Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US by Pei-Chia Lan (review)

Abstract

T he United States is home to about 369,000 Taiwanese-born immigrants, whose population increased fivefold since 1980 (Gibson and Lennon 2011; US Census Bureau 2018). Their growth mirrors that of the US Asian population, which also increased fivefold from 1.2 percent of the US population in 1965 to 6.4 percent today (Pew Research Center 2015). Focusing on ethnic (Han) Chinese families, Pei-Chia Lan sheds light on the challenges that parents face as they prepare their children for an increasingly competitive labor market against the backdrop of transnationalism, rapid cultural change, and increasing global inequality. In Raising Global Families, Lan turns our attention to Taiwanese and Chinese parents in Taiwan and Boston who rely on a bidirectional flow of culture, capital, and information to raise their children to be competitive players in a global context. Lan’s methodological design is ambitious and analytically innovative; it is cross-national, cross-class, and multi-method. She combines 80 in-depth interviews of middleand working-class parents in Taiwan with 56 in-depth interviews in middleand working-class Taiwanese and Chinese parents in Boston. She also incorporates ethnographic observations of parenting seminars in both geographic locales. By drawing on data from immigrant families and their home country counterparts from both middleand working-class backgrounds, she deftly shows how parents’ cultural repertoires, scripts, and strategies evolve in transnational contexts, and finds that class is key to understanding differences in parental access to ethnic and cultural capital. Inspired by Annette Lareau’s seminal Unequal Childhoods (2011) and Marianne Cooper’s more recent Cut Adrift (2014), Lan extends their work to illustrate how class and culture operate and evolve on a transnational scale. She expands Cooper’s notion of “security projects” and argues that parents enact “global security strategies” to mitigate insecurity in a context of polarizing global inequality. She finds that parenting strategies are not only classand location-specific, but they also vary within groups.