"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."