Chapter 13: The Making of School Success and Failure: The Case of the New Immigrant Students from Mainland China

This paper examines the impact of change in the socio-cultural environment on the school performance of new immigrant secondary school students who came to Hong Kong from Mainland China for the purpose of family reunion. These immigrant students were born in the Mainland, but because one of their parents, usually the father, is a Hong Kong permanent resident, have been allowed under the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to join their parents as the territory’s permanent residents. These new immigrants (usually referred to as new arrivals in the local literature) are ethnically the same as the overwhelming majority of the Hong Kong population, but having been in the territory for less than three or four years, have had to cope with problems and difficulties in adapting to a new environment. They have had to come to grips with a discontinuity in school experiences, a change in family life, a break with past friendships, as well as unfamiliarity with a social-cultural setting which is more modernized and westernized than their places of origin. In addition, new immigrants (and visitors) from the Mainland have been the subject of ridicule and discrimination in the local media and among the local population (Government Secretariat, 1997, pp. 17, 28–29). In short these new immigrant students have faced difficulties and obstacles which can be expected to detract from their performance at school. Yet as the data from the respondents in my study show, while some have fallen behind in their school performance, many others have surpassed their local counterparts in academic achievement. What factors and conditions, then, have contributed to the success and failure of these new immigrant students? To what extent can their success and failure be attributed to differences in the way they respond to changes and challenges in the new environment? What is the role of socio-cultural change in the making of academic success and failure? Indeed questions such as these have been the subject of numerous studies on minority education in multicultural and multiethnic societies such as the United States and Britain. I will now take a cursory look at those studies which bear a thematic affinity to our inquiry, in order to draw explanatory insights to guide our analysis.