Caring Across Generations

The Linked Lives of Korean American Families

Grace J. Yoo, Barbara W. Kim

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780814729427
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

More than 1.3 million Korean Americans livein the United States, the majority of them foreign-born immigrants and theirchildren, the so-called 1.5 and second generations. While many sons anddaughters of Korean immigrants outwardly conform to the stereotyped image ofthe upwardly mobile, highly educated super-achiever, the realities andchallenges that the children of Korean immigrants face in their adult lives astheir immigrant parents grow older and confronthealth issues that are far more complex. In CaringAcross Generations, Grace J. Yoo and Barbara W. Kim explore how earlierexperiences helping immigrant parents navigate American society have prepared KoreanAmerican children for negotiating and redefining the traditional gender norms,close familial relationships, and cultural practices that their parents expectthem to adhere to as they reach adulthood. Drawing on in-depth interviews with137 second and 1.5 generation Korean Americans, Yoo & Kim explore issuessuch as their childhood experiences, their interpreted cultural traditions andvalues in regards to care and respect for the elderly, their attitudes andvalues regarding care for aging parents, their observations of parents facingretirement and life changes, and their experiences with providing care whenparents face illness or the prospects of dying. A unique study at theintersection of immigration and aging, CaringAcross Generations provides a new look at the linked lives of immigrantsand their families, and the struggles and triumphs that they face over manygenerations.

1

Brokering Dreams

When we were growing up, we went to art classes on Saturdays. That was because of my mom, she wanted us to make art. And we played the violin because she wanted me to play the violin. And, of course, you’re supposed to have good grades, and you’re supposed to help them out in their business. … So while my parents worked long hours we would come home and take care of ourselves and eat, whatever. And all weekend, we would have to work, whatever it was. And of course, they would pay you by giving you food. … You know, you never get any kind of praise, any compliments, no hugs. It was just—ah, criticism.

—Lauren

Lauren emigrated with her family from Korea when she was five years old. Her parents ran a number of small businesses until they retired in the early 2000s. Today, Lauren remembers the pressure to “do it all” in her childhood. In addition to taking art and music lessons, studying for good grades, and helping out in her parents’ business, Lauren assumed the role of the primary translator/interpreter in the family as a child. As a teenager, she took a part-time job to earn personal spending money, but her parents needed her paychecks to cover household bills. She filled out college financial aid forms for her older sibling and tended to her parents’ business, legal, and medical matters. Now in their thirties, Lauren and her sibling pay the mortgage and all the bills for their retired parents. Lauren has filled out applications for Medicare and senior housing and goes grocery shopping and translates mail for them. Lauren jokes that much to her surprise, her parents have become more open and affectionate as they aged: “Now that I’m older and they want to give me hugs. It’s like, ugh, what are you doing?” Her parents relied on their children’s help when they were young because, as Lauren says, “We [as a family] had to survive.” Lauren and her sister will continue to support their parents “because we’ve been doing it for a while.” For Lauren, caring for her parents throughout her life is not simply a cultural mandate or value, but a practical and necessary result of how immigration made the children’s labor vital to the family’s overall establishment in the United States.

* * *

By 2008, almost 30 percent of young adults aged eighteen to thirty-four in the United States were either foreign-born or had at least one foreign-born parent. Scholars predict that “as this generation reaches adulthood in large numbers within the next decade or two, its impact will be increasingly and widely felt throughout the society.”¹ The transition to adulthood differs widely by generation, ethnicity, national origin, and nativity/citizenship status and with respect to education, work, marriage, and birth rate. Studying the processes by which new Americans acculturate in relation to their families helps make sense of the collective immigrant experience, and suggests broader implications for American politics, economy, and culture against the backdrop of global economic restructuring.

The children of immigrants are coming of age at a critical time in American society, as it experiences dramatic demographic shifts through immigration and aging. In recent decades, ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic diversity has been fueled by international migration resulting from the liberalization of U.S. civil rights and immigration laws in the latter half of the twentieth century.² Like many other immigrants, those from Korea have faced multiple issues including language and cultural barriers, underemployment, and downward mobility.³ At the same time, Korean immigrants have played a unique role in small business entrepreneurship.⁴ Compared to other racial/ethnic and immigrant groups in the United States, Korean immigrants have the highest self-employment rate.⁵

In the larger context of contemporary U.S. immigration, studies of Korean immigrant families have focused on the experiences of the first generation and their economic and social adaptation to the United States. These studies have highlighted changing post-migration family dynamics, focusing on issues such as the impact of ethnic entrepreneurship and labor participation on spousal relations and gender roles.⁶ Meanwhile, studies from the perspective of children of Korean immigrants, or the second generation, have thoughtfully explored educational goals/expectations, intergenerational conflicts, and racial, ethnic, class, political, and religious identities in relation to the broader American society.⁷ Further studies have explored how children of Korean and other Asian immigrants contribute critically to the collective survival and well-being of the family as laborers in family businesses and as primary translators and interpreters for their households.⁸ In one of the first studies to focus on the practices and perspectives of children in labor-intensive ethnic/family/immigrant entrepreneurship, Miri Song compared the labor of Chinese children in their immigrant parents’ take-away restaurants in England to the caring labor that adult children, usually daughters, provide for elderly parents.⁹ Song writes:

Described as a labor of love, looking after elderly parents is based upon intense feelings of obligation and guilt, as well as love and concern. Such caring work for elderly parents is said to be difficult, in part, because it seems to reverse the traditional parent-child relationship—rather than parents caring for their children, adult children, in turn, look after their parents in infirmity and illness. … While this kind of work seems almost universal for adult daughters, the performance of caring work by children or adolescents, rather than adults, is relatively unusual in most contemporary Western societies.¹⁰

Korean immigrants experience a similar dynamic: children help with their family’s economic survival, and roles reverse as these children—at young ages—navigate culture, language, and racism for their immigrant parents and care for their economic survival. As introduced by Lauren’s story above, this chapter explores the pressures and challenges of growing up with parents who invested in their children’s educational and other opportunities while also relying on their children as mediators, translators, and workers for survival and stability. By getting good grades, cultural and language brokering, working in family businesses, and managing family relations, young children and teenagers have provided care and solace to their immigrant parents in ways this chapter illustrates in detail. While the kind of labor that children of immigrants provide is a labor of love, as Miri Song notes, it is not without pressures, conflicts, and negotiations; nor are feelings about such childhoods free from ambivalence.

Caring Starts Early: Emotion Work in Childhood

Studies of immigrant families illustrate that the parents face many more hardships, including financial challenges and English proficiency, than native U.S.-born parents. Indeed, a recent study indicates that immigrant parents face significantly elevated levels of parental aggravation and have significantly fewer resources compared to American-born parents.¹¹ In keeping with these findings, most respondents remembered high stress levels in their households as parents struggled to find and maintain work or start up small businesses. They recalled the additional difficulties their parents faced due to limited English reading and speaking abilities, cultural unfamiliarity, and encounters with racism and discrimination at work and in public spaces.

Children of immigrants in our study not only empathized with their immigrant parents’ plights but often actively sought to make things better for their parents. That is, they performed “emotion work,” which sociologist Arlie Hochschild defines as “the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling.”¹² Hochschild argues that one who engages in emotion work tries to evoke, shape, or suppress one’s (or another’s) inner feelings for the purpose of caring for family and loved ones. A growing body of literature describes how women engage in the bulk of emotion work within their intimate relationships and families as they assume responsibility for maintaining familial ties and the emotional care-taking of others.¹³ Like others who have engaged in emotion work, the respondents in our study were involved in varying levels of care for their immigrant parents.¹⁴

Although respondents of all genders discussed emotion work that they provided to their parents over a lifetime, daughters most often talked about this type of work as care and of their necessary role in soothing parents. Trying to ease their parents’ stresses over and worries about immigrant survival, female respondents sought to shield their parents from the external society through brokering language and culture, doing well in school, or otherwise acting on behalf of their parents. While the work that daughters more often mentioned entailed emotion work, sons discussed physical work such as chores at home or at the family business which they provided as a form of care giving. In both cases, the facets of emotional and physical work in childhood were intended to help parents survive and feel better in the present and hopeful about the future.

Scholars have found that children are aware of the difficulties and challenges their parents face in migrating to the United States, and feel pressure and responsibility to make up for these through academic, professional, and financial achievements in the future.¹⁵ Many respondents in our study experienced similar pressure to varying degrees as they observed how their parents’ education and work experiences in Korea often did not translate to equivalent work in America. What many remembered from their childhoods was the toll that that this rupture between pre-immigration education and work experience and post-immigration opportunities took on their parents and family relations. As children, many respondents tried to manage the negative emotions that resulted. Many recalled how their parents fought with each other over language difficulties, financial uncertainties, and downward social mobility.

Nancy, for one, witnessed many fights between her parents, especially when they left a comfortable, more “privileged life” in Korea to struggle financially in the United States:

There were lots and lots of fights. I think they were like, on the brink of divorce so often I can’t even count them. You know they’re both hot-tempered. They’re typical Koreans, and they’d throw things and yell. My brothers and sister and I would tell them “Stop fighting! It’s too loud!” You know, I was never scared that they were going to hurt each other, or that we were going to get hurt. It was never like that, but more like “stop, stop, stop”—it’s just too much. It’s too loud, too often. So just memories of just lots of yelling, about money, about the pressures of being an immigrant and finding housing for all of us. Where are we going to live? How are we going to get money for the next car payment? How are we going to pay for food, for the next month? You know, just the ongoing struggle not being able to speak that much English. They left a pretty, middle-class to upper-middle-class lifestyle to being lower-middle class or just sometimes, just being straight impoverished in the States. So I think that was hard for them. Like, oh, they roll the dice and they came out against them.

Like Nancy, many respondents shared memories of watching struggling parents trying to make it in America. These difficulties often served as catalysts for children of immigrants to attempt to make things better for their families. These efforts included getting good grades; helping at home and at work; working to be their parents’ voice in an English-speaking world; and running errands to get their parents’ favorite food or drinks.

Getting Good Grades

As documented in previous studies, children’s academic success was a source of pride for many immigrant parents (and conversely, source of great conflict for children who did not do as well in school), especially for those parents who viewed such success as a stepping stone to future opportunities for their children and the collective household.¹⁶ Doing well in school was one way that respondents addressed their parents’ difficult work and lowered social status. For those in our sample, getting good grades was also a way for respondents to manage their parents’ emotions, not only by soothing them, but also providing their parents with status in the present and hope for the future. Across the board, respondents described childhoods that often focused on academic achievement that would ultimately impact parents’ emotions. However, gender differences did exist in how “getting good grades” was interpreted and viewed by these children of immigrants. Daughters saw good grades as something that could make or break their parents’ day, while sons were more ambivalent about the need to perform and manage their parents’ emotions in this manner.

Connie, for example, describes how, by doing well in school, she could change the negative emotions her self-employed parents were experiencing. Her father, who worked as an engineer in Korea, came to the United States to attend graduate school, but eventually dropped out of the program for financial reasons. For Connie, getting good grades not only was a form of emotion work, but also became a source of empowerment:

When I brought home good grades, I couldn’t wait to become the object of their bliss. As the child of first generation immigrants, I got used to seeing a tired, grim facial expression on my parents’ faces. When I brought home straight A’s, their faces would be transformed; happy, joyful, hopeful—all the things they rarely were, otherwise. To be the cause of such transformation made me feel not only happy, but also powerful.

Another respondent who did well in school observed that her parents used her good grades to show off among other Korean immigrants. Abigail, an executive in her forties, notes that

The most notable memory around my report cards was that my mother would put the report card into her purse so that she could look at it during her workday and also show it to her friends to “brag.” She told me that those reports cards are what made the immigration hardship worth it.

Although some respondents criticized this overt behavior of comparing children’s academic achievements, others like Abigail highlighted how her grades brought some comfort and validation to her mother. In this way, adult daughters like Abigail indicated how they were empathetic to their immigrant parents’ plight, and were aware that good grades could ease their difficult workdays and provide a hope for the future.

But the pressure to maintain top grades became challenging to meet as schoolwork increased in difficulty. As Connie grew older and bringing home good grades became more challenging, academics became a source of conflict, as she recalls:

I mean one B+ on my report card. My parents were no longer happy with me. Whatever stress and strain they felt became multiplied as they began to weigh the future against this slight. It was awful.

Compared to the daughters, the sons were more likely to frame their stories of academic and parental pressures in an ambivalent fashion. Although many males in the study did well in school as well, they tended to focus on the unfairness and relentlessness of these pressures. Dylan, for example, wryly observed that his parents, both of whom immigrated as international students, earned graduate degrees, and developed professional careers in the United States, had only one way to define achievement in school. It was through:

the classic, unexplained, unbridled emphasis on education to the exclusion of all else. … I was senior class president. I was sophomore class president. I was editor-in-chief of the newspaper. I ran track. I was in the marching band four years. I was on the student council, and my parents considered me a total failure because I didn’t get straight A’s. You know, they told me that much, “Until you get straight A’s, everything else you do is meaningless.”

Dylan, now in his forties, describes how his parents did not accept his various extra-curricular activities as forms of achievement that would help him in the future, in such areas as college admissions and career opportunities. More explicitly, other male respondents observed how their childhoods were limited because their parents’ worldviews were solely fixated on education. As Jeremy, who is in his thirties, recalls:

My parents, all they did was survive. I think my parents were very stubborn. They would just see a lot of things their way —but not knowing and understanding that there is more to life than just making money, more to life than just studying and getting good grades.

Although sons did not necessarily do better or worse academically, they differed from daughters in their reactions to parental pressures. Daughters empathized with their parents’ emotions, while sons were more likely to feel ambivalent about their parents and academics. Several male respondents, for example, discussed how they were so frustrated with their parents and their narrow definition of academic success that they sometimes purposely did poorly in school. Bart describes how, out of frustration with his parents who narrowly defined academic success as getting into an Ivy League university, he deliberately did badly in some classes so they would stop pressuring him to get into these schools.

Peter also experienced intense pressure to do well in school, especially from his father, who tried to motivate his son by showing his own report cards from Korea, pointing out how financially difficult it was to emigrate to the United States, and once, delivering severe corporal punishment. Like Bart, Peter reacted. He describes how the academic pressure created such a conflict between him and his parents that he purposefully did not do well in school.

My parents are intense people; it took me a long time to realize that. We have a wonderful rel...