The Street Boy Identity: An Alternate Strategy of Boston's Chinese-Americans

Chinese-American children are often seen by the larger white society as models of filial piety and scholastic achievement; however, in recent years Chinatowns in America have increasingly had to grapple with the problem of Chinese and Chinese-American street boys and delinquent youth gangs. This paper deals with the Chinese-American street boys of Boston's Chinatown community and with the conditions leading to the formation of such a group. Due to the Chinese migration pattern which has only now produced the first sizable American-born generation, to the shifting economic conditions within this community, and to the changing nature of family relationships, a number of Boston's Chinese-American boys find themselves unable and unwilling to identify totally with either the Chinese culture of their parents or the American culture of the larger society. Their solution has been to selectively identify with both cultures, valuing elements of each which they feel they have adequate control over and rejecting others which they feel unprepared to deal with, and in this way have created a new and manageable identity for themselves.