"To Cultivate Our Children to Be of East and West": Contesting Ethnic Heritage Language in Suburban Chinese Schools

Abstract

“THE GREAT CHALLENGE AND INSPIRATION [for Chinese parents in the United States] is to cultivate our children to be you zhong you xi [of East and West] rather than bu zhong bu xi [without East or West],” members of the Association of Chinese Schools wrote in the group’s 1985 annual publication. Decades earlier, during the 1960s, Chinese suburbanites around the country had begun to establish weekend heritage language schools in an effort to help young Chinese Americans—many of them American-born— retain a sense of their Chinese heritage while living in primarily European American areas. The schools offered a structured environment to learn about Chinese culture, be among co-ethnic peers, hone Chinese-language skills, and negotiate an identity that would encompass both the students’ Chinese and American backgrounds. Heritage language education has been one strategy employed by many immigrant groups for preserving their ethnic heritage in the United States. According to anthropologist Joe C. Fong, this type of education complements (rather than undermines) a student’s formal primary and secondary schooling. Although Chinese Americans from a variety of class, geographic, and linguistic backgrounds have established heritage language schools, this study focuses on middle-class groups living in affluent and predominantly white suburban areas with dispersed Chinese populations in the post-1960 era. The schools became sites where intra-ethnic differences surfaced in powerful ways for suburban Chinese groups. Rather than promoting a singular or universal understanding of Chinese ethnic heritage and language, the conflicts within these schools reveal the complexities of these suburban populations. This study explores these intra-ethnic dynamics at schools nationally, but with an emphasis on the suburbs around Washington, DC, and Wilmington, Delaware, to demonstrate how suburban middle-class Chinese Americans continued to maintain ethnic identities and community networks despite living in primarily European American suburbs. Both areas have relatively