Essay About Immigrant Fertility And Early Chinese Immigrants

Do Sub-Cultural Norms Survive Immigration?
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Immigrant fertility has received a great deal of scholarly attention over the years. A large
number of studies have examined the role of ethnic subcultures and found them to be
influential in explaining nativity and majority-minority differences in fertility and other family
patterns (Espenshade and Ye, 1994; Fischer and Marcum, 1984; Swicegood, Bean, Stephen
and Opitz, 1988; Tang, 2001). However, these studies typically treat an immigrant or ethnic
group as a homogeneous cultural unit and hence miss the within-subgroup diversity. For
instance, immigrants from China in fact comprise several distinct culturo-linguistic subgroups,
such as Cantonese, Mandarins, Shanghaiese, and so on. Relevant to fertility studies, the
Cantonese in China are believed to be more familistic and pronatal than Mandarins (Lee,
2004), and to thus demonstrate higher fertility rates that cannot be explained by economic
and educational levels (Birdsall and Jamison, 1983; Feeney and Wang, 1993). When these
subgroups are put together as simply members of “Chinese culture,” as previous studies
have done, an important part of the scenario is overlooked.
The failure to examine subgroup cultural differences among Chinese immigrants can partly
be explained by methodological and data factors. For example, qualitative studies often
focus on early Chinese immigrants, who are overwhelmingly Cantonese.
Quantitative studies, on the other hand, largely rely on Census data which, until recently,
have not provided detailed information on Chinese cultural subgroups. This situation,
however, changed in the most recent U.S. census. Census 2000 for the first tim& provided
detailed information on several major Chinese dialects, including Cantonese, Mandarin,
Fukienese / Taiwanese, and Shanghaiese. This paper will utilize such information to compare
the fertility of Cantonese and Mandarins and to explore how their fertility behaviors are
influenced by subcultural norms and the immigration process.
“An earlier version of this paper won the Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2005 annual meeting
of the Southern Demographic Association. The *author thanks Philip Cohen, Frank D. Bean, Judith Treas,
Julie Hoigaard, Brian Adams, Wang Feng, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
.. Department of Sociology, University of California – Irvine, 3151 Social Science, Plaza A, Irvine, CA
92697 USA.
Journal of Comparative Family Studies
CULTURE, SUBCULTURAL NORMS, AND FERTILITY
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