2nd Gen: An Analysis of Struggles Faced by Second-Generation Chinese-American Immigrants

2nd Gen: An Analysis of Struggles Faced by SecondGeneration Chinese-American Immigrants Brendan Mindiak, Mahesh Khanwalkar, Yujia Gao

Introduction Stories of immigrants coming to the United States often portray the struggles, and at times, triumphs of how these people start their new lives. However, rarely do these stories focus on the struggles of the children, referred to as “second-generation immigrants.�

Although these families often come to the United States seeking greater opportunity, the children, in addition to struggles faced by immigrants in general, also face a unique set of issues related to their sense of identity.

The 1993 film adaptation of the novel The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan in comparison to the collection of short stories Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang, both of which are stories about the families of Chinese-American immigrants, reveal the unique issues of second generation immigrant adolescents. The Joy Luck Club features the stories of four second-generation Chinese-American immigrants as well as their mothers, who were first-generation immigrants who came to the United States seeking better lives. Similarly, Sour Heart, centering on a community of immigrants and their struggle with poverty in 1990s New York, is told from the perspective of the daughters of Chinese-American immigrants.

The second-generation immigrant protagonists from the two sources often feel removed from both their families and their peers as a result of their forced assimilation into hegemonic American culture.

They are also confronted with the struggles of their own families, especially parental expectations of retaining their native roots, customs, and traditions. As a result of the conflicting expectations, the second-generation immigrants absorb and combine their heritage culture with the new cultures to construct a unique identity. Comparing and contrasting the struggles of second-generation immigrant adolescents in the context of Sour Heart and The Joy Luck Club will show the importance of how representations of Chinese-American immigrant communities through the eyes of adolescents contribute to larger cultural narratives about immigration, race, and youth.

Language & Cultural Assimilation As second-generation immigrants, the children are faced with the barrier of language and thus assimilating into the American culture. Christina, the narrator in the first story of Sour Heart, face such problems. Considering that she is quite young, language learning is relatively easy, which is something that she herself admits, “I could still improve in either language,” (Zhan.g 7) referring to her command of Chinese and English languages. However, she is faced with a dilemma of linguistic identity: learning and perfecting her English, while maintaining her Chinese mother-tongue. Her parents did not have this problem back in China since Chinese was all they needed, However, in the United States, their lack of fluency is a guiding factor in regards to the lack

of suitable opportunities, perhaps justifying jobs like her father’s Chinese food delivery gig. In addition, Christina has easy access to improving her English (something her parents do not have access to), via public education, so it becomes a self-imposed obligation to improve herself, else she would waste the opportunity that is presented to her, because her parents have slaved and sacrificed so much to give her even what little that she has.

Similarly, language is a key factor with regards to identities of the protagonists in the Joy Luck Club to form their identities.

The mothers in the stories expected their children to speak “perfect English” rather than broken English that they spoke, which they thought would mean power and privileges. The second generation kids do speak perfect English, implying their successful assimilation into American cultures. In the meantime, they still speak broken English with their parents, indicating their retained Chinese roots.

Cultural & Value Difference Parents in Asian cultures are typically depicted as extremely strict, with high expectations of their children. In Sour Heart, Although Zhang does challenge this notion, there are still points where this stereotype shines through. One motivating factor in Christina’s stay in China was the idea that, “a child should go to a good school and gain high marks, and a child should come home to adults who have already prepared a warm snack” (Zhang 33) which is something that her parent’s could not provide as they struggled to make ends meet in the United States. They had to work hard everyday, putting in long hours, yet the result was fruitless because of multifarious exploitation, limited well-paying opportunities, and poor living conditions. Christina would not be able to go to good schools or top the class rank, since they were constantly moving around and could not provide a stable and successful environment. Therefore, in their mind, a reasonable action would be to send Christina to China to live with her grandparents.

This stay in China could give her first-hand exposure to her culture and heritage, which is a stereotypical immigrant parent desire. However, it also depicts Christina’s helplessness in controlling her life, which forces her to deal with the stark cultural differences between living in China and the US and molding those influences into her own identity.

“I had passed out of ESL two separate times and was referred to as ‘a little genius’ by my first ESL teacher and as having ‘incredible language acquisition’ by my second” Christina, in Sour Heart, discussing her academic history

In The Joy Luck Club, after performing poorly in a piano recital, second-generation immigrant June believes that she will never again have to play the piano. However, she is surprised when her mother forces her to shut off the television so she can continue practicing. June’s mother, Suyuan, who was born and raised in China, still holds the traditional Eastern parenting opinion that children should follow the directions and paths set by the parents. Suyuan demonstrates this belief when she becomes upset with June, stating, “There be two kinds of daughter: obedient ones or follow own mind. Only one kind of daughter could live in this house: obedient kind” (The Joy Luck Club).

However, what her mother demands her to do upsets June to the point of yelling “I’m not your slave. This isn’t China.

You can’t make me” (The Joy Luck Club). This line reveals that June is aware of the cultural differences of parent-to-child relationships in China and the United States.

Being born and raised in the U.S., June is more accustomed to the westernized relationship where despite parents being ultimately in charge of their children, they do so with benevolence, acting with the interests of their children in mind (Heung).

Additionally, the second-generation girls are exposed to a set of values that greatly differ from the collectivism in China:

individualism in the United States, which taught them that everyone’s rights are respected, that they could be control their own lives, and that they could be who they wanted to be in this world. Thus, the children tend to resist from what their parents want for them. A vivid example of this is June’s anxious declaration to her mother, “You want me to be someone I’m not! I’ll never be the kind of daughter that you want me to be,” (The Joy Luck Club) representing the second-generation’s reluctance to follow the paths that their parents set up for them.

The result of the conflicting values between obedience and individual determinism is that while the children make efforts to resist their parents’ anticipated paths, which in some cases they do succeed, their lives are still largely dependent on what their parents think.

Suyuan dragging June to the piano after her unsuccessful performance

Pressures to Succeed In Sour Heart, the author Jenny Zhang attempts to dismantle the myth of immigrant stories. Instead of the “rags to riches” success stories that are told by mainstream immigrant narratives, Zhang displayed what life is really like for the immigrants coming to a completely new country: daily struggles with food, expensive living accommodations, and scarcities of other basic necessities of life. In the book, several families share a similar background with each other: most of them came to the United States as foreign students. This is a byproduct of the time period in which these stories took place: after the Reform and Opening-up in China and before the 1989 Tiananmen movement (Feng).

Figure 1. The number of Chinese immigrants over time.

According to Figure 1, the Chinese-American immigrant population nearly doubled from 1980 to 1990, which is propelled by the repeal of Chinese Exclusion Act, the economic reform since 1978 in China, the Immigration Act in the United States that opened up migration for non-Europeans (Migration Policy Institute). The intellectual immigrants have to work extremely hard to earn wages and sustain their entire families.The family crisis had impacted the second-generation kids’ attitudes toward their future success.

For example, the narrator of the first story, Christina, feels a great pressure to succeed. The story details how her family struggles with poverty and unstable living situations. She has a deep understanding of how much her parents sacrifice. Christina observes, “... every second of every day my parents were planning to undergo yet another sacrifice to make our lives that much better” (Zhang 7). Aware of the sacrifices that her parents had made for her, Christina wants to feel like she can contribute to her family. She wants to find ways to sacrifice for her family so that she does not feel like a burden. However, another byproduct of this knowledge is her desire to not squander the opportunities her parents sacrificed so much to give her.

In a similar manner, from The Joy Luck Club, the main protagonist June feels pressure to be successful in all aspects of life: Suyan, her Chinese immigrant mother, forces June to play the piano as a result of her competition with her “best friend and archenemy” Lindo.

These two women are constantly trying to best each other through their daughters. Recently, Lindo’s daughter, Waverly won a chess tournament so Suyuan pressures June to win this talent show. However, when June does not perform at the level Suyuan expects of her, she is visibly disappointed with her daughter. In the movie, the mothers of the second-generation daughters have high expectations for their daughters, wishing them to be well-rounded and “defectless.”

“You want me to be someone I’m not!

I’ll never be the kind of daughter that you want me to be!”

June to her mother, from The Joy Luck Club

This not only comes from the traditional Chinese belief:

望子成龙 望女成凤 which means “expect sons and daughters to have a bright future,” but also the Asian American Dream, which is “the overwhelming desire both to escape economic, social, and political hardship and to achieve a level of prosperity and success impossible in their homeland.” (Asian American Dream), which is strengthened in Asian communities because immigrants come to the United States to seek better lives, and they had to prove not only themselves, but also their children, capable of climbing up the social ladder.

The two things combined together results in first-generation immigrant parents’ higher anticipations of their children. In order to fulfill the expectations, the children were often forced to do things that they did not want to do — piano for June and chess for Waverly — and expect them to be obedient and follow whatever is said to them. The mothers would also use their children’s talents and accomplishments as “weapons” for showing off to other parents.

Conclusion Although Sour Heart and The Joy Luck Club are based on different times in history, and the protagonists are confronted with different problems — struggle with poverty for Sour Heart and problems with assimilating into the American society without losing the sense of “being Chinese” for The Joy Luck Club — both stories describe the lives, and more specifically, the struggles of immigrants and their children, and similarities in terms of the struggles of the second-generation immigrants can be traced throughout the two books. As second-generation immigrants, they face not only the issues surrounding their economic status or culture, but also with finding a sense of belonging. Often, second-generation immigrants are expected to both adapt American ideals and values while also maintaining their respect and appreciation for traditional Chinese culture. This leaves them feeling external pressure that manifests in several different forms. First, they feel as though they are faced with a binary choice: either abandon their cultural roots, or not participate in the society in which they live. Second, the children often feel as though they are disappointments to their parents because they cannot meet their high expectations. Finally, there is a feeling that these children must be successful as a means of repaying their parents for the sacrifices they made to provide them with such great opportunities. These three issues are intertwined together, and, as a result, they constitute the struggles that second-generation immigrants all share, despite the various other factors of their lives. Thus, their identities are dynamic mixtures of both Chinese heritage and American cultures.

Works Cited Feng, Peter. “Being Chinese American, Becoming Asian American: ‘Chan Is Missing.’”

Cinema Journal, vol. 35, no. 4, 1996, pp. 88–118. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1225719.

Heung, Marina. “Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan's ‘The Joy Luck Club.’”

Feminist Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, 1993, pp. 597–616. JSTOR, JSTOR, Nazli Kibria (1997) The construction of ‘Asian American’: Reflections on intermarriage and ethnic identity among second‐generation Chinese and Korean Americans, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 20:3, 523-544, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.1997.9993973 "The Asian American Dream." Literary Themes for Students: The American Dream. . Encyclopedia.com. 12 Nov. 2018<https://www.encyclopedia.com>.

Wang, Wayne, director. The Joy Luck Club. Buena Vista Pictures, 1993.

Woo, Lori. “The Cultural Identities of Second-Generation Immigrants.” Affinity Magazine, 20 Dec. 2016, affinitymagazine.us/2016/12/20/the-cultural-identities-of-second-generation-immigrants/.

Zhang, Jenny. Sour Heart. Penguin, 2017.

Zong, Jie, et al. “Chinese Immigrants in the United States.” Migrationpolicy.org, 13 June 2018, www.migrationpolicy.org/article/chinese-immigrants-united-states.