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.

Conclusion

This chapter reviews the book’s main themes and findings through the broader lens of the mixed-method approach, noting the ways in which the survey data and the family ethnographies provided surprises and novel insights into the workings of immigrant Korean American parents and their adolescent children. The chapter ends with the conclusion that, contrary to previous common portraits of immigrant Asian American parents as “tiger parents” focused on intense cultivation of academic and occupational attainment for their children, immigrant parents care deeply about how to cultivate their children’s healthy sense of self, with awareness of their gendered and racialized positions within the U.S. society. In turn, their children respond to their immigrant parents’ aspirations and care in resilient—and often surprising—ways.

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.

Jenny

This chapter features the Park family, whose daughter Jenny’s story opened the introduction. This family was distinctive in the intimate mother-daughter bond that remained throughout the years even as the bond was tested by the musician mother’s cultivation of the daughter’s musical career and the daughter’s eventual rejection of that path after her conservatory training. This family also spoke extensively of the gendered nature of immigrant parenting, with the mother’s concern for her daughter’s self-esteem in light of White and Korean beauty standards and her thoughts about desired career paths for her daughter and her son. This chapter builds on other recent ethnographic works about Asian American classical musicians and their families. The chapter uncovers an additional meaning that music holds for immigrant families, representing their non-English-speaking parents’ desires to be intimately involved in their children’s American lives.

Community Context

This chapter describes the research process, from survey data collection to family ethnography. It details the ethnic geography of the Chicagoland Korean American community through ethnographic observations of the churches, neighborhoods, social service agencies, and schools that mattered in the lives of the Korean Americans in the book. The survey included 204 Korean American teens and 102 parents, from whom five families were selected and followed. The chapter briefly discusses what the survey revealed about how the Chicagoland Korean American parents and teens viewed individual and family well-being. Among Korean American teen, their perception of how well their family was functioning correlated highly with their individual psychological distress and wellness. However, although the survey responses did reveal glimpses of parent-child acculturation gaps and individual distress, the survey findings did not conform very well to the familiar story of a generational gap in acculturation between parents and teens as the primary driver of family or individual difficulties. Whereas the survey gives a broad brushstroke picture of Korean American families with teens, it also left many intriguing questions to be answered. The chapter ends with a description of how the families were selected for intensive and long-term follow-up.

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.

Ben

This chapter features the Koh family, who lived in a modest home located within an affluent suburban school district. The parents had worked various jobs in the service sector (primarily as owners or workers at a dry cleaner, with the father driving school buses to supplement income) and moved from Chicago city proper to an affluent suburb for better educational opportunity for their two teen boys. The Koh family is notable for the parents’ (especially the mother’s) concern about their older son’s masculinity and racial identity, in light of what the parents felt they experienced as targets of racism in their work lives. She worried that her Asian American son was seen as a “doormat” by his affluent White peers and encouraged his athletic pursuits as a countermeasure. The chapter follows the family’s immigration experience and parenting strategies, which were colored by various racial indignities and injustices, taking note of the fact that this family’s central concerns were not about fostering high academic achievement but about fortifying their sons with social capital to navigate the racialized landscape of their adopted home.

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.