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Ed. Magazine

Model Matters

The Research of Assistant Professor Vivian Louie To pull yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps is a quintessentially American idea, allied in the national imagination with the image of the immigrant striver who improves his lot in life through sheer hard work. “It’s an attractive idea in a lot of ways,” says Harvard Graduate School of Education Assistant Professor Vivian Louie, whose research looks at the role of the immigrant family in the educational experiences of second-generation Chinese Americans who are consistently presented as high academic achievers. “I see the presentation of Asian Americans as a ‘model minority' in terms of the continuation of this story Americans tell about themselves, a narrative which has previously embraced Jewish and West Indian immigrants in much the same way.” [caption id="attachment_8489" align="alignleft" width="145" caption="Assistant Professor Vivian Louie (©Andrew Brilliant / Brilliant Pictures, Inc.)"]
[/caption] Louie’s own experiences while growing up gave her cause to reflect on this popular perception. Born in New York’s Chinatown to working-class Chinese immigrant parents, Louie initially struggled in grade school. “My second-grade teacher asked my dad if I had hearing problems, because I did not respond when spoken to,” she recalls. It was not Louie’s hearing that was the problem but rather that English was her second language. She credits her academic success to the concern and encouragement of her teachers in the formative years of elementary school. “It’s not that I was smarter, or worked harder, but instead that I feel I have had opportunities that other members of my family haven’t.” Frustrated by explanations of Asian academic achievement that related purely to either cultural identity or structural forces, and noting a gap in research on how such matters related to race and class, Louie wanted to find out how the children themselves situated the influence of family in relation to schooling.
Frustrated by explanations of Asian academic achievement that related purely to either cultural identity or structural forces...Louie wanted to find out how the children themselves situated the influence of family in relation to schooling.
The result is Louie’s new book, Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity among Chinese Americans, originally conceived as her doctoral dissertation at Yale. To more fully explore the range of Chinese-American experiences in higher education, Louie conducted interviews with students from two very different four-year institutions along the private/public and residential/commuter spectrum: Columbia University, an Ivy League school; and Hunter College of the City University of New York. What Louie found was that even though Hunter College students, in particular, critiqued the notion that all Asian Americans are high academic achievers from wealthy, suburban backgrounds, “They still subscribed to the idea of ethnic culture as being very important to Asian-American academic performance as they knew it.” Across class and gender lines, students spoke of the premium their parents placed on education. What are the consequences for students who believe the immigrant family is crucial to Asian-American academic achievement but who are not necessarily high achievers themselves? “They have to say their family wasn’t typical, that they were the exception,” Louie explains. “They do blame themselves in some way.” This conclusion was borne out in the frequently tentative reactions of Hunter College students to Louie’s presence as a Yale-educated researcher. Upon entering the project, Louie expected she would have an advantage as a second-generation Chinese American doing research on a group with those very characteristics, but was surprised to find herself being treated differently by students from each college. “Even though my personal background differed in many ways to that of the Columbia students, who tend to come from the suburbs with highly educated professional parents, those students were very welcoming because they saw academic linkages.” By contrast, Hunter students coming from backgrounds similar to hers, “growing up in Chinatown with working-class parents,” were much more reluctant to participate. Not only did they believe the model minority image did not apply to them, but they also grew up hearing about working-class Chinese-American high achievers from their parents, who garnered this information from networks of Chinese immigrant parents.The result was an underlying sense of alienation that made interviewing difficult. Louie speculates that “they felt, ‘Here’s an example of another person who made it to a school that is associated with being Asian American,’ and this then tapped into the whole anxiety that they had not lived up to their parents’ expectations.” In stark contrast to the conventional wisdom of the immigrant’s self-improvement story, Louie’s research on the differing experiences of Chinese Americans shows that race and class still do matter in profound ways. About the Article A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2004-2005 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For More Information More information about Vivian Louie is available in the Faculty Profiles.

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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