Abstract
Second-Generation Korean Experiences in the United States and Canada, edited by Pyong Gap Min, a prolific and authoritative author of Korean American studies, and his Canadian collaborator Samuel Noh, is a welcome addition to a growing list of titles on the new second generation. This book includes an introduction and twelve chapters, seven of which were assembled from papers initially presented at a conference on second-generationKorean experience in North America held at Queens College in 2013; the rest were commissioned later. This collection offers wide-ranging coverage of 1.5- and second-generation Korean experiences in the United States and Canada, from socioeconomic attainments to employment patterns, educational success, religious adaptation, marriage patterns, political participation, mental health, racialization, identities, and parenting.
After the overarching introduction to the book project and to Korean immigration and adaptation by the editors, Chapter One by Chang-Hwan Kim provides by far the clearest evidence of socioeconomic attainments among 1.5- and second-generation Korean Americans, using 2007 to 2011 American Community Survey (ACS) data. It shows an increasing educational attainment from first to 1.5 to second generation. It also reveals rising labor force participation rates, declining self-employment rates, and increasing annual earnings across generations, but low homeownership rates, high poverty rates, and high economic inequality among all generations of Korean Americans, as well as a lack of progress across generations in the last three measures.
It is well documented that Korean immigrants have a high concentration in small businesses through self-employment. Also using the 2007 to 2011 ACS data, in Chapter Two Pyong Gap Min and Deborah Kim-Lu indisputably demonstrate decreasing self-employment rates across different generations of Korean Americans. Veering from the footsteps of their immigrant parents, 1.5- and second-generation Korean Americans tend to shift from small businesses to professional and managerial occupations in the mainstream economy.
Chapter Three, by Jerry Park, tests five hypotheses about whether second-generation Korean American Protestants (SGKAP) are more likely to retain their ethnic cultures (or experience “ethnic insularity” or lack of integration, in the author’s language) than other racial/ethnic groups. He finds no significant differences between SGKAPs and the second generation of other Asian groups or other racial/ethnic groups in religious retention, ethnic language retention, or attendance at Asian-dominant churches, but significant variations in preference for racial endogamy and rate of actual endogamy. These upshots should at best be deemed tentative because they are based on bivariate analyses, often small sample sizes, and a local sample in the Los Angeles area.
In Chapter Four, Pyong Gap Min and Chigon Kim proffer a rarely-seen analysis of marital patterns among both pre-1965 and post-1965 Korean Americans by generation. They show the highest intermarriage rates among pre-1965 1.5-generation Koreans, an increasing intermarriage rate over generations among post-1965 Korean Americans, and large gender gaps in intermarriage for both pre- and post-1965 Korean Americans by generation. In their analysis of cross-generationmarital patterns among in-marriedKoreans, they uncover that for all three generations a large majority of Koreans tend to marry within their own generations. They also consider marital patterns of multiracial Korean Americans.
Chapter Five, by Sookhee Oh, assesses the impact of group membership and context on political participation by generation among Korean, Chinese, and Filipino Americans. The results evince only modest or no differences among the three groups in voter registration and voting rates and no significant relationship between generation and registration/voting except for the Chinese. Her descriptive statistics in Tables 5.2 and 5.3 cannot test the relationship between socioeconomic resources and registration/voting, nor can her CPS data assess the effect of context of participation on registration/voting.
In Chapters Six and Seven, Samuel Noh and his colleagues competently examine whether the effect of perceived discrimination on psychological and behavioral problems and self-acceptance is moderated by ethnic identity among Korean-Canadian youth using data from the Growing up Canadian Project. In Chapter Six, they detect significantly higher levels of both perceived discrimination and depression among Korean-Canadian youth as compared to Caucasian youth and a significant moderating effect of ethnic pride (one of three dimensions of ethnic identity) but not of ethnic attachment or ethnic exploration (the other two dimensions) in buffering the risk of depression. InChapter Seven, they find a significant exacerbating effect of discrimination and a mostly significant lessening effect of ethnic prideon depression, anxiety, and antisocial behavior, and a significant effect of interaction between ethnic pride and discrimination on depression and anxiety. Nonetheless, neither overall ethnic identity nor any one of its three dimensions moderates the effect of discrimination on psychological or physical self-acceptance.
Chapter Eight, by Dae Young Kim, was taken from a chapter of his dissertation-turned-book by LFB Scholarly Publishing. Using a qualitative approach, this chapter depicts forms of racialization but focuses on the responses of 1.5- and second-generation Korean Americans to ethnicity probes and ethnic identification. Its significance lies in calling attention to the role of racialization in hindering the full integration of second-generation Korean Americans. Nevertheless, without a definition of racialization, readers are very likely to equate racialization with racial prejudice and discrimination after reading the chapter.
In Chapter Nine, Nadia Kim and Christine Oh address why Korean children of immigrants who are academically successful feel so unhappy. Based on two separate samples of in-depth interviews of thirty largely Korean University of California students, they suggest that the use of better performing co-ethnics as reference groups, undue parental expectations and pressures, and the lack of an ethnic emotional support system have rendered them successful “unhappy failures.” They provocatively argue that academic success must be redefined. Methodologically, framing the structural-cultural theoretical framework as a guide for their study seems to deviate from the inductive qualitative research tradition.
Employing a qualitative method and in-depth interview data, in Chapter Ten Angie Chung and Trivina Kang bring to light the plural perspectives of second-generation Koreans and Chinese on why educational success in important. They cogently demonstrate that education is viewed as a filial obligation to parents, as a path to the American Dream, or as a form of self-fulfillment by second-generation Koreans and Chinese.
Following the classic ethnographic tradition, in Chapter Eleven Minjung Ryu provides a scrupulous and vivid account of the identities of 1.5- and second-generation Korean students at Parkview High School, Georgia, as Twinkies (yellow on the outside, white on the inside), assimilated/white-washed old timers and FOBs (Fresh Off the Boat), or unassimilated newcomers. She portrays how the two groups differed in language use, Americanization, social networking, academic performance, and behavior patterns, and especially how FOBs were marginalized. The chapter, however, does not fulfill the promise of its title by thoroughly examining the impact of the identities on school learning.
In Chapter Twelve, Miliann Kang asks: “Are second-generation Korean-American women tiger mothers?” Her response: the answer is “very complicated” and perhaps both no and yes to some extent. Using the profiles of three Korean mothers as data, she shrewdly delineates three differential parenting styles of second-generation Korean mothers as responses to the U.S. racial context: strategic racialized mothering, transnational racialized mothering, and resistant racialized mothering.
Overall, this anthology presents a microcosm of younger-generation Korean experiences in North America by pulling together all important aspects of their lives in one single volume. It does so via both quantitative and qualitative approaches, often using original data that is as current as possible. Quite a few chapters offer useful information not handily available in existing volumes on second-generation Korean Americans. It sets a nice example for the analysis of the second-generation experience for other ethnic groups.
Uneven quality of contributed articles is a common weakness in edited volumes, and this book is no exception, as critiqued in the preceding paragraphs. Another blemish is the lopsided distribution of articles across the covered countries, as only two out of the twelve articles pertain to Korean youth experience in Canada in the area of mental health. Hence, the experience reflected in the book should be largely taken as the Korean American experience. These cavils notwithstanding, this collection, laden with broad interdisciplinary knowledge of, and many insights into, the experiences of 1.5- and second-generation Koreans in North America, will be a treasured reference for scholars and students in Korean North American studies, international migration studies, ethnic studies, and the social sciences.