Striving in the Suburbs: Education and the Pursuit of Success in a Chinese Immigrant Community

This dissertation examines the ways that a highly educated and professional-class Chinese immigrant community in the affluent white suburbs of the New York metropolitan area has strived for success in racialized America through education. Drawing on 100 interviews with first-generation immigrants and 18 months of participant observational fieldwork, this ethnography uncovers how this Chinese community defines what it means to achieve and live a successful life—both for themselves and for their children—and how education functions as a modality to achieve not only socioeconomic mobility and stability but also valued social resources such as respect, esteem, and belonging. This study ultimately offers a case of how immigrant communities learn to navigate the racialized forces, discourses, and structures around them and to make sense of their complex position in America.