‘We are Korean people and we must speak Korean well:’ parental involvement in five Korean American families with successful heritage language maintenance

Author(s):  
Sarah Sok ◽  
Anat Schwartz
Author(s):  
Sumie Okazaki ◽  
Nancy Abelmann

This chapter features the Chung family, who, like the Koh family, were keenly aware of racism. Both parents prided themselves on working outside of the ethnic sector—the mother as a highly skilled surgical nurse and the father as an owner of a video rental store. The family’s higher income compelled the parents to move their family from an affluent suburb populated by many other Korean American families to another affluent suburb that was overwhelmingly White—a strategy to exit the ethnic enclave in order to assimilate themselves and their children into multicultural (but mostly White) America to ensure successful transitions to professional occupations populated by successful (White) others. The chapter follows the family through the eyes of the younger son, who realized the illusive nature of the parents’ assimilation strategy and eventually pursued graduate study in a humanities discipline.


Author(s):  
Sumie Okazaki ◽  
Nancy Abelmann

This chapter sets the context for our study, including highlights from a study conducted on the campus of the University of Illinois that served as the impetus for the study of Korean American teens and parents in Chicagoland. The chapter presents the findings—as well as new questions sparked by the findings—of that campus study in light of the prevailing narrative about Korean American (and Asian American) families from previous scholarly works about the nature of intergenerational relationships in immigrant families. The Chicagoland Korean American families featured in our study are also placed in the context of the local, national, and transnational conversations that were ongoing among, and about, Korean American and Korean families and teens at the time of the study.


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