ABSTRACT
New Chinese immigration to Singapore is a contemporary phenomenon emerging after Singapore and China normalized diplomatic relations in 1990. Unlike their earlier coethnics migrating to Singapore, the newcomers from Mainland China, often called xinyimin in Mandarin, are predominately young with a balanced sex ratio. One of the most urgent resettlement issues that concerns young Chinese immigrant parents is their children’s education. In this chapter, we offer a descriptive analysis of family formation and parenting practices with a focus on examining how young xinyimin parents cope with resettlement challenges and navigate Singapore’s competitive education system to ensure their children’s academic success. Based on data collected from face-to-face interviews and participant observations, we find that, while xinyimin share similar cultural values and views on education and hold similar expectations of children’s educational achievement to Chinese Singaporean parents, they are more anxious about outcomes and future career prospects and thus more likely to adopt intense parenting strategies and practices than their Singaporean counterparts. We also find that, while Chinese way of parenting is severely contested in the processes of migration and adaptation, the success in promoting children’s educational excellence involves not only the right set of culturally specific strategies but also tangible support from familial or ethnic social networks and host-society institutions. We conclude by discussing some of the unintended consequences of intensive parenting and highlighting important implications for understanding immigrant education.
