Tuesday, October 11, 2011

From Mike Oh

How has assimilation affected your family and your family life?

9 comments:

  1. Being a 1.5 generation Korean American, assimilation has affected my family in a very big way.Assimilation divided my family by drawing a line between my parents and my sister and I. My parents spent most of their life in Korea and grew up with a traditional and conservative lifestyle while my sister and I grew up more westernized and open minded. Even after the move to America, my father and mother raised us just as they were raised in Korea. Because of this, there were many conflicts between us since my sister and I wanted to be treated like our other friends whose parents were born and raised in a western society. A language barrier was also created between us as my mother to this day can't speak english that well and my sister cannot speak korean. Although I do not experience as much miscommunication myself,i can see how hard it is for my sister and my mother to connect.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Assimilation has affected my family and my families life in many different ways, its helped us better understand different types of cultures and ethnicity's in how they live and go about their lifes. Living in a diverse city has opened our eyes and helped my family accept alot of new and different things. My family has learned never to judge but instead to always accept and respect everything and anything around us.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Assimilation has sadly created a gap between me and my parents. I am a first generation in my family and my parents have lived in Korea for most of their lives. After they arrived to America and had my sister and I, they were having a hard time trying to adapt to the American culture.
    The reason is pretty clear. They lived in Korea for more than 20 years and so it''s harder to adapt when one has been conditioned to think another way for the entirety of their life. When I came here, I knew some of the Korean culture from home, but the world around had me deep into the American lifestyle.
    Because of this, my parents and I struggle to communicate with one another because I lost the Korean language other than extremely basic understanding and my parents have a hard time speaking in English. They don't understand a lot of what I do because they still haven't fully soaked in the culture, and so forth.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Assimilation has definitely affected my family in many ways. My parents were both born and grew up in China so life was much different for them in China then it is for me now in America. This difference creates a gap between our understandings of each other. First is language in which I do speak, write, and read Chinese but not even close to as fluent as my parents. Many times it is hard to communicate with them in Chinese and I do understand many of the Chinese "sayings" that they say. Next is culture/traditions. We have a lot of disagreements because of our different views on life. My parents are more traditional while mine are more modernized. Luckily, my parents have slowly been getting more used to the American ways over the years but they still disagree in many ways.

    ReplyDelete
  5. assimilation was a crucial art of survival when I moved to the united states from the philippines. In able for you to function in a society I had to stay connected with changes in the society. I had to conform what is deemed normal. To know what's normal you had to learn the ways of society as whole.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Although my family and I had difficulties adapting ourselves to American Culture at first, we enjoyed many moments of it because we experienced several cultural diversities that we had never experience in the Philippines before such as different foods, clothing styles, new friends and new lifestyle. Simply stated, it was a breath of fresh air. In addition, assimilation to American culture also provided me a wider world to experience new things, become more independent and gave me a new opportunity to fulfill my goals.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I have lived my whole life in CA I really don't know anything about the traditions of my culture, because my family has adapted so well to the American lifestyle I feel like there is no culture in my family anymore. My family has pretty much lost everything in our culture. I don't know anything about where I came from I have always had to learn about the places myself. My parents and family don't really talk about our culture.
    Assimilation has affected my life in a bad way, I have always felt like a outsider when I am with my family because I can see that we have pretty much thrown away our culture and taken on something that doesn't feel like us.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Assimilation has affected my family about 55%. That is just my percentage. My family has learned American manners and even a love for American food. Mannerism for my family was part of my family's assimilation because they wanted to be able to communicate and become accepted by the American community. Living in America meant that we were part of America's society so they believed we should act like it to be accepted. Food wise, my parents still don't like certain foods and will not eat American food on the daily. They would eat it occasionally. Culturally, my family is pretty complicated, but their assimilation to American culture is quite decent.

    ReplyDelete
  9. One distinct way that I can see how assimilation has affected my family life is through the language barriers that exist. Since my father had to get a job here to provide for our family, his English speaking skills are far better than that of my mother's. My grandma (dad's mom) also does not know how to speak any English. However, because of this reason, my brother and I speak a lot more to my father than my mother+grandmother because of the language barrier that exists.

    ReplyDelete