After School
Angela Chen

“Children growing up in Asian diasporic households are intimately familiar with the cram school—spaces that were neither home nor school, yet for many became a sort of third-space where learning was stripped down to its most bare and often unflattering qualities. These spaces are intimately tied to the immigrant communities they are embedded within. Despite the pejorative connotation of their names, cram schools have a gentler role to play, often acting as surrogate families for those who attend, and offer a different path toward assimilation that is in many ways kinder and more egalitarian than the Hobbesian combat zone of your average American public school. Quietly political and deeply personal, After School speaks to how these overlooked spaces have shaped generations of families.This book is a bittersweet reflection on how familial care, the pressures of education, and the hustle of being a small business owner all intersected in one strip mall in Southern California, where the love of a parent finds expression in the math exercises of a worn and xeroxed spiral-bound workbook.” —Kenneth Tam, Artist, Assistant Professor, Rice University, and Faculty, The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College

“Angela Chen’s After School combines deadpan, evidential black-and-white photographs with the family archive of teaching guides, textbooks, and tutoring manuals intended to boost test scores—a subject that could otherwise be objective and unemotional but here is deeply personal, one that feels epic in its scope of self-exploration. Despite the preponderance of empirical data about her childhood and upbringing, the question of who she is and the nature of identity for any of us fundamentally remains a mystery.” —Gregory Crewdson, Photographer, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Photography, Yale School of Art

“At first appearing to be an abecedary using pictures and childhood anecdotes, After School quickly branches off and coalesces into a cram session on Chinese discipline, ‘excellence,’ family striving, hard labor, immigrant ingenuity, and the various verbal and nonverbal calculuses as well as politics of education—all pursued in the relentless L.A. glare of the long con or conundrum of the so-called American Dream. Angela Chen’s exacting book, an inventive, personal photo-essay, takes its place with those of Allan Sekula, Fred Lonidier, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She schools us carefully, pitching her lessons between pride and heartbreak.” —Bruce Hainley, David and Caroline Minter Professor of the Humanities, Rice University

“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 altogether, it is a fascinating memoir that offers a nuanced and multifaceted glimpse into the ethos of parenting, pedagogy, and immigrant striving.” —Arthur Ou, Artist, Professor of Photography, Parsons School of Design

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.

This project was made possible with the support of the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) and the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.

?The book is the source of an exhibit at Counterpath, opening August 9, 2025 and on view through September, 2025. Details here. Videos of opening here.

Angela Chen (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. angelachen.info (author photo: Lorena Molina)

After School
by Angela Chen
8.5 x 11, 170 pgs., $50
ISBN 978-1-962365-08-6
Copublished with np:
November 2025