Eric
This chapter features the Shin family and their ongoing efforts to help a wayward son navigate a rocky road toward young adulthood. At the start of the ethnographic involvement with this family, the son had gotten into minor troubles with the law and was struggling to graduate from high school. In the ensuing years, the son wandered from one low-skilled job to another and never managed more than a semester here and there at a community college, creating many parental worries, regrets, and recriminations about what went wrong in their parenting and family life. This chapter illustrates the challenges Korean American families face when their children’s school and career pathways do not conform to the conventional success frame that many immigrant Asian American families hold.