Tomoko Tokunaga, Learning to Belong in the World: An Ethnography of Asian American Girls

Abstract

Under the infl uence of an intensifi ed globalization process, we are witnessing a rapid increase of international migrants worldwide. Among them are so-called “second-generation immigrant children”, who are defined as individuals who were born and raised in a host country and have at least one foreign-born parent. In the United States today, they make up a signifi cant proportion of the population, increasing the society’s ethnic and racial diversity more than ever before. Successful integration of second-generation children to the mainstream educational system and labor force has become a major political concern. These societal changes and concerns have led many scholars in sociology, anthropology, and education to focus on the adaptation processes of second-generation immigrant children since the 1990s. In line with this burgeoning literature, this book explores how 1.5 and second-generation Asian American immigrant youth, living in a multi-ethnic suburb of a metropolitan area in the United States, negotiate the often incompatible cultural values of the country of origin and the host society and struggle to construct belonging and identity in a marginalized environment. The author, Tokunaga, does an excellent job in presenting the complex worldview and nuanced feelings of nine working-class Asian American girls, whose ethnicities include Chinese, Indian, Filipina, and Vietnamese. Through her fi eldwork at an afterschool program at Maple High in which the girls participated, and by interacting with the girls in and out of school, Tokunaga was able to capture the minute details of the girls’ life in-between. The book successfully reveals the ways in which the girls interpreted and strategically negotiated the contradictions from an insider’s perspective. In addition to a rich body of ethnographic data, Tokunaga’s ambitious use of the Japanese concept ibasho off ers fresh insight into the often neglected in-between lives of immigrant youth. Drawing on various Japanese literature, Tokunaga introduces the ibasho concept as “places where they feel at home and where they could be themselves” (8), and having “a practice-oriented aspect”, “focuses on the processes of ‘creating ibasho’ (ibasho zukuri)’ rather than assuming it is a fixed and passive condition”(9). Guided by this ibasho concept, Learning to Belong in the World: An Ethnography of Asian American Girls