My mentee and I have both been profoundly shaped—in different ways, of course—by being the children of immigrant parents. In this piece, I wanted to explore this heritage and touch on how I see Generation F responding to parental influence.
Perhaps it starts with an offhand remark from your parents about how certain classmates of yours are “ordinary” or, even more damning, “average.” It’s only later that you realize all of those classmates are white.
Week after week, they make comments about picky Jewish coworkers, lazy black store clerks, fat white diners, and so on. Since your parents speak to each other in Mandarin, these digs go unheard by the people they’re referring to, but you understand them. You don’t detect any prejudice or hate in their voices; instead, “Puerto Ricans are poor and loud” is said in much the same tone as “The sky is blue.” Their remarks are small and offhand, but like a single drop of water that keeps striking a stone, they wear you down.
It’s not solely about race. “Housewife” is one of the worst words they use about a person—it means terminal idleness and lack of ambition. “Secretary,” you learn, is a few rungs up from “housewife”—it’s above “waitress” and “gossip,” but below “administrator” or “graduate student.”
Occasionally you get confused about who’s winning. As your family piles into the station wagon after dinner with your parents’ friends and the seat belts click, your father and mother launch into how ill-behaved their children are and how carelessly the dishes were prepared. The friends are Chinese doctors, just like your parents, so you realize that even among the best people, there are gradations. Our family’s food is better than everyone else’s, you think in the back seat, with a glow of pride.
As you grow up, you see the ignorance in your parents’ biases. You make friends with people of all kinds—from other races and backgrounds and even ones who didn’t go to college. You are a different person than your parents, you think. You are a better person.
It takes years before you notice yourself listening to coworkers, friends, family members, with the unamused tolerance of a deity who is stuck living with mortals due to a twist of fate. It’s still more years before you step down from the throne.
You envy the self-aware girls and women of Generation F—they let the remarks that you absorbed roll off them like water on ducks and they speak up when they need to. And you even start to think, Maybe they’re better than . . . before you stop.