Walking in Two Worlds

This one's been germinating for a while. The seed's been there all my life, but I suppose it got exposed to the elements by reading an article in an alumni magazine about how a student ending up doing two different internships during a recent summer break. It was personally poignant as the student's parents turned out to be Chinese immigrants from the same region of China that my parents  originally emigrated from. The first internship was in Washington D.C. where all his fellow interns' parents were all people with influence within the Beltway able to pull strings while his immigrant parents run a Chinese restaurant in a small city in Michigan. While his peers' parents were actively involved in furthering their careers, conversations with his parents are limited to topics such as how to make rice porridge. Unable to explain how he wishes to be an international policy maker in terms of immigrant migration, he's told his parents that he helped his teacher while in Washington, and that he wants to be a teacher someday. At the same time, he wants his goals to bring honor to his family.

There's a lot of memories dredged up by this article, but the ones that resonate most deeply at the moment are tied to the struggle of living in two different worlds trying to reconcile the differences between in the values of my parents' ethnic culture and what I will loosely describe as American culture. Let me try to explain. I've lived in southern California for almost 30 years now. I feel a lot more at home here than I ever did living in the midwest. I'm still different from most people - but no one is like anyone else here. Instead of one dominant culture out here, LA consists of a number of different subcultures, even within different ethnic groups; a therapist who treats only asian-americans was at first fascinated by me where we first met: an american asian from the midwest, who didn't act or speak like any other asian male he'd ever met. A Nisei (Japanese-american) himself, raised in the (San Fernando) Valley, he told me that when speaking to any other LA-raised Nisei, within a few minutes he could discern where that person had been born and raised: the Valley, Little Tokyo, the south bay (Gardena), etc. There is no one-size-fits-all story to express the Asian-american experience. But that's not going to stop me from trying to identify the commonalities. (And there's an even more profound difference that I didn't recognize until recently; the culture is different here because western/central european heritage and traditions really don't exist here. The immigrants by a huge majority come from elsewhere. So the dynamics are different here.)

So as I continue to explore what it's meant to walk in two worlds, I'm going to need to keep reminding the reader that while a lot of my experience will be applicable to many fellow asian-americans with immigrant parents, a lot of it might not.