Bicultural Overtones: College, Music Education, and Mental Health Experiences of Second-Generation Chinese-Americans

This thesis explores the experiences of second-generation Chinese-American young adults navigating through the context of their childhood experiences and young adult perspectives negotiating biculturalism, success, belonging, and mental health in the domain of music education. Music performance is a culturally-revealing and intersectional space where Chinese-American values and norms are manifested, institutionalized, and thrown into relief. My research methodology is qualitative, shaped by auto-ethnography, and derived from semi-structured, open-ended interviews of second-generation Chinese-American young adults and music educators. The central findings that emerged from this study include: the pursuit of a college education is a key bicultural norm in the experiences of second-generation Chinese-Americans; Chinese-American immigrants have created a biculturally informed structure of collegiate educational attainment; music education is a valued Chinese-American space used to actualize success for both children and parents; while the paths to musical and educational attainment provide effective avenues for attainment, they also engender risks to mental health. These voices and lived-experiences of the informants have been threaded together to form a body of research that contributes to the lack of academic literature on this ethnic niche.