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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?"