Navigating the educational pathway: intergenerational dynamics and transcultural negotiations of immigrant Chinese in Luxembourg

ABSTRACT

Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the contested roles of education in the intergenerational dynamics and transcultural negotiations of immigrant Chinese in Luxembourg. It offers an account of how immigrant youth and parents exhibited particular cultural orientations and social ties that helped them gain collective wellbeing yet also produced intergenerational and cross-cultural tensions in childrearing and schooling. Immigrant-specific social and cultural resources – as reflected in children’s labor participation in family catering businesses and parental high academic expectations – are both a source of empowerment for immigrant survival, and a source of constraint when leading to racial stereotyping and tensions in home-school, parent–child relations. This paper calls for culturally responsive schooling in order to better understand immigrants’ multi-pronged challenges, resources, and aspirations in negotiating educational inequalities. This study hopes to contribute to scholarship on immigrant education and European Chinese diaspora more broadly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ After the Second World War, an overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants in Europe found employment in ethnic economic niches (such as furniture making, catering, and garment workshops). With individual entrepreneurship, social networks among co-ethnics, and most importantly a consistent pattern of chain migration, existing immigrants helped new arrivals incorporate into business activities, become financially successful in time, and together build up strong ethnic economies in the host societies (Benton & Pieke, 1998).

² Official statistics of Luxembourg lumps together all non-EU foreign-born inhabitants, and does not indicate the size of Chinese immigrants. According to a Chinese embassy staff, there were three to four thousand Chinese inhabitants in Luxembourg in 2013, an estimate likely not including undocumented arrivals.

³ On the folk lexicon, the Qingtianese proudly call themselves the Chinese Jews who are voluntary nomads with strong commercial interests and who willingly endure arduous transnational paths in search for a better life.

⁴ Luxembourgish as the national language, German and French as the administrative languages. The sociolinguistic landscape is described as triglossia: while Luxembourgish is primarily used in oral and non-formal in-group communication, French and German appear most frequently in written forms and out-group exchanges. The educational system mimics the sociolinguistic landscape of triglossia: while Luxembourgish is the only language used in pre-primary education, standard German and French are introduced during the first years of primary school and continue as the languages of instruction as well as the subjects throughout primary and secondary education. Around the age 14, students start learning English as a compulsory subject, while they may also choose to take other languages (such as Italian, Latin, and Spanish) as optional subjects (Davis, 1994).

⁵ For a similar description in the U.S., see Alvarez, L. (1995). Interpreting new worlds for parents. New York Times, 1 October.

⁶ For a few months, I offered lessons on conversational and restaurant English at the Chinese Protestant church, per the request of the pastor who saw the growing English-speaking clientele in Luxembourg. The class attendees were adult workers or owners of restaurants who came to study with me Monday afternoons during business recess.

⁷ Chinese parents in this research were generally concerned about what they perceived to be the low standards of math teaching in Luxembourg schools.

⁸ Chinese students receive a dual-track education from the public schools and weekend Chinese schools (Benton & Pieke, 1998, pp.148–149). Unlike regular Luxembourg schools, the weekend Chinese school primarily aims to provide lessons for immigrant students to learn Chinese as their heritage language. In addition, it also provides lessons in musical instruments, calligraphy, martial arts as an integrated Chinese cultural program. See http://www.clccl.lu/program .

⁹ Chinese restaurants typically open six days a week, with business hours further lengthened to accommodate customers’ need for extended dining and socializing during weekends. In the summer when the service sector closed or slowed down for congé annual (annual vacation), the Chinese restaurants stayed open.

¹⁰ In a controversial book titled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother published in 2011, Amy Chua describes her efforts to raise her America-born children in the strict Chinese style and how her disciplinarian childrearing practices both bring about family clashes and contribute to the academic and extracurricular success of the children. The book generated an immense public response to the different styles of parenting between families of western and eastern cultural backgrounds, especially whether large numbers of talented Asian American children (the model minorities) profited from parenting approaches similar to Chua’s.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg.