Abstract
Most studies of Chinese upward mobility focus on how immigrant community institutions sustain ethnic culture to foster educational success. In contrast, I analyze how community-based music schools develop a cultural strategy to guide immigrants to pursue enrollment in prestigious colleges by utilizing high cultural capital in classical music. Chinese immigrant families take advantage of information networks in these schools to develop a bonding form of social capital that allows not only middle-class families but also working-class families to redefine the meaning of ethnicity. This is theoretically surprising, because some theory predicts that middle class status is needed to benefit from such cultural capital. Through competence in Western classical music, Asian students signify their well roundedness, an achievement that goes beyond rote learning. Chinese families pursue this musical cultural strategy to incorporate themselves into mainstream educational institutions. Research on the strategic use of nonoppositional musical culture for educational mobility suggests the limitation of segmented assimilation theory.
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Notes
Amy Chua’s memoir, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, describes how she employed tough love parenting strategies. She defines her strategies as Chinese parenting style, where parents set up clear, rigid rules and apply them consistently so that the children can master difficult-to-acquire classical music competence at a young age. Her book launched a heated debate about the strengths and weaknesses of though love strategies for child rearing.
Does participation in music education improve academic performance? According to Hodges’s systematic analysis of prior research (2007), evidence suggests some music experiences have a positive impact on academic performance under specific circumstances. For example, music education is related to preschoolers’ phonological awareness and reading skills. The focus of my research, however, is on how parents interpret the impact of music education on their children’s academic achievement.
In this paper, “Chinese [華人]” refers to people of Chinese descent, including those from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Chinese diasporas. Because Taiwanese immigrants owned most ethnic music education enterprises in Flushing in the 1980s, I use “Taiwanese-owned music schools” to distinguish this unique historical development. In the 1980s, there was a wave of Taiwanese who came to New York City as international students, high-skilled workers, or business migrants (Tseng 2000). With their relatively higher socioeconomic status, many settled in neighborhoods outside traditional immigrant destinations such as Manhattan’s Chinatown (Kwong 1996). These highly skilled immigrants were not only less dependent on traditional immigrant support structures (enclaves), they often brought various resources to their newly settled communities (Zhou and Kim 2006). This study highlights the function of music schools not only as an instrument of survival for highly skilled Taiwanese immigrants but also as a resource for ethnic groups arriving in these communities.
In the 1990s, the Mozart School became a local affiliate for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM). The local affiliate advertises ABRSM exams in area newspapers, registers exam takers, and offers exam-taking sites. Over the years, the number of students taking the ABRSM exams in the New York metropolitan area increased markedly—from 50 students annually in the mid-1980s, to almost a thousand students by 2010.
Yamaha is a Japanese corporation offering music-related products and services. Its music schools have a more than 50-year history in East Asia. These schools offer music education with a standardized curriculum and exams.
As a researcher from CUNY, I was not surprised by Mrs. Hsieh’s statements. When I introduce myself to Chinese immigrant families, they are always disappointed. I need to make an effort to convince them that I am capable of conducting research.
On May 22, 2010, the Youth Orchestra, CYCNY, held a concert in conjunction with the Taiwan Center and the Taiwanese Association at Carnegie Hall (reference from http://www.youthorchestra.com/).
Many well-off Asian parents decide to move to the suburbs to avoid the city’s public schools. New York’s average public schools are not of particularly high quality, and admission to its specialized schools is highly competitive.
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Acknowledgments
The author thanks Robert Sauté, Philip Kasinitz, Robert Courtney Smith, Paul Attewell, Pyong-Gap Min, David Seitz, Pei-Chia Lan, Kuan-Yi Chen, Lihuan Chuo, the journal editors and reviewers for their insightful comments, and the study’s participants for sharing their stories with me.
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Lu, WT. Confucius or Mozart? Community Cultural Wealth and Upward Mobility Among Children of Chinese Immigrants. Qual Sociol 36, 303–321 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-013-9251-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-013-9251-y