Chinese Female Professors at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Struggles for Negotiations and Assimilations in the Cross-Cultural Setting of China and America

Abstract

Assimilation is a lifelong job for foreign-born Chinese Americans due to the fact that Chinese and American cultures are drastically different from each other. Thus, they have to struggle for negotiations between two cultures. This paper will discuss how Chinese female professors at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign struggle for negotiations and assimilations in the cross-cultural setting of China and America. During ten weeks of fieldwork, I used ethnographic approaches, including interview, participant observation, and “go-along” method. This paper will present the research group’s struggles for negotiations and assimilations in America through shaping sketches of them, describing their struggles in the cross-cultural marriages, and mapping their houses both in China and in America.