Content area
Full Text
Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities, by Nazli Kibria. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002.
Nazli Kibria's qualitative study is an important and welcome addition to the growing body of work on second-generation Asian Americans. Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities is also a nuanced and provocative intervention into debates about the racialization of Asian Americans, the limits and possibilities of pan-ethnic identity, and the workings of the model minority myth. Kibria states at the outset that her findings suggest that "the Asian American experience of the ethnic American model is centrally marked by a confrontation with its largely hidden and unstated racial character" (4). The book's introduction frames this problematic as the "puzzle of the new immigrant integration," but it becomes clear that Kibria's analysis also sheds light on the fundamental "puzzle" of conceptualizations of race in the United States. The tensions and contradictions in notions of race and ethnic identity are revealing, for I think they point to the ways in which the problematic of "race" is one in which Asian American studies is still embroiled. That is, it is one that Asian American Studies needs to address clearly through a theory that accounts for its simultaneous ideological and material character, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant have attempted to do, while grappling with the centrality of race politics to Asian American studies as a movement and as an academic field.
The strength of this sociological study lies in the fact that its insights are embedded in interview narratives; Kibria grounds her analysis throughout in the often poignant voices of her informants. This study is based on 64 in-depth interviews with second-generation Chinese and Korean Americans conducted in the Los Angeles and Boston metropolitan areas. The sample consists largely of middle-class adults between the ages of 21 and 40 years who were born in the United States or came here at the age of twelve or younger.
One of the valuable arguments in Kibria's study is her acknowledgment of the ways in which processes of...