Questioning and Reinventing Ethno-cultural Heritage: A Comparative Ethnography of Complementary Chinese Language Schools

• In Event: 4365 - Asians and Asian Americans

Abstract

What can we learn about ethnicity, race, language, and education, when members of local communities of an ethnic minority educate their youth in the minority’s language and cultural identity, through community-based schooling scheduled outside of mainline schooling? Given that such projects occur throughout the United States, in both affluent and working-class communities, in both suburbs and cities, they should not be considered exceptional or peripheral, but rather as constitutive elements of belonging within an ethnic, cultural, and linguistic community. In other words, youth -- and particularly ethnic-minority, language-minority, immigrant youth -- are taught what it means to have ethnicity and language, and therefore ethnicity and language are assigned value by community organizations. In this paper, I study, through ethnographic and interview methods, this type of education project, in the form of complementary Chinese language schools, commonly known as “Chinese schools,” in the San Francisco Bay Area. Specifically, I study one such school in “Georgetown,” an affluent suburb, and another in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

I argue that participants at both schools construct Chinese language, culture, and ethnicity in tandem as resources for youths’ future trajectories. Specifically, they do this by explaining Mandarin Chinese language education through meanings of ethno-cultural heritage and economic value. However, the two schools differ in how they maneuver these meanings into alternating positions of dominance and subordination, which I argue reflects class disparities between Georgetown and Chinatown. This research has informs sociological conversations about segmented assimilation and ethnic capital among Asian American immigrants.

Author

• David Song, Stanford University