The Pursuit of the Chinese Dream in America illuminates the hopes, expectations, challenges, and aspirations of this generation of Chinese students as they pursue higher education at American universities. Based on interviews with Chinese students, parents, teachers, and educational agents in Shanghai, this ethnographic study examines the cultural, economic, and social factors that have fostered the increase of Chinese undergraduates on American campuses.

Dennis T. Yang describes the pivotal roles that parents, teachers, peers, and educational agents played as students embarked on the college admissions process for American universities, with an emphasis on the prominent influence of parents during the college decision-making process. Yang addresses how his interviewees, particularly the parents and students, interpreted and evaluated the importance of cultural, social, and economic capital in their lives, and how the drive to obtain these forms of capital, to varying degrees, affected the families’ decisions to conceive of and support the study abroad option.