Parents Tolerate Americanization; Children Gain Respect for Heritage

After 21 years of living in America, Shih-how and Jane Chang have witnessed the slow but unmistakable Americanization of their three daughters.

No matter how often they speak Chinese to them, no matter how many stories of their families and the “old country” they pass on, no matter how many Chinese classes are given, the parents see in their own daughters the gradual loss of a great heritage.

It isn’t that the Changs didn’t expect this to happen. It is the rapidity and thoroughness of their daughters’ Americanization that amazes them.

And recently, as if to underscore the reach of assimilation in their family, their eldest daughter married a Caucasian.

But the parents, immigrants from Taiwan who became U.S. citizens more than a decade ago, had long ago made their choice.

“America is our home. If you do your best here, you have more opportunities. Our children will have them too. But we know there will be cultural adjustments too,” said Shih-how, 54, an American-educated engineer and the current principal of the parent-run Irvine Chinese School.

As he spoke, his serious, bespectacled demeanor and carefully worded English seemed to fit the stereotype of Chinese in America. Yet both parents’ naturally vibrant personalities can surface quickly, even among strangers, especially when the Changs slip back into speaking Mandarin.

But the subject this evening at their Irvine home was a particularly crucial one, and Jane Chang, 53, also confronted this matter of assimilation solemnly.

“Yes, I worry a lot about it,” she said in still halting English. “Yes, it makes me sad when the culture goes, the language goes. When young people look like a Chinese, but don’t speak or think Chinese, it is very sad.”

It may be that assimilation, at least in the case of the Chang daughters, hasn’t been that thorough.

Consider this from 25-year-old Sherry Jystad, whose vivacity and restless curiosity--like her sisters Julie, 20, and Karen, 16--is as much Chinese as it is American.

“Now we realize that we’re a lot more Chinese than we thought,” said Sherry, a UC Irvine-educated computer programmer. “This surprises us because--living here in Orange County--most of our friends and the things we do are non-Chinese.”

Maybe, she suggested, something of what they were taught by their parents and at the Irvine Chinese School has rubbed off. (The girls first attended in 1980 when they moved to Irvine after living in San Diego, New Orleans and Wichita, Kan.)

Maybe it’s because of the trendiness of books, films and plays by Asian-Americans--whose works provide a cathartic experience for children of Chinese immigrants, especially the widely noted stories of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan.

And maybe it’s the overall experience of simply growing up, and, added Julie, an engineering major at UC Irvine, “seeing some things a lot clearer and gaining more understanding of your parents.”

Yet, said Julie, who studied Chinese culture in Taiwan last year in a summer institute for American-born Chinese, “We really don’t have to define just how we discovered it (Chinese identity). As long as we know it’s a part of us that we now recognize and treasure.”

This was not always so apparent.

Like most children at the Irvine Chinese School, the Chang girls had intensely disliked the whole idea of ethnic schools, and not just because it meant extra school and extra homework.

“We kept thinking: Why are we going to these classes? The reasons seemed so obscure to us,” said Julie, who first attended the cultural and Mandarin language classes at age 11. “To us it was just to please our parents, because they told us to do it.”

Indeed, the classes seemed one more traditional duty to fulfill for the parents--most of whom, like Shih-how and Jane Chang, were born on the Chinese mainland--and who demanded obedience, familial responsibilities and school achievement in the strictest sense.

But the classes also made many children feel even more racially apart. They felt embarrassed whenever speaking Chinese outside the home or whenever their parents behaved in a stereotypical “Chinese” manner. They felt profoundly lacking in the kinds of independence and spontaneity that their Caucasian friends took for granted.

And, in the classic conflicts so detailed in contemporary Asian-American literature, the children felt lost in a bicultural chasm.

“You felt like in a void. Our parents were expecting us to be good Chinese,” Sherry said. “The (American) schools were teaching us to be good Americans.”

Yet, their Chinese-ness has slowly begun to surface. “For me, it was the literature. Reading works like (Amy Tan’s) ‘The Joy Luck Club,’ ” Sherry explained. “I saw our families, particularly our mothers, come to life in those stories (about immigrant mothers and American-raised daughters). I laughed--and cried--throughout that book.”

For Julie, who was also moved by the Tan stories, her sense of ethnic liberation came in that trip last year to Taiwan (which she took only at her parents’ insistence).

“I met hundreds of (American-born Chinese) students like myself--confused, a little like lost souls,” Julie recalled. “It was a revelation. We all had the same kind of families. We felt a special closeness, like finding what our parents had been saying all along.”

If the daughters have changed--so, too, apparently, have the Chang parents.

“They have adapted terrifically well, we think,” said the youngest, Karen. “Oh sure, they’re still very traditional. But they have accepted change, like giving us more say-so, more independence.”

And they have even tolerated marriage to a non-Chinese.

Although Shih-how and Jane Chang, like most Chinese immigrant parents, still strongly prefer that their children marry only Chinese, they have shown acceptance of Sherry’s marriage to Glenn Jystad.

Sherry and Glenn, also 25 and a computer programmer, had met five years earlier at UC Irvine.

“My feeling is that if they are happy, if they get along and like each other, it does not matter what the color is,” Shih-how said.

Jane, who had been the most outspoken about the marriage, described it this way: “I like Glenn. He has a real happy personality and even temperament. He has a good education and job.”

After the wedding last October, when Glenn asked Jane how she should be addressed--”Mrs. Chang? Mother Chang?--his mother-in-law retorted: “Mom, of course!”

In other ways, Jane Chang still defies Americanization.

She shops only at Chinese markets, such as those in Little Saigon, Santa Ana and Monterey Park. She cooks only Chinese meals: her favorite seafood, pork, vegetable and bean-curd dishes. She brings along precooked Chinese goodies whenever they travel to areas not blessed with Chinese restaurants.

She never misses her mah-jongg sessions every month in Orange and Los Angeles counties. She is still a devoted fan of Taiwan-filmed soap operas, renting video versions from nearby Chinese stores.

And she has not surrendered her fondest hopes for future generations. She still dreams of Julie and Karen marrying--of course--a Chinese.

And when Sherry and Glenn’s first child is born, when she is called upon for baby-sitting duty, she will--of course--lavish the child with love and coos.

But grandmother Chang’s bedtime tales will be about Old China. And she will read and speak to the child--but of course--in Chinese.