Interactional Account of Relational Harmony in Chinese Immigrant Families: A Comparative Perspective.
详细信息
文摘
The ethnographically informed analyses speak to the cultural stereotype of the logic of Chinese childrearing and Chinese-Americans' challenges in straddling hybrid socio-cultural worlds. Drawing upon the approach that regards talk as a form of social practice, I demonstrated different ways in which kin relationships are indigenously orchestrated by foreign Chinese parents and their American-born children in three immigrant families in the county of Los Angeles. By way of illustration, I concluded a tri-directional correlation amongst the particular ways in which such speech activities as assessment, membership categorization and directive-response moves are naturalistically practiced in familial interactions. Embodied in the correlation are the ways in which hierarchy is constituted in the Chinese-acculturated family and egalitarianism in the American-acculturated family synchronically found across the three Chinese immigrant households. Even though traditional Chinese parents' logic of childrearing is usually stereotyped as being maliciously motivated (Chua 2011), it is ideologically argued that the type of parenting style is characteristic of the "shame-socialized" Chinese culture (Schoenhals 1993:192) where interpersonal "collectivism" is practiced (Kusserow 2004). In order to be an ethically competent Chinese, the U.S.-born children may therefore be raised in ways that regularly downplay values of individualism. In contrast to the key concept of "individualism" appreciated in the egalitarian U.S. society, where kids are entitled to be "self-confident" and "autonomous" (Kusserow 2004), such a logic of childrearing is normally believed to be the pivot point of constant familial conflicts taking place between Chinese foreign parents and their native U.S.-born children. Countering the perspective offered in prior literature, kin relationships indigenously practiced in the two Chinese-acculturated families demonstrate an orientation towards familial cohesiveness and harmony, and this is the phenomenon suggested to be in congruence with the patterns of interaction characterized by hierarchical, collectivistic, and shame-oriented traditions.