back to the ethnic community. Chinese language schools, the only educational channel that could teach ethnic language and skills, were made saliently important by the social segregation. Whenever there was a sizable Chinese enclave, there was at least one Chinese language school. Attending Chinese language schools after regular school became a matter of course to the Chinese children, with little questioning. With the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, immigrant Chinese and their offspring were legally allowed and encouraged to participate in American society for the first time in history. The Chinese community began to reorient itself from sojourning and separation to socioeconomic integration. Children were encouraged to aim for economic mobility and break away from Chinatown through learning the English language and adopting the mainstream culture. As a result, between World War II and the 1960s, Chinese language schools experienced a period of decline due to pressures to assimilate (Zhou &

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Li 2003). The necessity of Chinese schooling and the practical value of Chinese language proficiency were put to question both by the public educators and by the immigrant parents themselves. Since the 1970s, however, there has been a revival and rapid growth of Chinese language schools in Chinatowns and suburban Chinese communities. This has to do with the influx of more and more Chinese immigrants after the 1965 Immigration Act. New immigrants brought about increasing ethnic businesses and institutions, visibly enlarged the Chinese American community and caused it to prosper. Moreover, the post-1965 immigrants included well-educated professionals and international students from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong who strongly believed in the value of their home language. Therefore, new Chinese language schools sprung up, not only in Chinatown, but also in middle-class suburbs, to serve the needs of the newly-arrived Chinese families. The National Council of Association of Chinese Language Schools in 1994 counted a total of 643 registered Chinese language schools in the United States serving 82,675 K-12 students. But the function of Chinese language schools is somewhat different from before. They are more to preserve language and cultural heritage in the second and succeeding generations than offering them survival skills. Many Chinese parents declare that they want their children to learn English and excel in school, but at the same time they fear to lose their children if they become too Americanized. Thus Chinese language schools under the current situation play the role of connecting the American-born children to their ethnic origin and promoting immigrant family cohesion. As a result of the rapid increase of ethnic language schools in recent years, a new community emerged among the Chinese immigrants, i.e., the Chinese language school community. Compared with the several different Chinese communities mentioned above, such as the townsmen community, the academic community, and the church community etc, the Chinese language school community is unique in that it is formed purely because of the bond of the heritage language and the perceived mission to transmit it to the next generation among the Chinese immigrants.

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PARENT INVOLVEMENT INCHINESE LANGUAGE SCHOOLS All of the children in my study except the two Fujianese children, Long and Maya who attend Chinese-English bilingual programs in their regular school, go to Chinese schools or have had Chinese language school experience. Most Chinese language schools are weekend schools, usually taking half day on Saturday or Sunday. The Chinese school I was teaching and observing at, Shanzhi Chinese School, meets on Saturday morning from 9 am to 12 noon, with one hour after-school art program after that. So families who have children go to the same Chinese school meet at least once a week in the Chinese school. The Chinese school also holds frequent parents’ meetings and teachers’ meetings to promote exchange of thoughts and ideas among the Chinese families about good practices in heritage language teaching and learning. Although today’s Chinese schools have become more diverse in its governance and form, they are usually nonprofits relying on governed by a board consisting of volunteer parents. Shanzhi Chinese School is no exception. Ms. Sun, the former Principal of Shanzhi Chinese school, said, Shanzhi was started by the Chinese parents. Almost all the Chinese schools were started by the parents because it is the parents who want their children to learn Chinese language and culture. The American mainstream schools are not able to provide training and education in this regard. They have to use the community resources and power to build a school for their own children. (Interview Community Teacher 3, 11/10/03). Some parents are ethnic business owners and community leaders who donate funding to the school. Other parents volunteer to act as teacher aides, chauffeurs to pick up or drop off students, fundraising workers, and even janitors. Still other parents contribute their home language knowledge and pedagogical skills and become classroom teachers. In a word, the Chinese parents pool together community resources and make best use of them to make the Chinese language schools come into being. In turn, when the Chinese language schools are set up, the Chinese parents work together and form a closely networked community that provides accumulated social capital to the immigrant families.

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The social capital thus formed in the Chinese language school environment is beneficial to the Chinese parents and children in many different aspects. First, the Chinese language school functions to provide unique opportunities for immigrant families to form a different set of peer group networks, giving them more leverage in negotiating parent-child relations at home. Previously, I have argued that co-ethnic peer networks can help the Chinese children cope with the bicultural conflicts as a collective unit and relieve the stress they encounter in the acculturation process. The co-ethnic peer networks among the children are often established when they attend community activities along with their parents. However, as I mentioned before, the co-ethnic friendships formed on many occasions do not necessarily develop into meaningful social ties in their life. For one thing, they might not be able to get in touch with one another on a regular basis, depending on the frequency of the community activities. For another, while the Chinese children and parents get together to enjoy ethnic activities, they rarely pour out worries and problems to other co-ethnics. The Chinese language school plays a critical role in building long-lasting and strong co-ethnic peer networks. Parents and children coming to the Chinese language schools once a week are connected by the common goal of learning the heritage language, which is often the origin of conflicts in immigrant families. In the Chinese language school, the parents and children can openly discuss how these problems have affected their families and how they should deal with them. As a consequence, bicultural conflicts are moderated to a large degree, with other Chinese families facing the same issues and suggesting possible solutions. Compared with other ethnic institutions, the Chinese language schools offer a particularly friendly space where children express and share their feelings about growing up in immigrant Chinese families. Secondly, the Chinese language school empowers the Chinese parents, especially those who are limited in English, to get actively involved in their children’s education. As we have seen above, the Chinese parents’ involvement is direct and intense in Chinese schools, but similar involvement is minimal in U.S. public schools because of language and cultural barriers. Donna’s mother said,

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We hardly attend her school activities. Her Dad is very busy, as to me, I have time to go, but my language is not good. I can’t understand it well. I can’t communicate with the teacher. I feel very uncomfortable with this. Because in China, when I went to pick up the kid, I often liked to chat with the teacher about her. Sometimes if she behaved a little different from before, behaved well or not well, I could always go to the teacher and talk to her, but here I had no way to communicate with the teacher. (Interview 10, 11/20/03) Although Donna’s mother was eager to participate in her child’s school and communicate with the teachers, language barriers prevented her from doing so. Minority parents’ school involvement has been reportedly lower than that of European American parents. The Chinese children in my study also complained that their parents don’t go to their school often. “My classmates said they had never seen my mother. I don’t know how to answer my friends” (Interview 1b, 07/19/03). Nina’s case further reveals the distance between her parents and her school. Nina’s mother said, Because I don’t go to Nina’s school often, Nina asked me: ‘Do you know about my activities at school? Do you know if I made a new friend today? Even for my best friends, do you know their last names?’ But for me, I feel out of place being in her school. Like last time when I go to her school for the parents’ conference, I felt it very difficult to socialize with other parents. When they introduced themselves to me whose parents they were, not a single one I have heard of. I can’t remember their names. But they seem to all know that I am Nina’s Mom. (Interview 8, 11/16/03) Fewer Chinese parents take an active part in their children’s regular school activities. However, most Chinese parents have been involved in the Chinese school to a certain extent. For example, John’s mother is the homeroom parent of her son’s third-grade class in the Chinese school. Nancy’s mother had volunteered to teach Chinese to the young children. Through serving in the Chinese schools, the parents monitor and

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supervise their children’s heritage language learning. More importantly, their involvement in the Chinese school facilitates their getting to know the mainstream school without having to get actually involved in formal schools and their parent-teacher associations. Many Chinese schools have parent associations modeled after the parent-teacher associations in public schools. They also observe important school policies that are common to the public schools, such as discipline strategies, holiday observance and extracurricular activities. In this sense, the Chinese schools provide an important physical site for the formerly unrelated Chinese parents to socialize and share information about how to educate their children, not only in how to maintain the heritage language in them, but also in how to promote their success in the mainstream school. Often the less acculturated or English-limited parents learn about the American educational system from other co-ethnic parents. Thus, through the Chinese language schools, the immigrant parents can be indirectly but effectively connected to formal schools. The social capital arising from participating in Chinese schools is extremely valuable serving this particular goal. CHINESE LANGUAGE SCHOOLS AND HERITAGE LANGUAGE TRANSMISSION Since the Chinese language schools are established to teach the heritage language to the second-generation children, their impact on the children’s bilingual development is crucial. Although some Chinese parents teach their children Chinese at home, they nonetheless mention the huge difficulties and obstacles in transmitting the heritage language on their own and the children learning the heritage language on their own. Naning’s mother said, Because if I teach her Chinese at home, there is no environment, she will quickly forget it, or say, she has no interest in learning it. Once there is the environment where she can learn with other kids, she will be more interested. So we send her to the Chinese school. It’s not expensive, only 150$ one semester. It’s pretty good. (Interview 3, 09/28/03)

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In the previous chapters, I have examined the heritage language proficiency of the second-generation children. That is, although most Chinese children possess a high level of Chinese listening and speaking abilities, their reading and writing skills severely lag behind. The development of children’s biliteracy presents a big challenge to the Chinese parents. Quite a few parents bought books from China or from Chinatown bookstores and attempted to teach the children Chinese in their spare time. However, the effect is not as good as they thought. I taught him at home. I also invited other children to my house and learn together with him. It’s no good learning by himself. But the effect was not good. I can only say that I have tried my best. To our regret, he cannot read and write. I taught him up to second, third grades’ textbooks, but he is now … if he takes up a first-grade Chinese textbook to read, he cannot do it. He only knows several words. (Interview 9, 11/06/03) Yet not every parent has the time or resources to be heritage language teacher to their children. Working parents often find they are exhausted after work and unable to take extra teaching job at home. The Fujianese parents are not proficient in the Chinese reading and writing themselves with their low level of education and don’t have the expertise to transmit the written form of the heritage language. As a way out, most Chinese parents place hope on the Chinese language school to make their children literate in the heritage language. Moreover, the Chinese language schools are affordable (the student tuition ranging from $50-200 per semester), easily accessible (there are usually several Chinese schools around the city, so the parents can pick one close to their neighborhood) and flexible in time arrangement (on weekends). Therefore, it is a common practice that second-generation Chinese children go to a Chinese school on weekends as part of their life. The effect of the Chinese language schools in achieving the parents’ goal is open to question, though. Some parents are ambivalent about what the Chinese schools can do with only three hours a week, compared with the regular school’s work load. What the children learn in the Chinese school over weekends could be easily forgotten without reinforcement during the week. At Shanzhi Chinese school where I

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taught, the Chinese language school teachers realize this problem and try to solve it by assigning a week’s homework to the children, in the hope that they can work on Chinese a little bit every day. They also give frequent quizzes and tests to motivate or push the children to learn Chinese. Even thus, the children’s heritage language literacy skills remain a headache to their parents. John’s mother said, My eldest son is in the highest grade at the Chinese school, 12th grade. But if you compare his Chinese level with the children in China, he is not as good as the third graders. Like in reading one sentence, 10 words he may only know 3 or 5 and he still couldn’t figure out what the sentence means. (Interview 5, 10/25/03) Bilingual development in an English-dominant language environment is recognizably challenging. Some parents get disappointed and stop sending their children to the Chinese school after several years’ efforts, especially after their regular schoolwork gets heavier. However, other parents still hold positive and optimistic attitudes towards heritage language learning in the Chinese language school. Mary’s mother said, Usually the Chinese words she speaks are all the simplest daily words. But I find she is improving. The other day, I said: Can you ask your sister what she wants? After a while, I asked her: Mary, what does your sister want? She said in Chinese: ‘When I asked her what she wanted, she didn’t respond’. (Laughing) So she used the word “Hui Da” (respond) because she learned it in the Chinese school. I think if she keeps learning, she can do it in the long run. (Interview 14, 12/07/03) Still other parents in my study believe that although the Chinese language school could provide great help for the children’s home language maintenance and advancement, they cannot solely rely on the Chinese language school and neglect reinforcement at home on a daily basis. Many parents purposefully speak Chinese at home with their children. Some parents read Chinese books to the children before going

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to bed or help children write Chinese journals. When these parental efforts are combined with formal learning at Chinese language school, I argue that the children will have better chances of mastering the heritage language reading and writing skills. CHINESE LANGUAGE SCHOOLS AND HERITAGE CULTURAL IMMERSION In addition to promoting bilingualism among the second-generation Chinese children, the Chinese language schools also provide an environment for heritage cultural transmission. Although the primary aim of Chinese language schools is to teach the Chinese language, the content of the language class is often accompanied by non-academic enrichment and recreation, most of which are ethnic cultural activities. Moreover, Chinese language schools usually provide an extra hour’s cultural class after the language teaching classes. At Shanzhi Chinese School I observed and taught, the three hours from 9 to 12 in the morning are divided into three periods, with each period 50 minutes followed by 10 minutes’ recess. The first two periods are usually devoted to learning from the textbook, reciting poems or other language-related tasks, but the third period is the time set for cultural learning. The students are eager to have the third period come because the teachers will lead them to do activities that are very different from what they do in regular schools. For example, in the cultural classes, the teachers at Shanzhi had invited Chinese artists to play Gu Zheng, a traditional Chinese musical instrument that has become rare in modern times. They also had the children practice Chinese ink calligraphy, do Origami, play Chinese chess, as well as do outdoor games that are popular in Chinese schools, such as rubber band skipping and hopscotch etc. To make the cultural class richer and more colorful, the teachers/parents at Chinese language schools usually have to prepare a long time and work together to make the activities happen. Sometimes they even buy the needed materials out of their own pocket in ethnic bookstores or from overseas. After the classes, some Chinese schools offer one-hour optional after-school art programs, such as painting, opera, Kung Fu, and dancing, taught by the Chinese art teachers. Interested students can learn Chinese art in these programs. During the traditional Chinese holiday seasons, such as the Chinese New Year and

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the Mid-Autumn Festival, Chinese schools participate in celebratory parades, evening shows, and other community events such as sports and choral or dance festivals. They also have their own performance by the students themselves and invite all the parents to watch and enjoy. Participation in these cultural activities not only exposes children to their cultural heritage, reaffirming their ethnic identity, but also provides opportunities for the children to work closely with their parents and other adults in the community on common ethnic projects. Besides the overt cultural forms, the passing-on of cultural heritage is also reflected in the subtle moral teaching imbedded in the language classes. When the Chinese schools are in session, they provide a cultural environment where the children are surrounded by other Chinese and pressured to act Chinese. The textbooks they learn often include traditional Chinese legends and folklore stories that emphasize moral lessons and collective spirit. Sometimes students are asked to recite classical Chinese poems and lyrics containing strong moral instructions and Confucian behavior code. Teachers also reinforce the values of filial piety, respect for authority, hard work, and discipline in class. In the fourth-grade class I observed, the students have to say “Good morning, Teacher” in Chinese when they come to the Chinese school in the morning and “Goodbye, Teacher” when they leave the school. Once a girl’s brother came to her class to tell her something, he did not greet the teacher. The girl corrected him immediately in Chinese: “You should have said ‘Good morning, Teacher Zhang’ first.” In view of what actually happens in the Chinese language school, I found that it is not just a language school, but rather a place of cultural education for the second-generation children to become a whole-rounded person possessed with Chinese cultural traits. The heritage cultural immersion in the Chinese language schools works directly to nurture a strong ethnic identity and ethnic pride among the Chinese children who may otherwise reject the Chinese identity due to pressures to assimilate. The Chinese customs, values and traditions are emphasized and given due attention in the Chinese schools, which reinforces what the parents tend to do at home. Consequently, the second-generation children are better able to understand their parents’ culture and learn to respect them instead of running counter to them as they get more and more acculturated. In this sense, the Chinese language

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schools not only function to teach the heritage language and culture, but also help alleviate generational dissonance in the immigrant family by promoting bicultural development in the Chinese children. In the end, it is to be noted that Chinese language school is only one among a wide variety of child- and youth-centered ethnic institutions in the contemporary Chinese community, which together constitutes a comprehensive system of supplementary education to the mainstream schools (Zhou & Li 2003). Other ethnic institutions serving the Chinese children, to name only a few, are the Chinese churches that offer Sunday School to the church-going families’ children, tutoring programs targeted to the Chinatown children who need extra help on homework but whose parents are not able to help them, and informal day care centers for young children and school-age children during after-school time, such as Aunt Wang’s House. Among all these ethnic institutions, however, the Chinese language school is recognized as the only community institution that aims to transmit the heritage language and culture to the second-generation children in a formal and systematic way. No matter whether it has succeeded in doing so, most Chinese parents insist sending their children to the Chinese school as an indispensable part of their growth and education in the US.

SUMMARY This chapter focused on the social networks of the Chinese immigrant parents and their second-generation children to explore how these social ties bear upon heritage language maintenance. The social networks covered here include extended family ties, parents’ exchange networks within the co-ethnic communities and interactive networks with cross-ethnic ties, children’s co-ethnic and cross-ethnic peer networks etc. The purpose of discussing the Chinese parents’ and children’s social networks extensively was to provide a detailed picture of what social relationships the Chinese families have formed and how they influence their acculturation in the host country, especially with regards to heritage language and culture maintenance. Findings from my interview data and field observations both indicate that the Chinese co-ethnic communities and networks are crucial to the survival of the Chinese families in the host country.

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Although in the beginning stage the parents rely on extended family ties in the home country for emotional support, the relatives and friends left behind eventually have to become “passive ties” due to the geographical distance. Not having adequate language skills and understanding of the new culture, the Chinese parents turn to co-ethnic communities where they speak the familiar mother tongue and feel much at ease with the Chinese way of interpersonal relationships within the communities. At the same time, the co-ethnic communities also help the immigrant parents to adjust to the new surroundings in many aspects of their lives, such as housing, transportation, language and safety etc. Co-ethnics who stay longer in the US explain the new culture to the newcomers with lessons they learned from their own experience. Therefore, the co-ethnic communities serve as an important language and cultural middle ground that relieves the overwhelming stress first-generation immigrants tend to feel with forced assimilation and allows them to acculturate at their own pace. With the second-generation children, co-ethnics are equally important, however in different ways. For the Mandarin children who are quickly advancing to language shift and cultural assimilation, their co-ethnic networks help balance out the lack of co-ethnics in the school environment and contribute to their ethnic identification. It can also slow down their acculturation pace and motivate them to learn the heritage language along with other co-ethnic peers. As such, children’s co-ethnic networks reinforce parents’ heritage language maintenance efforts and lessen generational conflicts in the Chinese immigrant families. For the Fujianese children, the co-ethnic networks can help them fight against the sense of inferiority coming from overt discrimination and develop high self-esteem as well as ethnic pride, which are essential for them to survive collectively in the US society. The different types of social networks that the Chinese families have established work together to provide a supportive environment for transmitting the heritage language to the next generation. Grandparents and transnational behaviors that the well-to-do Mandarin families frequently engage in are especially important to children’s heritage language development. The close-knit networks within the Chinese co-ethnic communities in the US also encourage and foster parents’ and children’s positive attitudes towards the maintenance of their heritage

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language. Most prominently, the Chinese communities pull together community forces and social capital to establish Chinese language schools as formal educational institutions for the Chinese children to develop bilingualism. The rapid increase of the Chinese language schools in recent years throughout the US reveals strong parents’ commitment and enthusiasm to preserve the heritage language. Through active parental involvement, the Chinese language school has become not only a learning center for the heritage language and culture, but also a social center for the parents and children to share experiences, socialize and acculturate together.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

POLICY AND BEYOND

THE STUDY Over 120 million people changed their country of residence in 1994 (Elovitz & Kahn 1997: 7). The United States is far from the only country receiving an influx of immigrants, refugees, and “temporary” workers, but it is by far the largest immigrant country in the world. It is high time to take a look at the personal experiences of being an immigrant. Demographics are not enough and survey research is often not meaningful to the very people living lives of strangers in a foreign land. This study was an attempt to explore in-depth the adaptation experiences and stories of one group of immigrants in the US: Chinese immigrants. Specifically, this study looked at how the Chinese immigrant parents and children deal with the dilemma of maintaining their language of origin while at the same time acculturating to the host language and culture. Different from previous studies on language maintenance, I brought the concept of “acculturation” to the study as a larger framework in which to situate the language issues faced by immigrant families. Built upon past research findings and theories on language maintenance and acculturation, this study took recent Chinese immigrant families as the focus group to investigate the role of heritage language maintenance in their acculturation process in the US. When immigrants arrive in a host country, they invariably face acculturation tasks of coming to terms with two cultures, the culture of origin they are brought up with and the host culture they find in the new surroundings. Berry (1980)’s two-way acculturation matrix indicates that there can be four types of acculturation outcomes, namely, assimilation, separation, integration and marginalization, representing, respectively, one’s identification with the host culture only, with the home culture only, with both cultures and with neither culture. Ying (1995) further delineated the three domains of acculturation, language 213

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competence, cultural participation and social network. Using Berry (1980)’s acculturation models and Ying (1995)’s domains of acculturation as a conceptual framework, this study was dedicated to exploring how the Chinese parents and children relate to the home culture and the host culture, and what roles the heritage language plays in the three distinct domains of acculturation. My main research question for this study was: what issues are involved in heritage language maintenance between two generations in the Chinese immigrant families? More specifically, I sought to answer the following questions: 1

2

3

4

What are the language experiences for Chinese parents and children in the US, respectively? How do they encounter and acquire English? To what degree is the Chinese language, both spoken and written, maintained by the second-generation Chinese children? What are the language attitudes with the Chinese parents? How do they seek to transmit the heritage language to the next generation? How do the children respond to their parents’ language beliefs and language maintenance efforts? What a role does the heritage language play in the acculturation process of the Chinese parents and children? What cultural practices do the Chinese immigrant families participate in? What conflicts emerge between generations in terms of cultural differences? What is the social environment for the children to speak the heritage language in the US? What are the major social networks to the Chinese parents and children in the US? How do these social networks bear upon heritage language maintenance?

To answer the above questions, this study used ethnographic interviews and participant observations with 18 Chinese immigrant families in two important Chinese communities in Philadelphia, namely the academic community in the University City and the church community in Chinatown. Findings from the study extend the existing literature on heritage language maintenance by providing an ethnographic account of how Chinese as a heritage language is

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maintained among the Chinese immigrants and their descendants in the US. The major results of the study are presented from Chapter 4 to Chapter 7 in a way to tackle with the above four research questions and are summarized below. QUESTION 1: LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY AND LANGUAGE PRFERENCE Overall, I found that most of the Chinese first-generation parents in my study keep using their heritage language in the host country and their English proficiency vary extensively. Some well-educated Mandarin-speaking parents have achieved functional bilingualism and a high level of English proficiency, while the Fujianese parents with disadvantageous educational and socioeconomic backgrounds largely remain monolingual in their home dialect. Even among the bilingual parents, Chinese is still the preferred, dominant communication language though. Using Li Wei (1994)’s typology of bilingualism, the Fujianese parents are monolingual home language speakers, while the Mandarin parents are functionally bilingual home language speakers. On the other hand, although all the second-generation children in my study start with Chinese as their first/home language and most of them do maintain their heritage language to a certain level, especially in speaking and listening, they prefer using English to Chinese and regard English as their dominant language from an early age. While some children continue to use the heritage language in the families, communities and other informal social settings, others tend to use English both in school and outside school and only speak the heritage language on limited occasions. The former are in the mixed bilingual speaker category, while the latter are mostly functionally bilingual host language speakers. My ethnographic study is also able to portray the language experiences of the second-generation children in their initial encounter with English. I found most of the Chinese children in my study have experienced a difficult process in learning English instead of naturally picking it up as the common misconception indicates. The lack of English ability has caused them isolation and loneliness in the school settings. Therefore, I argue that the widespread and swift language shift among the second-generation children has to do with the pressures for language assimilation and the negative societal attitudes towards the

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children’s heritage language that they generally experience in their initial painful process of learning English. In doing so, this study supplements and accounts for the argument from Portes & Hao (1998)’s quantitative analysis and other data sets that the majority of second-generation Asian children experienced language shift to English. Findings from my study exemplify important issues regarding the linguistic status of Chinese immigrant families, hitherto largely unknown to the research community, language educators and the general public. Importantly, my findings refute the common misconception that the Chinese population is a monolithic whole by showing the diverse degrees of bilingualism among the Chinese parents and children. There exist discrepancies in the language skills and language preference not only between generations within an immigrant family, but also within the same generation among the parent group or the children group who come from different family backgrounds. The gap between Mandarin-speaking and Fujianese-speaking parents in English acquisition and bilingual skills is especially striking and worthy of further attention in future research on immigrants. On the other hand, the finding that the better-educated Mandarin-speaking Chinese parents who work in middle class job positions also demonstrated a clear language preference for Chinese might surprise the mainstream and help the mainstream society understand why heritage/home language maintenance among second-generation children is an important issue. QUESTION 2: LANGUAGE ATTITUDES AND LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE EFFORTS My study also suggests that in spite of children’s language preference for and shift to English, the Chinese parents in my study nonetheless value their heritage language and strongly advocate heritage language learning to the children. This finding is further substantiated by Wiley et al. (in press)’s language attitudes survey among the Chinese in the US. The Chinese parents in my study not only see their heritage language as a valuable resource that can help the children succeed in the globalized job market, but also believe that it is important to the family’s survival as an organic whole in the US. That is, according to the parents, the heritage language can contribute to children’s ethnic

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identity formation and to family cohesion in the host country. Therefore, the Chinese parents emphasize heritage language learning to the children through a variety of channels, such as sending the children to heritage language schools, taking them to China for visits, teaching Chinese to the children at home, speaking Chinese with the children purposefully at home, and buying videos and other educational resources in the heritage language for the children etc. To a large extent, the Chinese parents are engaged in the reversing of language shift that Fishman (1991) advocated for linguistically different groups. However, the Chinese children in my study often show resistance towards their parents’ efforts to make them learn the heritage language, due to the lack of values attached to the heritage language in the mainstream US society. Past research, especially the “model minority” literature, tended to speculate that the success-driven Asian immigrant parents are eager to make their children shift to English as soon as possible in order for them to succeed in the mainstream society. Through in-depth interviews with the Chinese parents in their mother tongue, my study has obtained an insider’s perspective about the Chinese parents’ attitudes and behavior with regards to their heritage language. The findings not only reveal that the Chinese parents are strongly determined to maintain their heritage language maintenance to the next generation, but also demonstrate what specific measures they have taken to enhance heritage language learning in their children. Such findings help to clarify the ambiguity surrounding immigrant parents’ attitudes toward heritage language maintenance in their children. QUESTION 3: LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AND CULTURAL PARTICIPATION Different from most previous research on language maintenance, a major contribution of my study is that it examines heritage language maintenance within the larger context of the Chinese immigrant families’ acculturation in the US. My study reveals that although most of the first-generation Chinese parents are open-minded towards the American customs and beliefs, they are ambivalent about the culturally relevant knowledge and culturally appropriate ways of behaving in the mainstream culture. Therefore, they are often hesitant to participate in the mainstream cultural activities. To a large extent, they remain home

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culture oriented and maintain the traditional Chinese lifestyles, such as in eating habit, entertainment styles and holiday observance. More importantly, they adhere to the Confucianist worldview in their perceptions of parent-child relationship and parenting styles, among which are collectivism, authoritarian parenting, expectation of children’s submission, filial piety etc. Culturally speaking, the first-generation Chinese exhibits separation from the mainstream, only to find solace in the ethnic communities. Even the Mandarin-speaking parents in my study do not identify themselves as Chinese Americans after they have become naturalized citizens. They largely see themselves as Chinese living in the US. On the other hand, the second-generation children are acculturated faster to the American values and customs given their daily immersion in US public schools. They become fond of American fast food, love to see cartoons and movies in English, and they celebrate American holidays at school. Furthermore, as they are educated in the US educational system, they gradually accept the dominant American mainstream values, such as individualism, privacy, freedom and independence etc., since an early age. The different degrees of acculturation into the American society between the Chinese parents and children often result in serious generational dissonance and conflicts, loss of parental authority and “role reversal”, especially when the children grow older and face more assimilation pressures at school. It is against this background of dissonant acculturation between generations in immigrant families that my study demonstrates the importance of heritage language maintenance. My study shows that in families where the second-generation children maintain adequate heritage language skills, they have become the bridge for their first-generation parents to learn about the American mainstream society and acculturate in a certain degree, such as Long’s family, Nina’s family etc. Conversely, families that fail to maintain the heritage language in the children may have to see the parents largely isolated from the mainstream culture and less acculturated, such as Min’s family. The children’s role as a language and cultural broker is crucial to immigrant Chinese families’ collective survival in the host country, especial to those families where parents have very limited knowledge of the dominant language and culture. In this sense, the children’s faster acculturation to the host culture becomes a family resource and help

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rather than a root for generational dissonance. However, heritage language maintenance is often a prerequisite for the children to play the role of a broker successfully. Here my study further illustrates Portes and Rumbaut’s (2001) scheme on the relationship between generational language knowledge and types of acculturation, as shown in Table 3, Chapter 2 of this book. That is, when children move decisively in language shift to English while parents have acquired minimum English proficiency, dissonant acculturation will occur between the two generations. On the other hand, when children are possessed with high proficiency levels of their mother tongue, selective acculturation will result in the immigrant family regardless of the parents’ English abilities. QUESTION 4: SOCIAL NETWORK AND LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE My study takes a socio-cultural stance in looking at heritage language maintenance. So I examined the significant social networks that the Chinese families have established while living in the US and investigated how they impact on heritage language learning. I found three important social ties for the Chinese families: the extended family in China as passive ties, the co-ethnic immigrant communities as exchange ties, and the cross-ethnic networks as interactive ties. Findings from my interview data and field observations indicate that the different types of social networks that the Chinese families have established work together to provide a supportive environment for transmitting the heritage language to the next generation. Grandparents and transnational behaviors that the well-to-do Mandarin families frequently engage in are especially important to children’s heritage language development. The close-knit networks within the Chinese co-ethnic communities in the US also encourage and foster parents’ and children’s positive attitudes towards the maintenance of their heritage language. In unfolding the social mechanisms within the Chinese co-ethnic communities, I examined the Chinese language schools as important ethnic educational institutions to transmit the heritage language and culture. The rapid increase of the Chinese language schools in recent years throughout the US reveals immigrant parents’ commitment and enthusiasm to preserve the heritage language. Through active parental

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involvement, the Chinese language school has become not only a learning center for the heritage language and culture, but also a social center for the parents and children to share experiences, socialize and acculturate together. My argument on the role of Chinese communities in promoting heritage language learning echoes Zhou & Li (2003)’s and Chao (1997)’s observations on Chinese language schools. To conclude, my study builds on and extends the existing literature on language maintenance by Cummins (1983), Hornberger (1988), Lee (2002), Portes & Hao (1998, 2002), Portes & Rumbaut (2001), Wiley & Valdes (2000), etc. In looking at the Chinese heritage language maintenance in particular, my study has joined the works by Li, G. (2002, 2006), Li, W. (1994, 2000), McGinnis (2005, 2007), Sun (2000), Wang (2006), Zhou & Li (2003), etc. The findings from my study based on the ethnographic account of a small group of Chinese immigrants in Philadelphia strongly advocate for the value of heritage language learning and uphold Ruiz (1984)’s language-as-a-resource orientation. The major contribution of my study lies in the approach to examine heritage language maintenance against the three domains of acculturation, language preference, cultural participation and social network. In doing so, my study empathizes with Portes & Hao (2002)’s argument that total assimilation is only achieved at the expense of valuable loss to the second-generation children and therefore may not be the best acculturation outcomes.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS THE US LANGUAGE POLICY Heritage language maintenance is an important issue to immigrants and their descendants. The persistent use of the heritage language in the host country is prominent among first-generation immigrants. For one thing, first-generation immigrants from non-English speaking countries usually have limited English skills, especially during the initial periods after their arrival. In some cases, the heritage language is the only communication means they can resort to. For another, although some of the better-educated immigrants could acquire English proficiently enough for them to communicate in it, they are reluctant to give up the language which they are born with and which could give them a sense of familiarity and self-worth. All these factors lead to the continued use of the language of origin in the immigrants.

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However, language maintenance with the immigrants’ American-born or raised children is a controversial issue. Many educators, policymakers, and researchers doubt the necessity of heritage language maintenance in the second-generation children. A common fear among the mainstream language discourse is that immigrant children who keep using parents’ language will be retarded in their acquisition of English and hindered in their assimilation to the new culture. Following this line of reasoning, they advocate a shift to English as soon as possible in order for the immigrant children to succeed in the mainstream society. Historically, there have been two controversial language policies in the US that are directed at language minority students: bilingual education and English-Only. The former recognizes the legitimacy of minority languages in school settings, while the latter reflects the English hegemony and the language assimilation ideology. The two language policies have alternated in American educational history, with one getting the upper hand of the other in a particular period of time. After the 1980s, the English-Only ideology has become the dominant discourse in the policy arena, as shown by Proposition 227 in California, Proposition 209 in Arizona, and the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act under Bush’s administration. In view of the escalating bilingual versus English-Only debate in recent years, one important message from my study is the critical importance of immigrant children’s heritage language to their own well-being and to their families’ well-being in the host country. My study suggests that language assimilation to English is not the best result for the second-generation children and heritage language learning will not hinder the social adaptation and upward mobility of immigrant children to American society. On the contrary, maintenance of heritage language skills among the second-generation children empowers them to have access to the cultural resources of their parents and at the same time helps to ease the cultural conflicts within the immigrant families. Ruiz (1984) distinguished three different kinds of language orientations: language-as-a-problem, language-as-a-right, and language-as-a-resource. My study has shown that the Chinese immigrant parents highly value their heritage language as an importance resource for the second-generation children to succeed in the increasingly globalized society. However, the mainstream

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undertone transmitted to the second-generation children from the policy arena and from the school environment is still the language-as-a-problem ideology. Given the contemporary globalization trends and the increasing demand for language skills in the labor market, language educators in the US have paid more and more attention to the foreign language learning in recent years. It is ironic that the immigrant children should be pressured to forget their own languages when many mainstream Americans are spending years in school to satisfy the market need by acquiring them. The changes in the larger social environment indicate that the time has come for educators, researchers and policymakers alike to adopt a new lens to view immigrant children’s heritage languages. Policymakers and educators should pay due attention to the immigrant languages in devising an appropriate language policy and program to children from linguistically different backgrounds. My study suggests to educators and policymakers that a language policy that values the heritage languages may better serve the immigrant children in their acculturation to the US society under the increasingly globalized environment. As Bankston & Zhou (1995: 15) poignantly said: At the least, educators should view native languages neither as obstructions to be swept out of the way in the rush to assimilation nor as inconveniences to be endured while gradually moving students toward assimilation into an exclusively English-speaking society. NEW APPROACHES TO HERITAGE LANGUAGE EDUCATION Three important lessons with regards to heritage language education can be drawn from the findings of my study. First, my study confirms that immigrant parents and communities are the major forces contributing to heritage language education. In particular, my study investigates the role of Chinese language schools in the maintenance of the Chinese language among the second-generation children as a collective community force based on the social capital shared by the Chinese immigrant community. Heritage language schools are very popular among the recent immigrant communities in the US, such as the Korean language schools, the Japanese language schools, and the Chinese language schools. The

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number of these language schools is growing at such a surprising rate that the task of heritage language maintenance seems to have been securely taken care of by these institutions. However, children often demonstrate resistance towards parents’ efforts in heritage language maintenance both at home and in the Chinese language schools. My account of the second-generation Chinese children’s English learning experiences at school has shown that their heritage language, however valued by the parents, have no legitimate place in the school settings, which conveys a language assimilation message to the immigrant children and causes them to react passively to their parents’ heritage language transmission efforts. In a study on Korean second-generation college students, Lee (2002: 130) made the following observation: “It usually requires psychological maturation on the part of the individual to realise the true value and benefit of knowing one’s heritage language and culture, which often comes at a later age.” The younger children are often subject to the language assimilation pressures in their immediate school environment and fail to recognize the potential payoffs of learning the heritage language in the long run. By the time they realize it, they have missed the perfect timing of learning the language and often have to re-learn it as a foreign language in college. Therefore, I argue that only when parents, teachers, and society at large value the heritage languages and see them as a social resource rather than a disadvantage can young second-generation children start to enjoy and take pride in learning their heritage language at an early age. Secondly, heritage language schools largely operate independently of the public education system and on a voluntary basis within the immigrant communities. They are typically initiated and organized by a group of parents who are interested in maintaining the heritage language to their children. Some parents become active members of the school’s administrative staff, while others prefer classroom teaching and helping teachers with learning activities (Chao 1997). With the active participation of the parents and community members, heritage language schools help build a positive learning environment for learning Chinese and engaging in Chinese-language cultural events. Moreover, since the restrictive language policies in recent years are targeted at public education, the heritage language schools as a community institution are not affected. Instead, they have become widespread and vigorous in providing supplemental native-language

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support beyond the English-only instruction in public schools (Li 2005). Along with the benefits accompanying the voluntary nature in which heritage language schools are organized and operated, there are serious disadvantages too. Running independently of the public school system, heritage language schools are not eligible to receive financial support from the school district and are confined to the local community, i.e., the participating families, for resources. Without the systematic support of various kinds from the larger society, the heritage language schools are often in sporadic status and cannot sustain themselves, subjected to the wavering enthusiasm and unstable participation of the volunteering parents who have their own working schedules and are neither certified educators nor language specialists. Li (2005) argued that the excessive dependence of the heritage language schools on the volunteering parents caused problems, such as the low quality of teaching and inadequately prepared teachers. My study with the Chinese children’s heritage language learning experiences in these weekend schools shows that although decisive in heritage-language preservations, such schools are not as effective and fruitful as the parents expected, due to the voluntary nature of the teaching and learning activities in them. Therefore, heritage language schools cannot just rely on the immigrant families or the communities themselves for success. Instead, they should try to enlist resources and support, both material and spiritual, from the outside. Only when the larger society fosters heritage language learning can the immigrant parents pass their language to the next generation successfully. One way of reaching out beyond the confines of the local community is through cooperation with the bilingual programs in public schools. Bilingual programs, broadly speaking, refer to the instructional practice that makes use of both English and minority children’s home language in the classroom. A variety of programs, such as ESL, sheltered English, structured immersion, two-way immersion, dual-language programs etc., are all included under the term of “bilingual education”. Hornberger (1991) characterized the different kinds of bilingual programs into three types, the transitional model, the maintenance model and the enrichment model. My study suggests that immigrant children’s heritage languages should no longer be viewed as a mere tool to help them master English as soon as possible. Instead, they are a valuable resource in and of themselves. Therefore, public schools should set up more maintenance and

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enrichment bilingual programs to provide the second-generation children with opportunities to learn the heritage language in the school settings. Such bilingual programs can benefit from working together with the heritage language schools within the immigrant community, while at the same time strongly support the learning activities in the latter to preserve the heritage language. Thirdly, my study has important pedagogical implications for heritage language teaching and learning. I have shown that as the Chinese children get older, they are less willing to communicate in their mother tongue due to the lack of correspondent literacy development in their mother tongue. The older children feel restricted by their limited vocabulary in the heritage language to express their sophisticated meanings, which leads to their increasing disinclination to speak the heritage language and accelerates language shift to English. However, the language maintenance efforts that the Chinese parents engage in are largely focused on promoting the oral skills, in the hope that the children should at least communicate with the family or community members. It is also a common misconception that the Chinese reading and writing are believed to be difficult to develop among the heritage language learners. The priority put on the oral skills have discouraged the children from putting efforts into the literacy development in the heritage language. The consequence is that many Chinese parents complain they cannot communicate “deeply” with their second-generation children. Therefore, I argue that each of the four aspects of the language cannot stand alone. Without the proper development of reading and writing abilities in children’s heritage language, it is hard to maintain a high level of speaking skills in them. My study also suggests that heritage language education should be made more relevant to the second-generation’s current school life, instead of merely promising a good future for them. Nancy’s ingenious incorporation in her regular math class of what she has learned in the heritage language with her grandparents at home has illustrated the possible ways that heritage language learning can be used as a resource in their immediate school life, in addition to being a resource for the children’s future success in school and in career. Parents, educators and policymakers should design curriculums and textbooks in a way to establish the connection between the learning activities in the heritage language schools and those in the regular schools. In that case, the second-generation children will have additional incentive to participate in the heritage language schools on weekends.

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PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT AND HOME-SCHOOL PARTNERSHIP There is a consensus among researchers that parental involvement in education is not only beneficial but also crucial to students’ academic achievement, especially for minority children (McCaleb 1994; Swap 1993). Active parental involvement in schooling can improve students’ self-esteem, affirm their sense of personal and cultural identity, and motivate them to learn new knowledge by building on existing “funds of knowledge” from their home culture (Moll 1992). On the other hand, the school-home dichotomy can bring psychological and cognitive damage to children’s development (Li 2002). My study contributes to the understanding of the immigrant parents by looking at how they seek to transmit their heritage language and culture to the second-generation children. In doing so, my study points to the crucial role of the immigrant parents in educating their children in the host country. All the Chinese parents, including the Mandarin academic ones and the disadvantaged Fujianese ones, regard education as the way for upward mobility and hope for the best for their children’s education. However, very rarely we find these parents’ involvement in American schools. According to Epstein (1989: 25-26)’s scheme, there are five hierarchical levels of parental involvement. Type 1: The basic obligations of parents that are associated with basic responsibilities of childbearing. Type 2: The basic obligations of school that include formal and informal communication with parents about school programs, students’ progress and special needs. Type 3: Parental involvement in school, which refers to parents’ actual presence in school and other volunteering involvement in learning. Type 4: Parental involvement in learning activities at home. This form of participation refers to parent participation in schoolwork the child carries home, either at the child’s request or that of the school. Type 5: Parental involvement in governance and advocacy, which involves parental leadership. My study has portrayed in detail how the Chinese parents fulfilled their obligations in Type 1 and Type 4 categories. Moreover, their active participation in the community heritage language school also

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indicates that their involvement in children’s education has gone far beyond than that. They are actually involved in a lot of Type 5 activities, assuming parental leadership in school governance, although the school here is not the mainstream, regular school. However, they are relatively inactive in Type 2 and Type 3 activities. The Chinese parents’ active involvement in the community heritage language school and lack of involvement in children’s regular school highlights the need for educators and policymakers to take a different look at parental involvement within the immigrant families and appreciate what they have done for their children outside school. More often than not, the immigrant parents also desire to get involved in their children’s regular school activities, but they are intimidated to do so due to the lack of English proficiency and cultural understanding about the American educational system. For example, my interview with Nina’s family shows that although Nina complained about her mother’s absence from her school activities, she nonetheless felt embarrassed when her mother did come to school and couldn’t act the way other parents did. The Fujianese parents, such as Min’s mother, were even more isolated from their children’s school, given their own minimum education and serious language barriers. This suggests that American schools serving the immigrant student population should try to reach out to the immigrant parents and devise ways for their participation and involvement, instead of perpetuating their separation from their children’s schools and eventually from their children themselves. My study also reveals the cultural conflicts between the home culture and the school culture, distinctly manifested in the dissonant acculturation patterns between the first-generation parents and their second-generation children. To build a cultural continuity between students’ home and school experiences, educators should first get to know more about immigrant parents and their family lives before they can collaborate with them in addressing key developmental issues in the children. However, the mainstream society lacks the substantial knowledge on the first-generation immigrant parents since they are new to the country. My study has provided detailed information about the Chinese immigrant parents in many aspects, such as their language skills, language attitudes, their cultural identity, social networks and acculturation patterns in the US, through adopting a household,

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intergenerational perspective in my ethnographic account. Based on my study, I argue that teachers should be active players in building the home-school partnerships. They could make use of the children’s bilingual skills and ask them to act as translators during the teacher-parent meetings. They could also introduce the school programs to the parents by providing them with bilingual brochures with the help of the second-generation children. While the immigrant parents start to learn more about their children’s American schooling experiences, the cultural tensions between what children learn at school and what the parents teach at home will be mitigated. At the same time, as the parents get more familiarized with the American educational system, they could also bring their cultural resources and inputs to the classes to inform a culturally responsive pedagogy to the teachers.

DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH This study intended to investigate the intersection of immigration, language and acculturation issues among Chinese immigrant families, a rapidly increasing but previously understudied immigrant group in the US. Using participant observations and qualitative interviews with 18 Chinese immigrant families in Philadelphia, this study was able to describe in detail and depth the language str.uggles that immigrant parents and children face, their intergenerational conflicts, cultural activities, social networks and other important acculturation issues that survey research cannot capture. However, the sample size for the study was small. Although the participants of the study were purposefully selected from two different Chinese communities in Philadelphia, their experiences reported in the study may not represent those of all the Chinese immigrants in the US. Moreover, the locality of the Philadelphia metropolitan area with its large number of Chinese population in Philadelphia Chinatown as well as its population diversity in the eastern coast could have provided a particular socio-cultural context for examining heritage language maintenance. Therefore, the results of the study should be taken with caution if readers want to generalize them to the Chinese experience nationwide in the US, such as to the Chinese residing in small towns or rural areas where there is not a large Chinese community and the population is not as diverse.

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The findings and limitations of the study together suggest several areas for future research with immigrant population. First, more research efforts should be made in the future to study different subgroups of immigrant families and children along the lines of nativity, socioeconomic status, residential areas, etc, to provide a holistic picture of the immigrant experience in the US. In the past, immigrant ethnic groups tended to be viewed as a monolithic whole. However, my study with the Mandarin-speaking Chinese families and Fujianese-speaking families examined separately demonstrates that there exist great differences between the two groups of the Chinese in terms of their language skills, educational levels, pre-immigration background, socioeconomic status and occupation. As a result of these differences, their acculturation processes vary dramatically and education of their children should vary accordingly. More ethnographic research should be done in the future to address children from first-generation, second-generation or even third-generation immigrant families separately, as well as immigrant children residing in different geographical regions of the US, such as the western coast, the rural areas and the south. Secondly, my study with Chinese children’s heritage language maintenance and acculturation experiences suggests that age is an important factor in minority children’s language maintenance and cultural adjustment. Therefore, longitudinal studies are needed in further research to unfold how children change and acculturate in different stages of their life trajectories and what factors are involved. Finally, this study is an exploratory one in examining the relationship between language maintenance and acculturation among immigrant families. Few research studies on language maintenance have adopted this perspective. However, the interplay of language, immigration and acculturation deserves further attention in the future research.

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APPENDIX 1: INTERVIEW PROTOCOLS Parent Interview: First, I want to ask about your personal information. 1. Name: 2. Age: 3. Education: 4. Occupation: (current job, past job) 5. Number of children: 6. Name of the child to be interviewed: 7. Grade and school of the child: 8. Age of the child: Now I would like to ask about your immigration background. 9. When did you come to US? How old were you then? 10. Why did you come to US? 11. When did your spouse come to US? How did she/he come? 12. Where was your child born, in China or US? If in China, when did the child come to US? 13. How many years have you lived in Philadelphia? Where else have you lived in US? 14. Where did you live before you came to the US? 15. Do you plan to stay permanently in US? Are you a US citizen? Or green card holder or anything else? Language: Now I want to ask about the language use in your household. 16. What is your mother tongue? 17. How is your English? 18. How about other members in your family? 19. When do you use Chinese at home? When do you use English at home? 20. What language do you use most often with your child? When do you speak Chinese with your child? 21. Do you think Chinese is important to your child? Why? 231

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22. When does your child use Chinese, according to your observation? 23. Who teaches your child Chinese? Have you ever sent or do you plan to send your child to a Chinese school? Can you talk more about the Chinese school? 24. What language do you use most in your workplace? 25. What language do you use most with your relatives and friends? To whom do you speak Chinese? To whom do you speak English? 26. Which language do you like to use, Chinese or English? Have there been any changes of language use in you and your family since your first arrival in the US? Cultural Orientation: Now I would like to ask about your and your family’s daily life. 27. How much time do you spend with your child every day? 28. Can you describe what activities you do together with your child (on weekdays and on weekends)? (eg. concert, zoos, sing songs together, read stories together, help with homework, play games, visit museum, play sports, tell stories, do housework chores, go to library, watch movies together) 29. What holidays do you celebrate at home? How do you celebrate them? Do you celebrate Chinese New Year? 30. How do you celebrate your child’s birthday? 31. Do you have a Chinese TV channel? Do you read more Chinese books or English books? Do you listen to more Chinese music or English music? Chinese videos and English videos? How about your child? 32. Where do you buy things when you go shopping? Will you bring your child with you? Why or why not? 33. How often do you go to Chinatown in Philadelphia? Do you bring your child when you go there? What do you generally do in Chinatown? 34. What other cultural activities do you attend? (eg. in the community, in the workplace and elsewhere) What activities do you bring your child to? Are these activities Chinese or American27 by tradition? 35. Do you like Chinese food or American food? What is a typical dinner for your family? 27 Here “American” is used broadly to refer to the American mainstream. The following usages are the same.

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36. Do you have a religion? How important is religion to your life? Did your religion change after you came to US? 37. Have you brought your child back to China? How often? And for what purpose? 38. How important do you think Chinese culture is to your child? How important do you think American culture is to your child? Social Network: Now I would like to know about your friends and your social network 39. Who are you living with currently? 40. Do you have relatives in the US? Where are they? Do you get in touch with them very often? 41. Do you have many Chinese friends? Do you have many American friends? 42. Do you have close contact with friends and relatives in China? How many of your current friends did you already know before you came to the US? 43. Do you have many friends in your neighborhood? Are they Chinese or American? 44. How long have you lived in this neighborhood? Do you like it? What are your major considerations when you choose a neighborhood to live? (safety, rent, Chinese neighbors, good school etc) 45. Have you ever invited your colleagues to your house? 46. Are your colleagues mostly American or foreign born? If foreign born, where? 47. What activities do you usually do with your friends? Will you take your child along with you? 48. Does your child have many Chinese friends? Does he/she have many American friends? How about friends of other ethnicities? 49. Do you know your child’s friends? Do you know their parents? How many do you know? 50. Are you a member of any Chinese organizations in US? What kind of organizations are they? 51. According to your experience, how do you think of the relations, such as friendship, between Chinese people in the US? 52. According to your experience, how do you think of the relations, such as friendship, between Chinese and Americans? How about the relations between Chinese and people from other ethnicities?

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53. Who has helped you the most after you came to the US? 54. Who can you rely on to take care of the child when you are not available? Child Raising Now I would like to learn about how you raise your child. 55. How much education do you expect your child to get? How much do you think you should be responsible for your children’s academic achievement? 56. What are your major concerns when you choose a school for your children? (eg. close to home, safety, reputation, special language programs, etc) Is his/her school a regularly assigned one or a school you chose yourself? 57. Do you think it important for your child’s teachers to be aware of your family background? Do your child’s teachers know that your child speaks Chinese? 58. How often do you visit your child’s school? For what purposes? What may have prevented you from visiting your child’s school? (too busy, language barrier, lack of information, transportation etc) How important do you think school visit is? 59. Who influences you most in how to raise your children, your friends, relatives, parents, or people in the neighborhood? 60. What would you do when your child becomes disobedient? 61. Do you have rules for your children in watching TV, doing homework, doing housework chores etc? 62. Do you have extra homework for your child? Has your child been tutored in any subject? 63. What resources have you purchased for your child’s education? ( eg. computer, library card, books, etc) 64. What special training programs have you enrolled your child in? 65. How satisfied are you with your child’s education so far? Self-Identity: Finally, I would like to ask about your adjustment in the US. 66. How is your general impression of the US like? Do you like living in the US? Did you feel the same way in the first year of being in the US? 67. Have there been any changes in you or your family since your first arrival in the US? (such as eating habit, spending patterns, living

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styles, activities you attend or any other aspect of your life) 68. How different do you think you are from other Americans? (appearance, idea, culture, spending pattern etc) 69. Do you think your ethnicity of being a Chinese has ever affected you in any way in the US? Do you think your child will be affected in the same way? 70. How would you identify yourself in terms of ethnicity and nationality? “I am a (an) ___(Chinese, Chinese American, American Chinese, Chinese overseas, Asian American, Asian, American etc)”. Why would you identify yourself like this?

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CHILD INTERVIEW: Demographics: 1. Name: 2. Grade: 3. Sex: 4. School: 5. Date of Birth: 6. Place of Birth: 7. Father’s name: 8. Mother’s name: For those not born in US: 9. When did you come to US? How old were you then? How long have you been in US? Chinese Language: Now, I want to talk about the languages you speak. 10. What is your home language? 11. How well can you speak Chinese? 12. How well can you read Chinese? 13. How well can you understand Chinese? 14. How well can you write Chinese? 15. How many languages are you able to use? 16. What language do you use most at home? 17. What language do you use most with friends, at school etc.? Do you use Chinese at school? 18. Which language are you most comfortable with? 19. When and to whom do you use Chinese? When and to whom do you use English? 20. Have you been to Chinese language school? How long have you been there? 21. Do you like going there? Why or why not? 22. Where else and from whom do you learn Chinese? Do you learn Chinese at school? 23. Is Chinese difficult to you? Why or why not? 24. Are you proud of knowing Chinese? 25. How important is Chinese to you? 26. Now I am going to read a story to you in Chinese, okay? (See the

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attached Chinese story) 27. Now the story is with you. Can you read it to me? Cultural Activity: Now I am going to ask about your everyday life. 28. What is your favorite food? Do you like Chinese food? 29. What is your favorite cartoon character? What TV programs do you like? 30. Who do you want to be when you grow up? Can you name your favorite famous person? 31. What is your favorite holiday? What do you do on this holiday? Do you celebrate Chinese New Year? 32. How do you usually spend your birthday? 33. Do you like Chinatown? Do you often go there? What do you do when you are in Chinatown? 34. Have you been to China? Do you like it there? What do you know about China? 35. Where do you buy things you need? 36. Do you have pocket money that you can use yourself? 37. How many hours do you spend on homework every day? 38. Do you feel schoolwork is hard? 39. Do you like your parents to visit school? Why or why not? 40. How often do you argue with your parents? On what things do you argue? 41. What kind of things do you usually do together with your Mom and Dad? (concert, sing songs together, read stories together, help with homework, play games, visit museum, play sports, tell stories, do housework chores) 42. Which activity do you like best, among all these? Social Network: Now I want you to talk about your friends and school. 43. Do you have many friends? Can you name one of your best friends? 44. How many friends do you have at school? How many friends do you have in your neighborhood? 45. Do you have Chinese friends? Where are your friends come from? 46. What language do you use with your friends? To whom do you use Chinese?

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47. Who do you like to make friends with? What kind of children do you like to play with? Why? 48. What kind of things do you usually do when you are with friends? (Games, homework, fight, shopping, discussion, etc.) 49. Do you like your school? Why or why not? 50. Which teacher do you like best? Why? 51. Do you like your classmates? Do you play with them very often? 52. How different do you think you are from your classmates? 53. What kinds of activities do you do together with teachers and classmates at school? 54. Who do you often stay with after school? (such as friends, parents, relatives, siblings, grandparents, teacher, tutor, etc) What do you do? 55. Who do you turn to for help when you are in trouble, for example, when you have problem with your school work? Self-Identity: Finally, I want to play a game with you. (using the chart) 56. How do you identify yourself? For example, you would say to others: “I am a (an) ____ (Chinese, Chinese American, American, or I don’t know etc).

APPENDIX 2: CONSENT FORM UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA Donghui Zhang Graduate School of Education Tel: (215) 386-4982 24-Hour Emergency Number: (215) 662-6059 CONSENT FORM Home Language Maintenance and Acculturation Among Second-Generation Chinese Children

INVITATION TO PARTICIPATE: You are being asked to participate in a research study on Chinese American children because your family is an immigrant family of Chinese descent PURPOSE: The purpose of the study is to investigate the Chinese immigrant families’ adaptation experience in the US, with the focus on the home language maintenance and acculturation patterns among second-generation Chinese children. PROCEDURES: Data will be collected through in-depth interviews and participant observations with Chinese immigrant families in Philadelphia. The interview will take your family about 2 hours. All the formal interviews and informal conversations with the investigator will be audio-taped and recorded. RISKS: There is minimal risk to you for participating in this study. COSTS AND FINANCIAL RISKS: There will be no charge to you for this research study. BENEFITS:

The study can contribute to an understanding of the 239

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Chinese immigrant children’s adjustment experience in the US and therefore is beneficial to your child’s development. COMPENSATION: A gift of about 20 dollars in value will be given to your family as a whole (parent/child combined) to compensate for your cooperation and participation in this study. CONFIDENTIALITY: Every attempt will be made by the investigator to maintain all information collected in this study strictly confidential, except as may be required by court order or by law. Authorized representatives of the University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board (IRB), a committee charged with protecting the rights and welfare of research subjects, may be provided access to medical or research records that identify you by name. If any publication or presentations results from this research, you will not be identified by name. Your standing within the University will not be affected by your participation in this research study. The study is going to result in a dissertation shared among academic community in education. You will receive a written summary of the dissertation. DISCLAIMER/WITHDRAWAL: Your participation in this study is completely voluntary and that you may withdraw at any time without prejudicing your standing within the University of Pennsylvania or your class. SUBJECT RIGHTS: If you wish further information regarding your rights as a research subject, you may contact the Director of Regulatory Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania by telephoning (215) 898-2614. If you have any questions pertaining to your participation in this research study, you may contact the physician by calling the telephone number(s) listed at the top of page one. You have been given the opportunity to ask questions and have had them answered to your satisfaction.

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CONCLUSION: You have read and understand the consent form. You agree to participate in this research study. Upon signing below, you will receive a copy of the consent form.

Name of Subject (parent/parents)

Signature of (parent/parents)

Subject

Date/ Time

Name of (Child)

Signature (Child)

Subject

Date/ Time

Signature of Person Obtaining Consent

Date/ Time

Subject

Name of Person Obtaining Consent

of

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INDEX -A“accommodation without assimilation”, 17 Acculturation definition of, 3-4 domains of, 4, 20, 213-214 language maintenance and, 1, 4, 17-19, 213, 229 outcomes and patterns of, 14-18, 19-20, 24, 197, 213, 220 process of, 1-3, 17-18, 23, 30, 32, 153-154, 141, 144, 181, 194, 202, 213 models and typologies of, 12-13, 19, 213-214 paces of, 19, 143, 156, 160-161, 165, 169, 198, 210, 218 Adler, P., 63 Adler, P. A., 63 Adler, P. S., 23 Alba, R., 4 Alice, 61, 83, 89, 91, 153, Alice’s mother, 135, 154, 186, 189 Asian American Federation of New York, 42-43 assimilation, 4-5, 11-16, 22, 75, 91, 99, 109, 113, 124, 141, 146, 165, 169, 186, 193, 197, 210, 213, 215, 218, 220-223 255

-BBankston, C. L., 16, 24-25, 222 Barringer, H. R., 32, 105 Beauvais, F., 15-16 Bennet, M., 154 Bernal, G., 16 Berry, J. W. 5, 14-16, 24, 213-214 Bhabha, H., 25 bilingual development, 28-30, 85, 92, 102, 120, 165, 204, 206, bilingual education, 224 bilingual programs, 86, 91-92, 168, 201, 224-225, Bilingual Education Act, 10 bilingual proficiency, 69, 70, 78. See also heritage language proficiency typology of bilingualism, 100-101 bicultural biculturality, 14, 17, 24, 181-182 bicultural identity, 16, 19, 24, 156, 181, 194 bicultural competence, 16 bicultural development, 196, 209 biliteracy, 9, 92, 95-96, 98, 181-182, 205 Blanc, M., 24 Blount, B. G., 12

256 Boski, P., 14, 16 Brown, B. B., 147 Bourhis, R., 27 Bukowski, W. M., 148 -CCai, G., 18 Caifeng, 61 Caifeng’s mother, 62, 163 Cantonese, 29, 33, 35, 39, 44, 57, 84, 183, 184 Cha, S. C., 18 Chang, J., 28 Chang, I., 32, 34-35 Chao, R. K., 105, 147 Chao, T. H., 28, 220, 223 Chen, X., 191 Chinatown, 31, 36, 43-46, 51, 54, 56-57, 60-63, 92, 100, 114, 130-132, 141-146, 163-164, 167, 182-185, 188, 196-197, 200, 205, Chinese communities, 6, 34-36, 40 in Philadelphia, 42-47, 51-52, 56, 59-60, 63, 143, 163, 184, 189, 191, 198-201, 209-211, 214, Chinese Exclusion Act, 200 Chinese immigrants profile of, 37-41 and Chinese immigration, 31-36 Chinese language schools, 51, 198-211, 219-220, 222-223

Index Chow, R., 25 Chun, K., 29 co-ethnic communities, 53, 63, 120, 159, 163, 171, 183-196, 202, 210, 219. See also Chinese communities. co-ethnic networks. See co-ethnic communities Coleman, H. L. K., 1, 13, Coleman, J. S., 198 Confucian culture, 2, 4, 25, 50, 54, 108, 112, 130, 139, 146, 150, 153, 155, 172, 178, 183, 208, 218 Cortes, D. E., 15 Coupland, N., 24, 111 Crawford, J., 10, 22, 123, cultural identity, 20-21, 23-25, 66, 129-130, 142, 182, 226, 227 cultural participation, 129, 130, 139, 140, 168, 214, 217, 220 Cummins, J., 18, 104, 220 -DDalto, G., 11 David, M. K., 28 De Bot, K., 18 Diaz, R. M., 104 Donna, 61, 86, 100, 191, 195 Donna’s mother, 62, 86, 110, 118, 173, 181, 185, 195, 203 Dornbusch, S. M., 147

Index -EEdmonston, B., 143 Ekstrand, L. H., 16 Elovitz, P. H., 129, 194, 213 English language learner, 22, 78, 91, 124 English-Only, 10-11, 22, 84, 124, 187, 221 Epstein, J. L., 227 ESL, 80-84, 224 ethnic identity, 15, 17, 23, 25-26, 140, 182, 199 extended family, 172-178, 182, 183 -FFetterman, D M., 49 first-generation immigrants, 2-3, 6, 18, 20, 36, 53-60, 67 Fishman, J. A., 1, 3, 10, 22, 24, 123, 217 Ford, B., 194 Fujianese, 2, 29, 35, 39 Fujianese-speaking immigrants, 6, 43-44, 46-47, 51-54, 61-62, 65, 76-78 -GGans, H., 17, 20 Garcia, E.E., 103, 104 Garcia, H.D.C., 18 Gardner, R. C., 23 generational conflicts. See generational dissonance generational dissonance, 2, 7, 18-20, 69, 130, 144-155, 218-219

257 Gerber, D., 124 Gerton, J., 1, 13 Gibson, M. A., 4, 18 Giles, H., 24, 27, 111 globalization, 12, 29, 106, 222 Gordon, M. M., 4 Govindasamy, S., 26, 28 Guba, G. E., 54 Gudykunst, W., 111 Gurin, P., 111 -HHakuta, K., 69, 103-104 Hamers, J., 24 Hao, L., 11, 18, 216, 220 Haugen, E., 3 heritage language, 1-3 and family cohesion, 111-113, 163-164 and ethnic identity, 55, 103, 108-111, 123, 127, 208, 216-217 as a resource, 10, 12, 104-108, 216, 220-221 Chinese as a, 28-30, 220 maintenance of, 1-5 mediating role of, 164, 168. See also language and cultural broker proficiency of, 92-95 Heyer, V., 33 Hill, J., 27 Hill, K., 27 Hinton, L., 10 Ho, D. Y. F., 154 Hoffman, C., 25 home language. See heritage language Hones, D. F., 18

258 host country, 1, 2, 9, 12, 16, 106, 109, 134, 143, 158, 163, 174, 177, 187, 213 Hornberger, N. H., 3, 9, 11, 21, 50, 220 Huberman, A. M., 66 Hulsen, M., 18 Hurtado, A., 111 -IImmigration Law, 32, 34, 36, 173 intergenerational approach, 19-20, 69, 228 IRB, 66 -JJansen, G., 54 Jo, H., 25, 176 John, 61, 175 John’s mother, 62, 71-72, 125, 131, 134, 136, 141, 144-145, 149, 157-158, 161, 175, 177, 185-186, 190, 204, 206 Johnson, R., 15 Johnston, M.E., 12 -KKahn, C., 129, 194, 213 Kao, G., 29 Kim, U., 14, 16 Kipp, S., 26 Kwong, P., 33-35, 44, 143 -LLaFromboise, T., 1, 5, 13, 16

Index Lambert, W. E., 104 Lang, J. G., 16 language and cultural broker, 163-164, 168 language attitudes, 21-23, 90, 103-116, 121-126, 176, 216 language as a resource, 21, 123 language as a problem, 21, 123 language as a right, 21 language ideology, 21-22, 90, 123, 187 language maintenance, 3, 10, 95, 220 language attitudes and, 21-22, 103-121 cultural identity and, 23-26, 129-130, 142, 182. See also cultural participation, acculturation social network and, 26-28. See also Chinese language schools language policy, 5, 7, 10-11, 84, 220, 222 language shift, 10-11, 21, 85-91 Lao vs. Nichols, 10 Lee, J., 23-24, 220, 223 Lee, S. J., 17 Lewis, E., 194 Li, G., 25-26, 28, 50, 54, 220, 226 Li, M., 224 Li, W., 26, 28, 39, 100, 107, 171, 185, 215, 220, Li, X., 197, 199-200, 209, 220

Index Lieberson, S., 11 Lin, J., 31, 33, 143 Lincoln, Y. S., 54 Ling, H., 183 Leizhao, 61, 112 Leizhao’s father, 62, 97 Lo, Jennifer, 84, 114-115, 164 Long, 61, 86, 91-92, 94, 100, 196, 201 Long’s father, 62, 218 Lowe, L., 25 Lulu, 61, 87, 91, 96, 117-119, 122-123, 164 Lulu’s mother, 62, 82, 104-105, 116, 119, 164 -MMandarin, 2, 29, 35, 39, 46, 50-51, 56, 107 Mandarin-speaking immigrants, 2, 6, 46, 54, 57, 61-62, 70 Mary, 61, 187, 192, 206 Mary’s mother, 62, 75, 82, 109, 138, 187, 192, 206 Massey, D. S., 1 Matute-Bianchi, M.A., 24 Maya, 61, 86, 91-92, 94, 100, 163, 168, 196, 201 Maya’s father, 62, 77, 159, 163, 167-169 McCaleb, S. P., 226 McGinnis, S., 9, 28, 29, 220 McKay, S. L., 11, 18, 32, 38 Meimei, 176, 192 Mesthrie, R., 3 Miles, M. B., 66

259 Milroy, L., 26, 27, 177 Min, 61, 114, 142, 165-167, 195 Min’s mother, 62, 107, 113-114, 143, 165-167, 195-196, 218, 227 Ms. Sun, 98, 201 Moll, L., 226 Munoz, R. F., 16 -NNambiar, M., 26, 28 Nancy, 61, 79-80, 87, 94, 125-126, 132-134, 141-142, 164, 180-182, 194-195, 225 Nany’s mother, 62, 74, 76, 106, 110, 118, 195, 180-182, 204 Nancy’s grandmother, 164, 180-181 Naning, 61, 140, 177, 179, 181, Naning’s mother, 62, 72-73, 76, 133, 137, 155, 158, 178-179, 190, 204 National Council of Association of Chinese Language Schools, 200 Nee,V., 4 New York, 40-43, 57, 106, 197 Nina, 61, 90, 96, 123-124, 126, 140, 145-153, 159, 193, 195, 203, 227 Nina’s mother, 62, 75, 90, 105, 117, 134, 136, 145-153, 175, 187, 190, 193, 196, 218 No Child Left Behind, 11, 22, 221 Northover, M., 24

260

Index

-OOetting, E. R., 15, 16 Ogbu, J. U., 24, 29, 198

Rumbaut, R. G., 1, 4, 5, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 30, 32, 143, 156, 197, 219, 220

-PPalinkas, L. A., 194 Pandharipande, R., 24 parenting, 146-156. See also generational dissonance parental involvement, 211, 226 Passel, J. S., 143 Peal, E., 104 Peirce, B. N., 27 Peshkin, A., 54 Peyton, J. K., 9 Philadelphia, 2, 6, 30-31, 41-47, 51-63, 85, 87, 89, 97, 117, 167, 184, 191, 199, 214, 220, 228 Phinney, J. S., 1, 5, 13, 15, 20, 23 Porter, J. R., 13 Portes, A., 1, 4, 5, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 30, 32, 143, 156, 197, 216, 219, 220 Prabhakaran, V., 27 Proposition 203, 11, 22, 221 Proposition 227, 11, 22, 221

-SSakamoto, M., 18 Schnittker, J., 4, 13, 16, 17, 20 Schwartz, S., 159 Seale, C., 49 second-generation children, 1, 3, 6, 11, 22, 30, 53, 60, 64 “segmented assimilation”, 20 selective acculturation, 19-20, 156, 219 sense of being grounded, 193-194, 196 Silverstein, M., 21 Sippola, L. K., 148 Siu, S., 29 social capital, 198-199, 202, 204, 210, 222 social network, 26-28, 171, 173, 178, 182, 184-185, 189, 193-198 Sorensen, J. L., 16 Spradley, J. P., 49 Steinberg, L., 147 Stewart, E., 153 Stoessel, S., 26, 28 Sue, S., 29, 105 Sun, L., 98, 201, 220 Sung, B. L., 15 Swap, S. M., 226

-RRanard, D. A., 9 Ramsey, S. R., 39, 107 Redding, S. G., 108 Robinson, P., 111 Rodriguez, C., 197, 198 Rogler, L. H., 15 Ruiz, R., 10, 21, 123, 220, 221

-TTan, John, 44, 57 Takeuchi, D. T., 32, 105 Taylor, D., 27

Index Thompson, J. Ting-Toomey, S., 111 Tracy, 61, 65, 80-81, 83, 85, 91, 100, 112, 191 Tracy’s mother, 80, 87, 112, 113, 118, 120 Tracy’s father, 80, 83, 87 -UUeda, R., 9 US Census Bureau, 9, 28, 36-41, 56, 58-59 University City, 46, 56, 58-60, 63, 142, 184, 189, 195, 214 University of Pennsylvania, 45, 50-51, 58-59, 63, 66 -VValdes, G., 9, 220 Veltman, C., 10 Vicky, 61, 65 Vicky’s mother, 62, 104, 117, 158,160, 180, 187 -WWang, X., 28, 176, 195, 209, 220 Washington, R.E., 13, 40 Watson, J. L., 183 Weinreich, U., 3 Weltens, B., 18 Wiley, T. G., 9, 29, 39, 216, 220 William, 61, William’s mother, 62, 82, 107, 188 Winning, A., 27 Wong, B. P., 11, 18, 32, 33, 38 Wright, S., 18

261 -XXenos, P., 32,105 Xiaoyan, 61, 81, 83, 89, 90-91, 94, 100, 162-163 Xiaoyan’s father, 130, 139 Xiaoyan’s mother, 62, 72, 81, 88-89, 118, 160, 162 -YYagmur, K., 26 Yigang, 61, 196 Yigang’s mother, 62 Ying,Y-W., 4, 6, 14, 20, 130, 213, 214 Young, M. C., 23 -ZZanden, V., 9, 17 Zeng, D., 4 Zhou,M., 16, 17, 18, 20, 24, 25, 29, 45, 130, 143, 188, 197, 199, 200, 209, 220, 223, 243