Family pressure and the educational experience of the daughters of Vietnamese refugees

Abstract

This article explores the issue of gender role changes encountered by young Vietnamese-American women based on our ethnographic study of Versailles Village, a low-income ethnic community in New Orleans, US. We examine how female Vietnamese high school students deal with conflicts between the stubborn traditionalism of parents and the desire for personal liberty of American-reared children and how they negotiate gender roles at home and in school and society. Through in-depth examination of the school experience of young Vietnamese women, we find that they not only equal young men in scholastic performance and ambition, but may even show higher levels of achievement. Our data indicate that it is not because the women are liberating themselves from traditional gender roles in order to avail themselves of the opportunities of American society. Instead, the socio-economic conditions of the new land place a new emphasis on education for both men and women. Immigrant families see the importance of education as an avenue of upward mobility for their children and encourage educational achievement. Precisely because traditional gender roles lead families to exercise greater control over daughters, young women are pushed even more than young men toward scholastic performance.