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Why Born This Way

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Submitted By pobby
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Why Born This Way ‘I look nothing like her, nothing’. This was said by a ten-year-old Asian American boy and “her” referred his mother. This young boy’s name is Ken Liu. Now he is a famous science-fiction writer, who won both 2012 Hugo Award and 2011 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. When he was young, he was puzzled by a words-----“chink face”. Because of his face, he had to take a lot of unfair judgments from others and mocks from his peers. Therefore, Ken hated his mother who was born in China and married with his American father through an introduction service in China (his father “had picked his mom out of a catalog”). There were also problems behind the face itself. Ken’s mother could not speak English, which made Ken do not even want to talk with her. However, after his mother tried a lot to learn how to speak English, Ken did not want to talk with her neither because his mother’s “accent and broken sentences embarrassed him”. Then for many years, he almost never talked to his mother again. Many second-generation immigrants have the same experience with Ken Liu due to their special culture background. There are so much unavoidable conflict between the second-generation immigrants and their parents. Parents and teenagers in the immigrant families have different goals and concerns in their lives in United States. Dr. Vappu Tyyskä, a Associate Professor at Ryerson UniversityFirst doing many research about intergenerational relations, named these two group of people as “old world” parents and their “new world” children. First, I will stand in the old world showing the parents’ thoughts and focus. Different with their children, immigrant parents spend most of their lifetime in their origin country. Parents try to achieve the retention of culture among their children, which always contradicts with what their children get from their peers-----the main culture.

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