Do you ever feel like you and your children are never on the same page, same wavelength, same team? I feel like my parents and I aren’t just pages apart, we simply own two completely different books. I’ve decided to write this letter after I found out that asian children with immigrant parents go through very similar struggles.
My parents both left Vietnam when they were only eighteen and twenty to find a better life elsewhere. My dad was actually among the 12 million refugees after the Vietnam War. Now what comes on a new territory after one has navigated on a tiny boat for days? A full-blown exotic culture and a new foreign language. Those two factors, parents, are the main reasons why us, children, are sometimes not on the same page with you.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love the culture I was born with! I get to eat bún bò huế every month and get to celebrate the Lunar New Year every year. However, as someone who was born in a western country, some ideologies I learned in school or from my environment sometimes fail to agree with the values you grew up in your home country. For example, when I interviewed my friend Adrian–who has Chinese immigrant parents–and asked him to tell me one thing his parents believe in that makes him uncomfortable, he answered, “My parents want my future significant other to be Chinese… to keep the bloodline pure.” Although he said he doesn’t entirely reject the idea of it, he believes the pressure to find the perfect significant other that agrees with his parents’ standards is unnecessarily heavy. Emphasis on the pressure part. I cannot emphasize enough on how much pressure some of you put on us for “having good grades” or “finding the perfect partner”. I know a lot of your children would agree with me on this stance, and that for sure has affected many’s mental health.
And with that comes another issue. How am I supposed to tell how I feel to my parents with my broken Vietnamese? My parents don’t really understand French nor English, and I can easily make casual conversations in Vietnamese but can’t come forth with deeper ones. The language barrier really takes a heavy toll on some of us. Not only that, a lot of asian families come from a rather conservative background in which they don’t openly talk about their feelings. It’s hard. Adrian said he sometimes felt “like [he’s] being misunderstood,” saying how he wished “they could understand me.” Asians have this principle where we always have to respect our elders. And that would mean not speaking up our minds, refuting our words because we would be “disrespecting” you. Sometimes we just wish you could listen to us. No, we’re not trying to disrespect or “rebel”, we just want to be heard.
We hide a lot our values. That’s something we don’t really talk about. There were times where limits have been passed and things have happened, but I’m not getting into details for that.
Adrian
Please try to understand us. Considerate our feelings and the pressure you impose on us. Of course, consideration works from both sides. I’m sure you are trying your best to accommodate our lifestyle with yours, and I can assure you that we also are trying. Communicate! I can’t emphasize enough on how important communication is with your children. Communicating while being open-minded to each other’s feelings and thoughts is, I believe, the best way to have a successful first-generation children-parents relationship. Now, go break the ice!
– An asian child speaking up for other asian children
(If you want to learn more, here are two very interesting videos where we get the point of views of both Asian American children and parents. Some topics discussed in the videos reflect on the topics I wrote in this letter.)
6:35 : sandy's party 