Student Essagg

Three, two, one. If I ever commit a crime, I can always claim I was abused as a child or at least deprived of certain I felt I deserved, such as having my own BMW and a set of credit cards, ha. As far as my parents are concerned, I'm not driving until I hit 40. My parents just don't understand what it's like to be a teenager. What? Are you trying to tell me they weren't born over the hill with gray hairs and a bad sense of fashion? Whatever. Actually, they must have been kids once because I've seen pictures that prove it. Definitely sucking. I mean they were wearing bell bottoms. "Yeah, sure," you're thinking. "Everybody's parents are a little out of whack. After all, they're middle aged." But not only do my parents and I have a generation gap, we have a wide cultural one as well. My parents immigrated from Taiwan in the mid '70s to go to college in the United States. As foreign students speaking hardly any English, the

whole deal with drugs, protests and hippies kind of went whoosh all right over their heads. Consequently, they have a hard time relating to the society that I'm going up in now. The pressures that my parents had growing up in Taiwan were extremely different from today. Most explicit difference was the education system. Middle schools and high schools were unisex. Schoolwork and studies were highly empathized. Students were proud to earn a high grade in their class, unlike today where they'd be teased and called a nerd. The courses offered in schools were basically straight academic courses. They didn't have things like art, driver's ed, music and debate. As you can imagine, sex and dope weren't topics that frequently pervaded students' minds. It wasn't all work and no play, however. Teens still found time to mingle with their friends at movie theaters and shopping malls. Their social lives, if a bit more restrained, weren't all that different from mine today. However, the

general society was. The community that I live in now has much more violence and illegal activities going on than they could have ever dreamed of. Part of this is because their moral and ethical standards were much higher than ours are and part of it because they simply didn't have these drugs and other substances available to them. Something else my parents didn't have much of that we take for granted today was freedom. Their lives as teenagers were basically predetermined along a very direct and defined path that did not allow for much creativity of their own. Most of the time, students only had a few choices for their adult careers because it was all determined by what school they got into. Whereas in my future, I have much more say about what I want to be or do. All of these factors have influenced the way my parents have raised me. Although they have adapted to the American way of life, there are still distinct differences between my upbringing and those in my peers with the third or fourth generation English-speaking parents. And because my

ethnic background is different than the society that I am growing up in, my parents and I will have to adjust attitudes many times in order to exist in a mutual harmony with those around us.