Clash of Cultures
From The Peopling of NYC
I was born here. Like all the other kids in school, I was born and grew up here in America. I was never really like the other kids, though. Even though I talked the same, dressed the same, acted the same, and even watched the same TV shows and listened to the same music, they always treated me like an outsider just because I was Chinese. The teachers weren’t that much better, either. They kept saying my name wrong and calling on me in class before anyone else. It’s not like I even know what the answers were, really. They just expected me to know everything because all the other Chinese kids coming from China were geniuses. At first, the other kids kept picking on me because they wanted me to do their homework and stuff. When it turned out that I wasn’t a human calculator like everyone hoped, they got disappointed and kept asking “Why aren’t you as smart as all those other Asian kids?” After that, the other students didn’t really care that I wasn’t as smart as the other Chinese kids. They just started picking on me because I didn’t know how to fight “like that Bruce Lee guy in the movies.”
It wasn’t that much different at home. My parents kept pushing me and pushing me to do well at school, which is actually pretty understandable since most parents want their kids to do well and get a lot of money. But expecting me to get perfect grades in every class while trying to balance a social life is just too much. To top that off, my parents keep yelling at me for being lazy and not being “Chinese” enough. Just because I don’t know how to read Chinese doesn’t mean I’m not Chinese. That’s the reason why I never really made any friends and why everyone at school kept making fun of me. But at home, everyone thinks I’m too “American” and that I don’t understand anything about our culture. Honestly, I just don’t see why I’d need to know about some obscure religious practices that I’ll probably never use again. Really, I’d rather just lay back and relax like the other kids. I can’t do that, though, because I know my parents are just going to keep bugging me no matter what I do.
