Doug and Esther

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.

Family Context

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.

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.

Jun-Ho

This chapter features the Hyun family, the most recently immigrated family, who had arrived in the United States only two years prior to our meeting. Although the parents had decided to emigrate to the United States to provide their teenage sons with better opportunities—riding the popular wave of sending Korean children overseas for precollege study abroad—the mother had her own dreams about the desired impact of immigration for her own sense of cosmopolitanism as well as family cohesiveness. The chapter follows the travails of the older son as he struggled to meet the demands of being a college-bound English language learner—a fate foisted upon him against his will by his parents and initially resisted by him. The immigrant son eventually embraced his new American young adulthood in unexpected ways (and somewhat to his parents’ dismay) by joining the U.S. Army and serving tours in the Middle East. This chapter draws continuity between the more settled Korean American families (like those featured in previous chapters) and the more recently immigrated Korean American families by capturing the illusiveness as well as the unexpected possibilities of immigrant American young adulthood.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to the premise of the book, starting with an ethnographic episode with one of the five Korean American families featured in the book, in which a now-twenty-something young Korean American woman discloses what had come of her family’s strategy to pour resources into her training to become a classical musician. This episode is used to point to the major theme of the book (parent-child negotiation over a pathway to successful adulthood for the children of immigrants) and the psychological work and effort expended by both parents and teens to maintain the family bond. The chapter ends with a roadmap to the book.