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Managing Multicultural Lives

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................................................ix1 Introduction: Opening Up the Margins in the Mainstream..................................................12 Uncovering Asian Americas: Examining Korean Americans and Indian Americans in Texas.....................163 Growing Up Takes (Identity) Work: Developing Ethnic Identities..........................................444 Model Americans and Minorities: Racial Identities and Responses to Racism...............................845 Multiculturalism on the Job: The Work Domain............................................................1246 Aspiring to Authenticity: The Home Domain...............................................................1577 Becoming Cultural Citizens: The Leisure and Civil Society Domains.......................................1898 Conclusion: Reconciling Identities, Recognizing Constraints.............................................226Appendix: Questions.......................................................................................253Notes.....................................................................................................259Bibliography..............................................................................................285Index.....................................................................................................309

Chapter One

Opening Up the Margins in the Mainstream

HOW DOES AN INDIVIDUAL MAKE SENSE of and handle his or her multiple, sometimes conflicting identities? When I asked how he hoped to maintain his self-defined Indian culture, Samit, a twenty-four-year-old second-generation Indian American, replied:

The biggest way is marrying an Indian. Getting involved in the community and temple and attending its cultural events. Language is a big deal.... There are things you can talk about with Indians that you can't talk about with others.... I think growing up here it's very hard; a lot of culture and attributes of being Indian are lost. Sometimes I think I'm no different than Joe Smith who lives next door.

Later in the interview he also fondly recalled a ras garba festival held at his parents' home, which involves dancing in concentric circles while clapping sticks and hands-part of a traditional religious event for Gujarati Indians:

We used to have garba at our house growing up. My [White] American friends came over and they loved it. We had a blast. It was fun teaching them how to do it and doing it with them.

These two quotes suggest the multifaceted nature of an answer to how people maintain multiple commitments. Samit feels highly Americanized yet still attached to an ethnic culture that distinguishes him from the majority, as seen in the first quote. At times he is able to bridge those parts, such as with a ras garba festival that translates well to other Americans, as seen in the second quote.

Similarly, when I asked James, a twenty-seven-year-old second-generation Korean American, what effect the model minority stereotype of Asian Americans as diligent had on him at work as a financial advisor, he smiled and said:

That's why I wear glasses. I wear glasses because I think [that] people think "Asian American, glasses, studies hard, works hard." I wear contacts on the weekend when I am with my friends. Maybe I play the race card a little bit. Sure, why not, if people think, especially in financial advising, [that] I am good with numbers.

He works in the primary labor market, is fluent in standard English, and has the dress, accent, and other commonplace signifiers of middle-class Americans his age. Yet, contrary to popular assumptions, he does not leave his minority status at the door when he enters the workplace. Instead, he makes an effort to appear racialized. By consciously acting as a "model minority," he hopes to climb the job ladder. Like Samit, he looks for ways to bring together the various elements of himself.

These anecdotes draw attention to how people deal with contrasting identities, whether as an ethnic minority who grew up in middle-class America, a mother with a full-time career (Blair-Loy 2003), a gay man living in suburbia (Brekhus 2003), and so on. This study analyzes second-generation Korean American and Indian American professionals living in Dallas, Texas-a geographic region under-explored for Asian Americans-to investigate how they both differentiate and integrate their ethnic, racial, and American identities in daily life. I frame these professionals as the margins in (instead of versus) the mainstream in order to move away from the presumption that minorities always separate, both cognitively and in practice, their ethnic and racial identities from the majority. The term "margins in the mainstream" refers to people who are connected to yet separated from a social space, in this case the mainstream. As a result, they have multiple sets of commitments. Allowing for both tensions and associations between group identities not only captures the experiences of ethnic minorities, but also draws attention more broadly to the agency we all have in dealing with contradictory interests. Moreover, this perspective offers new insights into assessing identity development and performance, immigrant adaptation, and racialization. The study is based on in-depth interviews with almost ninety individuals as well as participant observations (see chapter 2 for research design). Informants' voices dominate in the text. I emphasize how the experiences of Korean Americans and Indian Americans overlap, while noting their particularities.

So much of the discourse on ethnicity, including fiction, autobiographical essays, and academic research, refers to American culture as modern and as prioritizing the individual relative to a traditional and constraining immigrant heritage. This discursive dichotomy conceals the cultural conservatisms found in America, including the constraints placed on women and the rise of overt religiosity. The West is extolled at the expense of "Oriental" countries, which are criticized as pre-enlightened (Said 1978). Yet Asian Americans themselves often interpret their experiences within this framework, and denying its power would misrepresent their subjectivities and practices. "Asian" and "American" values presumably contrast with one another. The former is read as an emphasis on family, elders, and social conservatism, and the latter as a prioritization on personal autonomy and individualism (Ahn 1999; Jo 2002; Kibria 2002; Maira 2002; Min and Kim 1999). I accept that people understand their lives within this dichotomy, but in this study I demonstrate how they also move beyond it in their expressions of their identities (Zhou and Lee 2004), signaling the constructed nature of this dualism while recognizing its felt effects.

MAKING SENSE OF ETHNIC AND RACIAL IDENTITIES

Samit and James make sense of their backgrounds in ways that both differentiate them from and allow for association with Whites. This latter possibility breaks with the standard framing of ethnic communities-that immigrant groups' identities only create a severance from the majority. Previous research suggests that rather than...