“My parents are letting go of some of their ways,” insists Joo Hee Yoo, 13, who came to Los Angeles from South Korea ten years ago. “They are beginning to understand that America is a place of freedom.” Maybe so, but the rules for Joo, who now goes by the name Jennifer, and her two younger sisters would strike many U.S. youngsters as unduly restrictive. No telephone calls to or from boys. No curling irons or pierced ears until age 15. No hair spray and makeup until after high school. “When you are a student, you should look like a student,” says her mother Hae Sun Yoo. “That is hard to tell children when society contradicts that here.” She and her husband have the solution. “When our daughters complain, ‘Why can’t we do this?’ we explain to them they are Korean,” says Hae Sun Yoo. But Jennifer is not totally swayed. Says she: “You can have a hairstyle and still have an education.”
While other 18-year-olds agonize over which pretty dress or funky pair of shoes to buy, Juniace Sene Charles worries about “what this month’s electricity and water bill are going to be.” The petite teenager, who came to Miami with her mother, younger brother and sister from Haiti two years ago, is the family’s financial mainstay. Every day when classes end at Edison High School, she rushes to her job at Wendy’s on Biscayne Boulevard. Her take-home weekly salary of about $75 is augmented occasionally by her mother’s earnings from babysitting. “I’m chief of the household,” she says. Juniace is fiercely loyal to her family, but determined to make her own life: “I’m going to college, and I’m going to be an agronomist. Here in America I can make it.”
Dressed in light cords and deck shoes, with sunglasses dangling from his sweatshirt, Son Nguyen, 18, seems like any other carefree high school graduate in Houston. “But if my mother saw me today, she would be shocked,” confesses Son, who fled Ho Chi Minh City at age eight with a younger brother, his older sister and her husband. “I wouldn’t be her boy anymore. I would be an American stranger.” Still, within the two-story brick house he shares with eight other people, Son becomes a model Vietnamese youth, industrious, responsible, deferential. In that household, Vietnamese is spoken, Vietnamese food is prepared, Vietnamese customs are followed. Son’s mother has not been permitted to leave Ho Chi Minh City, and after a decade of separation, he often wonders how he would greet her. With an exuberant American-style hug? Or with a formal, respectful hello? “I’m so changed now,” Son says, “that if I faced her, I wouldn’t know what to do.”
These conflicting tugs of direction are a perplexing constant in the lives of millions of youthful American immigrants. Growing up in two cultures is at once a source of frustration and delight, shame and pride, guilt and satisfaction. It can be both a barrier to success and a goad to accomplishment, a dislocating burden or an enriching benison. First-generation Americans have an “astonishing duality,” declares Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles, himself the son of an English immigrant. “They tend to have a more heightened awareness both of being American and also of being connected to another country.”
Immigrants’ children are sometimes agonizingly aware of the traits that mark them as foreign. Among these: their names. Jorge Orellana, 8, the son of immigrants from El Salvador, says classmates in a Chicago school taunted him with the words “Mexican kid.” He now introduces himself as George. Son Nguyen’s 16-year-old brother asks new acquaintances whether they want “my American or Vietnamese name.” He is Tien to his family, Tim to others.
Parents may encourage such a switch. Says Vietnamese Refugee Le Giau, a resident of Fountain Valley, Calif.: “They should change their names because it’s easier for them when they go to work.” His three daughters, Hanh, Tien and Trang, are now known as Hannah, Christina and Jennifer. Food too can be a sensitive issue. “My brother wants to become American all the way,” says Imelda Ortiz, 17, who left Mexico for Houston at age one. “He tells my mother to cook American food like meat loaf and potatoes. Instead we cook rice and beans and fajitas (skirt steak).”
Parents’ speaking a foreign language can embarrass children. Riki Hayashi, 6, shocked his Japanese-born mother Kaori last year by announcing that he did not want her to speak her native tongue when his schoolmates came to visit at their Culver City, Calif., home. “All his friends are American, and in his concept of himself he is American,” sighs Kaori. The parents’ poor command of English can prove awkward. Children are pressed into service for their immigrant parents in all kinds of circumstances: when the electric company sends a dunning notice, the landlord needs a lease signed, a policeman needs information.
Unlike offspring of native-born Americans, many children of immigrants learn early that frivolity is a luxury they can ill afford. Frequently they begin working before they become teenagers. “They’re capitalists, almost to the person,” notes Psychiatrist Coles. After school and on weekends, Le Giau’s four children help out at the family’s pastry shop. Hannah, 18, minds the cash register and serves customers. Vinh, 17, who has kept his name because it is easy to pronounce as “Vin,” works the cleanup detail. Christina, 15, washes dishes, and Jennifer, 12, aids her mother Therese with the baking and cake decorating. “American children don’t understand,” says Hannah. “They don’t know why I can’t go to the beach.” As a consequence, many immigrants’ children look upon home-grown Americans only as casual friends.
For the children of emigres, the emphasis is on education. “When they have good knowledge, they make good money,” explains Vong Ly, a Hmong tribesman from Laos who now lives in Banning, Calif., with seven of his nine children, ages eight to 17. Medicine, law, engineering, business and computer science are the favored fields. Le Trinh, a Vietnamese-born Chinese who arrived in Houston five years ago, will enter Texas A&M in the fall to study engineering. “It’s not my favorite subject,” she admits. “I love teaching, but that pays too low.”
Highly motivated, the children of immigrants frequently feel guilty and disgraced when they do not excel at their studies. Le Giau expressed pride but Daughter Jennifer was ashamed when she came in second in a spelling contest. Son Nguyen, who plans to study engineering and then become a doctor, is still concerned that he has been infected by slack U.S. student habits. Reason: instead of straight A’s, he pulled a few B’s in his senior year in high school.
Immigrant parents, however insistent, are not always successful in excluding distracting American influences. Le Vinh’s jet black hair is cut in a moderate punk style, and he sports fashionable, wide-shouldered jackets, to his father’s distress. “He would have me in the preppie look,” says Vinh with disdain. Retorts Le Giau: “When I went to school we wore uniforms.” Imelda Ortiz finds herself in a tug-of-war with her mother over American teens’ signature apparel: tight jeans. “My mom says I look like a Solid Gold dancer and makes me take them off,” complains Imelda. “She looks at the way some Anglo girls dress and says they don’t have dominio propio (self- control).”
The big problem, though, is dating. “I keep telling my mom that it is not bad to date and that she should trust me,” says Imelda, “but a boy can’t even come over to my house to talk to me. Not even outside on the steps. My mother says, ‘It looks bad, no respect to the house.’ ” Many boys also find themselves on a short tether. Asked about dating, Vinh tosses two wallet-size photos of girls onto the table. A disapproving stare from his father and Vinh promptly jams them into his pocket. “He’s the one I worry about,” says Le Giau. “Girls call him a lot. I have to cut off the phone. He doesn’t have time for girls. He has to study.”
Once the critical faculties of the children are sharpened by schooling and broader cultural exposure, however, the gap between them and their parents usually widens. That separation is the natural consequence of what Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, calls “the brutal bargain.” As Podhoretz, the son of Jews from Galicia, explains, “The more you succeed in the wider world, the more estranged you become from your parents’ mores and values. The paradox is you betray your parents by obeying them.”
The unusual closeness of immigrant families makes this struggle for autonomy painful to both sides. High School Junior Imelda Ortiz plans to study engineering in college. Her parents expect her to attend the University of Houston while living at home, a pattern set by her two sisters. But Imelda wants to enroll in the University of Texas at Austin. “I’m afraid to go out on my own,” she admits, “but even though it may turn out bad, at least I’ll learn, right? I’ll realize what is or is not for me.” Le Giau and his wife Therese expect their children to live at home until they wed and hope to arrange marriages for their daughters after they finish college. But the girls are already balking. Says Jennifer: “If the decision is up to them, they’d choose a smart man in business. I want a nice, funny man who will not always worry about his work.”
Despite the tendency to revolt, many children do not want to jettison their cultural heritage. Imelda Ortiz plans to raise her children in Mexican fashion. “I’ll be strict, but not as strict as my mother,” she says. “I feel like an American about work, education, external things. But I feel like a Mexican inside.”
To be both American and Mexican or American and anything else almost always means that one is not wholly either. For some, the dual identity breeds a sense of not belonging anywhere. But an intense attempt by an individual to wipe out an entire side of his or her character can end in tragedy. In 1979, Phede Eugene landed on a Florida beach. He was twelve and one of the maligned boat people from Haiti. Desperate to belong, he changed his name to Fred, learned to speak fluent English and became an A student at Miami’s Edison High School. He sang in the school choir and worked at a local Burger King to earn money to buy a car. No one, not even his girlfriend, suspected his Haitian background.
Then one evening last fall, his mask slipped: Fred’s sister dropped in at the fast-food outlet and spoke to him in Creole in front of his girlfriend. Next day Fred bought a gun. Two days later he drove his prized ’73 red-and-white Mercury to a church parking lot and shot himself to death. He was 17. Says his father, Ikanes Eugene, who shuttles migrant workers in his bus to Florida’s vegetable fields: “He felt the rejection of Haitians to the point he hid his own origin.”
Most children of immigrants do manage to make a satisfactory amalgam of their two worlds, keeping what they like and discarding what they do not. Le Trinh is just beginning to forge her own cultural alloy. She plays records by popular Vietnamese artists but likes European classical music. She has read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in Vietnamese, but now also appreciates the novels in the original English. She favors Vietnamese food, but has taken to one American custom without hesitation, gabbing on the telephone for hours on weekends. Like many immigrant children, Le Trinh insists that shunning a familial heritage is simply not an option worth considering. “I don’t think you should give up your past,” she declares, “but you should also find a way to fit into life here. I want to get along with Americans but keep my culture.” She pauses, then gives a tiny shake of her head and asks, “Do I want too much?”
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