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Informal social settings outside of school are as important as formal educational settings for children's learning and achievement. In the United States, informal settings are often organized by ethnicity and socioeconomic status in order to mediate the processes of individual learning, which consequently leads to intergroup differences in educational outcomes. This chapter examines how a particular type of informal social setting is created and structured by the ethnic community in order to generate resources for school success. By looking specifically into the non-profit and for-profit institutions serving young children and youth in Los Angeles' Chinese immigrant community, the chapter describes an ethnic system of supplementary education that not only offers tangible support but also reinforces cultural norms in pushing immigrant children to succeed in school. It is shown that the kind of informal social setting to which Chinese immigrant children are exposed is not necessarily intrinsic to a specific culture, but results from a national-origin group's migration selectivity, the strength of a pre-existing ethnic community, and the host society's reception. National-origin groups that constitute a significant middle class with valuable resources (i.e. education, job skills, and financial assets), upon arrival in the United States, have a leg-up in the race to move ahead in their new homeland, while others lacking group resources trail behind. Educators and policymakers should be careful not to attribute school success or failure merely to culture or to structure, but to the culture—structure interaction.

This chapter describes how children growing up in Chinatown and desiring an American education chose between attendance at one of the private schools or at the segregated Chinese Public School. There is an apparent curricular emphasis of both the public and the mission schools in attempting to inculcate foreign-born schoolchildren with patriotic American values. These early efforts foreshadowed twentieth-century Progressive campaigns that promoted Americanization. Chinese parents, although not opposed to American education, attempted to counter some of the negative influences of Christianization and Americanization by sending their children to Chinese-language and Chinese-culture schools in Chinatown. Most Chinese children attended both American and Chinese schools; attendance at both Chinese and American schools contributed to a feeling of dual identity common to many second-generation immigrant children.

Chapter 5 documents the key historic events that led to the rise of the National Medicine Movement. In March 1929, the National Board of Health unanimously passed a resolution to abolish the practice of traditional Chinese medicine. In response, proponents of Chinese medicine held a massive public demonstration in Shanghai and, for the first time ever, organized themselves into a national federation. This mobilization gave birth to the National Medicine Movement, effectively starting what would become a decade-long collective struggle between two styles of medicine. Instead of resisting the state, however, the proponents of this movement developed the vision of a “national medicine” and actively struggled to create a closer alliance between Chinese medicine and the Nationalist state. As they fought for the new professional interests that had been created and sanctioned by the state, this Movement was dedicated to pursuing upward mobility for practitioners of Chinese medicine by way of the state.

This chapter focuses on the ethno-culturally hybrid Straits Chinese, who intermarried with local Malays for generations in the Straits Settlements of British Malaya and Singapore, and the role of female education in efforts to restore their socioeconomic status during the early twentieth century. Straits Chinese were also known as Peranakan (Malay for “child/born of”), and their women were called Nyonya. Peranakan male elites (called Baba) expressed concerns about the backwardness of the Nyonya in the Straits Chinese Magazine and founded the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School to modernize their women and their community. The Straits Chinese perspective on female education was similar to that of elites in various modernizing nations around the world, but their case was unique because they occupied several ethno-cultural and national categories concurrently. Straits Chinese women were tasked with representing modernity and tradition simultaneously, and with helping to secure their community’s place in the transition from colony to nation-state.

Instead of treating “Chinese medicine” and “Western medicine” as well-established distinct groups, Chapter 6 argues that these two styles of medicine took shape only gradually as they competed with each other vis-a-vis the state. To support this argument, this chapter explores a fascinating diagram of the healthcare landscape in 1930’s Shanghai that was created in 1933 by Pang Jingzhou, a vocal critic of Chinese medicine. By way of discussing more than forty items listed in this diagram, Chapter 6 shows both the remarkable heterogeneity within these two styles of medicine, and the complicated inter-group dynamics among them. As this diagram includes folk medicine and religious practices, it furthermore shows how modern Chinese medicine purged itself of these healthcare practices and thereby re-emerged as a national entity from this historic confrontation.

Carolyn Koo is a Chinese born in the United States, and grew up in a suburb of New York City where Chinese faces were few and far between. She remembers not appreciating her Chinese school experience, mostly because it involved extra work and Saturday classes. Carolyn tells of her grandfather's reunion with his family with whom he was separated for 30 years, and narrates her grandparents' life stories. She discusses her efforts in getting to know her grandfather better and the great things that she discovered about him.

Owing to his enthusiasm in Chinese theater, which sprang from his boyhood in Shandong, Wong attempted to bring a San Francisco Chinese theater troupe to New York, offering the Americans an opportunity to better comprehend Chinese culture. He also founded a Chinese language school in 1884, and in the meantime he studied law and worked as an interpreter. Between 1883 and 1886, Wong sold approximately 50 articles which fundamentally centred on China and the Chinese people, and these articles intrigued an array of American readers.

Chapter 6 identifies how Chinese Americans maintain the value of family through rituals, including rites of passage, ethnic routines, and table traditions. Rites of passage such as the wedding tea ceremony provide individuals with distinct responsibilities within the family. Ethnic routines, including family meals, transnational visits, and reunions, inculcate the norms of hospitality, reciprocity, and face/shame. They also teach the cultural scripts of familism through table traditions, such as pouring tea. Traditions and rituals change over time, however, and second-generation Chinese Americans pass on their liyi values and ethics differently than their immigrant parents did. The second generation lack a migration story of family sacrifice and have an attenuated knowledge of Chinese liyi traditions, and racialized multiculturalism further reduces ethnic traditions to what is marketable and consumable. Chinese Americans therefore hybridize and Americanize their ethnicity, which results in a new liyi Chinese American identity that consists of food and fun.

The distinct opposites of order and disorder, harmony and chaos were only knowable from social reality, after looking back at centuries of human behavior. The simultaneous projection of the concepts of order and of systematic correspondence from society onto nature could occur only after this knowledge had been attained. It led to origin of the doctrines of yin-yang and the five agents. The latter was initially conceived of expressly to explain social and political change. The doctrine of the five agents was expanded only in a second step to explain all kinds of change. Change is the temporary dominance of certain agents. The foundations for Chinese natural sciences were laid by 300 bc that led to the assumption of inherent laws. Law is the opposite of arbitrariness, or the randomness of actions, in which the decisions to act in one way or another follow no schematic instructions. They could arise from either emotions or from considerations of the present moment.