Angie Y. Chung - Böcker

Since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Koreatown has become increasingly fractured by intergenerational conflict, class polarization, and suburban flight. In the face of these struggles, community organizations can provide centralized resources and infrastructure to foster an ethnic consciousness and political solidarity among Korean Americans. This book analyzes the role of ethnic community-based organizations and the dynamics of contemporary Korean American politics.Drawing on two case studies, the author identifies diverse ways in which community-based organizations negotiate their political agendas and mainstream ties within the traditional ethnic power structures. One organization promotes middle-class ethnic goals through accommodation to immigrant leaders, while the other emphasizes social justice through alliances with outside interest groups. Both cases challenge the traditional assumption that assimilation undermines ethnicity as a meaningful framework for political identity and solidarity in immigrant groups. Legacies of Struggle reveals how community-based organizations create innovative spaces for political participation among new generations of Korean Americans.

Since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Koreatown has become increasingly fractured by intergenerational conflict, class polarization, and suburban flight. In the face of these struggles, community organizations can provide centralized resources and infrastructure to foster an ethnic consciousness and political solidarity among Korean Americans. This book analyzes the role of ethnic community-based organizations and the dynamics of contemporary Korean American politics.Drawing on two case studies, the author identifies diverse ways in which community-based organizations negotiate their political agendas and mainstream ties within the traditional ethnic power structures. One organization promotes middle-class ethnic goals through accommodation to immigrant leaders, while the other emphasizes social justice through alliances with outside interest groups. Both cases challenge the traditional assumption that assimilation undermines ethnicity as a meaningful framework for political identity and solidarity in immigrant groups. Legacies of Struggle reveals how community-based organizations create innovative spaces for political participation among new generations of Korean Americans.

Tiger Mom. Asian patriarchy. Model minority children. Generation gap. The many images used to describe the prototypical Asian family have given rise to two versions of the Asian immigrant family myth. The first celebrates Asian families for upholding the traditional heteronormative ideal of the “normal (white) American family” based on a hard-working male breadwinner and a devoted wife and mother who raises obedient children. The other demonizes Asian families around these very same cultural values by highlighting the dangers of excessive parenting, oppressive hierarchies, and emotionless pragmatism in Asian cultures. Saving Face cuts through these myths, offering a more nuanced portrait of Asian immigrant families in a changing world as recalled by the people who lived them first-hand: the grown children of Chinese and Korean immigrants. Drawing on extensive interviews, sociologist Angie Y. Chung examines how these second-generation children negotiate the complex and conflicted feelings they have toward their family responsibilities and upbringing. Although they know little about their parents’ lives, she reveals how Korean and Chinese Americans assemble fragments of their childhood memories, kinship narratives, and racial myths to make sense of their family experiences. However, Chung also finds that these adaptive strategies come at a considerable social and psychological cost and do less to reconcile the social stresses that minority immigrant families endure today. Saving Face not only gives readers a new appreciation for the often painful generation gap between immigrants and their children, it also reveals the love, empathy, and communication strategies families use to help bridge those rifts.