My best friend, Jenny Quan, is an Asian woman. She has talked to me a few times about her background but hasn’t gone into detail about it with me. Before this interview I knew that her father is an Americanized Asian man and her mother is still very much about her Asian culture.
The interview I conducted with Jenny turned out to be very telling and pretty emotional. I knew the dynamic of her family is very different than my own but I never knew to what extent. She told me that her mother was born and raised in Vietnam, one of 11 children. In her 20’s she immigrated to the U.S. through a Vietnamese man who promised to bring her and her sisters there if she married him. She had three children with this man then eventually divorced him and married Jenny’s Father, Jerry, and had Jenny. Jenny’s father is at the total other end of the spectrum when compared to her mother. He was born in Florida and raised in Georgia. He is fifth generation Chinese of his family. He speaks English and basic Chinese.

Jenny told me that she only spoke Vietnamese until she was 8 when her mother developed a gambling problem from her new-found wealth and moved away. After that there was no one to keep the traditions, language and overall Vietnamese culture going. Her father attempted to help her learn Chinese but as Jenny told me it’s almost impossible to learn unless you start early on.
She told me about the struggles of not living up to the Asian expectation of being extremely intellectual and being a minority in her schools growing up. The main thing Jenny admitted to struggling with is the language barrier with her mom. Her mom only speaks broken English so it makes it very hard to communicate with her. It has prevented her from having a real relationship with her. Since her mother grew up in Vietnam, it makes it hard for Jenny to tell her that something she says is inappropriate or that she’s wrong because in the Vietnamese culture you should never defy your mother.

I think Jenny is a strong example of the second kind of cultural identity mentioned in Hall’s article. She is a mixture of the old and new. She has been exposed to the 1st generation Vietnamese culture as well as the American culture while growing up here in the United States. Due to unfortunate circumstances she’s lost a lot of the Vietnamese culture she was exposed to earlier in life, but she did reveal to me that she wishes she could go back and hold onto it even harder so that she would still have some part of it today..