In After School, Angela Chen unpacks the culture of after school tutoring centers in predominantly East Asian communities in the San Gabriel Valley, CA. Known as buxiban in Chinese, hagwon in Korean, and juku in Japanese, these after schools are referred to colloquially as cram schools and by scholars as shadow education. But in the US, after schools also provide essential childcare services to busy parents, many of whom are new immigrants. Despite the outsize role they play in Asian American communities, the general public knows very little about them. Through autobiographical texts, photographs, and xeroxed collages, Chen recounts how her parents, new immigrants from Taiwan, began their after school business and considers the relationship between this educational ecosystem and the myth of American meritocracy.

"After School is a tender and endearing work of ethnography that fuses text, image, and archival materials to explore the travails and diligent care of a family-run 'cram' school. The book is several threads artfully intertwined—a family album, a visual topographic study, curricular documents, and cultural anthropology. Taken all together, it is a fascinating memoir that offers a nuanced and multifaceted glimpse into the ethos of parenting, pedagogy, and immigrant striving." — Arthur Ou

Angela Chen 陳勇氣 (she/her) is a Taiwanese-American photo-based artist, writer, and educator from the ethnoburbs of the San Gabriel Valley, California. Her work combines autobiographical texts, photographs, and archival documents to explore the immigrant experience, the process of assimilation, and how we develop a relationship to place. Angela is a graduate of the Yale School of Art, where she was an Alice Kimball Traveling Fellow and an Art and Social Justice Grantee. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She taught previously at Rice University and New York University.