African Canadian, Born And A Canadian

Growing up with parents who are immigrants can present many obstacles for the children of those immigrants. There are many problems people face that we do not even realize. Things happen behind closed doors that we might not even be aware of. Writers Sandra Cisneros and Amy Tan help us become aware of these problems. Both of these authors express those hardships in their stories about growing up with foreign parents. Although their most apparent hardships are about different struggles, both of their stories have a similar underlying theme.

A important dilemma in my personal life is about my experience as a first generation immigrant in the United States. My parents take extra precaution to make sure I do not loose sight of where I came form and so, my parents drive to Mexico every year with my sister and I to see relatives who are living in conditions worse than ours so that we are grateful of our life in America. As I see my cousins and nieces/nephews grow up, I see realize that they have no real role model to look up to as no one has completed college when their parents exited high school and some not even that. So I want to help my family members to aspire to be something better in life and not a mailman or manual laborer like my father and uncles. I would like to instill

Children of immigrant parents should know that they are not alone and there are many other kids out there will similar backgrounds. Throughout middle school and high school, I had a few other Asian American friends. Just like me, their parents knew very little English and knew very little about the American culture and ways. We couldn’t talk about our lifestyle at home to our other friends because we would just sound strange. Although we couldn’t talk to others without feeling judged, we did have each other to laugh about crazy Asian mother moments and was able to feel empathy for the mean Asian father moments we experienced. It can be hard being a child of immigrant parents because as a child, all you want to do is fit in and have friends but, coming from a completely different background makes it hard for

Immigrants’ refusal to appreciate a fused culture promotes division. Mukherjee questions the idea of immigrants losing their culture for American ideals: “Parents express rage or despair at their U.S.-born children's forgetting of, or indifference to, some aspects of Indian culture,” to that Mukherjee asks, “Is it so terrible that our children are discovering or are inventing homelands for themselves?” (Mukherjee, 1997, para. 28). Many immigrants experience anger when their children no longer hold the ideals of their home country. This tension produced within the household hinders the unity within a resident country’s culture and encourages division within families. Using herself as an example, Mukherjee provides another instance of anger directed at her from her own subculture: “They direct their rage at me because, by becoming a U.S.

The article reading, “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants,” by Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, discusses the theory of segmented assimilation through which the new growing second generation cannot be “gleaned from the experience of their parents or from that of children of European immigrants arriving at the turn of the century” (1993: 74). The beginning of this article begins with discussing the difficulties and the pressures kids from the second generation experience from their parents and peers as to outside discrimination (Portes and Zhou 1993: 75). Research done on the process of social adaptation of the immigrant second generation conducted by the authors, showed how the outcomes of assimilation, contrasting,

Second generation immigrants are becoming more and more common in different countries, as first generation immigrants start having kids. These children are becoming much more integrated into the countries that they are born in and due to that, many of them are becoming assimilated into that country’s culture. This causes several problems with the parents of these children, as the parents feel that their children are losing their cultural and their identity, while the children believe that the best way to integrate into that country is to become like everyone else there. Several things are thought to correlate with second generation immigrants and their integration into society. Some examples include, education, family relationships, and cultural

The teenage years and transition to adulthood is in itself a very difficult period. Blending or fitting in are omnipresent issues that must be dealt with. For children of immigrants, this difficulty is only intensified through language. Both Amy Tan and Khang Nguyen strategically use narrative anecdotes and employ several rhetorical devices to illustrate this struggle in their works, “Mother Tongue” and “The Happy Days,” respectfully. Amy Tan chooses her childhood home as the primary setting of her work. This allows her to focus primarily on her conversations and interactions with her mother. However, she also gives several anecdotes in which her mother’s background and improper English negatively affected her, outside the home. Through

Many second generation minorities from immigrant parents are driven subconsciously to conform to new culture and social norms. For foreign born parents and native born children integrating the two cultures they inhabit brings about different obstacles and experiences. In Jhumpa’s “The Namesake” the protagonist Gogol is a native born American with foreign born parents. The difference with birth location plays an important role in assimilating to a new society in a new geography. The difficulty for parents is the fact that they’ve spent a decent amount of time accustomed to a new geography, language, culture and society which makes it difficult to feel comfortable when all of that changes. For Gogol the difficulty only lies with the cultural norms imposed by his parent’s and the culture and social norms that are constantly presented in the new society.

Higher expectations by first-generation immigrant parents also involve as intergenerational conflict in forming the American identity. In the article “Intergenerational

The African diaspora identity has much to do with the immigrant’s adopted homeland as it does with their origin. The identity bridges the originating past (tribe) and the contemporary / future (diasporan)

This is an analysis of prospect of migrant families playing a dynamic role in making gap between the learning systems due to conflicted concepts about how the US society will affect their communities (Conchas 477). These may lead to families being afraid of losing their children to Americanization. This idea is plausible when one considers the difference between the environments at home as compared to those

I would love to think that your family background and where come from should not predict how you communicate in life, but who you grew up with, who are your family and where you grew up definitely has a lot of influence of how you are going to communicate later in life

Multiculturalism is a significant part of the North American culture. Customarily, people who have left their home country have done so in pursuit of a better life. The desire to integrate successfully and become a positive contributor in society places a lot of pressure on families who come from backgrounds that are different from the mainstream culture. While settling in Canada, newcomers face a number of socio-economic and cultural barriers that can put a strain on family relations and degrade cultural practices. For my essay I will be discussing the family conflict circulating immigration within a family; putting specific focus on first generation North American youth and emerging conflict that is generated from intergenerational differences, that is digested from diverse opinions based on different cultures.

The cross-generational immigrant experience affects individuals in a unique manner wherein ethnicity, and therefore, cultural identity becomes something continuously negotiated. My father and his family came to Canada from South Africa as refugees 31 years ago. However, my mother was born in Edmonton and her family has been in Canada for at least 7 generations. As for myself, I belong to no isolated culture and like to consider myself a challenge to the often-one-dimensional approach to both ethnic and cultural identity. I am a biracial, English-speaking, second-generation Canadian female that grew up in a culturally blended, lower-middle class household and neighbourhood, whilst belonging to the “nerd” subculture outside of my family, as a self-professed literature enthusiast. This culturally diverse upbringing has had a profound impact on my personal identity.

Firstly, I wanted to get more insight on just how much Asian immigrant parents have to sacrifice for their child, to witness how vital education is towards them. My parents themselves are also immigrants which gives me some common knowledge about the sacrifice immigrant parents face. However, I wanted to gain a different point of views on how parents view sacrifice; then I came across an article titled “Giving It Up: Immigrant Parents and Sacrifice.” This article by Theresa Celebran Jones is more a story about her being a parent and also a child to Asian immigrant parents. Jones elucidates the pressure parents may put on their child by