Sun-Hee Park, Lisa. Consuming Citizenship:

Sun-Hee Park, Lisa. Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs. (2005) Stanford: Stanford University Press. Park's main purpose in this book is to examine "the process by which Korean-American and Chinese-American children of entrepreneurial immigrants struggle to define themselves as Americans" (p. 16). Park's examination is based on more than a hundred interviews, of which eighty eight adolescents, like herself, grew up in immigrant entrepreneurial families. She also interviewed seventeen children of non-entrepreneurial immigrants and additional thirty four family and community members of Korean and Chinese immigrants.

Park proposes a new perspective on examining the experiences of Asian immigrants and their second-generation offspring in the United States. Moving away from a long-established tradition of exploring how Asian immigrants managed to integrate into the American mainstream successfully -- which she critiques as an approach "that necessitates the absorption of immigrants into a preexisting and unequal social hierarchy" (p. 1) -- Park attempts to explain how the existing social structure in the United States shapes the lives of Asian immigrants.

"I argue that for Asian-Americans, the process in question is not whether or not they have adapted," Park writes, "but rather why Asian-Americans are made to feel compelled to prove their 'Americanness" and how Asian-Americans display their social citizenship (or belonging)" (p. 2). According to Park, Asian immigrants are quire ready to integrate into the American mainstream society. Therefore, the pressing question is to understand why second-generation Asian immigrants -- legal American citizens -- are continuously pressured to prove their "real" Americanness.

Focusing on children of entrepreneurial immigrant families is illuminating, Park says, because these children try to live to the hope of reaching the American dream by immigrants, on the one hand, and live up to the expectations of Euro-Americans as the exemplary "model minority," on the other. These children try to meet the expectations of the American ideology of success (in terms of accumulating economic wealth), Park argues, by exerting "their social citizenship through consumption" (p. 2).

Indeed, Park's analysis of how Asian immigrant children try to succeed in American society revolves around the idea of consumption as the most dominant social relationship in American society. In Park's analysis, consumption in American society is a marker of identity for Asian-Americans, it defines their role in the society, and only by consuming more can these immigrants and their children demonstrate the rest of America that they truly belong to American society.

This "belonging," she writes "is presented through possession of material goods that symbolize that one contributes to rather than burdens the United States -- thereby making one a 'good' (versus 'bad') immigrant" (p. 5). By climbing to the upper layers of the social hierarchy through acquisition of wealth and prestige, immigrants in America try to free themselves from racial discrimination directed against them. This process operates under an assumption that the more one is wealthy, the more he or she is protected from racism.

The social definitions of citizenship here, Park argues, play the major role since legally children of immigrants are not required to overcome the barriers imposed by the existing social hierarchy. The idea of social citizenship helps us to understand the unequal power structure that relegates immigrants -- and other representatives of the lower class, for that matter -- "to particular spaces within this hierarchy based upon their race, class, and gender" (p. 5). Asian immigrants in America, Park argues, have to choose between being a "dependent" immigrant and a "deserving" one.

Most Asian-Americans strive for the latter, fulfilling the expectations of the dominant culture as a "model minority." This decision, according to Park, is based on a "false" idea, as this notion, rather than granting Asian-Americans full citizenship, reinforces their designated social space where Asian-Americans know how to "behave" in a certain way. The "model minority" notion presumes that Asian-Americans are superior to African-Americans but are inferior to White Americans.

Moreover, Park also argues, American dominant culture falsely claims that the Asian-American successes in finding upward economic mobility are made possible by the opportunities offered in the United States. In reality, she argues, Asian-Americans succeed in spite of the barriers imposed by the social structure which discriminates along racial, gender, and class lines. Park outlines her argument in the book by dividing it into several chapters thematically. In chapter 2, she discusses the social context under which the experiences of Chinese and Korean-American immigrant children may be analyzed.

She argues that Korean and Chinese-Americans forge a "strong collective Asian-American identity" (p. 24). In chapter 3, Park elaborates.