Danny ChaiI think there’s a strong possibility that my children will be more “Asian” than I am.
That’s strange to me. I think for most part, each generation that descends from immigrants becomes more “American”; by that I just mean they find less and less of their identity in their particular ethnic background. You can see this by looking at who they marry. First generation immigrants almost all marry within their own ethnicity. This is less true of the second generation, although they still tend to marry with similar cultures. Then you get like modern day Japanese-Americans, where the majority of them marry non-Japanese-Americans.
It’s also evident in who they hang out with I think. I dunno, just in general, I think that Asians, like all ethnic minorities in America, have gotten less Asian which each successive generation.
Well I’m pretty white-washed, I think. I’m fairly familiar with Korean culture but I don’t speak the language too well or care about it that much, to be perfectly frank. I rarely crave Korean food. Not really big on Korean pride. I mean, I’m happy to be Korean, I’m just not a hangook manseh guy. I dunno, I think I hit a magic center growing up in terms of there being other Korean/Asians around. There weren’t so few that I was made super aware of my ethnic identity, but there weren’t so many that I had super Asian pride either. To make a sweeping, inaccurate generalization, it seems like people who are really into Asian-American issues come from one of these two backgrounds, where there were nearly none or very many other Asians around when they grew up.
The thing is, Asian presence and influence in culture is growing, so there’s this weird Asian pride thing going on I never experienced when growing up. Like, I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that whatever school our kids go to, there will be many Asians there. It’s inevitable. Just, they (we) all value education too much and are willing to sacrifice for it. The Newsweek top high schools list just came out and I guarantee you, Asian parents all over are figuring out how to move into the appropriate school zones. If there are good schools with few Asians now, they’ll get there. It’s inevitable.
So yeah, our kids will have a lot of Asian friends. Maybe they’ll go to Borders and read manga. I still can’t get over it, how the bookstores have an extensive manga section. The craziest thing is, recently the Sunnyvale Borders added a non-translated manga section. That’s just insane to me. But yeah, Asian influence is growing. So maybe my kids will be all into Asian pride. Not that that’s bad. It’s just weird to me.