Keywords: Chinese Canadian, Second Generation Youth, Social Capital, .... later when they started to enroll into universities, particularly in British Columbia, ...
Youth Growing up in Chinese Immigrant Families Within the Canadian Context: A Critical Examination Through a Capital Lens (Submission Version)
For final print, please refer to: Yan, M. C., (2015). Youth growing up in Chinese immigrant families within the Canadian context: A critical examination through a capital lens. Chan, E.K.L. (Eds). Chinese Migration and Family at Risk. Chapter Seven. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 117-140
Keywords: Chinese Canadian, Second Generation Youth, Social Capital, Cultural Capital, Canada, Immigrants. Abstracts: Chinese immigration to China has had a long history. However, due to the exclusionary policies and practice, the growth of Chinese immigrant group in Canada was suffocated. It was until the early 1980s when a massive influx of Hong Kong Chinese, there have been a rapid growth of Chinese immigrant communities in major metropolitan centres in Canada. In three decades, the Hong Kong Chinese immigrant (HKCI) group has generated a few unique social phenomena which set precedence for other immigrant groups to follow. Meanwhile, these phenomena also have significant implications to the second generation who grew up in the HKCI families. Employing a theoretical lens of capital, this paper provides a brief description and examines the challenges of how youth from HKCI families have grown up. In brief, youth from HKCI families have relatively rich cultural capital both inherited from their families and earned by themselves in schooling. Through their families they may have rich bonding social capital within the Chinese community that facilitates their growing up and sustains their heritage cultural capital, but they are weak at bridging capital that can help them reach to the resources in the greater society. Further disadvantaged by the systemic discrimination policies and practices in the labour market, like other visible minority youth, they have relatively poorer economic outcome, when compared to their counterparts from the dominant group of people. Introduction Chinese immigrants came to Canada as early as in the late 1850s to catch the gold rush in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia. Today, according to the 2011 Census, over 1,324,700 Chinese individuals are now residing in Canada which makes “Chinese” the second largest visible (racial) minority group in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2013a). During the last one and a
half centuries, different generations of Chinese immigrants came to Canada. Li (1998) roughly divided the history of Chinese immigration to Canada into three different eras: the exclusionary (1880s to mid-1940s), the post-war (late 1940s to early 1980s), and the contemporary (mid1980s to present). Different political and economic contexts featured in each era, which generated different levels of discrimination and structural barriers for the Chinese immigrant families. Most of these Chinese immigrant families have resiliently overcome these barriers. Compared to their counterparts from other immigrant groups, youth from Chinese immigrant families have become, for better or for worse, as the model minority group in Canada. To fully understand how different generations of youth from Chinese immigrant families grew up in Canada is beyond the capacity of this book chapter. I intend to focus only on the experience of a particular group of youth who came from Chinese families who migrated to Canada from Hong Kong (hereafter HK) between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. Many of these immigrant families either came to Canada with small children (i.e., the one-point-five generation) or gave birth to children after arriving Canada (i.e., the second generation). As indicated in the 2011 census, the median age of second-generation Chinese individuals, who are either completing their higher education or participating in the labor force, is 16.8 (Statistics Canada, 2013b). Due to the very fact that these two generations of children have gradually become the backbone of Canadian society and particularly of the labor market, their experiences of growing up in immigrant families in Canada have important implications for social policies and social work practice. Although these two generations of young people share a similar cultural background and grew up in a similar sociocultural context, each young person will have their own story to tell about how they grew up in Canada. I have no intention to homogenize their varied and rich lived
experience. The purpose of this chapter is, through a theoretical lens, to identify and examine some of these young people’s common experiences and patterns documented in the literature. However, there is only a handful of literature that focuses solely on the experience of youth from Hong Kong Chinese immigrant (hereafter, HKCI) families. In most literature, the discussion tends to arbitrarily group together youth from different Chinese locales (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China, and other locations). When selecting literature, I have tried to make sure that it has empirical relevance to youth from HKCI families. Growing up in the Exclusion Era To understand the lived experience of contemporary Chinese immigrants to Canada, we need to have some knowledge of the early history of Chinese immigrant communities in Canada (A quick summary of the history, please refer to Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter, No date). Chinese individuals first came to Canada for the gold rush. Later, when Canada started building the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), there was a huge influx of Chinese laborers to Canada, particularly to the West coast, for the completion of dangerous construction and manual service works. In 1882, the heyday of CPR construction, 8,083 Chinese individuals arrived by ship in Canada (Li, 1998). Some of these laborers stayed after the construction of the CPR was complete. As a result, the Chinese population in Canada grew from 2,500 in 1860 to 9,126 in 1891 (Li, 1998). However, under the White Canadian policy, the expansion of the Chinese community—members of which were perceived as culturally and biologically inferior—was seen as a threat to the Canadian society (Anderson, 1991). In 1885 when the CPR was complete and in response to the public pressure, the Canadian government enacted the first anti-Chinese bill and imposed a “Head Tax”
of $50 on all Chinese individuals entering Canada, which the Canadian government subsequently increased to $500 (equivalent to two years of wage of a Chinese labourer) in 1904. Despite this financial barrier, the Chinese population in Canada resiliently increased to 36,924 in 1921. To stop the growth of the Chinese community, in 1923, the Canadian government imposed the Chinese Immigration Act, which is also known as the Exclusion Act, under which only diplomats, children born in Canada, university students, and merchants were allowed to enter Canada. Many families became separated and very often the wife (or the mother) would still be in China. In 1941, it is estimated that an overwhelming majority of Chinese families, a total of 20,141, were “separated” with the wife outside Canada (Li, 1998). The Exclusion Act led to the inevitable delay of the second generation in the Chinese community (Li, 1998). In other words, there were not that many young people in the Chinese community in Canada during the Exclusion era. The children who were within the Chinese Community in Canada during this era faced numerous discriminatory treatments by the public and government policies. Most of the time, they had to confine their daily activities within Chinatown or its vicinity. Even up to the 1940s’, both the Canadian government and the general public still did not welcome members of the Chinese community into many areas within the City of Vancouver (Anderson, 1991). The Canadian government even once segregated Chinese students from white students in Victoria in the early 1900s (Li, 1998) and in Vancouver in the 1920s (Anderson, 1991). For a very long period of time, Chinese individuals were not allowed to enroll in Canadian universities. Even later when they started to enroll into universities, particularly in British Columbia, they could not enter professions such as pharmacy, dentistry, medicine, banking, law, and nursing (Anderson, 1991).
The Second World War led to a breakthrough when China and Canada became allies of the US-British force. Locally, the involvement of Chinese Canadians in the war had also changed the attitude of the Canadian public and government. The Canadian government’s involvement in and signing of the Human Rights Charter of the United Nations also embarrassed the government regarding its own segregation policy. Meanwhile, the then National Government of China also put pressure on the Canadian government to relax its exclusionary practice (Anderson, 1991). Slowly, with the support of non-Chinese Canadians, the Chinese Canadian community was successful in repealing the Exclusion Act in 1947. Nonetheless, the repeal of the Exclusion Act did not lead to any major change in Chinese immigration. Under the then sponsorship system, racial bias continued to give preference to immigrants from the other side of the Atlantic. It was not until the government finally introduced the point system, that the Chinese Canadian community was no longer being “artificially controlled, nor stigmatized by legislation” (Anderson, 1991, p. 186). The introduction of the point system also signified a gradual change of the sociopolitical environment for children and youth growing up in Chinese families in Canada. The blatant and explicit racial discriminatory practice that had long disadvantaged youth from Chinese families was no longer acceptable. In principle, protected by and embraced in the Canadian Charters of Rights and Freedoms (1982) and Multiculturalism Act (1988), they could from then on be able to grow up as equal as everyone else. However, in practice, how true is this? Chinese Immigrants Between the 1980s and 1990s Immigration is always a result of different factors pushing and pulling people to move from one country to another (Gmelch, 1980). In 1967, the Canadian government introduced the point system that changed the immigration patterns of Canada. The new system opened up
opportunities for qualified people in different parts of the world to move to Canada. Chinese immigrants slowly took advantage of this new system. From 1968 to 1976, only 89,868 Chinese individuals from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China moved to Canada. The situation changed abruptly in the early 1980s when the British and Chinese government signed the Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People's Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong, which officially resumed the exercise of sovereignty of the Chinese government over HK after 1997. The political uncertainty of HK after 1997 drove many HK Chinese individuals to migrate to other countries. In 1989, the Chinese government’s brutal cracked down of the student movement in the Tiananmen Square reinforced the distrust of many HK Chinese individuals toward the Chinese government. However, the political reason is one factor but not the sole factor that caused the massive out-migration in HK. For instance, for many parents, pursuing a better education for their children was also a significant reason (Waters, 2005). As a result, more than 380,000 HK Chinese individuals immigrated to Canada from the mid-1980s to the mid1990s (Ley & Kobayashi, 2005). This massive influx of HKCIs within a decade and its abrupt slowing down in 1998, a year after HK was officially returned to China (see Table 1), was an unprecedented phenomenon in Canadian immigration history. Insert Table 1
Chinese Immigrants from Hong Kong, Mainland and Taiwan to Canada 1990 to 1998 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 Hong Kong Economic migrants 21140 11628 20596 23698 24731 11806 14491 11211 29261 22340 38910 36576 44169 31746 29966 22195 Sub-Total Mainland Economic migrants 3937 8511 2325 1281 3133 4984 11434 12151 7989 13915 10429 9466 12486 13291 17516 18453 Sub-Total Taiwan Economic migrants 3202 3904 6610 9026 6272 5952 10435 10373 3681 4488 7456 9867 7411 7691 13207 13288 Sub-Total Total Economic migrants 28279 24043 29531 34005 34136 22742 36360 33735 40931 40743 56795 55909 64066 52728 60689 53936 Total
1998 4203 8071 12943 19740 5575 7172 22721 34983
* This includes Independents, self-employed, entrepreneurs, investors, retired and the live-in caregiver. Source: Citizenship and Immigration Statistics 1990 - 1996, Table IM16 and Facts and Figures 1997 and 1998. Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada.
Indeed, because of the political and economic contexts in HK and Canada, HKCIs have generated a few noticeable social phenomena. First and foremost, as shown in Table 1, over a half of HKCIs were economic migrants. Meeting the requirement of the point system as economic migrants also implies that the HKCIs were generally highly educated and wellexperienced young professionals. Compared to other immigrant groups from elsewhere, the HKCIs were relatively financially well-off due to their middle class status and the higher value of property market in Hong Kong. Within only a decade, the HKCIs transformed many neighborhoods in urban Canada, mainly Toronto and Vancouver. They also generated a critical mass that supported the rapid development of ethnic media, business, and services. Second, during the period of the influx of HKCIs (between 1985 and 1997), the economic condition in Canada was relatively undesirable. The unemployment rate ranged from 7.5% (1989) to 11.4% (1993) with an average of 9.5% (The calcuation is based on information compiled by Economics and Statistics Branch of Newfoundland & Labrador Statistics Agency, 2014). Meanwhile, the economic condition in HK during the same period was blooming. As a result,
many breadwinners of HKCI families chose to keep their jobs and businesses in HK, and to engage in transnational commuting. These transnational economic ties led to the phenomena of an “astronaut family” (Waters, 2005) and of “satellite kids” (Tsang, Irving, Alaggia, Chau, & Benjamin, 2003). Families’ experience of either situation would have one or both parents absent from home for a long period of time. Third, a great majority of HKCIs have chosen to be naturalized as Canadian citizens. After receiving the Canadian citizenship, many have decided to return to HK to catch the economic bloom when they felt secure with the political stability in HK. According to a study conducted by the Asia-Pacific Foundation, the HKCIs constitute the majority of the so-called “Canadian diaspora” in HK. Roughly 67% of the 300,000 Canadian citizens living in HK were born in HK (Zhang & DeGolyer, 2011). Among the Chinese Canadian individuals residing in HK, 18% of them are in the 20-29 age range. Indeed, the trend of moving to HK for employment has been noted even among the one-point-five and second generations of HKCI families (Yan, Lam, & Lauer, 2013). These three phenomena are not exclusively unique to the HKCI communities in Canada. Similar situations were noted elsewhere where there is a significant size of HKCIs; for instance, New Zealand (Ho, 2002), and among other immigrant groups, such as Taiwanese (Chiang, 2008) and Korean (Lee & Koo, 2006). However, because of its relatively large size, the experience of HKCIs in Canada has first been documented in the literature. These three phenomena have had critical implications for our understanding of how youth grow up in these families in contemporary immigrant societies. To a certain extent, they reflect the challenges that most HKCI families in Canada may have experienced. Family and Youth: A Capital Lens
As a social system, families (particularly parents and other adult members) are expected to provide the resources—economic, cultural, human, and social—that their younger members can strategically use to achieve their developmental growth (Nee & Sanders, 2001). There are many ways to understand the concept of resource. Sociologists tend to use a capital lens to conceptualize resource; for instance, human capital (Becker, 1964), social capital (Portes, 1998), and cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Bourdieu (1986) suggested that the capital lens emphasizes three specific natures of resource: a) accumulative, b) potential to produce profits and to reproduce, and c) unequal distribution. Bourdieu argued that different forms of capital can be converted into symbolic capital, which legitimizes other forms of capital that give ones the prestige, honor, distinction, advantage, and authority over others, and that benefit their life chance (Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2013). The concept of capital has become important for immigration studies including those on HKCIs. Waters (2005) summarized a few studies on HKCI communities in different countries: “[M]igration, involving the tactical dispersal of family members around the world, has enabled Hong Kong Chinese families to maximize the potential accumulation of different forms of capital at different geographical sites.” (p. 363). Cultural-Human Capital and HKCI Families In Bourdieu’s (1986) articulation, cultural capital comes in three forms: the embodied, the objectified, and the institutionalized. However, as Nee and Sanders (2001) suggested, only the embodied and the institutionalized studies are relevant to immigrant families, and the institutionalized form can be better understood as human capital according to Becker’s canonical configuration (Becker, 1964). The primary form of cultural capital in the embodied state is culture, which is largely transmitted through a family’s socialization process (Bourdieu, 1986).
However, the accumulative nature of cultural capital also implies that people’s cultural capital can be obtained from somewhere else, such as from school and the media, as a strategic coping process (Swindler, 1986). HKCI families carry their own ethnic culture with them when migrating to Canada. Very often this culture becomes the background of socialization for their children. The rapid development of information technology also reinforces HKCI families to upkeep its heritage culture. As early as in the early 1990s, locally in Toronto and Vancouver—which have been the major hub of HKCIs—a strong ethnic media network was already established. For instance, in 1998, in Toronto, there were three printed newspapers, two of which were overseas versions of a HK based newspaper. Their readership reached 90,639 (Singtao Daily) and 88,007 (Ming Pao Daily). Meanwhile, there were three radio stations, one television station, and one Cantonese television channel from a multicultural station (n.k., 1999). Most of these media networks also provided a similar service in Vancouver. Since most of these media networks published and broadcasted news and TV programs from HK, many youth from HKCI families have been socialized by the HK Chinese culture. However, it was noticed that although most foreign born Chinese youth have maintained a high level of biculturalism, it was also found that the interest of Canadian born Chinese youth in Chinese culture has been in in decline (Ooka, 2002) . Perhaps the use of a heritage language is one of the strong indicators of how cultural capital is transmitted inter-generationally within immigrant families. In the 2011 Census, 1,112,610 people reported that their mother tongue is one of the Chinese dialects, among which 389,000 reported Cantonese (n.k., 2012). Meanwhile, Houle (2011) suggested, the continuous supply of new immigrants is a crucial factor that helps upkeep an immigrant’s heritage language. However, with the significant decrease of new immigrants from HK, it is reasonable to worry
that the use of Cantonese among the second generation from HKCI families may diminish. It was also found (Ooka, 2002) that there is a trend that the Canadian born second generation Chinese youth and Chinese youth who came to Canada at a young age tend to have a higher level of English monolingualism. This tendency is more significant among youth from higher income families. To understand how the new generation youth picked up the cultural capital from their family, we can turn to the stories of 18 new generation (i.e., one point five and second generation) youth from HKCI families who chose to work in HK. Although their stories cannot be generalized to all youth from the same background, they shed light on how these young people grew up. Yan et al. (2013) found that at home, almost all of them reported (n=17) that their family has kept a very HK style of living including speaking Chinese, going to a Chinese school, celebrating Chinese festivals, watching HK TV programs and news, watching Chinese movies, listening to Chinese music, and singing karaoke. Therefore, most of them are not strangers to their parents’ heritage culture even though many of them can no longer read and write Chinese. In addition, these youth also reported that the relatively cheap airfare has encouraged regular transnational visits among family members and friends in HK and in Canada. Many of the youth had visited HK before they returned to HK to work. Five of them even reported that they and their families visited HK at least once every one or two years (Yan, et al., 2013). These transnational visits helped strengthen their cultural tie with their parents’ HK cultural root. Growing up in Canada, this group of youth has inevitably been acculturated with the dominant culture. At least 11 of them reported that they grew up with a mainstream and multicultural group of peers (Yan, et al., 2013). Some even reported that their parents deliberately moved to an
area less populated by Chinese individuals in the hope that they could integrate better into the Canadian society. Indeed, for this group of youth, growing up in two cultures equipped them with the cultural knowledge and language skills to navigate globally in two different countries. However to many of them, they also has a strong adherence to the Canadian culture, which was manifested in their attempt to keep a Canadian lifestyle while they are working in HK (i.e., maintaining a close circle of friends sharing the same Canadian culture, drinking in the bar, watching a hockey game, reading Canadian newspapers, and checking flyers of Canadian stores online) (Yan, et al., 2013). With regard to their stories, these young people have maintained a healthy attitude toward their dual cultural identity and adapted well culturally in a different context. Thus, it is not surprising to learn that almost all of them call Canada their home (Yan, et al., 2013). This finding also echoes the results of Ooka’s (2002) study which indicated that a majority (57%) of Chinese youth, particularly among local born ones, chose a hyphenated (Chinese-Canadian) identity. In the institutionalized state, cultural capital is also known as human capital, which can be understood as an institutional recognition of one’s academic qualification (Bourdieu, 1986). Indeed, it is widely believed that education is an investment for future economic return and a symbolic signal to employers of one’s job-related attributes (Nee & Sanders, 2001). When compared to their counterparts of the general population, visible minority immigrant youth in Canada generally have a higher enrolment rate into higher education along with higher educational aspirations (Krahn & Taylor, 2005) and attainment (Boyd, 2002). Among all visible minority immigrant groups, children of Chinese immigrants are within one of the top two groups that attain higher academic achievement than children of Canadian born parents (Abada, Hou, & Ram, 2008). The success of children from Asian immigrant (of which many are HKCI) families
in higher education has even raised some eyebrows in the Canadian public discourse, which discriminatorily suggests that the student mass of Canadian universities has become “too Asian” (Cui & Kelly, 2013). To take a closer look at how youth from HKCI families may have performed in the education system, we turn to the study conducted by Abada et al. (2008). Since many of the Chinese samples in their study were from HKCI families who came to Canada from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, it may shed some light on this issue. According to their findings, the parental education background of the Chinese sample had little effect on the high education attainment. Meanwhile, keeping their mother tongue during childhood seemed to have no negative effect on their schooling. Compared to only 55% of their counterparts who spoke only either English or French with their parents, close to 73% of the Chinese samples who used their native language during childhood attained a university degree (Abada, Hou, & Ram, 2008). The intersection of this attainment rate and the preservation of their native language also reflects many Chinese parents’ dual concern of helping their children to maintain their heritage culture and to acquire mainstream culture. After all, the parents hope their children can benefit from the two different cultural contexts in which their children grow up. Traditionally, children’s academic success is a part of ideal parenting within the Chinese culture, which to a certain extent has also been arbitrarily exaggerated as a result of the controlling act of a “tiger” mother and father (Chua, 2011). There is no doubt that many HKCI parents share this similar cultural and contextual expectation particularly when pursuing a better education for their children has been a reason for many of them deciding to emigrate in the first place. In addition, for many Chinese immigrant parents, the high expectations they have for their
children’s success in school is also a measure by which they hope to uplift the marginalized social status of their family in the future (Guo, 2013). However, although a relatively high proportion of youth from HKCI families has been maintained within the higher education system in Canada, the success may be fading out. Recently, the school performance of children from HKCI families who are largely Cantonesespeaking seems to have been overpassed by the Mandarin-speaking Chinese groups. Gunderson, D'Silva, and Odo (2012) found that, at least in Vancouver, in 2008, compared with students who spoke Mandarin, Korean, and Russian, Cantonese-speaking high school children were doing less well at levels 11 and 12, and with university enrolment. Social Capital and Growing Up Social capital is largely about the resources embedded in social networks and memberships of different social groups that a person can mobilize for some functional purposes (Bourdieu, 1986). This concept has been widely used now in immigration studies to understand the educational, economic, and political performance of ethnic minority immigrants (e.g., Aizlewood, 2004; Zhou, 1994). Among all the definitions of social capital, Portes’s articulated social capital in immigrant studies as: “the capacity of individuals to command scarce resources by virtue of their membership in networks or broader social structures” (Portes, 1995, p. 12). However, not all networks serve the same function nor have the same capacity. Granovetter (1973) and Putman (2000) offered two similar classifications to illustrate the functions of different social capitals. In his famous book, Bowling Alone, Putnam (2000) divided social capital into two major forms. The bonding social capital reinforces specific reciprocity by mobilizing internal solidarity within groups, which is similar to what Granovetter calls “strong ties,” whereas, bridging social capital links one social group to external assets and information
through social network ties, which is called “weak ties” in Granovetter’s articulation (Granovetter, 1983; Putnam, 2000). For youth, their social capital mainly comes from their family and peers. Familial social capital, in terms of family relationship, has long been seen as instrumental in developing the human capital of the next generation (Coleman, 1988). Through the obligation, expectation, and trustworthiness embedded in the parent-child relationship, parents’ cultural (and human) capital can be transferred to their children through informal (e.g., chatting and family activities) and formal (e.g., schooling) channels. Most of HKCI parents came to Canada through the point system which by default selects a group of immigrants who have rich cultural (and human) capital in terms of educational and professional qualifications. However, their cultural capital may not be useful for their children growing up in Canada. Findings of a mid-1990s study of immigrant parents (including many HKCIs) in Vancouver indicated that due to their own cultural and schooling background, many immigrant parents found that the Canadian education model is too easy for their children (Hayden, Anderson, & Gunderson, 1997). As a result, many youth from these families were given extra work by their parents or their parents arranged to have different kinds of tutorials and other training outside of school so as to “upgrade” their children’s English as well as their mathematic skills. Due to their lack of knowledge of the Canadian school system, many immigrant parents also did not know how to guide their children through the education system which tends to assign children from non-English speaking families to English-as-a-second-language classes. Very often these children can fall behind in their learning. Also, maintaining a strong heritage culture at home can limit the exposure of immigrant children to the mainstream culture, which can sometimes limit their social interaction with their
non-Chinese classmates and lead to an ethnic based friendship circle (Minichiello, 2001). As Minichiello’s (2001) exploratory study found, many of her 23 Chinese youth participants reported that their friends were mainly Chinese who shared similar culture, language, interests, and activities. Although some participants who started school at the elementary school level reported that they had many Caucasian friends, intriguingly they were drawn into a Chinese network in high school. As one young woman in Minichiello’s study said: “It wasn’t as if I didn’t have any friends that were of other nationalities because up until high school I had close Caucasian friends and whatever, but once I got to high school I was in the Chinese immigrant group.” (Beth in Minichiello, 2001, p. 85) Beth is not alone. Researchers (Yan, et al., 2013; Yan, Lauer, & Chan, 2012b; Yan, Lauer, & Jhangiani, 2010) also found similar experiences in a few recent studies on new generation immigrant youth. For instance, among the 18 participants of the study on youth from HKCI families working in HK, 11 of them reported that as they grew older, their friendship shifted to be more with friends of Asian and Chinese background. Betty, one of these 11 participants, gave her explanation: “You hang out with them [Caucasians], they are fine, right, but then like culturewise…you can’t really relate to them as much… They were like, what’s Chinese New Year, whatever, right, oh, red packet, like what’s that? … When you’re with your Chinese friends, they can relate to this…they can relate to everything.” (Betty in Yan, et al., 2013, p. 185) The cultural proximity not only brings these young people closer to friends with a similar ethnic background and forms their ethnic based friendship network but also draws them to ethnic based associations. In a study of undergraduates from the University of British Columbia
(hereafter UBC), Yan et al. (2012b) found that compared to Caucasian counterparts, ethno-racial minority students, 30% of which are Chinese, are more likely involved in clubs and organizations; however, they also tend to be involved with clubs made up of members with similar backgrounds to themselves. In other words, the peer network of many youth from HKCI families may very likely be ethnic based, or using Granovetter’s term, may consist of strong ties, which may hamper them from accessing resources outside their ethnic community, particularly when it comes to job searching. Cultural proximity may pull these young people to peers who share the same culture. However, the racial tension or even racism that many Chinese youth experience in their everyday life may also push them together. Nowadays, racism in Canada is no longer blatant and overt; however, racism is not eliminated either. Instead, it is still prevalent but in covert, systemic, and disguised forms of practice. In a recent study on how visible minority youth experience and heal from violence caused by racial discriminatory motive, a second generation youth from a HKCI community reported that in her high school students were racially divided and different groups had their own gathering space. The place where Chinese students commonly hung out was labelled as “Chinatown.” She commented as follows: “... I feel I’m sort of a bit insulted, maybe, because ‘Chinatown’, Chinatown isn’t the best, right, and it’s a little bit of a slump, like a lower class population and maybe that’s what they feel, that Asians are below and should be labelled as ‘China Town.’ I think there’s a little bit of hatred here.” (Kubiliene, Yan, Kumsa, & Burman, Accepted, p. 10). In the same study, other youth with a HKCI background also shared that they often experienced racial discriminatory treatment (e.g., racial slur, body language, and signs and texts written on the wall) in public arenas: in the school hall way, shopping mall, washroom, and restaurant
(Kubiliene, et al., Accepted). The mainstream media also regularly reinforces the racist public discourse (Henry & Tator, 2002). A vivid example is the issue on “Too Asian” published in 2010 by the Maclean’s Magazine (Cui & Kelly, 2013) in which the diligent nature of Chinese individuals and other Asian students were denigrated. An example is as follows: “…Asian students work harder…they tend to be strivers, high achievers, and singleminded in their approach to university…White students, by contrast, are more likely to choose universities and build their school lives around social interactions, athletics and self-actualization—and, yes, alcohol.” (Findlay & Köhler, 2010, p. 78) Chinese and Asian students were portrayed as dull and with a lack of self-direction. However, perhaps among all forms of racial discrimination against them, the most significant one will soon be experienced by these young people when they enter the job market. Social Capital and Labor Market Experience Many youth from the HKCI community are now at the stage of entering the labor market. Their social capital is critical to their success in job searching. Granovetter (1974) has long argued that many young people get a job not because of who they are but because of who they know. It is imaginable that most young people do not know many people who can connect them with a job. Family and friends are their two major sources of connection. In terms of peers, the function of their ethnic based friendship circle can be very limiting. Findings of four recent studies on how youth from an ethnic minority immigrant background (including Chinese) entered the job market indicated that although friends can point them to where the job is, they have no influence on whether the participants of these studies get the job or not (Lauer, Wilkinson, Yan, Sin, & Tsang, 2012; Yan, et al., 2013; Yan, et al., 2012b; Yan, et al., 2010). Very often, their friends are as vulnerable as they are in terms of employment status.
For instance, in the case of youth from HKCI families working in HK, most of them explained that their friends’ influence was a decisive factor for their move. However, like participants of the other three studies, only very few of them reported that their job was connected to their friends (Yan, et al., 2013). If peers are not helpful then how about family? In youth employment literature, family tends to be seen as a major source of job referrals for young people (Granovetter, 1974). It is reported that “nearly 70% of all jobs in the USA are obtained as a result of family and friendship networks” (Leu 2009 cited in Lauer, et al., 2012, p. 4). However, it seems that this assumption has not been validated by the lived experience of many immigrant families, including the HKCI ones. At least among a cohort of UBC graduating undergraduates, their family was not useful in terms of helping them to find a job (Yan, et al., 2012b). The experience of an Asian U BC graduate is most telling. She explained why her parents are not helpful: “I don’t think they know how they want to help me, but they don’t know what it’s like to work in Canadian companies. So, they can’t really give me their advice. My mommy maybe felt that too. She said to me, “I do want to help you, but I don’t know how I can help you. Uh, I don’t know how it works.” So, that, that made me realize that, uh, they were just as frustrated as I am, but of course with a reason.” (Yan, et al., 2010, pp. 141142). It is a very helpless situation for both the youth and their parents. The reality is that despite the fact that many HKCIs came to Canada as skilled workers, being immigrants themselves, they are foreign to the Canadian job market and find it challenging to find a job for themselves too. It is known that the Canadian labor market is notoriously discriminatory against immigrants. With higher education qualifications, many immigrants have
had a worse labor market outcome when compared to the general Canadian population. The unemployment rate of immigrants, has always been higher than the one of the general population and the gap is widening particularly for recent immigrants who arrived in Canada less than 10 years ago (Yssaad, 2012). Meanwhile, despite the fact that many immigrants, including HKCI, were accepted into Canada due to their high education and professional qualifications, their rate of working in a regulated occupation (i.e., a profession that has a regulatory body) that matches their qualification is much lower. In 2006, while 62% of Canadian born people found work in the fields of study that would normally lead to work in their own profession, only 24% of foreigneducated immigrants did so (Zietsma, 2010). Critiques have long pointed out the problem that immigrants’ non-Canadian credentials are not recognized in Canada and their non-Canadian professional experience is often disregarded (Sakamoto, Chin, & Young, 2011). As a result many highly skilled and trained immigrants end up with low-pay, long hours, and contract jobs. Under these conditions, it is hard to expect that immigrant parents can provide any rich bridging social capital for their children when these young people enter the labor market. Having said that, many immigrant parents may be rich in bonding social capital. Having a social network is one of the key factors that determine where immigrants settle (Wong & Salaff, 1998). In other words, many HKCI tend to settle in Toronto and Vancouver where their friends are. As a result, these two cities have had the largest Chinese communities in Canada. The sheer size of these two communities has created an ethnic market that, not only serves the needs of, but also generates a job market for the Chinese population. For many HKCI parents, this is also the resource embedded in their bonding social capital that they can mobilize to help their children.
Nonetheless, jobs in the ethnic market are not appealing to many young people. In a study of Chinese, South Asian, and Filipino immigrant youth who did not have a higher education qualification, Yan et al. (2010) found that most participants preferred not to work in the ethnic market. As a Chinese youth commented: “Let’s say my dad or my mom will help me find a job. They will find a Chinese place. And I don’t want to work with Chinese people. Because they will rip me off, I don’t know. You know, they always give you less hours or less wages, and stuff like that, so I don’t like them introducing me to Chinese people” (Yan, et al., 2010, p. 138). To many of these young people, the working conditions of the ethnic labor market are unattractive to them: long hours, arduous work, lower and delayed pay, and unpaid overtime. To them, intriguingly the bonding social capital that may find them work can paradoxically compromise their rights to a fair and equitable treatment (Yan, et al., 2010). At least in the few studies reported above, HKCI parents’ bridging social capital in Canada is very limited. On the other hand, as immigrants, they have rich transnational social capital, the resource of which they may be able to mobilize to assist their children to reach out to the labor market back in their own homeland. The HKCI community is known to have probably the largest group of return migrants who are now residing back in HK. Unfortunately, it is not known how the social capital of the returned HKCI parents is useful in helping their children find a job in HK. Perhaps findings of the exploratory study of new generation youth from HKCI families who chose to work in HK may shed some light on how this transnational social capital works. When asked, all the 12 HKCI parent participants of the study, who have children working in HK, reported that they no longer had the social capital that they could use to help their child
find work there, because they themselves had left HK over 10 years ago and their previous networks were not functional anymore (Yan, Lam, Lauer, & Chan, 2012a). However, many reported that they have tried to mobilize their relatives and friends in HK through personal contacts and financial subsidy to assist their children in their preliminary settlement. One parent reported as follows: “I transferred a sum of money to Hong Kong but not to her. I gave it to my relative (with whom her child stayed). And then sometime[s], my child will also contribute some money to them” (Yan, et al., 2012a, p. 23). These parents’ stories were validated by the experience of the 18 youth participants who reported that their parents’ social capital in HK was very limited in terms of connecting them with a job but that it was very useful in terms of helping them to settle in the preliminary stage (Yan, et al., 2013). Almost all of these 18 young people shared a similar story about who helped them to settle in HK (i.e., relatives and parents’ friends who gave them a place to stay and emotional support to overcome the loneliness of being alone). One of the youth told us the following: “Emotionally, relatives also provide them with a feeling of home. Relatives, like having relatives here, that would make it nice, I guess, because as a kid, I was growing up, I didn’t really have a chance to meet so many of them so often and now I mean, in front of the dinner every so often itself where I would, as I was in Vancouver. … It makes me feel like it’s like home” (Yan, et al., 2012a, p. 23). Indeed, as we have found in different studies, in most cases, the social capital that HKCI parents have is limited in helping their children to enter the labor market, but they are the most reliable and intimate source of social capital for their children which also provides them with the
emotional and financial resources to go through the arduous job search process (Yan, et al., 2010). Conversion of Capital: Economic Outcome of Youth from a HKCI Family Both cultural (or human) and social capital only work “when they are recognized as having an [exchange] value” (Lawler, 2011, p. 1421). In other words, these two forms of capital only work when it can generate economic value for the youth. We can argue that the economic value of these capitals can be reflected in the performance of these young people in the labor market in terms of their employment rate, the nature of their employment, and more importantly, their wage. Generally speaking, there is an assumption that new generation youth from an immigrant family should do better than their parents in the labor market. It is simply because, unlike their immigrant parents, these young people grew up in Canada, have Canadian educational (and professional) qualifications, and neither a language nor a cultural barrier. So, given the fact that immigrant youth, particularly those coming from HKCI families, tend to have a higher attainment rate within higher education, they should be doing, if not better, at least as good as their non-immigrant counterparts in the labor market. Unfortunately, findings of a few recent studies seem to prove otherwise. Not all youth from an immigrant family background face the same kind of challenges. In Canada, when comparing to Caucasian local born and immigrant youth , youth from visible minority immigrant families face a double jeopardy: being young and being a visible minority (Yan, et al., 2012b). When examining the labour market outcomes of children of immigrants in Canada, Picot and Hou (2011) reported that after controlling for the educational attainment, location of residence, and socioeconomic differences, the visible minority second generation had a lower wage and a higher unemployment rate when compared with the domestic-born and
largely Caucasian generations. Similar findings were documented in a few earlier studies. In 2005, the Canadian Labour Congress reported that Canadian born workers of color (mostly second generation from immigrant families) tended to have a higher education qualification but they experienced a lower economic achievement in terms of their unemployment rate and the ratio in part-time and temporary work (Cheung, 2006). In 2007, another Statistic Canada document also reported that, although inconclusive, young visible minority youth—particularly men with two immigrant parents—faced earning challenges (Palameta, 2007). If social capital is a key factor that determines young people’s access to the labor market, we can understand why the new generation visible minority youth, including those whose parents are HKCIs, are in a disadvantageous position. As found in the UBC study (Yan, et al., 2012b), compared to their counterparts who are new immigrants and second generation immigrant, respondents who are third generation and largely white, have both richer bridging social capital and more positive outcome in job search. This result reflects that due to a lack of bridging social capital that can connect them to the mainstream job market, many immigrant youth have difficulty in accessing relatively high paid and prosperous job opportunities. However, this is not the whole of the explanation behind their poor economic achievement. Systemic discrimination that is embedded in the Canadian society (including the labor market) is another critical reason that further hampers these youth from accessing jobs and wages that match their high education attainment. Studies (Pendakur, 2005; Pendakur & Pendakur, 1998; Tran, 2004) consistently showed that accessing the Canadian job market has been notoriously difficult, not only for the foreign born in particular, but also for ethno-racial minorities in general.
However, discrimination against visible minorities is not entirely based on skin color. In a vigorously designed field study, an economist from the University of Toronto, Philip Oreopoulos, sent out 6000 resumes, which had a few different patterns of educational qualifications and work experience, both of which varied mainly in terms of whether these qualifications and experience were from Canada or a foreign country. The key predictor of this study was the name of the applicants which varied from English sounding names to other ethnic sounding names. The results reflect the severity of the systemic discrimination against nonCaucasian applicants. When everything else was equal, English-named applicants with a Canadian education and experience were more than three times more likely to be invited for an interview compared to applicants with Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani names and with a foreign education and experience (16% versus 5%) (Oreopoulos, 2009). Later, the study expanded to include another three major cities in Canada and the results were consistent. As Oreopoulos reported: “Overall, resumes with English sounding names are 39 percent more likely to receive callbacks than resumes with Indian, Pakistani, or Chinese names” (Oreopoulos, 2011, p. 160). Although many job recruiters that he interviewed cited the concern of language competence as a reason why they tended to pick English sounding names, Oreopoulos questioned this explanation by pointing out that even a Canadian born applicant with a Greek name fares much better than an applicant with a Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani name. Despite this challenge, we have still seen that some second generation Chinese Canadians have secured jobs in professional and managerial positions within the Canadian labor market. Actually, compared to other visible minority groups, the influence of the glass ceiling effect on the second generation Chinese Canadian seems to be statistically minimal (Pendakur & Pendakur,
2005). However, in real life, some young people from HKCI families are still haunted by the systemic discrimination when considering their future in terms of their ability and ambition. One father explained why his son, who was already in a managerial position in a big bank in Canada, decided to return to HK with his newly wedded wife: “We, people of yellow skin, find it more difficult here in terms of promotion to senior positions” (Yan, et al., 2013, p. 186). Meanwhile for some youth from HKCI families, the Canadian market is not big enough to match their career aspiration and ambition. Due to their high education qualification and bicultural background, there is a growing number of youth from HKCI families who have utilized their and their family’s transnational social capital and have moved to HK to seek a better and more prosperous job opportunity (Yan, et al., 2013). Conclusion For many youth from HKCI families, growing up in Canada may be a mundane and pleasant process. However, in this chapter, by using a capital lens, I intended to critically problematize this mundane process by drawing attention to some of the common experiences and patterns identified in the literature. As Bourdieu (1986) argued, the value and distribution of capital are structurally determined. Not all human and social capitals bear the same value. Not everyone has the same quality of human and social capital. More importantly, the use of capital is also contextual. Growing up in immigrant families, the new generation youth from HKCI families have generally accumulated rich human and cultural capitals. However, if coming from an immigrant family, these rich human and cultural capitals do not necessarily yield the new generation youth a good economic return from the labor market. Statistically, despite their higher level of academic achievement, youth from immigrant families, including many from HKCI
families, have done worse than their counterparts from the dominant, largely the Caucasian, group. In the Canadian labor market, whether young people’s human and cultural capitals can earn them the economic return that they deserve also depends on the social capital that they have. Unfortunately, in most cases, the social capital of youth from immigrant families is relatively limited in terms of connecting them to prosperous job opportunities outside their ethnic community. Coupling with their limited social capital is the systemic barrier that further hampers, if not deprives, them from achieving economic success. Today’s Canada is no longer a blatantly exclusive society. The multiculturalism ideal has almost become a cliché. However, for many visible minority youth, this cliché cannot rid them of systemic discriminatory treatments in their everyday social encounters in public arenas and in the job market. Given the fact that visible minority youth from immigrant families will be a major supply to the Canadian labor market (Statistics Canada, 2005), the government will need to generate policies that can combat the discriminatory practices against them and to develop specific programs that can help these young people to expand their social capital, which can then connect them to better job opportunities.
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