Abstract
Moving beyond the cultural clash model that treats intergenerational relationships as unidirectional, this study, based on in-depth interviews with working-class bilingual Korean children from Los Angeles, finds that they actively assume class-specific language brokering work to ensure family survival. However, because class remains as the invisible social force in America, children who learned about parental financial and legal problems through language brokering work maintained the hidden injury of class. The findings indicate that normative notions of carefree childhood, racialized class, and essentialized Korean culture, which uniformly uphold quintessential middle-class values, can impart a buried sense of inadequacy and desire among socially excluded working-class children.
This study examines how class, race, and language resources available to immigrant families both enable and constrain the agency of low-income bilingual children who must compensate for the language barriers faced by their first-generation immigrant parents. While tremendous attention has been placed on the language barriers that Asian immigrants encounter on a daily basis (Abelmann and Lie, 1995; Rumbaut et al., 2006), there are glaring gaps in research on the experiences of Asian-American children, particularly working-class children, who undertake language brokering work. To address this gap, this study centers on the experiences and perception of working-class 1 Korean-American ‘language brokers’ 2 who use bilingual skills and actively assume executive roles of advocating, decision-making, and negotiating with outside parties on behalf of their immigrant parents (Vasquez et al., 1994).
Working-class Korean-American children present a theoretically interesting case since Korean-Americans have long been touted as the homogeneous middle-class ‘model minorities’ due to their entrepreneurial successes. In the United States, race has been a powerful organizing mechanism that structures inequalities (Omi and Winant, 1986) and thus race/ethnicity 3 is often mistakenly understood as the difference in class (Bettie, 2003). This is particularly true for Korean-Americans. Most literature on Korean-Americans treats both middle- and working-class immigrants as a whole, focusing on self-employed immigrants and professionals. But, Korean-American communities are far from homogeneous. Nor is Korean culture a uniform entity that immigrants draw upon to raise their children in the United States. Furthermore, studies indicate that Korean communities have diversified in terms of class and occupation as a result of an increasing number of immigrants migrating under family reunification preferences and kinship-based chain migration (Abelmann and Lie, 1995; Lew, 2006).
However, the lack of scholarly attention to these differences has left an important question unanswered. That is, how do class, race, and language intersect to shape the experiences of Korean immigrants’ family lives? In line with ‘new’ childhood sociologists (Allison et al., 1998; Morrow, 1996) who argue that children are not passive recipients of adult values, I pose several questions. How does Korean-American children’s language brokering labor facilitate the survival of their low-income families, and what is the scope of this labor? And how do working-class Korean-Americans who are differently racialized in the United States as the middle-class model minority feel about their language brokering activities and experiences?
Going beyond the cultural clash model: Class and children’s agency
One pressing issue raised by contemporary immigration scholars concerns how immigrant parents – the primary conduits through which immigrant children experience homeland culture – can improve the life chances of their children. In this line of thinking, the issue of losing Asian culture for immigrant children is recurrently framed as a cultural clash between foreign-born parents and their more assimilated second-generation children. For example, segmented assimilation theorists (Portes and Rumbaut, 2001; Portes and Zhou, 1993) argue that wide assimilative gaps between immigrant parents and their children result in role reversal or dissonant acculturation, while other scholars studying Asian-American families use metaphors such as ‘family tightrope’ (Kibria, 1993) and ‘straddling the different worlds’ (Zhou, 2001) to describe the attempt by immigrant parents to reconcile dichotomous cultures.
While cultural dimensions of parenting are unquestionably important, the cultural clash model implicitly obscures children’s agency by treating intergenerational relationships as unidirectional in which parents impart resources and expectations that children passively accept or reject. Nevertheless, children are active agents who negotiate and shape their family lives. This is especially true for many children of immigrants who must adapt to intergenerational relationships that inevitably shift in the migration context (Song, 1999). Because most children of immigrants have a better command of the English language than their first-generation immigrant parents, and often retain their homeland languages to some degree (Rumbaut et al., 2006), their bilingual abilities serve as assets for families to draw upon to achieve daily tasks. For example, Abel Valenzuela (1999), who studied Mexican immigrant youth, demonstrates that immigrant children, especially girls and eldest children, facilitate permanent family settlements by serving as advocates for their families while educating them about legal rights, financial transactions, and the American educational system. Extending this body of literature, Marjorie Orellana (2009) provides a thorough understanding of how children use bilingual skills in multiple public and private domains to expand their families’ access to resources and information. Her findings support earlier research (Tse, 1995) that points to gross discrepancies between public criticism of the involvement of children language brokers and perspectives of children who see these brokering roles as rewarding and normal. Yet, as Reynolds and Orellana (2009) observe, such ‘normal’ activities are constrained by societal perceptions about what are appropriate activities for children and the public space that is inherently adult-centric, white, and English speaking.
Building on literature that focuses on the power imbalance structuring a child’s position within the family and between family and societal institutions, this study demonstrates how the ability of bilingual children to access resources for their families is also stratified by class. Though existing literature successfully demonstrates that these children are social agents who actively negotiate, adapt, and resist social constraints, a more nuanced analysis is necessary to take into account of how social class interacts with race and language to structure the activities, perceptions, and experiences of language brokers. Influenced by sociologists (Bourdieu, 1984; Lareau, 2003; Lew, 2006) who highlight the effects of social class on the way families access institutional resources, I explore how social class shapes the strategies that bilingual children employ to accomplish language brokering work that can ensure the survival of their families.
Social class often gets conflated with race in America (Bettie, 2003). For example, the moment that immigrants arrive in the United States, they are implicated in the racial order and tagged with racial markers irrespective of their class status. While the racialization process was never stable and has been re-legitimized across different time periods (Kim, 2000; Molina, 2006), the race-specific and essentially fixed meanings connected to Asian-Americans in this sociohistorical moment as the homogeneous middle-class model minorities can serve as mechanisms of control and shape the desire of socially marginalized working-class Asian ethnic groups – in this case, Korean-Americans. Demonstrating that the way children of immigrants understand their family lives is intimately connected to what they learn in other social contexts about their traditions and racial differences, this study rejects conventional wisdom that intergenerational relationships are private matters between immigrant parents and their children. Rather, the findings in this study show that the immigrant family is a site of marking racial differences which can expose and challenge intersecting forms of power relations in the United States (Espiritu, 2009) where immigrants and their children constitute over one-fifth of the population (Foner and Dreby, 2011).
Methodology
To explore how language, class, and race intersect to shape Korean-American language brokers’ perceptions of their own lives and experiences, I conducted in-depth interviews with 28 Korean-American language brokers living in Koreatown, a linguistically isolated community where 68% of the 42,000 Korean-American residents are working-class whose annual incomes fall 200% below the federal poverty line (Chung, 2007; KIWA, 2005; Ong and Doug, 2002). At the same time, Koreatown has developed into a hub of commercial activities through transnational investment from South Korea. With the construction of luxurious condominiums, rent prices in Koreatown have skyrocketed while low-income residents face eviction from their homes (Park and Kim, 2008). In central Los Angeles, which includes Koreatown, a total of 265 apartment demolitions took place between 1997 and 2007 (Sanchez et al., 2012). The cost of living in Koreatown is now 140% higher than the cost of living in other metropolitan areas, creating difficulties for low-income families, including Korean-Americans, who live and work in the neighborhood (KIWA, 2005).
In order to sample only those who served as language brokers for their parents on a regular basis, I distributed recruitment flyers outside of high schools located in Koreatown and Korean community organizations. The recruitment flyers – entitled ‘Share your experience of helping your parents through your bilingual ability’ – required participants to have grown up and currently live in Koreatown and engage in translation activities at least twice a week. Of the 33 youth that expressed interest in the study, potential participants were quickly screened using additional demographic questions such as age, parental occupational, and educational status, whether or not they received free or reduced lunch in high school, when they had arrived in the United States, and the language proficiency of both themselves and their parents.
A majority of the participants reported that their parents work in Korean supermarkets, retail trades, and restaurant businesses. These types of businesses represent the three largest employers in Koreatown, which hire mostly unskilled and non-union immigrants into non-benefit earning jobs. The average pay in these three job sectors was an estimated $7.27 per hour in 2005 (KIWA, 2005), while the median income of Koreatown workers in low-wage service occupations was $7928 between 2008 and 2010 (Sanchez et al., 2012). All participants in this study reported that their parents possessed limited English proficiency. This is possibly because the condition of working-class ethnic enclaves insulated their immigrant parents from mainstream society while limited language resources available to residents simultaneously increased their children’s interactions with mainstream authorities through translation works. Supporting previous research indicating gender imbalance (Valenzuela, 1999) and uneven sibling labor commitment (Song, 1999), 18 participants were girls, with little over half of the participants being the eldest child.
To ensure the confidentiality and anonymity of the participants, Institutional Review Board protocols were enforced. Before interviewing the participants, I spent some time getting to know them, talking to them about various topics including popular culture, clothes, shopping, applying to college, and Koreatown. Hoping to facilitate a more open and relaxed conversation and to minimize the power imbalance between interviewee and interviewer, I shared my childhood experiences as a language broker for my Korean monolingual parents. Because both children and parents did not see me as an outsider, but as a fellow Korean-American who shared their struggles, I was able to collect candid responses interspersed with colloquialism and moments of intense emotion.
Open-ended questions and follow-up probes about translation experiences and relationships with parents guided the interview process. Interviews included specific questions about childhood memories, daily translation activities, lessons learned from helping out parents, what participants liked and disliked about translating for parents, how participants would change their relationship with their parents, and whether or not their experience of translating changed the way they thought about themselves and their parents. One-third of the interviews were conducted using a mix of English and Korean while the remaining interviews were conducted in English only. All interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed, and the names contained in this study are pseudonyms.
Employing a grounded research method (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), this study derived explanation directly from the data. Except for the general purpose to study ‘invisible’ low-income Korean children and the assumption that children were active agents in their own experiences, no hypothesis was imposed. Yet, upon conducting interviews and closely reviewing transcripts, the class dimension of language brokering work became apparent. For example, when describing the type of language brokering activities and the lessons learned from helping their parents, the overwhelming majority of participants discussed learning about their family’s financial struggles indicated by the type of documents (e.g., delinquent bills and eviction letters) and people that they encountered (e.g., staff at an unemployment agency).
Interview responses were coded and further analyzed for meanings that participants attributed to their activities. Juggling translation activities evoked both positive and negative emotions. In discussing the types of translation activities they shouldered, children often tried to present themselves as competent language brokers and dutiful children by reporting their feelings of gratification and empathy. Yet, clearer negative emotions such as feeling frustrated, disappointed, or uncomfortable emerged when they were answering hypothetical questions regarding how they would change their family lives. Paying close attention to ideological assumptions, I analyzed these recurring contradictions of expected and experienced feelings that can reveal a paradox in the cultural value system within which children act, evaluate their labor, and judge their parents. Though participants were relatively older children, they looked back at their childhoods and articulated the continuous process of constructing reality and meanings based on their cumulated language brokering experiences.
Findings
The knowing child: Family secrets
Jaime was a 16-year-old Korean-American who immigrated to the United States when she was nine. After moving to the United States, Jamie’s mother worked as a cashier while her father moved between different co-ethnic businesses ranging from salesperson at a wholesale apparel business, valet, security guard, to stocker at a local Korean supermarket. At the time of interview, Jaime’s mother, who got increasingly frustrated with their family’s financial situation, had filed for divorce and left the house with Jaime’s older brother who often helped their parents with translation work. When her Korean monolingual father, who did not graduate from high school, was laid off from a Korean supermarket, Jaime realized that her father did not have anyone but Jaime to help him call the unemployment agency. At one point she recalled her uncomfortable feeling as the unemployment agent, who initially insisted on speaking with her father directly, relied on Jaime to ask her father about his financial situation: I think my dad was feeling really uncomfortable, but I had to find out why he got laid off, how much money he has in his bank account, and if he’s looking for a job right now. What else, there were so many questions and it was really complicated, and they wanted to know everything about my dad, literally. … I am his daughter and I can see how it can be humiliating for my dad to admit and show his daughter, ok, I am so struggling.
Like many middle-class and non-Korean children of immigrants in other studies (Agius Vallejo and Lee, 2009; Orellana, 2009; Park, 2005; Song, 1999), the working-class Korean-American language brokers in this study perceived their roles as ‘family responsibilities’ that they had to assume in order to help their parents establish permanent settlement. However, the type of translation and interpreting work that the participants had to shoulder often revealed their parents’ class backgrounds. Furthermore, due to their parents’ relatively lower level of education and intense work schedule in dead-end jobs, many parents lacked the resources and power to shield their children from financial troubles.
Born in the United States, John was a high school senior at an inner-city Los Angeles school and his mother worked late hours at a Korean beauty salon. Interviewed in front of his high school, John politely prefaced his conversation by stating that he only had one hour as he needed to work at a nearby Korean video store. John’s mother did not like the fact that he worked after school because he was often tired and would fall asleep at his desk trying to finish his homework. However, it was not until John saw the ‘three-day notice to pay the rent or quit’ on his door that he felt compelled to find another job to bring in money. Sharing that translation work often revealed his mom’s financial struggles, John shared: I asked my mom if we have to move out, but my mom said not to worry about it. But then, when I went to the apartment manager’s office with my mom, I had to translate for her. Why she missed the due date and all that. My mom was literally begging for the extension and I wanted to cry.
Similarly, Sandy, a high school junior whose single mother worked as a waitress in a Korean restaurant since they moved to Los Angeles in 1999, explained how she was shocked to discover that her mother consistently accrued credit card late fees and only paid minimum payments: My mom asked me why she had to pay this charge, like she was not sure why there was extra fee and that’s why I called the credit card company for her and they explained to me that when she pays late, there is this extra fee. And so, I can see in the charge that it’s like late fees, after late fees, and my mom wouldn’t pay like the whole bill and pay minimum because she didn’t have the money to pay. So, I realized like, oh, my family is really struggling financially.
According to many participants, their parents initially attempted to hide their financial troubles. But inevitably, participants were exposed to these troubles when relied upon for translation support. Another participant, Amy, age 15, who lived with her family in her grandmother’s small two bedroom apartment in Koreatown, compared her experience of growing up in Korea with her experience of living in the United States. She shared that her parents were no longer able to keep their financial problems as ‘secrets’: When we were in Korea, I didn’t really know that my parents were having a hard time, financially. So, when they said we are going to America, I was happy, because I didn’t know what was going on. But, here we have to find out about the difficulties that they are going through. In Korea, they could easily hide these secrets from me because they don’t need translation of what the letters say. The problem could have been hidden. But here, I was the first person to know it, because if they got a parking ticket and didn’t pay, I am the one who tell them, if their checks bounce back or if they get that final notice, I have to tell them about it.
As with Amy, many participants admitted that they often opened mail because it was easier for them to go through letters, sort, read, and ‘take care’ of them on their parents’ behalf. However, as Amy’s response suggests, ‘taking care’ of these bills also required children from low-income families to ‘see’ the problems and remind their parents about their family’s financial struggles. Almost all the participants stated that their parents were hard-working and worked long hours. However, unexpected situations, such as getting laid off or not getting paid on time, resulted in their parents’ inability to put food on the table.
Youth translators felt even more conflicted when they were put in situations dealing with legal matters. They felt obligated to help, but also uncomfortable being exposed to mistakes that their parents would have rather hidden from their children. In some cases, parents were suspected of criminal activity, but their limited English proficiency and lack of financial resources prevented them from efficiently dealing with these situations by themselves.
Jane, who immigrated to Koreatown at the age of four, talked about a situation where she ‘saved’ her father from getting arrested for a DUI. One night, when Jane was trying to sleep, she heard a loud police siren and looked out the window to see her father sitting on the sidewalk, next to a police car, with his head down. The officers suspected that Jane’s father had been driving under the influence and followed him from the freeway when he didn’t stop. Jane recalled that her father looked terrified as he told her in Korean that he only drank one shot of soju, a distilled alcoholic beverage native to Korea. Her father ultimately passed the field sobriety test, but only with the help of Jane who simultaneously felt uncomfortable and empathetic for her dad who had unintentionally involved his daughter in his ‘embarrassing’ moment.
Diana, who was born in Los Angeles, felt a similar sense of confusion and ambiguity when she helped to file a police report after her mom had been physically abused by her dad. Recalling the shattering sound of glass and her mother’s screams, Diana shared that she initially tried to turn a blind eye to the situation by rereading aloud the same paragraphs of her textbook over and over again. But, when two officers knocked on her door, she knew that she had to get involved as a translator. What Diana hated most was regurgitating what had happened to these intimidating authorities: I think my neighbor called the cop because they were so loud. So, when the scary cops came, my mom would not come out of the room and when police went into her room, she covered her face with her hands because her face was bruised up. She had to explain, but she couldn’t and I had to translate for her. How did I feel about it? I hated it. I really didn’t like it … they took my dad to jail. So, the next morning, I started calling a bunch of lawyers …
Most participants said that their mothers talked more openly about incidents of family conflicts while their fathers kept quiet. For example, after Jane helped her father remedy his DUI incident, she described how ‘small’ her father seemed to her that night. Jane’s father went into his room and did not come out. Likewise, Diana’s father never talked about the domestic violence incident with Diana. On the one hand, participants attributed these ‘private’ characteristics of their fathers as Korean characteristics. On the other hand, they expressed concerns about how their fathers, authoritarian household figures, gradually lost control and isolated themselves from their families. This situation could be even more jarring for fathers – linguistic and racial minorities – who may already feel powerless due to their limited access to economic opportunities in mainstream America (Min, 2001).
Both Diana and Jane were put in their situations because their fathers ran into trouble with the law. But, these situations must be understood in light of structural forces that prevent immigrant parents from shielding their children from such troubles. Lack of financial resources, limited understanding of American government bureaucracy, and insufficient bilingual services available to working-class immigrants unite to make immigrant parents ‘powerless’ in the eyes of their children. Previous studies have shown that ethnic organizations, including churches, play a pivotal role in providing social support for immigrant families (Lew, 2006; Min, 1992). Yet, while some parents of participants relied on co-ethnic peers in ethnic organizations, most parents’ busy schedules prevented them from fostering social capital within their communities. Moreover, many participants reported that their parents refused to discuss problems with their peers because these problems revealing their class positions were viewed as private family matters. In effect, working-class immigrant parents were more likely to rely on their children for translation support.
Negotiating inequality: ‘I am the fighter in my family’
Participants’ experiences of discovering their family’s economic struggles inevitably compelled these Korean bilingual youth to actively negotiate the inequality structure to protect their families and help them access resources. Focusing on the entrepreneurial labor that middle-class children of immigrants contribute to their family’s businesses, Park (2005) demonstrates that these middle-class children act as ‘problem solvers’ to facilitate business and resolve disputes in their family stores. Likewise, living in a community with limited language resources and having monolingual immigrant parents frequently urge working-class children of immigrants to assume the role of mediator and advocate (Valenzuela, 1999). However, because the ability of immigrant families to access resources and social networks is stratified by socioeconomic status (Lareau, 2003; Lew, 2006), working-class children of immigrants experience even greater difficulties in negotiating the amplified power imbalance between their families and other authorities.
The experiences of David, a 19-year-old, serve as a good example. When asked what was difficult about translating for his parents, David recalled drafting a letter to his apartment manager: I talked to the manager many times. Every time, it rains, we have to get one of those dishes like those big containers, because of the water leaks. But, he kept saying okay, okay, and the problem happens again next time it rains. So, I wrote the letter and said that we are not going to pay the rent if they don’t fix this problem soon.
When asked whether his parents asked him to write the letter that way, David said that his parents initially asked him to be ‘polite’ and not threaten to withhold rent, fearing the possibility of eviction. Accordingly, David negotiated the delicate balance between communicating his perspectives and respecting his parents’ views while simultaneously dealing with a manager who had ignored his lawful request: I think manager was ignoring my demand because I am not an adult. So, I googled like crazy and learned that by law, tenants can refuse to pay rent if we gave [the landlord] enough time to fix the problem. I told my parents about this and promised that I will try to sound professional in the letter, not rude.
Similarly, Min, a high school freshman whose mother worked as a Korean restaurant cook, shared a time when she successfully mediated the power differential between herself and a bank representative. Prideful of her negotiation strategies, Min shared that she always asked for a Korean translator when she called the bank, knowing that the bank never had one available. When asked to explain why she requested a translator, Min said, ‘Then they feel bad that they don’t have one. So, more power to me!’ Min had accumulated experiences in navigating such situations since her mother’s bank account was constantly overdrawn, a sign of her mother’s financial struggles. Though Min expressed a sense of frustration at times, she said that she was a competent broker who had helped her mom reduce her overdraft fees on several occasions.
Another participant, Jungmi, was a high school senior who shared her translating experiences with me in front of a youth center catering to low-income students. The oldest of three siblings, Jungmi was known as the ‘grandma’ in the group because of her emotional maturity. When asked to discuss her most recent translation experience, she paused, leaned on her elbow like a pensive adult, and shared that she recently filed a police report for her dad because someone had illegally used his credit card and social security information. ‘I wanted to do everything I could do, because my dad is so innocent,’ she declared in a rising voice. ‘I eventually talked with the supervisor of the credit card company to resolve the problem.’ As part of her translation labor, Jungmi assembled evidence to demonstrate that her father was working at the time when the fraudulent transactions occurred, but she felt frustrated that no one took her Korean monolingual dad and his child seriously when they reported the credit card fraud. Yet, despite her worried statements, Jungmi also exhibited a sense of deep conviction, charisma, and calmness in her voice when she said, ‘I don’t take no as an answer. I am known as the fighter in the family, because I have to get what I want especially when I call the credit card companies. It’s money issues.’
As with other participants’ narratives, Jungmi’s experiences echo findings from earlier studies that have underscored the salience of power operating in ‘specialized’ encounters (Orellana, 2009; Reynolds and Orellana, 2009). Because she was a child in the eyes of adult authorities, Jungmi felt constrained in advocating for her father. Furthermore, her father was doubly disadvantaged due to his limited English proficiency and his unconsciously enacted and socially learned dispositions generated by class inequality (Bourdieu, 1984). Nevertheless, Jungmi had to be the ‘fighter’ in the family, not because she chose to, but because she was the only one who possessed the bilingual skills and accumulated expertise to navigate inequality and fight for her ‘innocent’ father.
Stolen childhoods: The hidden injury of class
Scholars have argued that what is considered to be an ‘appropriate’ childhood varies across time and place (Allison et al., 1998; Zelizer, 1985). Yet, because contemporary Americans view children as priceless objects and emblematic of innocence (Zelizer, 1985), these cultural repertoires can control and regulate children’s desires. For example, although most participants did not report interacting frequently with ‘American’ or middle-class white peers (whose parents seemingly protect their children from all ‘adult’ matters), two-thirds of participants viewed childhood as a carefree stage having grown up in America and often exposed to media that depicted a ‘normal’ American family and childhood (Pyke, 2000). For example, Jungmi, who attended an inner-city high school in an ethnic enclave, recalled comparing her family life to other ‘Americans’ on television: You know I grew up watching TV shows showing the American family in the Brady Bunch, Mary-Kate and Ashley movies, and Boy meets World, and I could not understand why my parents could not be the way those characters were.
At the same time, many participants recollected childhood experiences that were shaped by their economic hardships. Kate, an 18-year-old who immigrated to Los Angeles at age 10, resented missing her childhood and said that she grew up too fast: There should be [a] boundary between parents and children. As a child, I think I learned something that I shouldn’t have learned. How much money my parents had in their account, what kind of financial struggles they were going through. Then you worry about uncertainty in life. I feel like I got old fast, internally. That is not very healthy. You know you meet someone and say, ‘This person is so innocent.’ I don’t think I am innocent for my age … I learned to grow up fast. I didn’t have the typical childhood.
Kate’s remarks underscored the fact that children of immigrants cannot make sense of their family lives apart from these pervasive dominant family ideologies (Coontz, 1992) and invisible norms associated with being white (Lipsitz, 1998) that work together to reinforce social values of ideal childhood and family structures.
To compensate for this feeling of exclusion, many participants often relied on what they understood as the Korean culture to ‘normalize’ their different family lives (Espiritu, 2000; Park, 2005) and present themselves as ‘responsible’ in the eyes of society. For example, while participants repeatedly talked about how different their lives were in comparison to other American families, they quickly qualified their comments by noting how their roles as language brokers marked ethnic belonging and reinforced their Korean identity. As Diana, who initially stated that she did not feel comfortable revealing her parents’ mistakes, noted: ‘Deep inside of my heart, I know that it’s a way to be a good Korean daughter. I am using my Korean language to help my parents out.’
However, using Korean culture to make sense of family lives serves as a limited tool for many language brokers since Korean culture itself has been racialized in the United States (Omi and Winant, 1986). That is, differences in family lives are constructed as essential, thereby masking the internal class differences within the Korean-American population. Many participants referred to an idealized image of ‘Koreanness’ that they learned within other contexts such as their ethnic churches and luxurious Korean shopping centers around their neighborhoods and questioned whether their own parents mirrored this same image. Being seen as a model minority student who overcame academic adversity with the help of her devoted ‘tiger mother’ was a frustrating experience for Jinju. Admitting that she never contested her peers and teachers who assumed that her exceptional academic performance reflected her parents’ unconditional support, Jinju shared that she sometimes resented her parents for their ‘dependency,’ especially when she was interrupted to help with translation work while in the middle of completing her school assignments: They bother me especially when I am doing my homework. I get really distracted when they come in and ask me to translate for them. I am like ‘dude, can’t you see my homework leave me alone.’ … Sometimes I think can’t my parents be more like other Korean parents who always care about their children’s education? That’s when I am showing them that I am so annoyed, I will be like why, and give them an attitude. … Ahhhh, oh my gosh, so that’s really frustrating.
Similarly, Kate described her parents as ‘Korean’ because they required obedient behaviors from their children: ‘You know Korean parents. They want you to drop everything and follow their orders.’ However, as with Jinju, the stereotypical representation of Asian parents as the devoted ‘model minority’ who fully supported educational success simultaneously compelled Kate to question her father’s parenting practices and view him as ‘less Korean’ for his dependency: I think Korean parents are stricter compared to American parents, but Korean parents also care more about their children’s grades. I am not saying my parents don’t care about my education, but they are not as involved, because their issues are so urgent. If they don’t take care of some bills right away, there is a consequence, like paying late fees. I know that they are busy but my parents are not typical Korean.
Likewise, in discussing their role as translators, participants constantly drew on available rhetoric associated with what it meant to be Korean parents. This pattern was also noticeable among those who tried to rescue their parents from such stereotypes. For example, Yujin consistently said that her parents were different from other Korean parents because they were more ‘laid-back and relaxed about her schooling.’ For Yujin, describing her parents as more laid-back and ‘modern’ was her attempt to distinguish her parents from ‘traditional’ Korean parents. When asked if she was content with her relationship with her parents, she paused and said: I kind of want them to remain the way they are, because they are really Americanized and not uptight and let the kids choose their career path, but sometimes, I wish my parents knew more about my school stuff.
Yujin’s struggle to carve out a positive parental image against the ethnic grain and her unappealing depiction of ‘Koreanness’ demonstrates the powerful role of racialization in shaping children’s evaluations of their family lives. The long-standing ideological representation of the United States as a classless society often compels Americans to use other categorical ‘differences’ such as race and gender to articulate the experiences of class (Bettie, 2003). For children of Korean immigrants who cannot escape invisible norms associated with whiteness, racial meanings associated with the model minority stereotype – depicting all Asian-Americans as successful minorities who eventually obtain social mobility through their cultural values of hard work – are a convenient way to make sense of and normalize ‘different’ experiences. In a way, it becomes easier for middle-class Korean-American children who often fit this stereotype to use such racialized cultural differences that are accepted by other Americans to feel both distant from, but also at times included in, the American mainstream (Dhingra, 2007). Yet, as this study reveals, working-class Korean-American language brokers, whose family lives are rendered invisible in mainstream society, face the complicated task of negotiating tensions between the existing dichotomous meanings of Asian and American since these meanings work to exclude their family lives.
Participants recognized that there were other children whose family lives seemed carefree in relation to their own. They also fleetingly communicated the sense of unfairness embedded in their class position. However, these ‘actively felt and lived’ class inequalities, or what Raymond Williams (1977: 132) identified as a ‘structure of feeling,’ was not recognized and articulated in terms of class injustice. Instead, participants in this study were unable to locate their experiences in relation to other working-class children of immigrants who actually shared common experiences of language brokering work. The ‘ideal’ notion of a carefree childhood combined with seemingly static, natural, and available racial meanings of being ‘Korean’ replaced class reasoning and prevented participants from seeing how race intersected with class to shape their language brokering experiences and family lives. Because these two fictive images marginalized low-income Korean immigrant monolingual parents who worked long hours, their children, who assumed complicated and class-specific language brokering work, maintained the hidden injury of class, ‘the feeling of vulnerability in contrasting oneself to others at a higher social level, the buried sense of inadequacy’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1972: 58).
Discussions and conclusion
Many children of immigrants use their bilingual skills to make remarkable differences in their family lives and reshape the intergenerational relationship. This study closely examined these contributions to the family while analyzing the challenges and emotions associated with class-specific language brokering labor. The challenges and arrays of mixed emotions that language brokers experience offer deeper insights into persistent social inequalities and immigrant children’s contradictory positions within their family as well as the larger society.
It is a mistake to assume that working-class immigrant parents lack the desire to provide their children with carefree childhoods, or what some participants understood in this study as ‘Korean’ childhoods associated with academic endeavor. Nor do these parents lack the desire to learn the English language. After all, they, as with their children, are exposed to dominant repertoires and recognize these social norms. However, working-class immigrant parents, who also face language barriers, are at a disadvantage in obtaining access to and fostering social capital, increasing the likelihood for bilingual children to step in as language brokers. Furthermore, the occupations available for many working-class immigrants are often dead-end jobs that prohibit the extra time and money necessary to learn the English language. Consequently, the immigrant parents’ ‘dependency’ expressed by many participants in this study reflects material constraints that many working-class immigrant families endure.
Lastly, social class has rarely been the central analytic frame of research on immigrant families. Instead, immigrant culture often becomes the primary focus of the debate regarding causes of conflicts in international relationships, thus neglecting to address how life experiences of immigrants and their children are classed as well as racialized in the United States. This traditional framework not only overlooks the structural forces that both enable and constrain children’s agency in their family, but it can also support the existing stereotypes about the racial groups. For more than four decades, scholars in the field of Asian-American studies argued that spotlighting the Asian culture to explain parental practices can reinforce the model minority stereotype that was thrust upon Asian-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement to evaluate other minorities who ‘failed’ to pull themselves up by their bootstraps due to their ‘cultural deficiency.’ Despite these persistent efforts, a dichotomous West versus East discourse depicting all Asian parents as strict and strong-willed and all ‘American parents’ as permissive and emotionally caring persists (see, for example, Chua, 2011). I do not argue that culture is an insignificant part of an immigrant child’s life. In fact, culture is profoundly important in the lives of second-generation children that can serve as a means to claim their superiority over the dominant group (Espiritu, 2000). However, Asian culture is often racialized to undermine class diversity among immigrants and used to uphold America’s long-standing ideology of individual responsibilities and economic mobility (Park, 2008). For this reason, it is important for researchers to broaden the theoretical lens and examine how ‘private’ lives of immigrant families and their daily struggles are deeply connected with a larger inequality system and the nation’s contradicting cultural visions of the appropriate childhood and family.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and critical feedback. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Leland Saito, Sharon Hays, Jody Vallejo, and Veronica Terriquez for their valuable comments. I am also indebted to Winston Lin, Jess Butler, Sean McCarron, and Michela Musto.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.