Many different kinds of Chinese immigrants reside in America.  These immigrants came in three waves: from 1800 to 1950, from 1949 to 1980, and from 1980 to the present.  Chinese immigrants to the United States can be grouped into two categories: the “uptown” Chinese families and the “downtown” Chinese families.  This reflects the many different Chinese families that are found in the US and also the diverse background of Chinese immigration to the United States, and it also implies that many different Chinese-American family practices can be found in the US.  However, in spite of all these differences, members of Chinese families are still extremely close.

            Originally, the first Chinese immigrants came to America planned to work, earn lots of money, and go back to China.  Unfortunately, many of these plans fell through.  Thus, the first Chinese immigrants were just single men laborers. Eventually, Chinese females came as well to form families with the men, but these families were very unstable due to the bad bachelor habits the men had picked up in the United States (i.e., gambling, drinking heavily, finding prostitutes).

            The Chinese-American finally became more stable as time passed, and especially after World War II when the Chinese were much more welcome in the United States.  The “uptown” Chinese, which are the Chinese people working in professional jobs, according to Lee-Beng Chua in Psycho-Social Adaptation and the Meaning of Achievement for Chinese Immigrants, make up about 45% of the Chinese-American population.  Another 40% are the “downtown” Chinese, who are manual and service works.  Most downtown Chinese people are very recent immigrants or old settlers who, according to Chua, predominantly come from the southern coast of China, live in Chinatowns, and typically are not very proficient at English. 

            Chua describes in his book how this “uptown-downtown bipolarity” reflects how different Chinese-American communities have “divergent cultural, educational, economic, and political resources” and with the different “residential environments, income, and education levels” have extremely “diverse parenting strategies and family socialization practices.”  Even with these differences in family practices, however, Benson Tong, in her book The Chinese Americans, describes how a common thread of Chinese families is that they “are cohesive and achieve-oriented” because of “changing historical and contemporary circumstances”; basically, despite all those cultural, educational, economic, social, and political differences, Chinese families are very unified.