Cultural Identity and Cultural Capital: An Exploration of Chinese-Canadian Immigrant Families’ Reading Practices and Chinese Literature

This paper explores Chinese immigrants’ reading practices of Chinese literature and relies on the concepts of cultural identity and cultural capital to consider how families in Vancouver read Chinese literature. This case study consists of interviews that I conducted with fourteen participants from twelve Chinese immigrant families in Vancouver, B.C, Canada in 2017. This research shows that within immigrant families, active readers of Chinese literature tend to be mainly immigrants who emigrated as adult and youth. And their reading practices indicates how Chinese immigrants deal with their Chinese cultural identities and the cultural capital that Chinese literature carries in the context of immigration.