Danny ChaiDave, you know a missionary’s kid. Brent Becker’s parents were missionaries; he was born in Korea, I think. I dunno, it’s kind of interesting talking to him about it.
I went to Portugal on missions once in high school and it was really interesting seeing the missionary family there. One interesting thing to me was that his kids were essentially Portuguese. Their first language was pretty much Portuguese and their English wasn’t all that great. I heard some time later that the family came back to the U.S. and the kids hated it – they just wanted to get back to Portugal. I don’t know how common that is, but I just thought it was interesting.
I think that’s something our parents didn’t think enough about when they came to the U.S. I dunno, it just feels like they came here for greater opportunities but believed they could keep their kids purely Korean. I think this has been one of the biggest motivations of the Korean church. But that’s just naive – if you raise your kids in another country, they’re going to be of that country, to varying degrees. When our parents complain how we’re not Korean, like how we want to marry non-Koreans or can’t speak the language or whatever else, they can trace that to their decision to come to this country. So don’t complain too much.
I dunno, maybe this almost never happens with missionaries’ kids, just, like I said, it’s what I saw with the one missionary family I saw. It was just something I had never thought about before, that an American missionary’s kids might not be American.